Insegnare San Tommaso o Don Ciotti?

Nelle scuole italiche, come alternativa alla tanto paventata “ora di legalità”, si potrebbe proporre l’ “ora di illegalità”: il contenuto edificante è assicurato, soprattutto alle elementari.

A volte – lo avete notato anche voi? – i paesaggi deturpati dagli imbrattatori sono più creativi di quelli “deturpati” dalle ordinanze.

Fatevi solo una domanda: Italia, addì, anno del Signore 2012… è più civile infrangere una legge o promulgarla?

Today my guess is that making laws is on average worse than breaking them…

Vediamo ora, dopo aver predicato, come razzoliamo. Dilemma: per educare la bimba, meglio nascondere o ostentare la presenza in macchina di un segnalatore-autovelox?

… my colleague Alan Stockman faced this dilemma when his oldest daughter Gwendolyn turned three and curious.

Alan opted for the hide-the-detector strategy, lest Gwendolyn get the idea that all rules are made to be broken.

The truth, of course, is that some rules are made to be broken and others are not, but philosophers as subtle as Saint Thomas Aquinas have grappled with the question of where to draw the line.

For Aquinas the key criterion was conformity with natural law, which is all well and good for a
sophisticated adult, but Alan didn’t think his three-year-old was quite prepared to grasp the concept of a natural speed limit.

So to maintain his daughter’s respect for the rule of law, Alan lived without a radar detector for a few years. There would be time enough, as Gwendolyn grew older, to show her that between black and white there are many shades of gray.

I told Alan he had the analysis half right and half wrong. The part he had right was this: It’s true that a very young child is likely to be confused if you tell her that some laws are bad while others are good. But it’s wrong to conclude, as Alan did, that very young children should be allowed to
believe that all laws are good.

My own inclination is to go the opposite route, by teaching the very young that all laws
are bad. As those children grow older and more sophisticated, they can be gradually introduced to the advanced Aquinean concept that some laws are actually just.

You walk a thin line with these things. I do want my daughter to know that policemen are good, in the sense that if you are lost they will help you find your way home. But I also want her to know that policemen are bad, in the sense that they enforce a lot of bad laws. I’ve talked to her
about this paradox, and she has no trouble grasping it.

Perché il tiranno adora i libri?

Niente di più facile che costruire un carcere con dei libri, in questo genere di edifici non c’ è nemmeno il problema delle finestre.

Uno specialista nell’ arte è Matéj Krén…

 

… ma la esercitano con dovizia anche molti governanti sparsi in tutto il mondo…

Professor John Lott of the University of Pennsylvania has presented evidence that across countries, expenditures on public schooling (as well as expenditures on public broadcasting) are positively correlated with levels of totalitarianism. (That is, by and large, the more totalitarian the country, the more it spends on public schooling.) By contrast, expenditures on public health, and other services with no obvious propaganda value, are not positively correlated with totalitarianism. This suggests that public schooling serves a rather unsavory agenda.

Lezioni dal cortile

Prima precisazione (sul tipo di lezioni): lezioni etiche.

Seconda precisazione (sul tipo di cortile): il cortile in cui giocano i bambini.

Si impara molto scendendo in cortile a far giocare i bimbi, soprattutto in materia di tasse e “tassazione dei ricchi”.

I fatti sono immaginati, le storie inventate, i personaggi sognati, ma i modi di pensare, quelli sono autentici.

I am blessed with a child so precocious that at age five, when she was watching television and heard newly elected President announce his intention to increase the income tax, she immediately burst into tears. There never was a prouder father.

The tax package came wrapped in the usual rhetoric: “The rich have too much and the poor have too little”; “They have more than they deserve,” “It’s only fair,” and so forth, ad tedium.

From the fact that politicians supply such rhetoric, I infer that there are voters who demand it. Probably that’s because it helps them feel less guilty about living by the sweat of their neighbors’ brows. Better to pretend your neighbor deserves to be exploited than to admit you’ are just being acquisitive.

The key word here, though, is “pretend.” The fact of the matter is that nobody really believes the rhetoric of redistribution. You can use that rhetoric to fool some of the
people some of the time, and they might appreciate being fooled. But nobody believes it all of the time, and deep down nobody believes it even some of the time. Nobody even comes close to believing it deep down.

How do I know this? I know it because I have a daughter, and I take my daughter to the playground, and I listen to what the other parents tell their children. In my considerable
experience, I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it’s okay to take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it’s okay for those others to form a “government” and vote to take those toys away.

We do, of course, encourage sharing, and we try to make our children feel ashamed when they are very selfish. But at the same time, we tell them that if another child is being selfish, you must cope with that in some way short of forcible expropriation…

These are not morally complex issues, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise. Politicians and commentators make their livings by encouraging that pretense, but when we talk to our children the pretense falls away. No adult has any difficulty distinguishing between
good and bad behavior on the playground.

The lessons we teach our children reveal the truth that is in our hearts. If you want to know what a politician or a commentator really believes, look not to his speeches or his columns, but to the advice he gives his children. If you want to know whether a politician is behaving well or badly, ask how his behavior would be received in your family room.

La tassa di Dio (ovvero del fisco ideale)

Come si regge la Gerusalemme celeste?

Non lo so, quello che so è che per costruire una comunità perfetta bisogna escogitare una tassa perfetta.

Ma la “tassa perfetta” (equa ed efficiente) ha un difetto non da poco: è necessariamente razzista, sessista e discriminatoria.

