You Think the GOP Has Problems?

American Thinker ^ | December 11, 2012 | Christopher Chantrill

[NCjim]

While everyone gathers around the water cooler Monday-morning quarterbacking Speaker Boehner on the execution of his game plan for the Cliff Bowl before it is even played, let us spare a thought for the hapless Democrats. After all, who would want to be a Democrat as we go into 2013?

Don't be fooled by that tough-guy act.

Yes, yes, we know that the Democrats own the future with the educated, the young, the black, and the Hispanic. And Republicans have just got to learn to speak Hispanic. Even Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan seem to agree.

But my suspicion is that the old song had it right. The new Democratic majority has gone about as far as it can go. You can tell that in the subtext of Democratic policy this holiday season, which seems to be: entitlements today, entitlements tomorrow, entitlements forever.

There is something vaguely familiar about that catchphrase.

Here is how I explain it.

Back in 1989, the Democrats panicked. They had just lost three presidential elections in a row, first to an amiable dunce and finally to a New England blue-blood. How bad can it get?

The new strategy, we can now see, was fiendishly clever. Democrats would feint towards the middle, as in New Democrats, while playing race politics with blacks and Hispanics.

[AZLiberty]

I referenced your work here, and I didn't even know you were a familiar Freeper. I love Knowledge Economy.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

the GOP needs to re-brand itself.

Thanks for some logic because a "third party" is absurd--it can't work, and it won't work.

[Carry_Okie]

Thank you. Comments like that mean a lot to me.

[Rich21IE]

Well, to understand my suggestion better, I should have added that in order to “rebrand” itself, the GOP or “Republican” party needs to dissolve altogether and a new party, (hopefully Conservative) needs be formed with a new name.

That probably can’t happen because the wealthy Republican elites like the Koch Brothers have invested too much of their capital into the “Republican” brand.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

So do you want all of us to just magically go "poof" and we're gone and then you'll bring us back again after you select a new name?

Are you going to pick and choose who you allow in your new "conservative" party.

I have a great big dose of reality for you--the Republican party is the conservative party and this talk of creating a new, more perfect party is NEVER going to happen. You have human nature to deal with.

Here is another dose of reality for those who believe they are more pure than others, the only choice you have is to stay in the existing Republican party and strengthen it.

If you can get a viable movement to go along with renaming the existing Republican party, I don't care but in the end, you still NEED the exact same people.

We have too many unrealistic people here on FR.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

I’m glad the wealthy Koch Bros. are there to help counteract people like Soros.

[AZLiberty]

As a technical point in Knowledge Economy, I particularly liked the idea of teaching algebra before arithmetic. One way to do this is to have kids learn to program, as Seymour Papert did with Logo.

There's a huge opportunity to leverage powerful, innate capabilities of the human mind at an early age. Kids learn a language -- what you would think would be a very difficult task -- at a very early age. I've just been "reading" (actually listening to the audio book) Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. This is an excellent popularization of linguistics work (initiated by Chomsky) that shows that the human mind has powerful, built-in capabilities for language, including complex structures for verbs (including subject, object, and other key modifiers) and other parts of language.

These innate capabilities can just as easily be used to learn programming languages (e.g., Logo, but especially object-oriented languages) and mathematical languages (e.g., algebra). Algebra then forms a framework for arithmetic, making that easier to learn.

If schools were actually about learning, they would be thinking about these things. Instead, schools are about creating interchangeable drones who are easy to manage.

[Carry_Okie]

I particularly liked the idea of teaching algebra before arithmetic.

I'm not big on the software approach. It's too busy and builds an ADD kid if you aren't careful. Moreover, it teaches them to trust what comes from the screen, and I"m not sure that's a good idea until later, once they start to get that there are liars in the world and what that means to them. Besides, when it comes to teaching a toddler, I prefer things that are really concrete.

The way I did it starts as simple as grouping objects with your hands on a piece of butcher paper on each side of a dividing line, cupping the groups like parentheses. Once you have too many groups and confusion sets in, draw the parentheses on the paper and the kid experiences the relief of organizing symbols, thus finding them attractive. Set it up again the next day, replacing the line with an equals sign. Then starts switching the groups from side to side into each parenthetical set, noting commutativity. Then add empty parentheses, and start putting some of the pieces inside, noting distributive and associative operations, counting each time to show that they are still the same on each side of the line. Etc.

At first, addition and subtraction are all I do. Then I stack the equations vertically and start to add them (yep, matrices at three years old). That's how I introduce multiplication. Take them outside and show them a dandelion. That makes it real.

A three year old can get it. Subtle, ain't it?

[Carry_Okie]

You’d like the above post.

[AZLiberty]

Are you familiar with the Tufts Early Algebra project?

[AZLiberty]

What do you think of Cuisinaire rods?

[AZLiberty]

And this: Bringing Out the Algebraic Character of Arithmetic: From Children's Ideas to Classroom Practice.

[Carry_Okie]

No. I'm not a professional educator. What I wrote above I would do with a three year old, but realize, I was teaching abstract ideas with shapes before they were six months old. Our older daughter was telling us which words began with which letters (and not the usual rote associations) before she was two. Yes, they are bright, but I really think that the teaching had a powerful effect upon how they perceived. Hell, I was singing to them and patting rhythms on mommy's tummy before they were born.

I'm just that way. :-)

[x]

It's hard to tell just what's the strategy and what's just the stuff Democrats or liberals do. Or rather, what's the Democratic Party's strategy and what's the strategies of the various interest groups that make up the liberal bloc.

I guess, Democrats did "put the mark of Cain" on the religious right after Reagan and did "demonize" Pat Buchanan, but that was also at a time when Clinton was trying to downplay social issues and win over voters who weren't exactly "social liberals."

To see the politics of those days as more racial than the politics of other times also doesn't seem accurate to me. Clinton painted Bush as the new Hoover, and minority groups that voted Democrat went along with that. There wasn't much need for special racially-based efforts in 1992 or 1996, when the trend was against Bush or Dole across the board.

The author's right that the Democrats' policies will trip them up sooner or later. That's clear. It's not so clear that the Republicans are in much better shape.

[AZLiberty]

We did similar things with our kids. We talked to them in adult language from day one — how else are they going to learn it? — while a friend was still talking baby talk to her kids when they were pre-teens. An aunt was amazed at how we talked to our 3-month-old daughter. She told me that she didn’t talk to her kids when they were infants. She figured they couldn’t understand anything, so why bother?

Many parents and many teachers are clueless about how to actually get kids to learn anything — partly because this current education system is several generations old. With each generation, teachers and kids and parents just get dumber.

[Carry_Okie]

With each generation, teachers and kids and parents just get dumber.

When public school teachers complain to me, "It's the parents," the first thing out of my mouth is, "Who educated them?" Stops 'em every time.