Clarity: Tutoring/Mentoring For The 21st Century

Clarity: Tutoring/Mentoring For The 21st Century CLARITY is a concept and a philosophy. It is also a program and a course, just like basket-weaving 101. There will be no proselytizing at CLARITY.

Its goal is to teach younger Americans how to think, never what to think. If anyone in the over- 30 set would like to join us, and perhaps think more clearly, they’re certainly welcome.

03/28/2015

Curriculum

The most important thing to remember about this program is that there is no curriculum, at least not in the normal sense of the word. Instead, students will be exposed to as many of the myths, clichés, lies, disingenuousness, misconceptions, half-truths, pandering, stereotyping, political correctness, indoctrination, manipulation, intellectual dishonesty and simple errors in what we’ve been taught and what we’ve been led to believe. Examples of this are everywhere, so the “curriculum” becomes all-encompassing. History, Science, Biography, Politics, Philosophy, Morality, War and Peace, Mathematics, Religion, Governmental Structure, especially re Capitalism, Socialism and Communism, are all open to question.
So these posts regarding 'curriculum' are merely snapshots meant to convey the enormity of the task ahead. Depending on the individual or group addressed by each specific effort, some topics might be worth several hours of discussion, some not so much.

03/28/2015

ABORTION

What’s the most divisive subject in America today? Race? No way! It’s abortion that divides us. Both sides are so intransigent that there will never be an agreement. The left will never compromise because they believe that a woman’s right to control her own body is absolute. The right because they believe abortion is murder or, at least, the killing of the unborn. No room for discussion on either side.

The pro-choice position is very hard to dispute. After all, the question becomes should a group of mostly middle-aged, mostly white, mostly men (congress) have the power to compel mostly young, mostly minority women to give birth to a child that they do not want? Seems like a no-brainer, but remember for the first 180+ years of our country that was the case. Margaret Sanger, who lived a mostly heroic life, was more than anyone, responsible for the relaxation of abortion restrictions and for the adoption of the birth-control pill. I say mostly because she became a firm believer in eugenics, seeking to rid the world of ‘undesirables’. Many blacks see eugenics as simply a code for black sterilization and the end of the black race. That’s unfair to Mrs. Sanger, but we need to consider her position and her persona warts and all, do we not? Approximately 70% of abortions by Planned Parenthood are performed on minority women and the clinics are mostly within walking distance of black neighborhoods.

The pro-life crowd is made up primarily of Christians, mostly Catholics with some Protestants, Jews, and a few libertarians and even humanists signing on for moral, rather than religious, reasons. But Christians have abortions and they certainly use birth control, they just don’t advertise it. The truth is that Roe v Wade works pretty well! Nobody likes Roe, and it may be bad law (we’re not qualified to judge that), but it’s had a pretty good shelf life. If you believe that every woman has an absolute right to control her own body, then you have to take this belief to its endgame - should late-term abortions be legalized? It's a tough call, even for an ardent abortion advocate. After all, the word for a 32 - week 'fetus' does not really start with an 'f', it starts with a 'b'.

For CLARITY, the problem with the two sides is that it’s mostly about politics and money. The young woman gets lost in the shuffle. She’s the instrument in the debate, but hardly the focus. Do you think, for a moment that any religious adviser would ever counsel a pregnant girl to consider her conscience or the possible ramifications of having an unwanted child? Of course not! Do you think that anyone from Planned Parenthood ever sits down with a girl and gives her advice that leads anywhere but to an abortion? Not likely!

What if there were a place where a girl could hear that having a child out of wedlock can be very tough financially, tough logistically with parents and friends being burdened, sometimes embarrassing with no guarantees that it could work. But, on the other hand that if she truly wanted the child, truly loved the child and was willing to fight for the life of the child that it could work and has worked and can work again. Unfortunately, that place doesn’t exist. Maybe someday…

03/08/2015

CLARITY/Science

Isn’t science overrated? Isn't science under-appreciated? When is science ever “settled”? Isn’t science almost always part conjecture? Why did it take eighty years to decide that Pluto wasn’t a planet after all? Poor Pluto!
Hasn’t the “science” of global warming been disproved? Isn’t the term climate change a convenient one – impossible to prove or disprove? What does 'climate change' mean anyway? There is no question that all the pollution that, in particular, Americans have flooded (no pun intended) the earth and the oceans and the sky with could have anything but a deleterious effect.

Aren’t scientists at their worse when they have an agenda and at their best when they discover things by mistake or simply by hard work? Isn’t the Hubbell the greatest scientific discovery of our time? Is evolution really science, or simply common sense? Isn’t science at its best when combined with mathematics? NASA, computers, medical breakthroughs et al are all combinations of science and math. You can’t have one without the other.

03/08/2015

CLARITY/Voting

Every year at election time, we see public service announcements urging all of us to vote. It’s our civic duty, we are told. Men and women have died so that we can have the right to vote. If you don’t vote, you have no right to any political opinions. It doesn’t matter which person or which party you vote for as long as you vote.

Isn’t voting, as some of my cynical friends suggest, a placebo – an op**te for the masses? Does one vote really matter? How could one vote ever decide a major election? Did anyone ever die so that I could choose between Barak Obama or John McCain? I hope not! Americans have given life and limb so that we can remain free. Isn’t that something to be eternally grateful for?

