The Republic of Dissent

Civilizing kids

I'm not sure how about I feel about Helene Guldberg writing this:

Whereas in the past it was accepted that children, in their unsophistication, would employ the kind of tactless, heartless, even in-your-face offensive behaviour that adults could not get away with, today such behaviour in the playground is seen as just as shocking and problematic as if it were between adults in an office.
The problem with this is that by focusing on bullying and racism in schools we can end up denying children the experiences they need to develop. Children need free time to play, have fun, stumble into difficulties, and work out how to resolve differences. Break-time is an important context for children to learn how to make decisions, take turns, and consolidate or break off friendships – and, of course, to let off steam and have some fun.

Is it just me or doesn't it like Parenting has become a job, which society feels one should be great at or suffer the consequences and children have become little me who have to be civilized before it is too late?

The usefulness of a Philosophy Department

As a Philosophy major, I enjoyed reading Harry Brighouse of the purpose of philosophy departments at American Universities. Sugary excerpt:

Ideally we’d be attempting to provide every single student with the experience and resources which will be most valuable. In practice, in large classes and deciding under uncertainty, we can’t do this; we design our syllabuses and instruction with the aim of providing quite specific things to particular groups of students. For myself, in the large lecture Contemporary Moral Issues course which is the course I teach most often, and which I have taught to many many more students than all my other courses put together, I have two main aims – one is to get the students thinking more carefully and in a richer way about moral issues that will affect their lives or about which they will be called to deliberate as citizens, by providing them with resources that our discipline has developed; and to give some of the students a realistic insight into what moral philosophy is and why it might be interesting to them. Both are, I hope, good for the majors, and I do try to ensure that students who either will major in, or are majoring in, Philosophy, will get a realistic sense of what one small corner of the discipline is like from my class—but that’s a secondary, not a primary, goal.

I have probably gotten more from being a philosophy major than I did from any from other degrees.  Most of the classes that I took to earn were classes that I wanted to take; they were small and full of students who, for the most part, wanted to be there and were thus more eager to discuss complicate subjects exhaustively. There were so few philosophy majors during my undergraduate years that we knew that the ones who stuck it out were dedicated, knew a lot about almost anything, could demonstrate it and wrote very well.

Satanic sex education

I agree with Mark Steel on this, which can only lead to the logical and reasonable conclusion that sex education should not be influenced by religion :

So we're left with differing methods of approaching sex education. One might be to acknowledge that we get desires, that can be lethal at times, so it's probably for the best if we find ways of managing them safely and respectfully. Or there's the more traditional method, which is more along the lines of "You know those natural feelings you get – well they're unnatural so stop having them."
They might as well teach that God wants everyone to be cold, and if we feel a desire to shut the door in winter we must fight the temptation, and we must go to the park in January in our swimming trunks to and, if we shiver or reach for a coat, that's Satan at work and we should discuss it with the priest.

Too easy to say

The worst thing about this quote from Gore Vidal isn't the quote itself, but the sad reality that he is asserting something that most of the planet believes...it is heartbreaking to say, but the rest of the world loves Obama because like the birthers, they believe that he isn't really American, (Africans believe that he is African because his father was Kenyan, Europeans believe that he has a European sensibility because he spent some of his youth in Indonesia and because he is well-read and went to Harvard, People in the Middle East believe that since his father was a Muslim, he has to be on their side,..etc.):

Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.

Time out

I'm taking a time out probably until Monday, but before I go, I will leave with you this sugary excerpt, which just reinforces my antagonism to Supernanny and to other shows that make a mockery of the complexity of parenting and of children:

