Tag: education

Oklahoma Bible Mandate Abandoned

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Government Failure, Opinion

Oklahoma Stuck with 500 Trump Bibles Already Purchased

Oklahoma has ended Ryan Walter’s mandate to place a Bible in every classroom. The Oklahoma Supreme Court in the wake of Walter’s resignation asked the State Superintendent if he wished to continue the current lawsuit defending the mandate. Walter’s replacement, Lindel Fields, withdrew the mandate this last Wednesday.

It appears much that Walters did while in office will be reversed and removed. I prefer not to think of him as having resigned preferring to think him melted by a bucket of water.

KOSU and NPR have a news article written by Robby Korth and Lionel Ramos.

https://www.kosu.org/education/2025-10-15/lindel-fields-announces-end-to-ryan-walters-oklahoma-classroom-bible-mandate

Ryan Walters’ controversial plan to put a Bible in every classroom last summer almost immediately met pushback. About a year ago, a coalition of parents, teachers and faith leaders filed a lawsuit against him and the state over the mandate.

The suit is ongoing, but because of Walters’ exit, Oklahoma’s State Supreme Court gave his replacement Lindel Fields, the opportunity to withdraw or resolve the case in the next two weeks.

But he ultimately took much less time. On Wednesday, Fields announced he would withdraw the mandate at the heart of the case.

(This is from a book picturing “The vanished places of worship and cathedrals in France from 1917.”)

Oklahoma like much of the United States is a place of many faiths. The Pew Research Center found that there were Oklahomans who practiced the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu faiths besides a bewildering variety of Protestant sects.

Here in Oklahoma we are leaving this chapter, this episode, of the culture wars to return to the very real problems of low morale among teachers and administrators as well as a tragic lack of funding for education in general. We are the 50th state in per pupil funding and I must reluctantly admit, a national laughingstock.

But stay tuned as various investigations into Walter’s conduct are now ongoing and there may be much, much more to see and hear about what passed for administrative decisions in Oklahoma Education.

In regard to business ethics, this is a cautionary tale of a narrow minded ideologue running wild. It is not the last one we will ever see although we may hope.

Salaries were paid to people who barely showed up, the most pitiful propaganda was adopted as if they somehow qualified as “teaching materials,” and the department was run like a personal fiefdom.

I wish the new Superintendent well and pray for his success.

The people of Oklahoma deserve so much better than what was done and a new beginning is called for.

James Alan Pilant

Children’s Brains Changed by Inequality

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Editorial, Government Failure

Research finds that Inequality creates a toxic environment.

MRI scans of thousands of children found that those living in areas of higher inequality had measurable changes to the brain and it is believed that these changes may have long term effects on mental health.

This should be front page news.

I am not surprised with the results or the fact that this is not a major story. As a society we talk about children as important but when it comes to money and effort, we demonstrate a lack of concern. .

If you live in a society where basic unfairness is part of the life you lead, you are harmed. The study showed that children from different social classes, that is, the winners and losers, suffered just the same.

The old simple Biblical principle that doing evil and having evil done to you damages the soul.

Yes, it does.

What are we going to do about it. The standard playbook used by Big Tobacco and currently by the fossil fuels industry will be applied as it always is when social change threatens the established order. And so, the result will be —

Nothing.

The Right Wing media machine will spend tens of thousands of words explaining the results away. They are quite likely to produce several made up studies in which they decisively prove that inequality is good for everybody. They will endlessly discuss avoiding a culture of “dependence,” which is a scurrilous way of describing having people fed. There will be several hundred thousand bots posting derogatory attacks on the specific researches and on academics in general. And there will have to be some death threats to round out the mix. After all, the cruelty is the point.

After these attacks, politicians, public figures and regular people will consider the topic controversial and have “doubts.” that these doubts are cleverly manufactured by evil and well paid advocates will be irrelevant.

(It is possible by careful planning using God’s gift of intelligence to create great and wonderful things.)

Now, what would intelligent thinking and capable human beings do with this research?

