This post is unbalanced and unfair. It is judgmental and uncaring. All of these characteristics are unacceptable in a woman. I therefore declare that I am now Jonathan Swift. In claiming his identity, I am being dishonest about my own. I am also emulating a dead white man when I might do better to emulate less well sung heroines and heroes. These things having been said, let us move on to the meat, or perhaps the potato of the matter.
The potato of the matter is that while most of my students are majors, with a few minors and graduate students thrown in for good measure, I am now teaching a group of students who have not yet entered the upper division. I would like to outlaw private education and homeschooling because both mis-prepare students for college and for life. There are exceptions, but I am sure the good private schools would make excellent magnet or otherwise specialized public schools. “Unschooling” is one thing, but homeschooling is about control and over-protectiveness.
All too many students from private schools caught ADHD there and now cannot read. They are visual learners, so they cannot listen in class. They have test anxiety so they need extra time. In addition, many of them are so well versed in Creation Science that they cannot do Algebra, which impedes their progress toward eligibility for upper division courses. They have difficulty being on a work team with Black or Jewish students, and they resign from extracurricular activities unless they are elected President of them.
Most recently I learned that the reason they could not study was that the light bulbs had burned out in their apartment and since it was the weekend, the manager was not present to change them. They did not realize light bulbs could be bought and easily changed. Especially with NCLB, the public schools have their problems as well. Yet their graduates have at least some skills.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I battled over this when my son turned two. For the first year and a half of his life, we lived in Sao Paulo, and I admired the public school system there. Kids only went to school for four hours a day, and they learned language, math, science, and social studies. The community took care of the arts education and extracurriculars.
When we returned to the U.S., I wanted to homeschool my kid because I didn’t want him to go to school all day (not to teach him creation science). But I wanted to treat the homeschooling as more of an apprenticeship rather than a classroom, and let him learn “school” stuff along the way.
My wife didn’t go for that. So, we sent him to a Montessori school around the corner from our house. He’s learning fast there, but he was already learning fast at home. No ADHD yet. But, the kids there are not a good representation of the greater community – not necessarily in terms of race and ethnicity, but in terms of economic class.
I want to send my kid to a community run school for four hours a day. I don’t want art classes there. I don’t want sports. Just language(s), math, science, and social studies. Do any of those exist?
BTW, I do see the value in arts education and sports and other extracurriculars. I just think the community can take care of that with volunteers and community centers geared towards that goal.
It seems I can’t get comments through if I provide links. But if you want to see a discussion of home schooling, you can go to my blog and type in “home schooling” in the little Google thing on the sidebar.
Home schooling is mostly a pathetic enterprise.
I think this is the post:
http://hattie.typepad.com/hatties_web/2006/12/spunky_home_sch.html
Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, LMAO! I love narrative!!!!!!!
I feel your frustration fly off the scream. Imagine me, the student, the student wanting to learn, to discuss, to absorb, just to be hindered by my fellow students who did not read the bloody text before class. Hello, we were all English-Literature majors and they would not read!!!!!!
Where are the students living? Whenever I kept an apartment, the light bulbs were on me, not management. I think management need to crack a few faces, welcome them into reality.
jonathan swift is/was one of the best satirists ever. i would be flattered to resemble him. i think you should be too, Z.
You know, many of those women who used to teach me in the Rhodesian high schools were unbalanced and uncaring. Women and their male counterparts in that culture both had a coolness about them. I’m not at all too happy that we have “advanced” beyond that now.
And it is really very irritating to me, I should add, to be preached at by Westerners who presume that they are advanced because they presume that they live in a democracy where everybody is treated equally. They cannot even countenance the suggestion that many women in Rhodesian and Zimbabwean society had higher social status than that which women generally have in “advanced” Western culture. But so it was. It’s why the great phallus is for me not the ultimate signifier. I had enough terrifying (and profoundly unsympathetic) female school teachers in Zimbabwe that it is not difficult for me to perceive women as (potentially at least) innately powerful. This is all down to my “regressive” social conditioning, but oh well.
