I am not a teacher, a student contemplating teaching as a career, or even a parent. I do not play one on television. Nonetheless, I found Mr. Kaufman’s book, Reclamation: Saving our schools starts from within, to be a compelling read. Indeed, I read the book in one sitting. Furthermore, I believe that teachers, students who are contemplating a career in teaching and parents will all find this book to be, at moments, an eye-opening exposé of the plight of our public schools, and also a prescription for reclaiming them.

Teachers who read this book will fall into one of two camps. The majority of them will be infuriated at having their worldview challenged. Those teachers are likely to vilify Kaufman for his positions, chalking it up to political bias, as his fellow teachers in Los Angeles did after he and a coworker wrote an op-ed piece promoting a merit pay proposal. However, there will be others who have spent time in the trenches and who have seen the biases, laziness, and self-centeredness of a large proportion of their fellow teachers and wish for something better – if not for them professionally, at least for the children who are a third, fourth or even fifth priority. Those teachers, even if they do not ultimately agree with Kaufman’s prescriptions, will recognize a kindred sense of moral outrage and will appreciate Kaufman’s attempt to steer a new course for public education.

Unfortunately, many students may be put off by Mr. Kaufman’s bleak portrayal of the culture in public schools where teachers are more concerned with padding their already bloated paychecks, with escaping responsibility, and with running out the clock before they can retire to a fat pension than they are with educating young men and women. There is an element of Kaufman’s narrative that may work to discourage potential young teachers from entering the profession. If so, that would be tragic, although Kaufman’s experience led him to make the same decision. Nonetheless, teachers-to-be owe it to themselves to read this account and to enter into their chosen profession with their eyes open.

Parents should consider sending their children to private school or homeschooling their children. But first, they should read this book.

Kaufman provides a two-chapter introduction, which probably should have been combined into a single chapter, explaining why he wrote this book and what he hopes to achieve from its publication.

Kaufman then goes about his work by establishing the problems inherent in the current public school culture. Lazy teachers, who are granted tenure after two short years, live in a world divorced from reality, but nonetheless believe that they are mistreated, underpaid, micromanaged, and unappreciated – none of which are true, at least after they achieve tenure. Kaufman shares an anecdote, which would be surprising to any but the most cynical, about one of his coworker’s reactions to the above-mentioned op-ed piece promoting merit pay. His coworker sent him an email agreeing that his reasoning was correct and that she largely agreed with him, but would nonetheless support the union, which strongly opposed merit pay.

Kaufman then convincingly shows the perfidy and moral bankruptcy of the teachers unions. He concludes that if any reform to the public schools is possible, teachers must reject the unions whose policies are positively harmful to students. Indeed one union head’s statement reveals the danger posed by unions to the welfare of children and their education when American Federation of Teachers president, Albert Shanker, said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, then I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Tragically, in light of that attitude, the vast majority of teachers vote the union line.

Competition, which the teachers unions strongly oppose and fear above anything else, Kaufman proclaims, is the great hope for American public education. Vouchers and charter schools, programs that give parents choices and force accountability on schools and teachers, are the path to reform of public schools.

Kaufman chronicles the hardly surprising liberal bias that inhabits American schoolrooms. From pointless field trips to shameful revision of American history and from eco-brainwashing of our children to outright anti-Americanism, the full pathology of the worst of the Leftist agenda is on display in our children’s classrooms. Moreover, any voice of moderation is shouted down, vilified and made into a pariah, all abetted by the administration of these schools.

Kaufman has a true gift for the use of anecdotes to illustrate his point. It is through the retelling of these stories that Kaufman is at his strongest. The book is sprinkled throughout with articles that he either wrote or co-wrote on the topics discussed in this book. While the writing is excellent, there are spots where a stronger editorial hand might have been beneficial to keep Kaufman’s narrative a bit more focused (for example, he spends a fair amount of time cataloging the evils of the anti-Semitic terrorist group, ANSWER, of which the teachers union is a supporter and perhaps loses focus on the main thesis). Overall, this is an excellent book with provocative content. Kaufman’s voice should be welcomed into any discussion of education reform and his thoughts deserve to be read widely.

I encourage everyone to buy a copy, or better yet, to buy three to give as gifts.