Sure, Supernanny remains must-watch TV for millions, bookshop shelves are cluttered with child-raising manuals and newspapers continue to report a constant stream of advice from the government and official bodies on how to raise children and run family life. It remains true that it’s a rare mum or dad who doesn’t obsess about their child’s safety, diet, educational attainment, social skills and general wellbeing. But it was inevitable that the current level of scrutiny given to private family life, and the social expectation that not only does ‘every child matter’ but that we should always be ‘putting children first’, would rustle up resentment.
And so it has – particularly among many middle-class mums who, while often believing that other people need advice and intervention, resent being addressed themselves in the patronising tones of expert advice. Having been sold a philosophy that the general troublesomeness of children is the product of dysfunctional parenting, they struggle to explain and accept their own battles at bed times, meal times, bath times and more or less any time when something needs to be done. Having been sold a promise that parenting ‘when done properly’ is stimulating, engaging and rewarding, they are bemused and frustrated with the stultifying tedium that comprises so much of domestic life. A domestic crisis becomes a personal crisis of being; it wasn’t meant to be this way.
“The slummy mummy rebellion is about as full of insight as a toddler’s tantrum”
This mother-malcontent has been reflected in an ever-growing genre of mummy-lit that sticks up two fingers at the orthodoxy of perfect parenting, pokes it in the eye and celebrates the dysfunctional chaos that is normal family life. But while we take to our hearts the fictional mothers who distress shop-bought mince pies to make them look home-made for the school cake sale, and we smile at tales of ‘cocktail playgroups’ serving martinis to mums, we put the books down unsatisfied. However entertaining they might be, they seem shallow; as raucous as a cheap laugh. This is because the reaction is just a reaction, and as full of insight as a toddler’s tantrum. Just as a two-year-old refuses to behave and tears the ribbon out of her hair, so the self-styled slummy mummy refuses to behave and reaches for the Chablis.

Critiquing Cultural studies

Michael Bérubé on Cultural Studies (hat tip: Bill Benson):

(...) cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."
Finally, cultural studies has had negligible impact on the American academic left in a political sense. (I make this argument at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Left at War.) That is because much of the American academic left continues to subscribe to the "manufacturing consent" model, in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media. The point to be made in response is not that corporate mass media don't dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day. The point, rather, is that work like Hall's on the ideological underpinnings of deregulation and privatization under Thatcher (which he called "authoritarian populism") shows that the situation is much more complicated than that propaganda model. The left's task would actually be easier if all it had to do was expose lies as lies. Instead, you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response.

Attitude américaine

Mass vetting

Josie Appleton on why it is important Philip Pullman's and other children's authors refusal to submit to the exhaustive vetting of their criminal records to give talks to schools in the UK:

For these adult volunteers, as for Pullman and fellow children’s authors – including Anne Fine and Michael Morpurgo – the demand that they be police-checked to have contact with children is intrusive and insulting. The vetting database is an instrument of bad faith: it assumes that everybody is tainted as a paedophile, unless proven otherwise. Only by being on a state database are we deemed purified; that is, authorised as ‘safe adults’.
The main result of mass vetting is to turn good people away from helping children: it breeds suspicion and erodes the informal relationships that are so key to children’s happiness (and indeed, their protection). As Pullman says, mass vetting ‘corrupts a child’s view of the world’, making children think that ‘the basic mode is not of trust but suspicion… It assumes that the default position of one human being to another is predatory rather than kindness.’ What kind of adultDisplay Optionss will these children become?

Unfortunately, I think it is going to be increasingly impossible for Appleton's points to be heard (I agree with her) because we live in times where suspicion is a prized skill and where trust is considered naïve. We live in a age where paranoia is reassuring and even heart-warming because it gives us the sense that we have safe-proofed our environment and prepared for every possible threat.

Theory and higher education

Sugary excerpt from Andrew Seal's review of Walter Kirn's Lost in Meritocracy:The Undereducation of an Overachiever:

In many ways, the undergraduate student is trespassing on the domain of Theory with inevitably mixed emotions: there is a sense in which the famous Emerson quote "What Plato has thought, he may think…" when updated to Derrida becomes a more perilous boast, and for that peril, more exhilarating, but also "hollow and vaguely hunted." And perhaps the fear that one can get the Theoretical code-words wrong is similar to the fear of being suddenly asked to leave an opulent party for not being properly dressed.
Yet affect is not reality—though the emotions may be similar, the upshot is not: there seems to me to be very little overlap between the academic effects of one's bluff being called on Theory and the social effects of having one's class inferiority reinforced, and not even that much overlap between the social uses of Theory and the social uses of class. I haven't been involved in too many social interactions where getting Theory wrong or not getting it at all has truly detrimental consequences, most often only causing passing anxiety or frustration, whereas the effects of class distinctions are less likely to be merely ephemeral, or to derive from such immediate origins.
The indiscriminate grouping of elitisms has, I think, profound consequences in talking about higher education, among other things. The ready association of intellectual pretension with class privilege makes it far too inviting to take the former as a valid substitute when it comes to the resentment and, more seriously, when it comes to critique. Reverse snobbery toward theory, in other words, becomes a sort of fillip of objection to other, more pervasive and more detrimental structures of inequality.