Women are given children to screw over but that does not mean women are important in regressive societies.
Hattie, Hattie, I don’t know if you understood what I said, or the irony of it. What I am saying is that Western society is really the regressive society.
For instance, in Western society, children are given women to screw over.
Great improvement, yes?
I am voting with Scratchy although I get Hattie’s point.
Kitty, yes, that is what I am talking about.
MD, yes, it is a horrible problem. IRL I favor doing the best one can, choosing the best one can find and afford. The thing about not having arts/etc. in the schools is, though, that middle class types will find these elsewhere and others may not. And arts, sports, etc. really *do* help.
What I am ranting at is people who in reality are C students – some just are, there is nothing wrong with it – but whose middle class parents want them to have A’s. What they learn from tutors, private schools, etc. is not how to learn better but how to make excuses for themselves.
It is a true disservice and all I can say is that I regret the waste of the parents’ hard earned money – it might have been better spent, at this point, on the KUCINICH campaign or any which will put an end to NCLB!!!
Well, many people don’t like children, but it’s not a virtue.
Well, I’m being too laconic. But it is true that never have there been so many stressed out parents, students, and teachers as there are at present in the U.S. And no child left behind is behind most of that.
A typical example: a woman I know has been told that her son, who is in the 6th grade, has a 3rd grade I.Q. At present, he is getting special ed classes in math and reading while being mainstreamed in his other subjects. The principle says that if at the end of the term he tests above 3rd grade in his skills he will not get the extra help any more. It’s because the school did so well with test scores over all that they lost most of their special ed funding. Or something.
None of this makes the slightest sense to the principal, the parent, or the kid.
I questioned her further and she says she feels her son is bright but confused. And no wonder!
I could not teach in such an atmosphere. And teachers are continuing to leave the profession in droves. Little wonder.
Little wonder. Because teachers are not allowed now to meet the academic needs of the students, but only the bureaucratic wishes of this weird system.
But the children and their parents are getting what they think they want! (They may not know anything about education or anything like that — but too bad.)
The point is that parents (on behalf of their children) are demanding something. It feels way cool to demand something. And they are getting something. And that feels way cool, too!
Who cares about actual education when you can have the adrenaline buzz of power and be able to demand …something?!
I think this hits things right on the head. And the more things sink in, the more I realize how truly outrageous this class is.
It’s a very messed up culture. I think the model is basically flawed: The idea that the best results come about through open confrontation which serves to separate the wheat from the chaff. In actual fact, this approach only produces mediocrity as everyone is whittled down to the point that they are only functioning at a very basic level. And of course it undermines intelligence too, since constant stress has a negative effect in terms of creativity and deeper thinking.
So Westerners really do need to get away from their mystical mode of thinking that they are somehow going to have a positive impact throught their “democratic contributions” — their hammering away at all and sundry in the dark.
No. The unmitigated expressions of your “reason” is not the way to further enlightenment. And Asia will supercede you.
It already is.
“In actual fact, this approach only produces mediocrity as everyone is whittled down to the point that they are only functioning at a very basic level. And of course it undermines intelligence too, since constant stress has a negative effect in terms of creativity and deeper thinking.”
Yes. And important. But the kind of constant mutual battering you are talking about is not composed of democratic contributions!
Asia – but are they not superceding (supposedly) by emulating the worst of the 19th century U.S.? Sweat shops, death penalty, environmental devastation?
OK– but it has very often been implied to me, for instance in the subtle way of Hattie and others, that the reason I recoil from the degradation of contemporary life, including mutual backstabbing, is that I am not progressive enough. It is implied that I ought to be able to see that this is the reasonable way forward, Perhaps I’m just not willing to sacrifice myself enough to see it? Perhaps I lack the honesty of lying down upon the table so that others can put my body to good use, through an appropriate and decent, organised dissection?
IN any case, whenever I complain about what I see in Modern life, I am usually told that I am just not sufficiently progressive to appreciate it properly — that everything is in order and as it should be, and that I am mocking at what is the height of civilised thinking.