Now, that is interesting. Obviously, we need more studies of children in societies with different levels of inequality. We also need to see if there are variations that can be achieved by different methods pf parenting and education.

We have information that leads us to see brain changes in children. So, what can we do and what are we doing now that has an effect on this process.

In other word, we as a society and a people take significant research and use it to improve our way of life.

That is what is supposed to happen.

But right now, the intelligent and cultured are under attack by an increasingly unhinged band of goons who are determined to impose their lack of breeding and intelligence on all of us.

We will see whether or not they succeed.

Here is the Guardian article explaining and linking to the research – along with a short quote.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/sep/30/study-links-greater-inequality-to-structural-changes-in-childrens-brains

A study of more than 10,000 young people in the US discovered altered brain development in children from wealthy and lower-income families in areas with higher rates of inequality, which were also associated with poorer mental health.

The data was gathered from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study and published in the journal Nature Mental Health.

Researchers at King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of York then measured inequality within a particular US state by scoring how evenly income is measured. States with higher levels of inequality included New York, Connecticut, California and Florida, while Utah, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont were more equal.

This article was written by Tobi Thomas for the Guardian.

Planting Seeds

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Editorial

I want to talk about teaching and how difficult it is.

When I was teaching, there was always the “wall.” That thing that prevented what I was trying to convey from getting through.

You see, my students were generally very young, eighteen to twenty-one. There were middle aged students who returned to school and a good number of veterans, and they were wonderful students. But the great mass were the young ones. And they were inexperienced

Without perspective, they could not draw a conclusions from a similar circumstance. You could lead them to the right answer but they had enormous difficulty applying the reasoning to anything else.

I used to show a clip from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where the learned knight leads the local peasants to a completely wrong conclusion (that witches burn because they are made of wood). And while they thought it was funny, they didn’t get the hard cold fact that leading people in the wrong direction is not that hard and the tools we depend on for teaching are not always that reliable.

It soon became evident that they had never been trained to understand the implications of what they were learning. In fact, for most of them learning was just a long boring process of getting the necessary paperwork for later employment. I taught every new class the rationale for why each major subject was part of their course of study and fit my own classes in that picture of whole trained human being.

So, I began to plant seeds. It seemed to me that if I placed an idea with wide applications in front of them several times, they would realize at some point later the implications of that idea. So, I taught the great ideas. I showed legendary movies, and I would tell the great stories of Western Culture. I was talented enough to make those things interesting.

Did the seeds grow? Probably. Ideas especially ideas deeply embedded in the culture have a lot of relevance and staying power.

But do I know that for a fact? No. You never know what effect your teaching has. You just hope.

James Alan Pilant

My Blog is a NO AI Generated Content Zone!

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics, Capitalism, code of ethics

Why? Because I hate the mediocre crap! By and large it is pitiful poorly written garbage.

(My vision of the AI monster preparing to destroy all actual writing and all actual images.)

Last year I sat down to renew my Office 365 subscription. It usually ran about seventy dollars but not that time. It was a hundred dollars. They had added AI and they charged me an additional thirty dollars for it. No choice. I was in the middle of several projects so I couldn’t opt out of the service although I am really thinking about going over to WordPerfect on the next renewal date.

I did one experiment with it. I gave it five words and a topic. It wrote an essay. Not a very good essay but sort of C+ kind of high school essay. The content did not alarm me. What alarmed me was the entire process took about thirty seconds. In theory, I could generate 120 essays in an hour. And I could see in my mind’s eye, some person writing a blog online or doing school or college work or writing editorials for the local paper writing essay after essay after essay with the touch of a few buttons.

That was the last time I used the AI feature on Word. Every time I start the program, every single damn time, it starts with the AI program with the prompts to use it. I have to deliberately turn it off.

I write my blog myself. It is my thoughts, my ideas, my writing, my spelling, my punctuation and my phrasing. You, my readers, deserve nothing less.

I am considering putting some kind of “NO AI” label on the site. If one is not available online currently, I’m sure it will be soon.

I want you to know I am not the only one upset by the explosion of AI mediocrity.