Good thinking people and race

The fact that I find myself agreeing more and more with John McWhorter on race leaves me pensive. It shows me how much my views have evolved on this issue. When McWhorter makes the assertions I shake my head in agreement, wonder whether it is possible to move beyond race and sadly come to the conclusion that it isn't going to happen in my lifetime:

When I started commenting about such things ten years ago, the going notion among good-thinking people was that racial preferences were about addressing poverty, the idea being that black people are, by definition, either poor or at least "struggling." But the simple fact is that most black Americans are not poor, by any metric. Too many black people are poor, proportionally, but most aren't - and the number of poor black people brought to selective campuses by Affirmative Action is minuscule.
Back in the nineties, if you brought this up, then next came the "diversity" idea - neglecting that the exact same insight was called tokenism until about 1975. Preferences make sense to me based on the cards you have been dealt. It's just that the idea, in 2009, that being black automatically means you have been dealt too bad a hand to be subject to serious competition in school admissions is obsolete, not to mention a grievous insult.

Gender and social factors

Chris Dillow from Stumbling and Mumbling has a great post on Gender and social factors in which he talks about a study which shows that the so-called feminine reluctance to compete might be created by society:

Alison Booth and Patrick Nolen ran some experiments in which they offered teenage boys and girls the choice of whether to compete or not against each other in some simple tasks - solving maze puzzles (it‘s always solving maze puzzles!). And they found that girls from single-sex schools were much more likely to want to compete against boys or other girls than were girls from mixed schools.
Girls from single sex schools, then, behave more like boys, insofar as they are more competitive. 

The difference between girls from single-sex schools and coed ones is bigger than the difference between single-sex schooled girls and boys.

I agree with Dillow that these facts matter, but I just don't know how to interpret them. Does it mean that we should separate boys and girls throughout their education so that they have a "better" chance to be normal or rather not to be limited by the prejudices of their societies ? If separation is the only means to ensure equality then society is in trouble . I wonder if gender is the only factor, which can lead to these findings. For example, I wonder what would happened in the same study was done about Blacks or other minorities. What if it was proven that Black kids are are more competitive and do better in school when they separated from white, would that mean that segregation is no longer an ill.? I would go even further I bet that we would find if we make a study of handicapped children that they do better when they are in schools who fit their needs and when there are in an environment when they are not viewed as abnormal. The point isn't that limiting social facs should be ignored, but life never deals us a fair hand, that societies in great part because it normalizes certain bias behaviors and prejudices. The challenge comes when it is the time to act and to understand tha acknowledgement neither is the promise or the hope to change enough. I'm fanatically convinced that my life would be better if I lived in a more structured and more adaptable environment, however I don't live in the Island in Lost, I live in the real world, everything I do as to start with the understanding of that absurd and alienating reality.

The dictatorship of value

A Simple, but sad truth from Jeanette Winterson:

I am here because of books. One of the reasons I am here is because I read Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, aged 16, at the second of being chucked out of the house. Camus is perfect for young people because he is all ardour and belief - his quest to believe in nothing lands him back at believing in each person's spirited defiance against the numbing operations of a machine-world.

Why is Labour intent on turning education into a machine-world instead of a journey into life?

Already, in English literature, kids are not required to read the whole of a text. They are led to believe by their weary and worn-out teachers that a book is not worth reading all the way through. You can spend hours on Facebook, but not Middlemarch?

Hermann Hesse, who is also off the syllabus, wrote a strange and prophetic book, The Glass Bead Game, about a future world where society has become utterly divided into those who are initiated into the mysteries of the game, and the masses who are not.

