QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT

Quality is a quality.

It is a quality of a quality.

Quality is not equality.

Quality is hierarchical, and is a matter of opinion, insofar as it is value-laden.

We have all known good people.

This doesn't mean they are good teachers, good mechanics, good cooks, or good at cutting hair.

It means that they follow the ten commandments.

What is a good teacher? At the elementary school level this is a teacher who cares enough about each student to bring out their best, and inspire them to learn, and to have confidence in themselves. Their punishments are not stringent, and generally not necessary. I had very few good teachers in elementary school. In high school I didn't have any. In college, I had several. In graduate school, almost everyone was an excellent teacher.

What is a good doctor?

What is a good healthcare system? (Let's separate ethics of access from the actual ability to keep people healthy.)

What is a good neighborhood?

What is a good parent?

What is a good book?

Is quality always linked to the good?

If so, is goodness situational, and about the function of a specific thing or person in a specific place and time, or is it a general quality, that can be abstracted?

Are we always fair in judging what's good, and what's bad? Do we do an adequate job assessing quality, or can we be spun?

What is a good president?

What is a good blog comment?

How can we determine the quality of a religion?

Because Pirsig is somewhat Buddhist in orientation, I refuse his values, because I saw Buddhism as a failure at every higher level.

Societies that are largely Buddhist are failed societies: Tibet, Myanmar, Vietnam, Sri Lanka. I see nothing to emulate.

Communist societies are even worse: North Korea, Red China, Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Romania under Ceausescu. I see nothing to emulate.

Islamic societies are even worse: Somalia, the Gambia, Afghanistan under the Taliban.
I see nothing to emulate.

Lutheran societies are the best: Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. I think the world should drop all its other notions, and study these five nations exclusively, and model themselves on them.

Catholic societies are not as good: Italy, Austria, Spain, South and Central America. Something is wrong with Catholic societies. They produce gangs that prey on others. Why do they do this?

We need to think more about the good, and its relationship to quality. What is a good t-shirt? What is a good boyfriend? What is a good car?

Perhaps these are not static indicators but rather they are notions that are in process, and in continual flux. A good hitter in baseball may have slumps. But overall they have a high batting average. This means they produce what we want them to produce, and are generally satisfied with them.

Perhaps industry has a better sense of quality assessment than we have in the humanities. In the humanities we have moved away from quality assessment. Now, we want social and political engagement in a text. We want texts to radicalize students, so that they are no longer Protestants, but Marxists.

I resist this, because I think Marxism is challenged in terms of the quality of society, the quality of goods, and the quality of morals.

I would prefer a return to a Protestant education in which work ethic, high quality outcome, and a sense of concern for others was paramount. We are increasingly besieged by a left that wants to bury Protestantism under a deluge of poor ideas stemming from Marxism. The last Protestant has been taken off the Supreme Court and replaced with gender benders and angry inclusion-mavens. Quality has been replaced by equality. The notion of the individual has been replaced by class. Love has been replaced by gender and power. Humor has been replaced by cynicism.

These are all obvious mistakes to all good Protestants and are considered icky. Communists are icky. They produce ickiness.

Protestants are nifty. They aren't necessarily any better than other people, but there is something in their philosophy that produces good societies overall from top to bottom. What is this quality?