goodbye to the decade of the crank
In just a few days, the decade will come to a close and every major publication has been trying to give a name to the last ten years. Naming a decade is no easy task of course. The name has to give readers a fairly good idea of what characterized this period of time and when we consider that much of the new millennium has so far been devoted to war, bitter political contests and a global economic boom followed by an epic crash that’s going to be felt for years to come, the only terms that seem to come to mind are either negative or somewhat meaningless numerical designations. As for me, I’m going to highlight something that seems to have slipped the minds of many would-be decade designators. From where I sit, this decade was the decade of the crank.
Over the last ten years, we’ve been inundated by a constantly growing stream of punditry and in a quest to give every view its time in the sun and equal treatment, we’ve managed to empower a contingent of people whose disregard for education, expertise and those with different political beliefs are nothing short of amazing. From old fixtures of partisan inanity, to new sensations like Glenn Beck, a man who seems to be a living, breathing incarnation of Above Top Secret, Prison Planet and Infowars, pundits have taken over TV. Whereas before, we knew that personal opinions and editorial agendas were being mixed into our news and accepted the subtle attempts at media manipulation as an unspoken given, the bias and partisanship of the news today is brazen and immediately apparent in the most obvious and ridiculous ways. When comedians are trusted more than news channels and the hardest hitting reporting comes after South Park and Futurama reruns, we have to be willing to admit to a crank infestation in the mass media.
Likewise, with ever growing access to medical and scientific information on the web, there are plenty of those who believe that reading WebMD or looking up a few concepts in physics online give them the knowledge to seriously debate with scientists and experts who dedicate their entire lives to the topics they study. Fueled by anti-intellectualism which sees genuine expertise as nothing more than elitist pretense and assumes that all kinds of complicated things like cosmology or oncology are actually simple and can be mastered with a quick reading of a few web pages on the subject, the graduates of the University of Google have been the engines behind the rapid spread of the anti-vaccination movement, 2012 doomsday alarmism, homeopathy, Electric Universe and countless other pseudosciences with which we’re confronted today. And when politics enter the debate, things can get out of control. Just show a global warming denialist some snow and he’ll thunder how the very fact that we can still get a blizzard in winter is proof that the planet can’t possibly be warming up. Right. Because obviously, a potential five to six degree warming means it will never snow again. Ever.
The years of neglect for teaching critical thinking and curiosity in favor of cramming for standardized tests and blatant anti-intellectualism from partisan pundits and post-modernists alike has come back to bite us and bite us hard. We seem to have jettisoned the idea of experts and authority and replaced it with manufactroversies for ratings and blowhards who generally have no qualifications other than a strong opinion on the matter. We started taking medical advice from Oprah and Jenny McCarthy instead of actual doctors. We see conspiracies everywhere we turn. And we have to be so nice and considerate towards everyone and everything that unless we want to be flooded with complaints about being mean and bitter, we have to give everyone a pass, from a creationist who wants to dismantle science education after having a chat with God, to homeopaths and faith healers who want to force insurance companies to pay for things that don’t work. And perhaps worst of all, the cranks are highly paid professionals in their con artistry while the skeptics and scientists who try to keep them in line can’t even hold a candle to their income.
It’s not all gloom and doom though and there is a way out of this mess. But it’s not going be done in a day or a year. This turn of events took years to develop and it will take years to be wound back, starting with better and more reasonable education standards. Rather than teach kids the tests and allow the school administrators to treat them like products to be churned out on a steady schedule, create curriculums what will challenge the students, make them think, give them variety and accelerate how fast they learn. Education should stimulate, not become routine memorization and repetition. Next, there has to be an emphasis on math and science to emphasize the need for R&D, expertise, knowledge and groom a new generation of critical thinkers and high aiming innovators. These changes won’t come on their own or even with a nice letter to your local lawmakers, but after intense, thundering campaigns that don’t just affirm the need for science but tell a story of a nation in decline as far as innovation is concerned. Rather than just assume that the facts speak for themselves (they often don’t to those who are not aware of them), underline the problem. People should fear a future without a powerhouse R&D economy and we need to explain to them exactly why in the most brutally honest way we can. Nice obviously isn’t working. Perhaps honest and straight to the gut is the way to go.
Yes these are lofty goals and they will take a lot of time and effort, but if enough people start caring and getting tuned into the skepticism movement to help spread good science and the why we need to change the way we do things, maybe, just maybe the next decade could be the decade of scientists, researchers, engineers and artists who work for a better future for us all while inspiring others to do the same…
Actually, the decade won’t come to a close until the end of 2010. Since we start counting at one, the decade started Jan 1, 2001 and will end Dec 31, 2010.
Uh oh. I’ve seen Phil wage this battle on Twitter…
Technically there is no year zero which is why there was debate between whether 2000 or 2001 was the real start of the new millennium. However, when it comes to actual time, we covered ten years since December 31, 1999 to December 31, 2009 which is why we call this a full decade.
After all, we don’t say that someone who’s 30 is in her twenties since as far as time elapses there is a year zero, the months between birth and a first birthday.
“However, when it comes to actual time, we covered ten years since December 31, 1999 to December 31, 2009 which is why we call this a full decade.”
Yes, ten years was covered between those two dates, but that doesn’t mean it should be called a decade. Technically, we covered ten years between November 14th 1983 and November 14th 1993, but we don’t call that a decade.
You’re right, we don’t have a year zero. If you think about the time of Christ, the first decade was not from 1AD to 9AD. The decade ended at the end of 10AD – ten years. The next decade began in 11AD. And so on throughout the millennia.