Reading is a cheap and democratic way of revealing the human mind to itself - all you need is someone to teach you to read and, after that, some books. Why are we turning literature into a new mystery? Why are we saying to millions of kids: “This is not for you?” I'll tell you why, because the sceptics at the altar don't believe a word of this. Their message is clear - literature is of no value to the masses.

The only thing left to say after that is to recognize that we live in a scary and decaying world.

When happens when ignorance makes Europe becomes a country...

No she isn't acting, but I honestly don't know what to say when someone doesn't know that France is a country!

Getting the culture we deserve

Peter Aspden has an interesting piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that we get the culture we deserve even though we may not want it or we may despise it. His point is that culture doesn’t happen to us, it happens because of us. He used the example of the Spice Girls to make his point about our responsibility for our culture. Sugary excerpt:

The Spice Girls became international figures, despite producing a string of drippy ballads, opposite in tone from the zip and sassiness of their first hit, which showed how soon record company conservatism kicked in. A generation of commentators anxious to write seriously about popular culture expended thousands of words on the new phenomenon, but they made a fatal mistake: popular culture at the start had been serious, in intent and conception, and worked devilishly hard to be taken as such. Now it had largely been replaced by tat, but no one seemed to notice. The symbolism was paramount, and the results surreal. The Spectator really did want to know Geri Halliwell’s views on the single currency.

Most nastily of all, a new demographic was discovered, or should we say invented: the pre-teens. They copied the dead pouts and the crappy outfits, and pester-powered their way to commercial significance. They thought they were sexy, although they didn’t know what sexy was. Nor, it should be said, did the Spice Girls themselves, always too contrived in their moves to hint at the carnal mischievousness which is at the heart of cheap-and-cheerful pop (compare Sandie Shaw, Bananarama).

The Spice Girls managed a rarely sinister double achievement: they sexualised infants and they infantilised sexuality.

[…] Most western art turned its back on that kind of ingenuous entertainment around the time, perhaps, of the death of the Hollywood musical. In its place, we have installed the Spice Girls and their ilk (see their melismatic flailings every week on the ghastly The X Factor). They are inane, dripping with cynicism, dumbed down and hyped up. It is our fault. We seldom get the culture that we really, really want; just the one that we deserve.

Although I agree with Aspden on his main point about the fact that we get the culture we deserve, I don’t agree with him on anything else for the simple reason that he seems to be arguing that “crap” is new in culture and that “innocence” is necessary for a great culture. The temptation that too many people fall into when they discuss the state of popular culture is to argue that everything is new or that everything that is happening has happened before when the truth may be in the middle. What isn’t new is the condemnation of popular culture as vile, worthless, and raunchy. What in my opinion may be new is the increased fragmentation of culture caused by the increasing gap between those who have not only money, but also an education and those who do not. In other words, my argument is that people aren’t born with good tastes or bad tastes and that good taste is developed with exposure to different things and with knowledge. The dumbing down that is occurring isn’t because of a bad culture, but because of a less cultured, less knowledgeable, and less educated citizenry. Thus, the outrage of Aspden is misplaced and it shouldn’t be on the Spice Girls, but on societies and governments that believe that it is acceptable and even safer to have a population that is uneducated and therefore less demanding.

Strangers, prejudices, and education

John Derbyshire writes the following in the New English Review about Robert Putnam’s study on diversity, which concluded that focus on diversity increases distrust within a community and thus hurts civic life:

Could it be, could it possibly be (the terrible, disgraceful thought occurred to me), could it be that Professor Putnam, with all the resources of Harvard University behind him, with all his massed banks of computers and his battalions of research assistants, their Blackberries clicking and tweeping away, with his piles of questionnaires and his multivariate analyses and his yardsticks and control groups and coefficients of regression—could it be that he has discovered something that ol’ Rudyard knew all along, a hundred years ago?  That when strangers come among us (or for that matter, when we go among them), we find it hard to fathom or to trust them?
If so, then it might also be true that (gasp!) smart kids need to be educated separately from dumb kids (who actually exist!) 
It might even be true (oh no!), as was once the universal belief, that mostly-inbred human groups develop group characteristics—of behavior, and attitude, and socializability, as well as of mere appearance.  Come to think of it, why would this not have been a universal belief?  Matters of breeding and inheritance are, after all, the most ancient human studies—think of all those “begats” in the Old Testament, medieval lineage obsessions, and characters in Victorian novels saying “His family are nobodies, you know.”  With the publicity over recent events like the sequencing of a human genome and the fuss about genetically-modified crops, we have somehow got the impression that the inheritance and propagation of characteristics is a new topic.  In fact it is the oldest of all:  Human beings have been accumulating knowledge about it since animals were first domesticated back in the Neolithic.

