(if I were the) King of the Forest

Yet another story (from The Boston Globe) in which some mathematical or statistical analysis is reported with no critical evaluation. And yet again I register my protest…

I agree that the school system has probably failed them, but not by refusing to grant them a diploma; rather it has failed them by insisting that they are through with high-school merely because they have served their time and despite the fact that they can’t read and write English well enough to pass the MCAS exam. Justice would demand not an immediate – and meaningless – diploma but the opportunity for another year of intensive English instruction to overcome their deficiencies, followed by a well-earned and meaningful diploma which signified that they had, in fact, successfully completed the entirety of the high-school curriculum.

The fact that complexities were over-simplified is part of the format and a necessary evil. However, at the end one of the characters, as a closing remark on the Constitution, read from its preamble. Nice touch – except that they left part of it (many would say the most important part) out. What they read was:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, …. , promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America“.

What was left out, of course, were two of the primary purposes of government, ones which provide the necessary specifics for fulfilling what the Declaration of Independence considered the very reason for government to exist – the protection of individual rights. The missing phrases were:

“… to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, …“.

Proposition 209 in California abolished state-sponsored affirmative-action programs; affirmative-action in admissions for the University of California and the California State University had been eliminated earlier by a vote of the board of regents. The first reported results of the new policy were for law school admissions within the UC system, and they showed modest to drastic decreases in minority admissions; later results for other graduate and undergraduate programs showed smaller, but still significant, decreases. While those who unequivocally favor affirmative action insisted that the results proved the folly of proposition 209, I and others believe they are more properly viewed as an indicator of how ineffective affirmative action has been at addressing the problems underlying poor minority enrollment and achievement.

Adair Lara is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In January of 1997 she wrote a piece about math, in which she implied that the study of math was a tortuous, pointless exercise. The column was lighthearted, and left room for a dissenting view, but for me it dredged up ugly high-school memories of the self-righteous pomposity with which the ‘liberal arts’ clique derogated the ‘math rocks’ and ’science rocks’ as some inferior type of creature. There is a general attitude in our culture that to be mathematically illiterate is not only acceptable, but perhaps a source of pride — proof that you are a broad and open-minded thinker, not constrained to the ‘linear’ and ‘mechanical’ modes of thought required for mathematical rigor. As you might surmise, I disagree.