Political Science Critics: Digging in the Wrong Place?

By now, most observers who care about political science have surely come across, and commented about, Nicholas Kristof’s column bemoaning the cloistered nature of political scientists. I won’t try to rehash what's already been done by Steve Saideman, MonkeyCage, and other notable scholars who are regularly engaging in public discourse. Instead, I’ll try to touch on a few things that haven’t received much attention in the debate.

In the original Indiana Jones movie, there comes a point where the heroes realize that the bad guys are “digging in the wrong place” for the Ark. They haven’t done their homework. I’m not saying Kristof is a bad guy (he’s not), but he is definitely digging in the wrong place.

Guest Post: Wind Energy: A Change in Public Opinion

We periodically post the work of Anderson students and alumni. Kevin Sheward recently graduated from Anderson University with a BA in Political Science and a minor in non-profit leadership. He plans to pursue his MBA from Anderson University this fall. His professional interests include urban development and disaster recovery, with a personal interest in alternative energy.

---

Wind Energy: A Change in Public Opinion

Kevin Sheward

The United States has been a leader in many different areas of technology in innovation during its history, but one area that it has been a follower is in alternative energy incorporation. As a nation we have been successful thus far relying on fossil fuels to power our nation, but times are changing and as the environmental and health impacts of burning these fossil fuels are becoming better understood, there is a growing sense that we need to find cleaner and more advanced ways of powering our growing energy needs. Wind energy is one of the promising options that could be the replacement for fossil fuels in the future, but unfortunately it has faced an uphill battle.

The first wind farm was built in the Netherlands in the 1890’s but it wasn’t until 1980 at Crotched Mountain New Hampshire that the first wind farm was built on U.S. soil. It took the United States almost a century to implement a viable energy option that Europe was proving successful for decades. The reason for this is multi-faceted. Until the oil crises of the 1970s, oil and natural gas were extremely cheap energy options and there was little incentive to explore other energy options. Another reason was that the environmental movement hadn’t really begun until the 1970s and public awareness of the environmental costs of fossil fuels was not yet known.

Since the 1980’s wind energy has been implemented at a modest pace, and now wind turbines are dotted all across the nation. However, our shore lines have been untouched by wind energy, a drastic difference from northern Europe, China and Japan that have a combined 4.45 GW of installed wind energy potential with another 4.72 GW planned. The wind energy sector in the U.S. has struggled to break in to this market because three major factors: public opinion, an ironic lack of red tape, and perceived lack of financial viability.

Guest Post: Thoughts on the Spanish Education System

We periodically post the work of Anderson students and alumni. Jordan Clark graduated from Anderson University in 2011 with a BA in Political Science. In this post, Jordan reflects on his experience the past two years teaching English to secondary students in Madrid. He is currently looking for opportunities to contribute to sustainability and urban planning & development in Indianapolis.

---

Thoughts on the Spanish Education System

Jordan Clark

In front of the Ministry of Education

Following my 2011 graduation from AU, I had the good fortune of spending a pair of school years working as an English assistant at the Instituto Arquitecto Ventura Rodriguez, a secondary school in Madrid. My auxiliary teaching role afforded me an up-close and protracted look at one slice of the Spanish education system -- widely regarded both within Spain and without as an institution in crisis. The last several years have been (to put it mildly) unkind to every area of Spanish life, and though education in Spain suffered significant problems before the economic collapse, many believe it faces an even bleaker future because of it.

Lately the conservative-led Spanish government and its Ministry of Education have been making headlines for reform efforts that would: increase teacher workload by adding additional teaching hours and packing more students into each classroom; impose further standardized testing on an already exam-heavy system (both to separate out the best candidates for higher education and prioritize resources for those schools that have lower dropout rates); and most significantly, reduce funding for the public school system by 15 percent, despite an upward trend in student enrollment. Spain caught the austerity bug thanks to the economic crisis, and it looks like leadership have decided that no sector is off-limits.

Of course, in any country, it's easy to pick out a certain sector (or more) that just does not have it together. But I think it's worth stressing some of what afflicts the Spanish education system because current reform efforts seem to have been borne out of ignorance of the system's defects.

So, these are a few of the things that stood out to me during my two years in Madrid:

First of all, Spanish young people are incredibly bright, engaging, and capable. They're highly social, witty, as web-literate as anyone in the world. But in the classroom, these characteristics are often stymied. During most of the school year, my students seemed to be constantly stressed out. This was more the case the higher the grade level, and the closer we got to the end of a term. The reason usually initially consisted of a single word: examenes. Exams are at the heart of just about everything academics-wise in the school. They dominate virtually every school week, and test scores are treated as the end result rather than a means to assess how a student has progressed.

Guest Post: Language of Instruction in Tanzania: A Call for Bilingual Education

One of the goals of this blog is to highlight the work of our students and alumni in political science. You can expect to see several posts doing so in the near future. Kicking this off is the following essay from Anderson University alumnus Joshua Mlay, in which he shares some of his research on education policy in Tanzania.

Joshua is a graduate student in the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include language and literacy in Tanzania, and the privileging of colonial languages and culture at the expense of indigenous languages and culture.

---

Language of Instruction in Tanzania: A Call for Bilingual Education

Josh Mlay

From the late 60’s to mid-80’s Tanzania was renowned for her strong ideals built upon the Ujamaa policy that emphasized Pan Africanism, self-reliance, and national unity. The Arusha Declaration (the blue print of the Ujamaa policy) unequivocally warned that reliance on foreign aid would undermine Tanzania’s ability to make independent policy decisions. Unfortunately, subsequent governments chose to ignore this warning. Today, Tanzania is one of the world's largest foreign aid recipients. Furthermore, foreign aid is the government's largest source of finance. The implications of Tanzania’s reliance on foreign aid are evident in the detrimental policy positions she has adopted. The use of English as the sole language of Instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education is one such example.

During the Ujamaa period (1967-1985), there were attempts to make Kiswahili the language of instruction in all levels of education. However, since then, the Tanzanian government in “collaboration” with the West has implemented English as the sole language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education. The implementation of English as the language of instruction has staggering implications for the future of Tanzania’s social, political, and economic growth. The purpose of this post is to problematize the lack of multiple languages of instruction in secondary schools in Tanzania, which hinders learning and contradicts the purposes of secondary education as determined by the language policy implemented by the Ministry of Education. I argue that there is a crucial need to critically asses the use of English as the language of instruction in Tanzanian schools and a need to develop and implement a bilingual educational policy.

Over 95 percent of Tanzanian’s speak Kiswahili and it serves as the country’s national language. Fewer than five percent of Tanzanian’s speak English at home. Despite this, English is used the language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education regardless of its limited use in other social and economic sectors. The use of English as the language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education is perhaps the most significant and detrimental consequence of Tanzanian government’s collusion with the West.

Voting for Nehemiah

I was fortunate enough to be asked to help my church put together a series on faith and politics this year ahead of the election. My pastor framed the lessons around the book of Nehemiah and the essential leadership lessons that he provides.

I can sum these lessons up with two concepts: credibility and competence.

With respect to credibility, Nehemiah was a stranger in a strange land, but had earned the trust of the empire. As the cup-bearer he had already lived his life in a way where he was trusted by others. Right along with this, when he heard from his own people about the sorry state of a homeland he had never known, they were willing to follow him as a leader to rebuild the city walls.

Nehemiah was trusted by both sides. Can you think of a leader today who lives their life in a way that both the Republicans and Democrats place the highest degree of trust in their word?