Derbyshire fails however to address the critical issue posed by Putnam’s study, which isn’t about the value of diversity, but rather about the ways to ensuring that it becomes a less divisive issue. It is fine to assert to Kipling’s vision of human nature is right, but the issue because whether human nature should stand in the way of progress. In other words, is it a good excuse to argue that people should be allowed to be intolerant because of nature and to allow that society should seeking to modernize or to improve itself because nature is not only always right, but can be changed with education and experience?

Cultural decline

The Times of London has an article about that French students are shunning French literature to focus on subjects that will lead them to have more rewarding careers. This trend is worrying the Education Minister Xavier Darcos who has decided to do something about it:

“We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason,” he said. “They are always in demand.” As for the aspiring economists and sociologists, they often ended up on overcrowded university courses with few openings in the employment market, he added.

However, traditionalists believe that the initiative is already doomed because of the widely held view among the brightest students that literary studies are a soft option for no-hopers. This trend is an affront to the rich literary heritage that has produced writers such as Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, they say. There is also resentment that intellectual literati are losing their privileged status in a Gallic society that they say is being corrupted by television, the internet and globalisation.

The simple fact that the French government is worried about this issue shows in my opinion a key difference between France and the United States. A Secretary of the education could never make such a pronouncement because the primary focus of education in the US is not culture, but preparing students to become good professionals. In France, education (even though as this article shows things are rapidly changing) is still about becoming cultivated. This explains why its education system is a lot less flexible than the American one because it is believed that there are just some things that all students should know even if such knowledge may not help them in their future career. In the United States, the education system is very flexible, but unfortunately, reading is just considered a tool to learn something else more important such as math and science. Literature is a secondary subject because students believe that it will not lead them anywhere and because not reading is not only tolerated in the US, but acceptable.

Money, America, and Reading

John Freeman argues that Americans don’t read because they are obsessed with money and that reading is seen as a waste of time in the land where time is money. Sugary excerpt;

America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve Wasserman put it bluntly. "Reading has always been a minority taste in America," he said, "and that's OK." But I think what we're seeing now is something new which has to do with how a culture operates when all values become subservient to that of making money - when reading is not supported either from on top and from below.

One major part of the Republican revolution has been a full-scale assault on public welfare programming - which includes our national education budget. Indeed, Reagan ran on the platform that if elected he would abolish the department of education. Happily, that didn't happen, but as America's public schools turn out more and more illiterate children, the call has gone up to take the money we put into schools and put it into a private school system.
At the same time, the industries which support reading have been ground up and fed through the increasing corporatisation of American life. Book publishers and newspapers have been bought up by giant conglomerates. Publishers, once mildly profitable, have been forced to keep up with blockbuster driven media; newspapers, once wildly profitable, have been used as cash cows. And now that the media companies are done with these newspapers, those same owners are cutting back on all forms of news, including book pages.

And all the while reading is under assault from new forms of technology. At what point do we halt and do something drastic?

[…] We live in a visual culture now, one where a large part of what we see and absorb is telling us to buy. Barring a revolution, America will remain a consumer society, so I think some of the campaign to get people reading again in America should involve making books visible.

Part of the problem lies in the education systems in most American states, which create a society where few have a good education, which exposes them to the value and the magic of reading and where most don’t and have therefore to focus on surviving and on earning a living. The point is that not many kids learn that reading is fundamental. In the US, a good education is not only expensive, but it is also selective in the sense that where one starts is not only important, but also critical. Thus, although the American education system is based on merit, it also punishes those who have been unfortunate to be born in the wrong side of the tracks and to have stumble early in life. Catching up in the American education system is becoming increasingly difficult because doing so takes time and money, which explains why reading becomes secondary.

