Rubrication

It has often been said that Irish is a language with little use, and no place in the new Ireland and should no longer be a cumpulsory subject taught in schools. This notion needs to be unclothed as a complicated psychological condition and not a well reasoned argument.

School is cumpulsory. Numerous subjects in school are cumpulsory. English is cumpulsory. Maths are cumpulsory. While it is clearly desirable to have students who are enthusiastically engaged with subjects such that they study them even in their spare time, it is unreasonble to assume that that state should support a public school curriculum in which no subjects are cumpulsory and a basic level of knowledge is unecessary in any subject. I’m sure that most reasonable people will agree that some cumpulsory subjects are necessary and
desirable for the education of the public.

This naturally leads as to ask which cumpulsory subjects these should
be? Bilingualism has enormous cognitive benefits as has been demonstrated by numerous studies. It is hard to overstate the pedagogic value of bilingualism. The positive effects bleed into other subjects including performance in mathematics, critical thinking and of course learning subsequent languages.

The indirect socialogical benefits are also numerous. Nothing can unmask subjectivity and perspective like the study of another language. Additional languages provide access to conversations that could never have been had otherwise. If the language has a literary tradition (as does Irish) they also give access to a body of literature that might otherwise be inaccessable.

While the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not widely believed, it would be hard to suggest that some form of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is untrue even for universalists (I’ll have to make this a whole other post sometime).

Bilingualism should be considered a minimal basic requirement of education. What should this baseline be? I contend that Irish is the natural choice.

Irish is already fairly well known by most people in Ireland. While competency in speaking the language is low, people I have met tend to know quite a lot more than a ‘copla focal’. It would require very little effort for many Irish to gain speaking competency.

It is often claimed, half in jest, that either Polish or Mandarin should be the cumpulsory language since more people in Ireland use them daily then use the Irish language. For true bilingualism to occur it is neccessary that at least one of the additional languages taught, be taught universally. It is imperative to expect that one can use the langauge, at least at a basic level, and be understood. It is unreasonable to think that the language that will have these qualities is either Mandarin or Polish. It can’t be possible to make either of
them the single baseline cumpulsory language in school.

While the teaching (and speaking) of these two languages should be encouraged they can not be a replacement for Irish. Irish itself is the language with the greatest likelyhood of generating the socialogical consesus necessary to be a universally spoken language on the Island.

Irish, with its poetic character and its extensive and historically important literature should be seen as one of the pillars of pedagogy in public education in Ireland.

I, as an immigrant, have little comprehension of the complex emotional relationship that natives of the island have with the Irish language, besides the obvious understanding that it is indeed very complex. I have witnessed more than once, the same person in the same conversation both arguing for, and against, the importance of saving the Irish language. With such internal conflict amoung many Irish people, it is no wonder that there is a public conflict concerning the language.

There are a couple of vectors that I think that may have contributed to this complicated situation. One of which the cumpulsory teaching of the Irish language. The fact that after 12 years of study of the language in school, only a tiny percentage of people are able to speak the language with any fluency has to have had a negative effect. I’ve often heard people say that the language is impossible to learn. This is far from true, but it may indeed seem that way due to the tremendously poor methods employed in the teaching of the language.

I have heard from many sources that Irish is taught as a dead language; without a focus on conversation, and forcing memorization without teaching rules of grammar. This is a confluence of the absolute *WORST* ways to teach a language. Is it any wonder that people who take 4 years of French in the Irish school system feel far more comfortable in French? There is a large body of study on the proper methodology for teaching languages to obtain fluency. These methods need to be employed and the old techniques should be removed IMMEDIATELY before they can inflict psychological damage on yet another generation.

The Irish government is currently cash rich, and of all possible uses of money, nothing has a greater benefit for society and the long term economic health of a country than proper education. It has a nearly incalculable benefit. With this in mind my program for obtaining true bilingualism on the island would be the following.

Money should be made available to all teachers and child minders to spend signifcant periods in the Gaeltacht in the interest in assuring a high standard of fluency for those that are responsible for the education of our children.

Money should be made available to entirely subsize child care given through the Irish language. This would remove the hurdle for those who are usually at the greatest economic disadvantage in obtaining the Irish language. The money spent on child care would serve the dual perpose of education and social welfare while not increasing costs to the state significantly for either goal.

Money should be made available for adult education in the language. It is more expensive to obtain Irish language instruction in the Republic than it is in Northern Ireland. RTE should give their Irish language materials away for free (charging only for the cost of media). The BBC has better free language learning materials for Irish than does any entity in the Republic. I find this a highly embarassing situation, and I hope that others do as well.