And actually Asia, you know, they just keep marching on. They use a system of hard work to get ahead, rather than abusiveness encoded as “democracy”. The greater consideration that Asian people show for each other is, in fact, also linked to the fact that they are generally more authoritarian. So, there is less of a drive (and certainly less of justification) to batter into others and call that separating the wheat from the chaff — the inevitable process of democracy. Rather, most everyone in Asian society is some form of wheat in an a priori sense — not chaff.
What I’m getting at here is not some simplified and false dichotomy concerning whether or not to choose Brand Asia or Brand The West from the supermarket shelves of life, but rather that the term “democracy” is encoded in a particular way in the minds of many, many Westerners, at a grass-roots level.
The medieval trope of witch-hunting has not only become a “democratic right” for many of the citizens of Western culture, it has actually been turned into a “democratic” obligation for them. They are to leave no stone unturned in determining who is a genuine person and who is a non-genuine one, all under the rubric of “accountability”.
“Democratic rights” for the many means the excitement of chasing someone down and heading in for the kill.
I guess that if you are not “a witch” in this society, then you will fail to see my point, but to me, this much is patently evident.
“abusiveness encoded as ‘democracy’”
“’Democratic rights’” for the many means the excitement of chasing someone down and heading in for the kill.”
There’s more to say on all of this and I will say now, but on these two phrases for now:
It occurs to me that they would explain what the “freedom” Americans are now willing to sacrifice the Constitution for is.
I always wonder what the “freedom” we are supposed to be protecting is, since we have already signed our traditional freedoms away. But if what people are striving to protect is the right to conduct witch hunts and to abuse, then everything makes sense again. In a sad way, of course.
On hard work: apparently the “average” American works 46 hours a week, 38% work more than 50; at my university the official work week is 60 hours, but you must put in more to get ahead; working as little as 60 hours is not enough to stay on salary as full time in a legal or medical firm; only one full time job at minimum wage puts the worker well below the Federal poverty line (you need two such full time jobs, an 80 hour week) to reach or slightly exceed it. *And* it is said that hard work will get you ahead but this is increasingly untrue for all but the already privileged classes.
So at the same time as people stress out from overwork – and, obviously, lack the time to reflect – they also have these highly inappropriate feelings of entitlement and especially entitlement to abuse. And they resent legitimate authority but worship totalitarian gods.
It appears to me that we are having or have already had a national nervous breakdown.
Yeah, I wasn’t saying that hard work is morally laudable. Just that it is, for instance, a value of the Japanese in the same way that “democracy” is a value of Westerners. I wasn’t implying that it was a great thing, at all.
“the reason I recoil from the degradation of contemporary life, including mutual backstabbing, is that I am not progressive enough”
I notice this also and it is very odd. I have not figured it out. It seems sometimes that “progessive” is code for conformist; it is conformity in its nice, avant-garde clothes.
More on hard work – it’s a *huge* value here, too. Taking pride in the work itself, though, may not be something we do as much or as well as the Japanese. (N.B. that is a generalization based on stereotypes, though, I do not actually know enough to be able to make it with confidence.)
“more authoritarian”
You know, I think things were more authoritarian even here when I was younger, although also less abusive and more forward-looking. At that time the Constitution (for instance) was being liberalized and everyone was rebelling for 1968-type reasons, yet this pervasive sense of entitlement which now plagues us had not set in.
It seems sometimes that “progressive” is code for conformist; it is conformity in its nice, avant-garde clothes.
Yes I think that is getting at it. I think progressive is code for capitalist which in turn is code for conformist. Somewhere I read an off hand remark that some new Toyota SUV was going to be the hummer for the progressives. I thought and thought about this because of how much I hate SUVs. I kept wondering why would a progressive have an SUV at all if that progressive believes that hummers are bad. But the more I thought about it the more it all blended together. It is not about the renouncing of materialism, it about the pseudo-morality that comes with one-upmanship. If the progressive bought the hummer he or she cannot be morally superior, however, they still need a hummer substitute, which is what that new Toyota provides. Then there are people like me, who say “hey what about the whole thing about giving up SUVs because they are against the environment and they rob other people of space” and that is where the “you are not progressive enough” comes into play. In other words, if I actually renounce the SUVs I will be a real progressive therefore making the pseudo-progressives nervous so they have to discredit me before that happens by saying I am not progressive enough.