Here is the magazine Scientific American’s published article linked to below by linguist Naomi S. Baron which discusses AI and writing :

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-humans-lose-when-ai-writes-for-us/

But what happens to human communication when it’s my bot talking to your bot? Microsoft, Google and others are building out AI-infused e-mail functions that increasingly “read” what’s in our inbox and then draft replies for us. Today’s AI tools can learn your writing style and produce a reasonable facsimile of what you might have written yourself.

My concern is that it’s all too tempting to yield to such wiles in the name of saving time and minimizing effort. Whatever else makes us human, the ability to use words and grammar for expressing our thoughts and feelings is a critical chunk of that essence.

I was easily able to find numerous articles in a similar vein and to my dismay many cheerleading articles as well.

But I’ve made my decision.

I am a man hopefully a gentleman — and I do my own writing.

James Alan Pilant

The Lessons of this Administration

On By southwerkIn business ethics

The environment both natural and artificial shapes us.

I write about business ethics and I am deeply concerned about our current students in colleges and universities across the United States. Right now they are witnessing the highest and most powerful people in the United States government behaving in often illegal and continuously unethical ways. I am pointing specifically at the Cabinet members of the current administration although they are not the only ones.

They were selected on the basis of the most craven, servile loyalty and very often without any actual qualifications for their positions. And we see often on a daily basis, that to keep these jobs they must over and over again express their fealty to the current leadership. It is a degrading spectacle. Humans were meant to walk upright like free men and women not like some kind of whipped dog.

So, the current students here in this country witness a group of people getting ahead by sacrificing their honor, their self-respect, and abdicating their obedience and oath to the Constitution and laws of the United States. These people appear on television. They get good salaries and excellent benefits. There is an implication of after office service in think tanks and foundations at even more money. (However, the future of those from this openly corrupt administration is in some doubt.) Their lives are clear evidence that giving up your principles and abject loyalty to the most monstrous of individuals can be a successful strategy, if money and position are your only goals.

We do not live purely for money and position. I believe that is a truth. However, when I was teaching my students often told me that would seek a high paying position and do that job for twenty some years and then retire and live the life they wanted. I tried to explain to them that twenty years at a degrading and morally corrupt job would change them permanently, not to mention that a long life is not something that can be depended on. I am not sure they listened. After all, the lure of the opposite sex, nice cars, social position and economic security are very persuasive.

Explaining that a life you can look back on with pride is the only one worth living is difficult when your students are so young and want so many things so badly. And that is why we who teach are under a special and vital responsibility to point out the flaws in the “success at any personal cost” model.

We must be inspirational leaders not just teachers. We will have failed in a substantial and historically significant way if the current generation learns as a life lesson that servility and dishonor are proven paths to success. How will we be able to enjoy our retirements and our latter years when we see our students entering middle age in jobs they hate and despise because we were unable to communicate the important of moral and socially responsible conduct? And what of our nation? Can you imagine an entire generation admiring the antics of Pete Hegseth or Pam Bondi or any other of the cast of this ongoing federal reality show, a form of Wrestlemania writ large across our civic landscape?

If there was a time in your life to stand up for the values of the United States of America, this is it.

If you value your students’ futures, you must act to influence them to act in the interests of their nation, their posterity and their honor.

If not now, then when?

There is no convenient time to take a stand against evil.

Act now.

Your students and your nation are worth fighting for.

James Alan Pilant

Extortion as Policy

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Business ethics in the United States is taking some hard hits right now. In the last few days, one of the hardest hits that ethics in business has taken has come from what many people thought was a great university. They were mistaken.

Columbia University having agreed to a 200 million dollar payout has become the model for more Mafia style shakedowns of higher education in the United States.

Like Al Capone in Chicago, once you have one business paying protection you just roll up the rest of the block. So it is for American higher education. Columbia is the first in the dominoes.

Here – read the article about how Columbia will be the model.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-expects-other-schools-pay-164519393.html

“The deal didn’t just include a payout. Columbia also agreed to the appointment of an independent monitor who will determine if the school is abiding by the agreement, which includes provisions related to admissions, faculty hiring, and antisemitism on campus.”

