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The Moral Is Airs Sundays and Wednesdays.
Children and adolescents see the world differently than adults. It's not just that adults know more, which in most cases is true, but that they just don't see things in the same way. Kaye Cummings continues a series of short features exploring the development of understanding.
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Commentary: New Political Models Post-Arab Spring
Aired January 8th, 2012
Commentary by Alfred Evans, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at CSU Fresno.
What lessons from the experience of post-communist countries might be relevant for our understanding of revolutions in Arab countries sweeping political leaders from power? We know that revolution against authoritarian rule does not always bring a more democratic change in government, and we know that once a dictator is deposed, a struggle for control usually ensues between those forces formerly joined to depose the dictator.
A third lesson is that destroying the old regime usually is much easier than building a new one. In most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the overthrow of the communist party-state took place rapidly. Yet in the post-communist countries in which there was far-reaching political change, it took much longer to create and consolidate a new, stable political order. In some of the post-communist nations that task still may be unfinished.
So we should not expect a stable political regime supported by a national consensus to emerge any time soon in all of the Arab counties in which the old rulers have been overthrown. Instead we should expect to see a great deal of internal struggle and inconsistency in policies during the time of post-revolutionary change.
And yet another lesson to be learned from the post-communist experience is that attitudes toward the West have differed among different counties of the former Soviet bloc. In most nations in Eastern Europe, most people had a favorable view of the West. Most citizens in that region wanted their countries to be closely linked with Western Europe, and they welcomed the influence of the United States, because of their deep–seated dissatisfaction with domination by the Soviet Union. The desire to become part of the West forged a popular consensus in favor of democracy and capitalism in most Eastern European countries. On the other hand, in some countries that had been part of the Soviet Union itself, especially Russia, there was no such consensus in favor of westernization, and many citizens had a more skeptical attitude toward the motives of the United States.
The Arab world has had a very different experience in interaction with the West during recent decades and past centuries. According to experts on the Arab countries, most people in those countries look at the United States with far greater distrust than do people in the nations of the former Soviet bloc. As Jack Goldstone says, “the United States and other Western nations have little credibility in the Middle East.”
That information should not make us overly pessimistic about the prospects for the relationship between post-revolutionary Arab regimes and the USA. But we should be aware of the limits on American influence in Arab countries that are struggling to deal with the challenges of change.
The moral is that we should not expect the countries in the Arab world to be eager to adopt a copy of the American model. In fact, we should not expect all of those countries to embrace any single political model.
THE MORAL IS is brought to you by the Bonner Center for Character Education at CSU Fresno.
The views expressed on The Moral Is are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Valley Public Radio
Additional Links:
Bonner Center for Character Education
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Commentary: Arab Spring
Aired January 1st, 2012
Commentary by Alfred Evans, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at CSU Fresno.
No doubt 2011 will be remembered as a year of upheaval in the Arab world. Mass unrest already has ousted leaders in Tunisia and Egypt. Civil war has broken out in Libya. Protests in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria threaten the survival of leaders there. What results can we expect in Arab countries in which revolutions succeed in sweeping governments from power?
Not long ago a wave of revolutions engulfed most of the countries under communist rule. Political regimes under communist control fell throughout Eastern Europe. Twenty years ago the Soviet Union broke up.
What lessons about the upheavals in the Arab world can be learned from the experience of the post-communist states in the 1980s and 1990s? Although the Arab countries are different from those previously communist countries in many ways, some lessons from the post-communist experience may be worth noting.
First, we should mention the great diversity of trajectories of change in the nations that formerly were under communist rule. Different countries have followed different paths. Several of those countries, like Poland, have become fully functioning democracies. On the other hand, several of the other post-communist states are still as authoritarian as they were under the communists, with staged elections and suppression of freedom of speech and the press. And some countries of the former Soviet bloc, including Russia, are somewhere between full democracy and full authoritarianism.
Experts on the Middle East point out that conditions vary widely for different Arab countries. We should not expect to see the same results of political change in all those countries. Instead, it is likely that different countries will follow different paths, leading to a variety of outcomes, some of which may look messy.
The second lesson from the experience of countries where communist rule was overthrown is this: Though conditions varied from one country to another, in each of them the forces that opposed the communist party agreed on only one point—they all rejected the regime that held power. But after the communists lost power, the forces that had been united in opposition to the old system fragmented. Conflict broke out. In most post-communist countries a group that was nostalgic for the old, communist-dominated system also entered into the fray.
So we probably should expect something similar to happen in Arab countries where groups of citizens have overthrown entrenched rulers. There are signs that such divisions already have started to show up in Egypt among those who not long ago joined each other in Tahrir Square to demand that President Mubarak leave office. We may expect such divisions to appear among the former opponents of the old system in other Arab countries during the post-revolutionary phase.
Major political torrents are sweeping through Arab countries of the Middle East. But based on the history of revolutions in post-Communist countries it is still too early to tell which way these currents will flow.
THE MORAL IS is brought to you by the Bonner Center for Character Education at CSU Fresno.
The views expressed on The Moral Is are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Valley Public Radio
Additional Links:
Bonner Center for Character Education
Listen with Windows Media
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Commentary: Standardized Testing
Aired December 25th, 2011
Commentary by Ida M. Jones, Professor of Business Law at CSU Fresno.
When college faculty members meet and discuss teaching, the conversation usually includes a lament that today’s students are not prepared for college-level work. There is much speculation in those discussions about the reasons for that lack of preparation, including that students do too much multi-tasking, spend too much time on Facebook, and that their high school instructors did not help them learn how to study. Such conversations usually end with the professors scratching their heads and complaining that students are much less prepared than before.
Is it true that today’s students are really less well prepared? One measure of students’ critical thinking ability is the Collegiate Learning Assessment or the CLA, a standardized test designed to measure critical thinking. According to the authors of the book Academically Adrift, CLA results confirm that students are less prepared than before. They found that students who grew up poor performed less well on the CLA than students who grew up middle class, and that students whose parents had higher education degrees performed better. The assumption is that a middle class environment helps individuals learn to think better and more critically.
Can it be true that a social class gap corresponds to an analogous gap in reasoning ability? Do economically disadvantaged children really reason less well than their middle class counterparts?
Or might the gap exist because poor students are not prepared to analyze information in the same way because their outlook is different? Might tests such as the CLA measure a set of biased cultural competencies rather than the analytical and critical thinking skills they purport to measure?
Let’s look at an analogy. During the past several years the author of this piece has read books on living a Christian life. Those books were written by Christian authors such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. A common theme in such books is a recommendation that the reader “look out for and love ‘others’” and, those others include, for example, people of color, people who are less fortunate and people from other countries. The authors assume that the reader is not one of those “others”. In other words, those books were written based on certain assumptions about the readers.
So although many people can read and learn from them, the contexts of those books are from one perspective.
How is all this relevant to the CLA? It is relevant because if that test were designed to measure critical thinking skills, but the items on the test were oriented toward middle class culture, then it is possible that the resultant gap in scores is a gap in class thinking skills, but not a gap in critical thinking skills.
Although analyzing situations like a middle class person may help one succeed in U.S. culture, the inability to think from that perspective doesn’t necessarily equate to an inability to engage in critical thinking.
Many teachers, especially in higher education, lament the passing of the good old days as reflected by current students’ inability to perform well on standardized tests. But if that lament is based on faulty evidence, it may be misplaced.
THE MORAL IS is brought to you by the Bonner Center for Character Education at CSU Fresno.
The views expressed on The Moral Is are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Valley Public Radio
Additional Links:
Bonner Center for Character Education
Listen with Windows Media
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