Eroticism on campus

William Deresiewicz has written in the American Scholar the best article, which I have read in a long time about Love or rather sex on college’s campus. He argues that sexual, erotic intensity on campus among professor and students should not only be tolerated, but encouraged. I agree with him wholeheartedly because I share his view that the teacher and student relationship is so disturbing within American culture that it is infantilized or rather sexualized in a vain attempt to eradicate the key fact that teaching is about awakenning desires and that there is a key difference between erotic intensity and inappropriate sexual behavior. Sugary excerpt:

If there’s one god our culture worships as piously as sex, it’s children. But sex and children, sexual intimacy and familial intimacy, have something in common — beyond the fact that one leads to the other: both belong to us as creatures of nature, not as creators in culture. […] Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?
This is the kind of sex professors are having with their students behind closed doors: brain sex. And this is why we put up with the mediocre pay and the cultural contempt, not to mention the myriad indignities of graduate school and the tenure process. […] Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.
The truth is that these possibilities are not quite as alien to American culture as I’ve been making out. Along with the new stereotype that’s dominated the portrayal of academics in film and fiction in recent years has come, far less frequently, a different image of what a college teacher can be and mean, exactly along the lines I’ve been tracing. It is there in Julia Roberts’s character in Mona Lisa Smile, in the blind professor who teaches Cameron Diaz’s character to love poetry in In Her Shoes, and most obviously, in Tuesdays with Morrie, that gargantuan cultural phenomenon. Robin Williams offered a scholastic version in Dead Poets Society. But we seem to need to keep the idea, or at least the person who embodies it, at a safe distance. Both Mona Lisa Smile and Dead Poets Society take place in the 1950s and at single-sex schools. Cameron Diaz’s mentor and Morrie Schwartz are retired and dying. The Socratic relationship is so profoundly disturbing to our culture that it must be defused before it can be approached. Yet many thousands of kids go off to college every year hoping, at least dimly, to experience it. It has become a kind of suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name.

Deresiewicz is absolutely right. The best teachers I’ve had were those who made me desire something more than a good grade and who were less worried about going through their curriculum than about what I was feeling and seeing. Nowadays sex is so divinized that it is everywhere and that it has become dangerous and this explains why eroticism is disappearing. The difference between sex and eroticism is the difference between Playboy and Lolita. Erotic intensity should be welcome in an Academic setting precisely because it makes us aware that we are not solely sexual beings and that there is a gap between desire and action, which ethics may render unbridgeable. I don’t think that it is possible to learn in a sterilized or rather purified environment where there are no bias, no shortsightedness, no passion, no sex, and no microbes. The less college campuses resemble the real world, the less most unprepared students will be to face for after all in the real world is still a sexualized jungle where women and men flirt, cuddle, battle, and annihilate each other because they couldn’t get their pound of flesh.

Oxford and Fanaticism

Giles Fraser argues in the Guardian that Oxford is becoming like Bob Jones University, that is a place where religious fanatics are able to spread their venom.

Avoiding a necessary debate on multiculturalism

Michael Collins has a worth reading article in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian in which he attempts to show what he considers the effects of multiculturalism on the British urban schools. He argues that white pupils in urban schools are falling because of the cult of multiculturalism, which is based on a lie. Sugary excerpt:

Bad parenting was flagged up as the key culprit, with the high level of success of pupils from more family-based, insular, Chinese and Asian communities cited as the standard of attainment to aim for. If the response of those present at this day-long conference mimics that of the teaching staff at my own secondary school back in the punk spring of 1977, you can bet that the short-sightedness and fear around modern racial etiquette is responsible. With poor performance of black pupils the burden of blame is apportioned to those post-Macpherson fallbacks institutional racism or "unwitting prejudice". In the case of white pupils, racism can't by cited as a reason or excuse any more than the industrial revolution or the age of the child chimney sweep. However, were this any other ethnic group, cultural alienation, lack of high-profile role models and its derogatory portrayal within the media would be brought into the proceedings.

