More on utilitarianism in education policies

After reading my post on whether the utilitarian cost-benefit analysis that governs government policies killed liberal education, a high school classmate, "J," who lives and teaches in India comments:

Dickens' 'Hard Times' speaks exactly about this kind of utilitarianism in Education. It is a pity that we are still facing the crisis more than a century later.

Not only it is apt, I would think it is worse--utilitarian calculations seem to govern everything now.

"J" also provides this lengthy excerpt from Hard Times:

... Mr and Mrs M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I suppose, Sissy?’

‘O no!’ she eagerly returned. ‘They know everything.’

‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’

‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance. ‘But today, for instance, Mr M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.’

‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, it was. — But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.

‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.

‘National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’

‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.

‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,’ said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr M’Choakumchild said he would try me again. And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was — for I couldn’t think of a better one — that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘Then Mr M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, Here are the stutterings — ’

‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa — they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s another of my mistakes — of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error; ‘I said it was nothing.’

‘Nothing, Sissy?’

‘Nothing, Miss — to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,’ said Sissy. ‘And the worst of all is, that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like it.’

Hard Times by Charles Dickens, that is. 

Not to be confused with the 1975 movie by the same name. 

Though, it does seem like the movie, which is set in the Great Depression era, is also apt for now--when we are still struggling with the Great Recession's aftershocks:

Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

Of course, there is a a lot to disagree with in this essay; but, it is exceeded by the amount to think about ... (ht)

 The weird and unintentional pincer-movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-über-alles brigade has infiltrated, ironed out and reworked environmentalism for its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not about reforging a connection between over-civilised people and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our civilisation has become.Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hyper-capitalism; the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy....
... What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was perhaps inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers.

If that got you thinking, how about then watching George Carlin's bitingly satirical and funny segment on saving the planet:

How to ration healthcare?

In my earlier post on Peter Singer's essay on healthcare rationing, I intentionally stopped with his observation on the reality of rationing.

I did not comment on Singer's solution, which was an utilitarian discussion of quality of life years. I did not care for it because that framework did not convince me about how we might deal with ailments that might not affect a whole lot of people. Furthermore, it seemed to offer a corollary that old people should be knocked off rather than be treated because it is generally way too expensive to treat the elderly than it is to treat the young.

Darshak Sanghavi comments on this very issue:

The typical solution to such medical waste (most recently described in a New York Times Magazine article by utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer) is to ration health care spending, often with dubious mathematical formulae—in short, to starve the beast.

Sanghavi's essay is way more interesting, and less rhetorical than others, because of observations like this one:

We now recognize and treat problems that were previously hidden or never diagnosed—which is a good thing. Consider these sample statistics, all from generally reliable federal agencies: One percent of the population has celiac disease, causing anemia and other problems, one in 150 children tests positive for autism spectrum disorders, 2 percent to 5 percent of adults have an eating disorder, 20 percent of children are overweight, one in 22 pregnancies is complicated by a minor or major birth defect, and 10 percent of people have asthma. The list goes on. In the past, people just lived with these problems. Today, for better or worse, we do not simply let them go—and that costs more and more money.

In other words, in the olden days, people lived (or died) with problems that hadn't been given names. And some problems are getting to be more common--like with prostate--because we have more and more men living very long years; in years past, rarely did a man live that long to suffer from prostate issues.

We seem to be chasing after rainbows in the rush to reform healthcare in the US. It is bound to make most unhappy, and a few who manage to get deals, well, they will be happy. The White House adopting Bush-style tactics is not helping either. I am glad though that they changed their approach and released the list of names of healthcare executives who visited the White House for meetings.