The idea of referring to someone who’s 30 as being in their 20s doesn’t really equate in this matter. That’s more of a made up thing. All we’re saying in that case is that their age begins with the number 3 or 2 respectively. But the definition of a decade is more concrete and begins on the “one” year.
Incidentally, someone who is 30 is actually in their 31st year of life, not that that matters…
“…ten years was covered between those two dates, but that doesn’t mean it should be called a decade.”
Actually, ten years between any date can be called a decade. This is why the tenth anniversary of an event is often introduced with “a decade ago” and you can refer to any date ten years prior in the same way.
And as you said, there IS a year zero in regards to a person’s age – but not in regards to our calendar years.
If we were to push our current calendar back to Christ’s birth, when he (or He) was technically zero, we were in year 1AD. When he turned 1, we began the year 2AD.
So those two examples don’t equate very well.
Yeah, you are correct there. We would call that a decade. A decade is just a period of 10 years. But when referring to THE decade, as in “the decade is over” it is understood what is implied. And in my opinion, from what I’ve stated before, it is not over until the end of the “ten” year.
And rethinking your thing about age, I would concede that it would be correct, at the end of 1999, to say that the 90s are over – but not THE decade.
Woof! Gfish, you are such an inspiration, and yet so out of touch with reality, educationally speaking.
My dear wife, God rest her soul, was a teacher (she was THE English Teacher) at Zavalla, Texas High School when the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills was introduced. She’d been teacher of the year several years running, as chosen by the students. She would hold on Hamlet until her sophomores could not only recite long passages, but expound on their meaning. She went berzerk. She said, “Give it three years and no teacher in his right mind will focus on education, they will teach to the test.” She had alternatives, as almost all good teachers do, so she promptly resigned. Poor kids.
I think the system is so compromised at this point that we are talking about puppy mills. God knows what we’ll do to progress now.
Ragg,
Actually, I’m personally familiar with the politics and the reality of education which is why I’m so unhappy about where it’s headed. The funny thing is the teachers are taught to give their students challenges, variety and stimulate their curiosity. Then they get their licenses, enter the system and the school system breaks them and forces them to teach the test.
One of the biggest reasons why this happens is because administrators decided that the best way to show how well they’re doing to parents was to do well on a few standardized tests and the same went for lawmakers talking about what they call “accountability.” It’s cheap and easy to boil everything down to a redundant test which is why it was and still is the go to solution.
Now, on their own, well designed standardized tests can be useful. But today, the school boards, lawmakers and administrators went so overboard on them that teaching the holy state test is all that matters because they’ll get to keep their jobs for another year if enough kids pass and they can happily report to the parents that the school district is doing great. Hence, they’re willing to sacrifice kids’ educations by making the tests a de facto set of curricula and ignoring that there’s more to this whole teaching thing than making kids memorize the contents of test packets.
It’s only fitting that this post has stirred up the same calendar cranks with which we began the decade. Sigh.
Great post. Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I believe I would have used a great deal more profanity.
The key to standardized tests is the “well-designed” aspect. In my opinion, it can’t be done in the system we are currently using. State to state and district to district standards differ, sometimes greatly, yet these tests we are administering in the classrooms are designed on a national level. Therefore, the test that seems to be “well-designed” for some, is not for others. In college, pre-service teachers are taught to evaluate using differentiated instruction and assessment strategies, because they have been proven to provide a better picture of a student’s knowledge and learning. This all falls apart at the national level, though. The need for comparable results has trumped the need for students to learn and be taught to learn and think. Somewhere, someone started doing things backwards. The problem is fixing this situation, as it was once best described to me, is like fixing a plane engine during flight.
I know it’s not the “massive revolution” that’s called for, but I also think that parents need to take more responsibility for their child’s education as well. Many parents aren’t involved in their child’s education, and just sit back and expect someone else to handle the responsibility. At lot of the kids I know today that seem to be especially bright in public schools today have parents actively involved in their education, some even creating additional activities at home to encourage problem-solving, creativity, and ciritical thinking. I hope to reinforce that in my own child. YMMV.
That aside, what does Fallout have to do with “cranks?”
“…have parents actively involved in their education, some even creating additional activities at home to encourage problem-solving, creativity, and ciritical thinking.”
And that’s terrific. My only concern is that the noise from teachers who only want to teach how to give the right answer on a test or who don’t know much about science but teach it anyway would interfere with their efforts. The last thing I’d want to see is an educational system turning into a tag of war in which kids have to be constantly taught how to do things differently over and over again.
“That aside, what does Fallout have to do with “cranks?””
Nothing at all. I just wanted a menacing figure as a visual metaphor for the cranks’ hostility and agendas. Some of the illustrations on this blog are a tad like my version of Rorschach tests, widely open to interpretation by design.
My only concern is that the noise from teachers who only want to teach how to give the right answer on a test or who don’t know much about science but teach it anyway would interfere with their efforts.
And that concerns me as well. I’ve spent some time volunteering in Columbus schools – for a while working with a 5th grade science class. The teacher was spending more energy trying to get the kids under control than teaching – and when she could teach it was clear she was teaching verbatim from the book. If she were wearing Brotherhood of Steel armor, I’m sure she’d have their attention, at least.
I see parents working directly with their kids as a parallel goal to trying to change the system, not a replacement. If there was a middle ground, it’d be programs where third party organizations that work within schools to try to help kids along (OSU/CAS’ “WOW” program, BBBSOH Project Mentor). Lastly, I hope that the competition of successful charter schools (I’ve heard a lot of good things about Graham) will provide some lessons for public schools.