Oh and look!! With an independent monitor, the shakedowns can continue indefinitely! You can bet real, hard money that a parade of demands for more money and power will come on a regular basis because once you’ve shown moral cowardice and the absence of any backbone, the extortion never, ever stops.

Perhaps, as in Florida, cronies of our “government” will find themselves well paying positions with lots of free perks in the now morally challenged atmosphere of the cowering leadership of a once great university.

The spectacle of a great university folding like a gambler with a busted flush sounds like a story from a bad novel. Who would have thought that a great independent bastion of thought would be kneeling before the great orange Cheeto?

This is a blog on business ethics so let us do our moral analysis!!

When your research grants are stopped on spurious grounds and you are given a list of nonsensical loony demands including giving up your independence and ability to do things like choose your own faculty, you should:

A. Deploy your lawyers and summon support from alumni to fight this assault.

B. Seek political support seeking input from your stakeholders while taking a principled stand for the political independence of a major university.

C. Ally with other universities like Harvard and demand fair treatment and justice.

D. Pay 200 million dollars and give into every demand the administration makes.

My analysis would be that A, B and C are all viable paths of social responsibility and justice seeking. They did D, the path of cowardice and compliance. That was wrong.

The moral bankruptcy of American businesses faced with threats from the administration offers clear parallels to the end of the Wiemar Republic and the end of democracy in that country. This is a national tragedy with dramatic implications.

Since, I have taught business ethics, I must find that Columbia has erred on the side of wrong doing and moral failure.

They have just sacrificed not just two hundred million dollars but their moral reputation and their sacred honor.

They will not be getting them back.

And their failure makes it easier for this evil administration to shake down other schools.

It will never be the same institution that it once was and may safely be discarded as having any principles besides keeping federal funding flowing at all costs.

My long term prediction is as follows. They will find in the long term that they will lose the money as well. This isn’t a just one battle, the long term goal is annihilation. As a defender of civilization and thought, Columbia is to be destroyed. And that is what is going to happen unless braver people with actual spines come to their rescue. A rescue I might add, they in no way deserve.

James Alan Pilant

    They Drugged Their Students!

    On By southwerkIn business ethics1 Comment

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/two-teachers-yanked-texas-classroom-160046076.html

    It seems based on the evidence of the press reports and interviewed witnesses that teachers at an elementary school put “sleeping” patches on the children in the classroom regularly in large numbers. These are small children as young as four years old. I am outraged. You just don’t give other people’s children drugs. That they didn’t actually kill anybody is just dumb luck.

    Here’s a quote from the article:

    Najla Abdullah asked her four-year-old son if he too had received a sticker. “He said, ‘Yes, mommy. I get a special sticker,’” Abdullah told ABC. “I said, ‘What does it look like?’ He said, ‘I get it right here on my hand, and it has the storms with the clouds and the star and the moon.’”

    My son is entering his thirties so I didn’t even know these things existed (sleeping stickers). So, I went over and opened my Amazon account and there they were in large numbers and variety of colors and various capabilities. I’m sure many parents whose children have sleep problems find them to be of some benefit.

    However, drugging entire classrooms of tiny tots to make your job easier is wrong! (to put it mildly) Since, I assume there will be firings and criminal charges, hopefully the idea of drugging small children will not catch on as a teaching aid.

    As an expert on business ethics, my analytic abilities are wasted here. What analysis can you do? Is there a moral argument about giving other people’s children drugs? I think not. There is no way the teachers or teacher’s aides had any idea of what medications the children were already taking or the existence of an medical conditions the children might have had so administering any drug on a large scale is highly dangerous. These acts endangered children. End of moral analysis.

    If I may quote from a legendary source of moral support: In the New Testament, Jesus Christ issues a stern warning against harming children. In Matthew 18:6, Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

    This is a catastrophic failure of business ethics. The school is hunkered down. There is no listing of classes involved, number of students or if this was the only set of violations. We can expect this story to develop.