It all boils down to who has what, but who has what they have with the best smokescreen. Can you afford smokescreen A, B, or C. Can you soul afford smokescreen A,B, or C. My soul cannot afford any smokescreen, thereby disqualifying me from the race. “Get with the program you stupid girl, you are not even in the race.”
“It is not about the renouncing of materialism, it about the pseudo-morality that comes with one-upmanship.”
That I think is quite astute – as is your whole comment.
This one upmanship is as inevitable as it is cowardly.
Inevitable, because one (supposedly) exists to the extent that one can one-up others?
So that “democracy” ultimately means freedom to one-up?
This is actually possible: we are taught to think that there was a great shift from monarchies to republics, subject to citizen, but when one looks at things more closely, it is often that business elites wanted to have the rights of royalty.
I think it is a misunderstanding of democracy, actually, but there it is. Actually I think that what I have encountered is a peculiar and extremely odious confluence of a mere notion of democracy with a more deeply held social darwinistic ethos. But the social darwinistic ethos (and really not even that, except in a superficial and malignant way) is what is really functioning as an emotional dynamic at large when people demand “accountability” in their public servants or others, and when they DEMAND to be heard at any cost to anybody else.
“a peculiar and extremely odious confluence of a mere notion of democracy with a more deeply held social darwinistic ethos”
That is really interesting. So democracy is the right to struggle with everyone else at a really basic level.
Tangential, but perhaps not: in Parliament people can shout each other down but here it is not allowed in Congress. Apparently Benjamin Franklin introduced that idea, which he had learned from the Iroquois.
Well, the shouting at each other thing is not my cuppa tea. Actually, the Rhodesian way of doing things was generally subtler, more in tune with “justice being seen to be done” than Western ways are. Western ways (in my experience) are more like, “We will assert our passions in tune with the level of reason that we have defined as pertinent to our essence, and the fall-out from any such self-assertion is bound to have been blessed by God.” So Western ways are more mystically oriented and intellectually obscure in their goals, whereas Rhodesian ways were rational with an element of sophism (convincing others by force of rhetoric that justice had actually been done.) The Rhodesian approach was relatively sophisticated, in relation to the Western approach, bcause the goals and purposes of a meeting were always already well established before it took place.
In Africa, there were, traditionally, on the other hand, “indabas”, or tribal meetings.
The only place I’ve ever been that had meetings without pre-established goals and purposes is one of the departments I currently work in!
“‘We will assert our passions in tune with the level of reason that we have defined as pertinent to our essence, and the fall-out from any such self-assertion is bound to have been blessed by God.’ So Western ways are more mystically oriented and intellectually obscure in their goals….”
This seems to describe the current, typical “Ugly American” and the student I am currently so tired of.
What’s interesting to me is to learn that this is mystically oriented and intellectually obscure – those things are true but even I, the critic, have internalized far enough the idea that power is reason, that I forget to see that this attitude is in fact mystically oriented and intellectually obscure. But of course it is.
Well the meetings without pre-established goals are the ones without a leader. People come to vent and to see what they can get for their ventations.
Which is why I do not like them. In one of my departments this dislike is considered “controlling” – I say it is not, it is democratic.
It’s democratic in the deeper sense to dislike pie-slinging and a free for all. It hinders communication.
In the *deeper* sense? Woe is me. Although I have half a class of students who feel this way. If the key is not to communicate, this would explain why they cannot learn a foreign language or write a sentence for that matter!
haha.
Well, it’s nearly midnight. One more workpiece to write up.
Ah, wait a second – you check blogs on breaks from editing, the way I do on breaks from grading?
phoning japaneee