So I appeal to a wider audience. What is the Coolest Song Ever Recorded? I’ve offered my top two nominations. I like Frank’s version of Mack the Knife, but I think that almost any version automatically bumps its singer three notches on the coolness meter. Now is your turn to nominate your favorite for the title of Coolest Song Ever Recorded.

Its author pulls of the seemingly impossible task of making newspaper comics funny by adding “in my pants” to the final panels. You’ll LOL!

The point of the film is not whether ID is superior to Evolutionism, but rather that the mere suggestion that ID might provide some explanation as to the origins of life is strictly verboten in academic and scientific circles. Stein introduces his viewers to several scientists who have been drummed out of their positions because they had the audacity to mention Intelligent Design in their research.

One proponent of evolutionism, William Provine, an avowed atheist science historian at Cornell University, objected to the teaching of intelligent design in part on the basis that it’s “BOOOORING. I can’t think of any topic that is more BOOOORING!” Of course, when asked about the origins of life, Provine posited that aliens might have seeded life on this planet, deftly pushing back the question one generation (How did the seed scattering aliens come to exist, Professor Provine?).

Perhaps no single point shows that Stein was not attempting to advocate for the Intelligent Design position than the fact that Stein did not interview Michael Behe, a microbiologist whose book Darwin’s Black Box I found to provide much evidentiary support for intelligent design. Behe’s argument proceeded by examining the simplest of life forms, a single celled creature, and examined it at the microbiological level. At that level there are mechanisms (Behe uses a flagella as one example) that are incredibly complex structurally and functionally such that they could not have evolved happenstance. He coined the term “irreducible complexity”: Take away any of the structure’s complexity and it would cease to function and therefore would not confer an advantage which would be selected for. Indeed, extra baggage which provided no function would put the organism at a disadvantage, which Darwin predicted would ultimately cause its extinction. Critics of Behe have noted that some of the proteins that make up some of these structures that Behe used as examples occur in other contexts within the cell, however, that still fails to account for their combination into a specific structure which is much more complex than the joining of a few proteins randomly.

Instead, Stein focuses on the critics of intelligent design and their claims that ID is pseudoscience and thinly veiled Creationism. To that end, Richard Dawkins is prominently featured by Stein and given ample opportunity to advance his radical programme of atheism as the only rational position. At one point, he asks Dawkins if there were no circumstance under which Dawkins could concede intelligent design. Dawkins responded, like Provine, that he could imagine alien seeding as a possibility under which ID would not be completely ludicrous. Another opponent of ID suggested that life might have evolved from non-life “on the backs of crystals.” Somehow, Stein was able to quash the smirk which must have been fighting to spring into his features. Some people are born to be straight men.

Provine appeared later in the film to advance his (presumably non-boring) view of the world. To Provine the most liberating view is that human beings are nothing but random proteins clinging together for whatever brief moment of time they manage to cohere. That men are completely without any hope of any sort of afterlife, or indeed free will, but will simply blink out of consciousness and slowly decompose is for Provine ultimately comforting. Science is god enough, I suppose.

Unfortunately, Stein’s documentary lost its focus a bit toward the middle when he linked Evolutionism with Nazism, claiming not that evolutionists are Nazis, but that Nazis were Evolutionists and showing the linkage between Evolutionism and the Eugenics Movement of the early 20th century. I have heard it said that when one party in a debate injects the argument with Nazism, he has lost the argument. And, Stein’s critics have been quick to seize upon this digression in the film. Unfortunately, the discussion on Nazism was entirely unneeded and only worked to unfocus the issue that scientists are being silenced and blackballed when they consider the possibility that the universe may have intelligent direction.

The final scene interspersed Stein addressing a packed auditorium, extolling the virtue of freedom upon which this country is founded – including academic freedom – with Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate address and scenes of people chipping away at the Berlin Wall. I thought he would demand of the establishment, as Reagan did, that they tear down the wall they’ve erected to keep Evolutionism free from competition in the scientific community, but instead he called on those scientists who remain in the shadows, afraid of the censure which would follow were they to consider the ID position, to come out and to storm the wall. In the end, Stein’s way is almost certain to be more effective than my way would been. Those who guard the wall have to see the masses gathering, pickaxes in hand, before they will allow the wall to come down.

Playwright David Mamet explains why he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal.”

Martin Amis jettisons his liberal naivete and looks unflinchingly at Islamic terror.