If one vote doesn’t matter, but a lot of votes do, then how do you get to a lot of votes without totaling the individual votes? Shouldn’t the Electoral College be done away with? Is it still necessary to monitor the voters so that they don’t make really bad choices? And who would determine that? Haven’t voters made two bad choices already in this century? If we get a pass for electing Bush and Obama the first time (Gore and McCain were not very appealing), there’s still no excuse for re-electing them. Didn’t those Americans who were paying attention, know that the Iraqi invasion was based on a lie?

If we leave the voting booth feeling that we’ve done our civic duty even though we’ve re-elected a would-be tyrant, what does that say about us?

03/08/2015

CLARITY – Justice

Whenever there’s a verdict reached in a high-profile case that seems unfair (usually an acquittal of a seemingly obviously guilty person), we are told that we must respect the justice system. No one ever questions the wisdom in that statement.

So, what evidence do we have that we must trust the system? Did O.J. not murder Nicole and her friend? How did Kaylee Anthony wind up in the swamp? Do prosecutors ever falsify evidence? Do police ever plant weapons or drugs to get a conviction? Do defense lawyers ever help free people they know to be guilty? Were all these inmates freed by the innocence project simply victims of bad luck, bad defense lawyers or were they railroaded? Do politics and ambition play a role in false convictions? How about skin color, ability to pay, a previous rap sheet?

Isn’t it more accurate to say we must accept it, rather than respect it? Isn’t the term “jury of your peers” a fanciful anachronism? Weren’t the O.J. jurors impressed by his celebrity? What on earth were the Anthony jurors thinking? Didn’t they seem to have been, truly, a jury of her peers?

Isn’t it time to consider some type of minimum education for jurors (and perhaps for judges?) And how about some kind of in-house oversight of the media? After that, couldn’t we then revisit parole, and sentencing guidelines? Is there any part of the judicial system that we should be satisfied with?

02/05/2015

ABOUT US

THE PREMISE

The premise is that America needs to learn (or re-learn) how to think, how to reason and how to see things more clearly. At CLARITY, we believe that this can be accomplished and that we can do it.

WHAT IS IT? – CLARITY is a unique tutoring/mentoring program with a very ambitious agenda. It seeks to give younger people the tools to recognize and combat the oncoming (and ongoing) assault on their ability to learn. The plan will be marketed mainly to college-bound teens and to young adults who are already pursuing their various degrees. This does not mean that non-collegians or the over 30 set are not welcome, but I’m not sure that either group will be as likely to embrace the concept. There is a second component of CLARITY that will address K-12 specifically, an equally ambitious and even more altruistic part of the program which we’ll get into later.

The fundamental belief of CLARITY is that education is the most important and the most neglected component of life in America today (in spite of the efforts of a great many talented people.) It trumps self-esteem, religion, ethics, morality, history and biography, existentialism, science, mathematics and politics in importance simply because it encompasses all these things. As important as education is, however, it is rarely administered very well. There have been dozens of books and hundreds of articles that fall into the ‘Why Johnny can’t read’ genre, decrying the state of education in America and all of them are mostly, if not wholly, accurate. Paul Simon’s opening line of Kodachrome, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School…” is more than just hyperbole. Everyone talks about education and wants to improve it but very few know how to do it. CLARITY, then, will attempt to provide a roadmap. James Burnham, the fascinating Trotskyite-turned-Conservative, is credited with being the first to say “ Where there is no solution, there is no problem .“ This is (or should be ) true of abortion, the Arab-Israeli stalemate and many other problems in today’s world. However, it is not true of the woeful state of education in America. It is fixable but it’s going to take patience and hard work.


THE COLLECTIVE ‘WE’ – Virtually all of the books and the articles and the symposiums and the documentaries end with what I call the collective ‘we’: “If we don’t…”, “We must…”, “It is time we realized that…” etc. There is usually talk of a crisis and always a sense of urgency. Some authors/speakers are optimistic but most are not. I am not concerned about the ranking of American kids in relation to other countries (lists like these cannot be accurate) so I try not to use the word ‘crisis’ too much. I do believe there’s some urgency in improving the way young people are taught and how they are able to learn because we need them.

HOW DID IT EVOLVE? The course and the concept rely heavily on skeptics – Charlie Brown; “Poor Linus, it’ll take him years to unlearn everything Lucy is teaching him". Tevye, when considering one of many family dilemmas, “On the one hand there’s tradition, on the other hand the world is changing but on the OTHER hand…Malcolm Gladwell who writes several hundred words convincing the reader of the soundness of a certain position then ends the thought with a sentence like “But is it?” Gladwell is skeptical of almost everything and seems to have as keen an understanding of the ambivalence and elusiveness of the truth as anyone writing in America today.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist who understands the potential dangers of global warming without advocating the extreme overreaction of the far left and the far right. The left cannot bring themselves to accept (or even to talk about) Lomborg’s contention that there is little we can do to reverse the damaging effects of pollution for the next century. The right, much easier to understand, have their heads firmly planted in the sand.

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