The teaching of Irish in school should be modernised with a two pronged approach focusing both on conversational Irish, and on grammar and the study of literature.

I think that if these policies were to be put in place we could see wide spread fluency in the langnuage and most importantly a bilingual island within a generation.

I don’t intend that the Irish people be forced to give up their characteristic melange of national pride and self deprecation. I would never suggest such a thing. However, this should not keep us from implementing the most effective education system that we can.

If there is one aspect of modern society that I positively can’t stand it has to be cars.

If we could stand back and look at transportation objectively, cars would just look completely ridiculous. Let us contemplate cars as transportation for a moment.

Large steel objects are hurtled towards each other at a sum relative velocity of something like 160km/h whilst carrying only one person each. They use enormous amounts of energy. They use up huge tracts of land for their storage and for the infrastructure needed to carry them. Because they have no systematic routing, they end up with lower *average* velocities during rush-hour than bicycling. They spew enormous amounts of toxic fumes. A person is killed because of one every 240 minutes in our tiny island. Cars drive demand for energy much above what it should be resulting in increased desirability of oil which serves to create pathological political instability in the middle east. They lower quality of life as they are expensive to own and care for.

In sum total, they are not only wasteful, inefficient, toxic and deadly. They are also completely unecessary. We can affect travel in much better ways. The DART is a fabulous transportation system. If we could cover the island with a system like this, it would take up far less space, use less energy, and it would be faster for the purpose of travel than cars ever could.

I often hear the various parties (including the Greens!) saying that the trafic problem should be solved that with more and bigger roads to solve the traffic problem. One need only look at LA to see the complete futility and absurdity of trying to solve the problem by throwing roads at it. LA had faster average cross town transit speeds in 1920 when trolleys were common. It would be and environmental and aesthetic disaster if we were to turn Ireland into an LA-like twisted mass of freeways.

Where I grew up, in Anchorage Alaska, there really was nothing for it but to own a car. The city center was 12 km from my home, and winter temperatures could reach as low as -40C. There was no public transportation that could be used reliably. The most frequent bus routes were served once every 45 minutes. The buses were frequently late, or even worse early, and they sometimes didn’t come at all. The transit center where all bus transfers took place was at the *edge* of town. The poor were at a terrible disadvantage. A car was necessary to hold a job. The poor also spent a disproportionate amount of income on their cars since the weather causes more repairs to be necessary than in a more moderate climate and cheap cars would break down frequently.

Things are certainly never going to be that terrible in Ireland. The public transit system is great relative to the US, even if it is terrible relative to most of Europe. I am however frightened by the lack of support for a comprehensive public transportation plan and the talk of increased roads. If anything, all public roads should be toll roads. Using cars should be discouraged, and the money could be used to provide real alternatives. Poor decisions should not be rewarded with subsidies from the state. Building roads and road maintainance are a subsidy of a poor tranportation choice.

This site has some really great visualizations of various measures of progress throughout the world.

Fairly striking to me was the US having such a high infant mortality compared to nearly any other first world country. It is nearly on par with Cuba whose median income is 1/6th of the US median. It has 3 times the infant mortality of Sweden who has a smaller median income.

Charting World Progress http://www.gapminder.org/

I’ve often had questions that I wanted answers to and didn’t know who to ask. Sometimes the questions are unanswerable unless some mighty alien intelligence were to come and give them to me. Often times however, they are questions that should in principle be answerable. Here are some questions from my current wish list.
(read on…)

Gerrymandering has always been a crime against democracy, but now people have really taken it to its limit. Thanks to the growth in computing power and some nice software packages available quite cheap, you can redistrict to ensure that you will win. Take a look at these maps in the Economist

How to rig an election
(read on…)

I’m totally disgusted with the handling of Katrina. I’m just so utterly shocked that things have degraded to this level that I find it hard to talk about.

There are a couple of thoughts that have been spinning around my mind and I need to get them off my chest. I’m utterly amazed that the US federal government did not immediately send busses and other transportation to evacuate. The evacuation was completely voluntary, and therefor exclusively for those who can afford it.
(read on…)

You’ve probably already heard more about this than you want to regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, but I want to present what I think is a relatively novel argument. The gist is that dealing with global warming as if it was caused by man is sensible based on a risk analysis using a sort of Dutch Books style argument. (read on…)