Therefore there might be an argument to suggest the fact that urban white working class communities have endured more change, dislocation and upheaval than any other over the last 40 years, added to the racial and classcist slurs targeted regularly at this group by the press, might have some small part to play. But the greater responsibility for what is very much a 21st century trend might rest with the cult of multiculturalism.

How has multiculturalism become the cause of everything when I would argue it is about nothing else than not letting culture become a reason for isolation and for justifying segregation, exclusion and the perpetration of intolerable traditions? There is a growing and a successful attempt to make multiculturalists racists and naïve leftists because it is easier to defend conservatism in the restrictive sense of the term and the status quo by arguing that métissage, the blending of culture is a form of surrender because cultures either have to clash or to fail. Culture isn’t everything, as I like to say if I have to choose between culture and humanity and individuality, I will always choose the latter that is precisely the reason why I believe in multiculturalism because I don’t want culture to do to societies why religion has done to them in too many cases. Michael Collins is so unsure of his thesis that he plays cat and mouse with the reader in other to take all the necessary detours he has to take to avoid defining multiculturalism, to associate it with radical leftism, and to make it responsible for the failures of white students in urban schools. Collins doesn’t want to have a debate or even to have a trial, but only want to condemn because he doesn’t want the world to be complicated and doesn’t want to accept that contractions aren’t always signs of hypocrisy.

Sex education and Abstinence

The truth is in the pudding and it shows that costly (a billion dollars) American federal programs don’t work according to a survey, which shows that young people who are given abstinence only education are as likely to have sex as other people from their same age group. I still can’t believe that the US spent a billion dollars for abstinence programs.

Single-sex education

The Guardian reports on the results of single sex education. It shows that the results are mixed for strangely enough, it is boys’ schools, which have bad results in the sense that they have social problems. Sugary excerpt:

Assessing the biggest ever swath of historical data on the issue, researchers found that girls who go to girls' schools will later earn more than those from mixed schools - partly because they are less likely to make gendered decisions about their studies and are therefore more likely to take maths and science subjects. But the research also found social problems in boys-only schools. "Single-sex education seems to have a negative social impact for boys and a positive academic impact for girls," says Alice Sullivan, the IoE researcher behind the report.

[…] The researchers, Victor Lavy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Analía Schlosser of Princeton University, studied results from eight cohorts in 280 Israeli high schools, some 425,138 students. No matter which way they measured it, they found that the higher the proportion of girls in a class, the better the results for everyone. "The positive female peer effect is related to a lower level of classroom disruption and violence, improved inter-student and student-teacher relationships, as well as to an increase in students' overall satisfaction with their school," they wrote. "It also significantly lessens the teaching fatigue and burn-out feelings of teachers, though it does not affect their overall satisfaction from work."

I wonder what we can conclude from these results except than single sex education may be about nothing more than the reactionary notion that boys and girls cannot study together when in the real life they have to live together. If the notion of separate, but equal is unacceptable when it comes to race, should it be acceptable when it comes to gender.

India and skilled workers

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki argues that there is a glitch to India’s objective in becoming a superpower and that is its skills famine, its increasing shortage of skilled workers. He writes that on the contrary to the conventional value, which was for a long time that Indians were overeducated, the Indian government has been spending as much as it should have on education and that that failure is catching up with it. Sugary excerpt:

How is this possible in a country that every year produces two and a half million college graduates and four hundred thousand engineers? Start with the fact that just ten per cent of Indians get any kind of post-secondary education, compared with some fifty per cent who do in the U.S. Moreover, of that ten per cent, the vast majority go to one of India’s seventeen thousand colleges, many of which are closer to community colleges than to four-year institutions. India does have more than three hundred universities, but a recent survey by the London Times Higher Education Supplement put only two of them among the top hundred in the world. Many Indian graduates therefore enter the workforce with a low level of skills. A current study led by Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, has found that if you define “engineer” by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable.

The most interesting question is what type of education system Indiais going to have in the next few years. I wonder if its education system will become like the one of the United States in the sense that there will a growing gap between the have and the have-not and that it will become increasingly expensive to get a college education.