Particularly excoriated is Rand’s ”naïve attitude towards history and philosophy[,] that at times can only be described as sophomoric.”

On the opening page of his autobiography he writes:

I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that has happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast. But nothing has changed my determination to act as if I were wrong – if only because, in the last instance, men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

Then in 1938, with the clearest understanding of the consequences, we freely made the choice which history is slowly bringing all men to see is the only possible choice – the decision to die, if necessary, rather than to live under Communism.

What haunted me as I read this book was that question, which Chambers raised: “Which side is the winning side?” At first, I scoffed at the idea that Communism was the winning side and freedom the losing. After all, as a form of government, Communism has demonstrably failed wherever it has been implemented. The Soviet Union has collapsed and fractured into dozens of pieces. China, in order to stave off mass revolt, is implementing economic reforms and moving toward a more open market model. Castro, Chavez, and other lingering Communist despots are increasingly isolated. Every sign seems to be that Communism is dying. And not only dying, but dying spectacularly and publicly.

And yet, the Western nations continue to edge toward more socialistic governmental models – slouching toward Communism. I cannot help but think that Whittaker Chambers would not be terribly surprised by the rise of the nanny state. To Chambers, such an outcome would have been inevitable once man puts his faith in his fellow men instead of in God. The State is simply Man writ large. In this election cycle, we are not debating whether the government should provide health care, but rather how the government should provide it. An entire federal department makes it its business to see that your child is not left behind educationally. When viewed in that light, Chambers’ warning to his wife is nothing to scoff at.

One of the questions Chambers was continually asked was, “How did it happen that a man like you became a Communist?” His answer reveals that this basic question – “God or Man?” – is not necessarily an answer which is arrived at consciously, but that each person tends to grasp at one or the other outcomes as a result of some personal sense of the crisis of history. These crises tend to come in two flavors: the problem of war and the problem of economics. He said:

Some intellectuals are primarily moved by the problem of war. Others are first moved by the economic problem. Both crises are aspects of a greater crisis of history for which Communism offers a plausible explanation and which it promises to end. When an intellectual joins the Communist Party, he does so primarily because he sees no way of ending the crisis of history. In effect, his act is an act of despair, regardless of whether or not that is how he thinks of it. And to the degree that it is an act of despair, he will desire the party to use him in overcoming that crisis of history which is at the root of his despair. . . .

Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it as a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save – a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it. . . .

The ultimate choice I made was not for a theory or a party. It was – and I submit that this is true for almost any man and woman who has made it – a choice against death and for life.

There were many who refused through obstinate blindness to see the plain truth before them. Chambers writes about the near unanimous support that Alger Hiss received from those persons in positions of power and influence in the government (“the better people”) even after it was plain to most Americans that Chambers’ denouncement of him was trustworthy and that Hiss’ response was not. Indeed, society – and especially the federal government – was rifled through with supporters of Communism, even though they themselves refused to acknowledge their contributions. In a passage, which is eerie in its timeliness, Chambers recounts the attitudes of those who would placate the Soviets in the interest of maintaining peace:

They were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of historical self-delusion. Yet they had just fiercely supported a war in which one of their ululant outcries had been against appeasement; and they were much too intelligent really to believe that Russia was a democracy or most of the other upside-down things they said in defense of it. Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others. Let me call their peculiar condition which, sometime had unconsciously deep, and sometimes very conscious, political motives that it would perhaps be unmannerly to pry into here – the Popular Front mind.

It seems that the Popular Front may have fragmented into a variety of different fronts, but nonetheless the passage above, written 56 years ago, still rings true. One need only substitute Islamic Extremism for the Soviet Union to see the parallels. Suggest that perhaps leaving the Middle East alone would make no difference in that Islamic terrorists would still seek to destroy us upon our own ground, and you are at once set upon and denounced as racist, interventionist, and imperialist – and from both the Left and the Right. You see, what you have done, is to touch the root of their delusion – and that root is quite sensitive. One might also substitute Socialism (Communism Lite) into the above paragraph with the same result.

In the end, the old Soviet bear may be reawakening, its sympathizers still reside in the shadows of Western Civilization. New threats now stand in opposition to freedom, striving to deprive from man his connection to his God. A segment of the ruling class would turn over American sovereignty and make common cause with the malignant forces who audaciously place their hope in Man. It is precisely in times like these where Whittaker Chambers’ witness is especially needed.