    If I were advising the school. I would recommend an outside investigator be hired and as early as possible personnel decisions. They need to share as much information as is possible under the circumstances and new rules specifically banning these actions put in place.

    James Pilant

    Affordable Connectivity Program Ends Because of Governing Failure

    On By southwerkIn business ethics
    This is a Tennessee focused article but very good.

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/31/tech/fcc-affordable-connectivity-program-acp-close/index.html

    Direct Quote from the article above:

    On Friday, the US government announced the final closure of the broadly popular federal program, which has helped tens of millions of households afford internet service, after Republicans in Congress ignored calls by consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers to approve more funding this spring. The program’s lapse threatens to throw nearly 60 million Americans into financial distress, CNN has reported.

    For several years, the federal government has subsidized internet access to millions of Americans, almost 60 million of them. It was a very successful program because access to the internet is a “production good.” If you don’t remember you college economics or never had it, a production good is something you can buy that increases your output. Before the age of the computer that would have been a car (so you could go to work) or a typewriter (for filing applications and sending cover letters or working from home). Internet access allows you to apply for jobs or government benefits, communicate with your employer and learn the rules and regulations in countless fields. It is quite difficult to successfully apply for a job without an active internet connection.

    Then why did the Republicans not fund it? I think it is safe to say that philosophically Republicans believe that the government cannot successfully do anything. Perhaps when subsidizing highly profitable industries, they see an exception but not very often. There is also the factor that this assists people of the lower and lower middle class incomes, and they feel a strong need to make these people suffer so they will “learn to achieve like the rest of us.”

    If you have been following the news these last few weeks you may have observed that they were also busy browbeating University Presidents, Merrick Garland and the former Surgeon General. This kind of grandstanding takes the place of governing in their minds. Performing important government functions doesn’t get your name mentioned favorably on America’s numerous hate radio stations where every kind of nonsense is spouted as if it were the wisdom of the ages. Our alternate media sources do not find achievement and action on behalf of the public to be compelling topics. It doesn’t push the big topics of the deep state or the coming civil war, so we have a political party basically devoted to inaction and publicity stunts. This is called nihilism.

    It was a good program, a successful program that helped millions of Americans go to school, get jobs, maintain employment and learn important skills. It wasn’t very much money and it made a lot of difference but that kind of governing is out of style. Sabotage and inaction are the tools in use here. If we can make the government not work, we can hurt the current administration. The public be damned.

    It is ethically wrong, morally bankrupt and a failure of business ethics. But screwing over people while owning the libs is a value among Republicans more valuable than diamonds and gold. So, some teenager having difficulty applying to college because he has no internet access is just another victory over those people who practice compassion and making them suffer is the most important thing in the world.

    James Pilant

    AI Weaponized.

    On By southwerkIn business ethics

    As technology moves forward with often amazing speed, the law struggles to keep up. New offenses never even thought of before are happening every day. One tragic trend is the posting of fake nudes of high school students and there are many others. The internet is a massive information super highway of fraud, deception and filth. I don’t need to tell you in any detail because you see and experience yourself the horror of what the internet has become.

    This case detailed in the links below alleges that Dazhon Darien used AI technology to imitate the Pikesville high school’s principal. The fake recording had the principal disparaging minority students and teachers. It was spread about on the internet. Darien was under accusation of having billed the school illegally for about $2000. It seems the motive was revenge.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/maryland-teacher-ai-principal

    A quote from the article above:

    Using cloning technology, Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote. The recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers who “should never have been hired”.

    The AI attack was very successful. The principal was temporarily replaced as complaints flooded in. This was a truly vicious unprincipled attack. There are many disturbing elements, the main one being this is a first use case. There will be others and the results are likely to be at least as tragic and probably much, much worse.

    We must as a society find ways of dealing with these issues of technological criminal innovation much more quickly. AI is a revolutionary technology. To say that it could be used to kill is not an exaggeration. And I while I am seeing a great deal of concern and discussion, I’m not seeing much legislative and administrative action.

