Author / William Brooks

by William Brooks

America’s Choice: “Trickle Down” or Trickle Up”

Throughout recent election campaigns, from the articles, speeches, broadcasts and lectures of North America’s chattering class, the public has been hearing a lot of condescending reference to something the liberal left likes to call “trickle down” economics.

Progressive humourists, entertainers, politicians and academics generally use the term to disparage the merits of free-market capitalism. More specifically, they are referring to “supply side economics” which shaped the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions of the early 1980’s. It is something they say we should never return to.

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by William Brooks

Rethinking progressive education again

“That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories. Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They can break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some of the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years.” E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Cultural Literacy (1988)

 In the late 1980’s E.D. Hirsch Jr’s poignant observations about the general decline of “cultural literacy” became part of an ongoing debate about the quality, methods and purposes of schools. Hirsch’s controversial book on the subject underscored the fact that generations of contending educational reformers have either looked backward to sounder practices from “the good old days” or forward to what many believed to be liberation from the “dead hand of tradition.”

Most of us who have spent time in the education business, have to acknowledge that so-called “new discoveries” by “best practitioners” in education have beaten back the defenders of form and content in the traditional classroom. For some time, almost every purveyor of one form of “social justice” after another have found willing allies among progressive school teachers. Today, the fragmented curriculum, referred to by Hirsch in the nineteen eighties, remains a collection of disconnected subjects and technocratic skill sets. Unfortunately, people tend to applaud a familiar tune and a persistent culture of approval among unquestioning stakeholders has been supporting educational practices whose value has long since passed. If Canadians are to have any chance of reestablishing schools as serious centers of teaching and learning parents and citizens must first endeavor to understand how schools came to be the way they are.

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by William Brooks

Conservative ideas still marginalized

More than ever it appears that Canadians out of step with our progressive-liberal establishment continue to be reminded that conservatism, in almost any form, is at best inappropriate and at worst an affliction.

In fact, those who voted for Stephen Harper in the last election are generally left to conclude that: for the foreseeable future they can expect to be marginalized by our established opinion-makers.

Sure, conservatives can find support for their convictions in The Rebel Media, The Prince Arthur Herald or the occasional opinion piece in the National Post; but with the collapse of Sun TV, almost all of Canada’s most accessible broadcasting and press outlets are, once again, in the hands of their opponents. In the mid-nineteen sixties, the late, Lionel Trilling described the Left as our “adversary culture.” In 2016 it’s the other way around.

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by William Brooks

Is it really all about Harper?

The audacity of Canadians who have elected Stephen Harper throughout the entire Obama era appears to be as troubling for east coast American liberals as it is for the overwhelming majority in Canada’s media and cultural establishment.

This became evident early in our current election campaign when the legendary New York Times, newspaper of record for the American left, enlisted a young Toronto journalist to pen a stern warning for Canadians who might consider re-electing a Conservative government.

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by William Brooks

From McCarthyism to Harry Reid: Harsh words lead to deep divisions in USA

Edward R. Murrow once said: “To be persuasive we must be believable, to be believable we must be credible and to be credible we must be truthful.” Murrow is fondly remembered by American liberals as the 1950’s CBS journalist whose criticism of “McCarthyism” and the “Red Scare” helped speed the political downfall of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy is said to have abused his position as a US Senator by making unsubstantiated claims that there were large numbers of communists and Soviet spies in the US Government and other American cultural institutions. Today, the term “McCarthyism” is generally used to describe demagogic, reckless and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of a political opponent.

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by William Brooks

Plus ça change: Renewing Discourse in the Age of Aquarius

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …” said nineteenth century French journalist, Jean-Baptiste Karr; and such may be the feeling of many sixty to seventy year-old citizens of western democracies who have watched the disposition of our societies evolve over the past several decades.

As wide-eyed students in the 1960’s; scores in our cohort felt connected to the ascendance of a cosmic new era. In the early years of that decade, “the progressive movement” spoke to young people in the language of personal liberation, human equality and “social justice.” In the USA, Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. In Canada, a charming young bachelor prime minister promised a “just society” in a united, bilingual, multicultural nation.

