Ah, the good old days! That was when conservatives everywhere resorted speaking in only sentences that consisted of a noun, verb, and “Greece.” Every conservative policy under the sun had to be enacted or: “We’ll turn into Greece!” Well my friends, now United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron is back with a shocking bit of noun, verb, and “Greece” propaganda. While in Brussels to discuss matters related to the Ukraine, he took a moment to talk about domestic matters, because he’s afraid that the conservatives might not win the upcoming election. And so he lied in a very big way, claiming, “When I first came here as prime minister five years ago, Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat, we had similar sized budget deficits. The reason we are in a different position is we took long-term difficult decisions and we had all of the hard work and effort of the British people. I am determined we do not go backwards.”

Translation: we screwed our people and claimed it was for their own good; those lazy Greeks didn’t do it and look at what a mess their country is today; and vote conservative because we are doing everything right! Except that isn’t at all the case. Luckily, Simon Wren-Lewis is around to strike back, Controlling the Past. But before I get to what he wrote, I want to talk about something he barely mentioned, because he’s a real economist writing for other real economists and so assumes everyone knows: currency.

The United Kingdom, like the United States, has its own currency. So it is much easier for it to bounce back after a crisis, because other currencies will simply rise relative to it. But for a country like Greece that shares the euro with most of its trading partners, there can be no currency devaluation. Thus there is far more disruption as wages have to go down. Basically, Greece is stuck with using Germany’s valuable currency. So this made it infinitely easier for the UK to weather the 2008 financial crisis. And it is the reason that Greece should never have been used as a scare tactic for the UK and the United States. What happened to Greece simply couldn’t happen to the UK and US.

But let’s get to the bulk of Wren-Lewis’ article. It focused on the claim that “Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat.” Is that true? Not even close:

So in addition to not having its own currency, Greece enacted more than five times as much austerity as the United Kingdom did. But it is those noble pasty white Brits who did the hard work. This is very clearly meant to both stroke the ego of the British public and to make them feel that the very real pain they’ve been put through was for a reason (it wasn’t). The point of all this is to change the narrative of the past so that the current government looks good. And they want to push the idea that the same old conservative policies that they are always for are what we should thank for the better economic times. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t write as much as I should about education. The reason is that it greatly depresses me. The education “reform” movement is so pernicious and so powerful that it is hard not to think that all is lost. Here in the United States, this movement seems focused on destroying teacher unionization more than anything else. And as always when there is an attack on worker rights, the quality of jobs goes down. Even the most idealistic of those in the “reform” movement seem only interested focusing on test scores because that is something that is easy and quantifiable. It’s the old story of the drunk looking for her keys far away from where she lost them because “the light’s better here.”

Last week, Stephen Mucher, the director of Bard College’s “master of arts in teaching” program, wrote an important article, The Teaching Crisis That Unions and School Districts Won’t Address. It contains some amazing information in it. For example, “Since 2008, enrollment in teacher education programs in California is down 53%, and other bellwether states report a similar trend.” This trend is — Oh, what is the word?! — predictable. Let’s think about this for a moment.

The nation as a whole wants better teachers for our children. Everyone at least gives lip service to the idea that great teachers have a huge effect on our children. And the solution that we’ve come up with is: test the children more, over-structure classroom time, and vilify teachers. Oh, and don’t forget: get rid of their unions, decrease worker protections, and lower their salaries. That’s clearly not the way to get better teachers working in our schools. In fact, it is a recipe for destroying good teachers that are already working.

So what is it like to be a teacher?

It is hard to see the whole of the education “reform” movement as having any philosophy other than, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Now Mucher isn’t specifically talking about the “reform” movement. But the focus on testing and the vilification of teacher unions is all coming from the “reform” movement. And the “reform” movement goes where the money pushes it. And the money comes from the same people who moved our manufacturing jobs overseas. They want to do for education what they’ve done for the rest of the economy: turn teachers into low paid cogs, who can be plugged into any educational machine.

Mucher is clear as to what needs to be done. In addition to “competitive salaries, benefits and better working conditions” teachers need their jobs to be fulfilling:

No surprisingly, Diane Ravitch had a few choice words to say about all this. She noted something that is telling, “I doubt that most critics would know how to teach a classroom of 30 children of any age, but they feel emboldened to complain about those who do it every day.” I think that is part of the problem with the way that Americans look at teaching: they think it is something that anyone could do — very much the way that they think about politics. I’m not sure where they get this idea, except that Americans just have a tendency to devalue the work done by anyone. To me, the kind of teachers that the “reform” movement is crying out for practice the easiest kind of teaching.

What we end up with is a system that claims it wants Alfie Kohn acolytes in the classroom to stimulate and broaden the minds of children, but it wants to check in every two months to make sure that all the children have learned how to spell certain words and know the dictated parts of the multiplication table. That doesn’t work. But as I’ve said before, education “reform” has little or nothing to do with improving education, What Is the Goal of Education Reform? Since the real problems in our educational system are not being dealt with, it isn’t too surprising that the “reform” movement is only managing to make things worse.