    Our legislatures, our Governors, our federal system are all creatures of the past with long and storied histories. But they were developed in the age of the horse as the main instrument of travel and the written letter, the primary medium of communication. Let me just give you an example, in the great majority of states, Corporate law requires the Board of Directors to meet annually and keep records of that event. This is directly from an era in which they traveled by train and horse. Isn’t it obvious that the corporate board be regularly involved, meeting often and having some kind of regular contact with the company? Yet the law requires no more than that single meeting a year. And we’ve had the internet, automobiles and telephones for quite some time now and we have not adapted the the statutory law to mandate more contact in an ongoing business. And that is the story across the board in the United States. The laws are based on circumstances that have become obsolete.

    I suggest that the Justice Department create a division devoted to technological innovation and crime. This will give the government a slim chance of getting ahead of the curve of these new kinds of crime. We really don’t want to wake up one morning and find that AI had killed, destroyed reputations, collapsed companies and crashed infrastructures without legal recourse for the victims or the government.

    We need to act. We must act now. Because the wicked actors both here at home and overseas are not resting. They are actively plotting and will given any opportunity take advantage of these new technologies.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-school-principal-faced-threats-after-being-accused-of-offensive-language-on-a-recording-now-police-say-it-was-a-deepfake/ar-AA1nJhWo

    From the article above.

    On January 16, a Gmail user known as TJFOUST9 sent an email to three teachers, including Darien, at their school email addresses. The subject line said, “Pikesville Principal — Disturbing Recording.” A sound file was attached. A man could be heard speaking. Among other disparaging comments, including one about two teachers and another about Jewish people, the man said Black students couldn’t “test their way out of a paper bag.” The recording proliferated. A teacher who didn’t get along well with Eiswert admitted to sharing it with a student “who she knew would rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” the report said. The teacher also sent the recording to media outlets and the NAACP.

    Let the Valedictorian Speak Her Mind!

    On By southwerkIn business ethics

    The University of Southern California has canceled a brief remark (3-5 minutes) scheduled to be given at the graduation this year by the class Valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, on “public safety” grounds.

    I may be getting old and cynical but the University’s concern over public safety strikes me as nonsensical. This is the United States of America. From time to time, people have differences of opinion. I promise you Americans are not going to melt like a chocolate bar in hot summer sun if Ms. Tabassum says something many people disagree with in her 3-5 minute remarks.

    I also might point out that Ms. Tabassum stated that she had planned to talk about hope although I don’t think after this pitiful controversy that I or anybody else can expect her to continue with that topic.  

    In terms of business ethics, if USC is a private business, they have every right to cancel any part of the ceremony for any reason whatever. But they are a public university. If recollection serves, they are one of the land grant universities, one of President Lincoln’s ideas. Public institutions are supposed to respect the rights of Americans, particularly the right to political speech, the most protected form of speech under American Constitutional Law.

    What the University should be saying loud and clear is that our new Valedictorian has the right to speak her opinion. We may not agree with that opinion but it is better to live in a nation where people have a right to express their thoughts than one where thought, opinion and speech are proscribed in case they offend the public or the government.

    Now, I suppose some readers will accuse me of being Pro-Palestinian. To be honest, I don’t side much with anybody in this Middle Eastern mess. The Palestinians deserve the right to live, work and exercise voting rights. Their property must be protected. The Israeli’s have the right to exist and to be free from attack. Lots and lots of people have died and suffered sexual assaults. Hamas has done a bunch of killing and Israel with its indiscriminate use of firepower has done an even bigger bunch of killing. Do you see why I find both sides problematic?

    But while elements of this dispute have traveled to the United States, we are neither Israel or Palestine. Most of us are neither Muslims or Jews. We can hear both sides strident as the voices may be and make up our own minds as Americans are supposed to do.

    James Alan Pilant

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/let-her-speak-usc-campus-100043988.html

    University officials chose Tabassum, a biomedical engineering major with a minor in resistance to genocide, as valedictorian from a pool of nearly 100 applicants with GPAs of 3.98 or above. The title comes with an invitation to deliver a 3-to-5-minute speech to an audience of about 65,000 at the campuswide commencement ceremony on May 10.