In the young ranks of the working and lower middle-classes we felt our stars were rising. In 1969, uniformly turned out in tie-dyed T-shirts and bell-bottom dungarees, we sang along with the 5th Dimension. “Let the sun shine in” we intoned: “Harmony and understanding …sympathy and trust abounding …no more falsehoods or derisions …golden living dreams of visions …mystic crystal revelation …and the minds true liberation.” It was the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” and the universe was unfolding as it should.

By the late 1970’s, however, a decade-long reality check raised some disturbing questions about the conventional wisdom of our time.

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by William Brooks

Remembering a Missed Opportunity – Father Richard Neuhaus drew people together

This article was written in fond memory of Father Richard John Neuhaus, Editor of First Things magazine who died on January 9, 2009. It was published in The Atlantic Catholic, January 31, 2009.

Writers and public leaders well above my pay grade have already had much to say about the life and death of Father Richard John Neuhaus.

Born and raised in Pembroke, Ontario, the young Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a liberal Lutheran Leader of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s. In 1968 he was a delegate to the Democratic Convention in Chicago where he clashed with police and was arrested for disorderly conduct.

In the mid-nineteen seventies his ideas about religion and politics evolved. He was profoundly affected by the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision and began to vigorously defend a more conservative position on the sanctity of life and the place of religion in public affairs.

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by William Brooks

Quebec has its own divisions

This article was written in the wake of Lucien Bouchard’s move to the leadership of the Parti Quebecois and his vow to continue the long march toward Quebec independence. It was first published in the New Brunswick Herald Telegraph, January 17, 1996 as it appears below and again in The Gazette, Montreal, Monday, January 22, 1996 under the headline: Partition answer to irreconcilable differences.

Faced with the imminent arrival of Lucien Bouchard and his vow to complete the long march to independence, more and more Quebecers are coming to accept that they live in a deeply divided political society. Two radically different dreams are trapped in the confines of a single territory called Quebec.

The dominant political forces see a future independent, ethnic state, preserving a French-speaking culture which they view as unique and threatened by the English-speaking societies of North America. An indistinct opposition longs to return to a bilingual, liberal state supporting a cosmopolitan society in which the use of language and the free evolution of culture is a personal, family, business or neighborhood affair.

Neither of these political divisions is new, nor have they been played out on the modern historical stage without demonstrating their own particular strengths or inherent weaknesses. But two such adversarial concepts cannot live securely and comfortably under the same roof.

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by William Brooks

Was Dewey a Marxist?

This article was developed as a proposal for a Ph. D. thesis at the Faculty of Education, McGill University. It was published in Discourse, The St. Lawrence Institute, Winter, 1994.

In 1975 I published an article entitled “Some Reflections on Canadian Education” in the History and Social Science Teacher. I argued then that Canada had never produced an indigenous philosophy of education but had accepted imported ideas, first from Europe and later from the United States.

I pointed out that, by the late nineteenth century, the classical curriculum of the British grammar school, imported in the early years of colonial North America, gave way to the ideas of European social revolutionaries like Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebels. These philosophers changed our perception of the school’s purpose, slowly eroding the traditional concentration on formal literacy and the acquisition of knowledge, and giving way to an increasing concern with the methods of teaching and the interests of the child.

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by William Brooks

Deconstructing High School Economics

By Yarema Kelebay and William Brooks

Originally developed as a presentation to the 1987 Canadian School Trustees Association in Charlottetown, PEI, this paper was later published in The McGill Journal of Education Vol. 26 No. 1 (Winter 1991)

Abstract: When economics was implemented as a compulsory subject in Quebec high schools during the late 1970s, the then reigning demand-side Keynesian assumptions were written into the new curriculum. With the coming of the Austrian School’s supply-side revolution in the early 1980s, the government set economics curriculum was ideologically inhospitable to supply-side insights. This has left the current economics curriculum outdated and an obstacle to quality economics education. Curriculum reform is recommended.

The introduction of economics as a compulsory subject in Canadian high schools has occurred over the past five to ten years and it has happened at a very dynamic and volatile period in the intellectual history of the western world. So before considering what is actually taught in economics classrooms, it might be useful to consider the intellectual trends which have influenced teaching over recent decades?

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