I don’t stay up much on the whole gamergate thing, for reasons that will become clear enough in a moment. But I found Todd VanDerWerff’s article over at Vox interesting, Gamergaters Don’t Think It’s About Ethics in Journalism. They Think It’s About Colonialism. For those of you who are blessed with having never heard about it, gamergate is basically a great big whine on the part of the traditional gaming community who think that the girls and the darkies are going to pollute the insular fun of their Call of Duty games. I think the best way to think of gamergate is to imagine three ten-year-old boys inside a tree fort with a sign on the outside that reads, “No girls allowed.”

This article is in reference to an article by Gita Jackson at Boing Boing, We Are Not Colonists. According to her, the traditional gamers feel as though they are settlers of a world with their distinct culture. And now, they feel all these “foreign” elements are coming in and taking over. This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. No one is trying to stop people from getting their vile kicks from Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

I think the “colonization” paradigm is a useful one. But it describes the situation from the inside. Jackson asked the question, “Are there ‘natives’ to non-physical spaces?” Of course there aren’t. What makes one a native is to be born and raised in a place. These gamers are just as much immigrants as anyone else. But most of all, no one is taking anything from these guys:

But I also think it is simpler than this. The complaints of the gamers are exactly the complains of any group with power that sees that power threatened. It is really just about privilege. I don’t think the irony is missed on anyone that these aggrieved games are generally straight white mans of the middle class and up. The whole of gamergate can be seen as a microcosm of the American power elite’s clinging to power — or a replay of the aggrieved white male of the 1970s, trying to deal with the increasing public power of women.

From what I can tell, the ultimate fear of these basement dwellers is that people are starting to look down on them. And I think they are right. I think the portrayal of women in almost every game I’ve ever seen will gradually be seen sort of like Playboy magazine. But having the world think that you aren’t creepy, immature, or both is not something anyone has a right to expect. But expecting things you have no right to is the very definition of privilege.

Via The Vermont Political Observer, we learn that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Go read the article and the ones before it — it’s fascinating. But the basic story is that an eighth grader who was studying Latin noticed that Vermont did not have a Latin motto. So she requested that Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning pass a law to add one. And it was a really great on: Stella quarta decima fulgeat, which means “May the fourteenth star shine bright,” a reference to Vermont’s status as the fourteenth state. But since I’m writing about this, you probably already know what happened.

People heard that the Senate was trying to create a Latin motto and they freaked out. Let’s list some of the more amusing comments:

• Kevin P Hahn: “How about ‘go back south of the boarder'” [The Swiss border? The Austrian border? Or just that short Italian boarder who stays with us on weeknights?]
• Phil Salzano: “My question is, are we Latin, or are we Vermonters? Alright then, English it is…” [Even better: make it Vermontish.]
• Zeb Swierczynski: “ABSOLUTLY NOT!!!! sick and tired of that crap, they have their own countries.” [Well, had.]

This last one goes along with a number about how people need to know how to speak English. This is curious, because the original use of the word “illiterate” was to describe someone who could not read and write Latin. It is also funny how many people claimed that poor Senator Benning was “dumb” and “idiotic.” If ignorance is bliss, these must be some of the happiest people in the world!

What bothers me most about these reactions is that it shows that many Americans don’t even value the European traditions that they so often use to attack other cultures. So it is no longer a question of the United States being the most recent and greatest expression of western culture, it is that the United States is just this singularity that has no beginning and no end but rather just is. This represents a very big problem for me. I still think that there is much to be said about the “great books” approach to education. I want to be more inclusive, but I understand the wish to celebrate the western journey from Homer to Virgil to Dante — Greek to Latin to Italian. But to not know that intellectual history is submental and does not speak well of the United States as the greatest empire in human history.

Digby noted something else: “the conflation of Muslim with Mexican.” But it isn’t limited to that. To these people, all that seems to matter is that these other places are foreign. These are the same people, after all, who hated France because its government didn’t go along with our government in the invasion of Iraq. The only foreign country these people like is Israel, and that’s quite recent. And the only reason they like Israel is because it kills a lot of people who these conservatives hate even more.

An eighth grader requesting that the state create a Latin motto is a great example of American ideals. The negative reaction to it is a great example of American reality: ignorance, fear, and hatred under the guise of patriotism. It’s also the predictable outcome of our terrible educational system. But conservatives want to “fix” this system by making it even worse. Don’t let students know about the actual history of the world. Just start with Thanksgiving (1%), run through the Revolutionary War (50%), teach the Civil War as unnecessary because slavery was dying anyway (20%), explain how the income tax is unconstitutional (10%), and jump right to how Ronald Reagan saved the nation (19%). Give a multiple choice test and call it, “Education!” We don’t need no stinkin’ Latin!