Non ci credete?

Partiamo dall’ “equità”: è giusto colpire chi lavora sodo e premiare i lazzaroni che se la spassano tutto il giorno?

Noooo… rispondiamo tutti in coro: questo perché non troviamo giusto colpire o premiare le scelte delle persone in generale: se uno vuol bighellonare per i prati tutto il santo giorno, fatti suoi. Al limite qualcuno è tentato dall’ idea di prendere ai fortunati per dare agli sfortunati: la fortuna non è una scelta!

In questo senso puo’ essere giusto prendere da chi ha dei talenti innati per dare a chi non ne ha.

La forza di questo criterio è che funziona anche in termini di efficienza, anzi…

Efficiency demands it because a tax on ability is the clearest path around those disincentive effects we’re trying to avoid. Taxing work makes people work less, but taxing intelligence doesn’t make people dumber. (It might make them try to act dumber but that’s not exactly the same thing.)

Quindi? Bè, semplice:

We should tax not actual earnings, but potential earnings. In other words, we should tax not effort, but ability. This one is doubly imperative; both efficiency and fairness demand it.

Una volta fissati i principi, bisogna procedere il più pragmaticamente possibile:

Ideally we’d redistribute on the basis of traits like intelligence, but that won’t work because it’s too easy to fake a low I.Q. test score. So we retreat to redistribution on the basis of traits like race, sex, and height.

Se un sistema del genere ci ripugna è solo perché ogni meccanismo redistributivo è ripugnante di per sé e lo accettiamo solo se ci viene presentato in forme travisate.

Basta qualche analogia per rinforzare la conclusione:

If it is intrinsically fair to subsidize with cash those who are born without the skills to earn a decent
income, is it also intrinsically fair to subsidize with sex those who are born without the skills to attract desirable partners?

E magari:

… It is “fair” that productive individuals are taxed to support the welfare system, because without welfare those same productive individuals would be more often victimized by theft… and then… It is “fair” that attractive people should be coerced into granting occasional sexual favors, because without such a system, those same attractive people would be more often victimized by rape…

La cosa migliore, a questo punto, è ammettere che la fortuna alla lotteria della vita non è una colpa da punire, così come la sfortuna non è un merito da compensare. Ma questa ammissione segna la fine di ogni tassa redistributiva e molti preferiscono turarsi il naso, coprirsi gli occhi, smettere di ragionare, pur di procedere ugualmente all’ esproprio.

Incubo verde

Le tenere menti dei nostri bimbi vengono esposte tutti i giorni a una duplice minaccia, due “incubi verdi”: il pedofilo al parchetto e la maestra fissata con l’ ambiente.

Poiché il secondo esemplare è più numeroso e scorrazza indisturbato ancora oggi (2012) libero di interferire nell’ educazione dei più vulnerabili, ogni sana crociata contro le molestie all’ infanzia dovrebbe accordargli la precedenza.

The cult of environmentalism demands that children abandon all independent thought about the nature of rights and obligations, replacing it with mindless subservience to the value judgments of their teachers.

It wouldn’t be difficult for teachers to address environmental issues in a refreshingly different way—as invitations to critical thought. I believe, for example, that my child is old enough to think sensibly about the issue of whether to leave the water running while she brushes her teeth.

When she lets water run down the drain, she denies other people the use of that water. The value of that use, to a very good approximation, is measured by the price of the water. Cayley, now aged nine, is capable—with a little assistance in the form of leading questions—of estimating how much water escapes during a toothbrushing session, the value of that water, and whether that value is or is not high enough to justify the effort of turning the faucets off and on. That’s a good exercise in estimation and a good exercise in arithmetic. It’s also a great way for her to discover the true miracle of the marketplace: As long as Cayley cares about her own family’s water bill, she will automatically account for the interests of everyone else who might be interested in using that water.

But Cayley’s teachers have not wanted her to think clearly about such issues, perhaps out of fear that clear thought can become a habit, and habitual clear thinkers are
not good candidates for subservience. Instead, those teachers have pronounced from on high that because water is valuable to others, we should be exceptionally frugal with it. In an inquisitive child, this raises the question: With exactly which valuable resources are we obligated to be
exceptionally frugal? A child who is observant as well as inquisitive will quickly recognize that “all valuable resources” is not the teacher’s preferred answer. For example, teachers rarely argue that “because building supplies are valuable to others, we ought to build fewer schools”; even more rarely do they argue that “because skilled workers are valuable in industry, we ought to have
fewer teachers.”

Where is the pattern, then? What general rule compels us to conserve water but not to conserve on resources devoted to education? The blunt truth is that there is no
pattern, and the general rule is simply this: Only the teacher can tell you which resources should be conserved. The whole exercise is not about toothbrushing; it is about authority…

My daughter has been taught that all endangered species should be preserved, but she’s also been taught that the AIDS virus should be eradicated. When Cayley’s third grade teacher required her to write a report on the endangered species of her choice, I encouraged her to choose the AIDS virus. (I was unsuccessful.) The AIDS virus is probably only one of many species that are not yet as endangered as they ought to be…

… That’s why American junior high school kids can tell you exactly how fast the Amazon rain forest is shrinking, but have absolutely no framework for thinking about whether it’s shrinking too fast or not fast enough. It’s easy for a teacher to write a number on a blackboard (the rain forest is shrinking by such-and-such a number of square miles per year) and demand that students memorize that mere fact, unilluminated by any theory. It’s much harder to get students to think…