Lying about sex

Julie Sternberg writes about the lies, which she argues are told to American teenagers about sex in order to control their sexual behavior. She argues that the problem that ideologues have hijacked sexual education and have made it difficult to teach teenagers about sex in ways which reflect the world in which they live. Abstinence programs don't work because they aren't based on science, but on ideology and wishful thinking. Sugary excerpt:

If you’re like the majority of Americans, 75 percent to be exact, by the age of 20 you’ve had sex without being married to your partner. […] Yet our government is downright obsessed with abstinence until marriage. In fact, since 1996, the federal government has poured more than a billion dollars into programs that are required to promote abstinence until marriage, and forbidden from teaching about contraception, unless it is to emphasize failure rates. […] It gets worse. Not only are these programs encouraged by the government to teach that condoms fail, but many federally funded curricula exaggerate failure rates. A report released in December of 2004 by a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives detailed the distortion and misinformation found in some of the most widely used federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula. One such curriculum even compared using a condom to playing a game of Russian roulette.

Being a person of Faith doesn't make one a great president

Radley Balko responds to Mitt Romney's and to Michael Medved' s assertation that America should be run by a person of faith:

Worse for the assertions of Medved and Romney, it is morality, and the faith that morality is derived from, that’s driving these policies. Put another way, the faith of our leaders hasn’t instilled in them a particular compulsion to uphold our natural rights. It has compelled them to subvert them. It’s probably also worth noting that many (though not all) of the people resisting these policies are atheist or agnostic liberals and libertarians.

None of this is to say that religious people aren’t capable of respecting our rights. There are of course countless devout believers who are also eloquent defenders of liberty.
But to say that a man without religion can’t be trusted to respect our rights is nonsense. Especially when religious faith has motivated so many of our prior political leaders to erode them. Not least the man who currently occupies the White House.

New rules and cervical cancer

I like Bill Maher very much because I think that his humor is both edgy and intelligent, even though it can be at times inappropriate. I like this video which has an except of his new rules for this week because it makes what I think is a critical point about the cervical cancer vaccine and that is that it has nothing to do with abstinence and sexual education, but everything to do with health. After those who argue that by immunizing girls against cervical cancer, society is encouraging promiscuity are the same who argue that nature is always right and that in fact girls who have sex before marriage deserve to get cervical cancer. Thus the question is uniquely about whether sin bad, inappropriate, reckless behavior according to some people should be always punishable by death or incredible suffering that is whether science should save some people because they sinned or disobey some type of moral code. My answer to that question is a strong and passionate no!

Derrida, UC Irvine and sexual harassment

This article in the La Times about Jacques Derrida, the French Philosopher and creator of Deconstructionism, and his attempts to use his archives as a bargaining chip to force the University of California at Irvine not to purse a sexual harassment case against a university professor by his student is fascinating. I don't know whether to be outraged at Derrida who is no longer alive or to lament the fact that sexual harassment is too often a power tool on college campuses. By the way, the investigator of the university concluded that the sexual relationship between the college professor and his student was consensual, but of course, the damage was done. I guess that more people should read Coetzee's “Disgrace” and learn about the unsavory mixture of sex and academics.

Censorship and political correctness

Maria Grasso has an article lamenting the fact that students in Oxford can only use the word “gay” to designate a gay person. Sepia Mutiny had a post last week on the expulsion of a Student from American University for calling using a homophobic slur after being told to “go back to India.” All of this leads me to wonder where the proper balance between freedom of speech and decency not only on a college campus, but also in a democratic society. It seems to me that by censoring someone for using offensive or inappropriate, Universities are in fact giving up on their primary mission, which is to educate. Censorship or attempts to impose political correctness through inflexible rules are in fact asserting that you are not only what you say, but more importantly, that one is born a bigot and thus can never be change.

The criminalization of youth

Bryony Gordon addressed the fact that it is very difficult being young in today's modern society because adults assume the worst and are less willing to forgive youthful mistakes because they have forgotten that a child isn't an adult. Money Quote:

If youths are behaving any worse than before — and, according to the penal reform charity Nacro, Britain's youth crime rates have dropped 27 per cent in the past 10 years — then it is grown-ups who are to blame for having the audacity to demand respect from teens while at the same time disrespecting them. That might make me want to commit an act of violence on the nearest person in authority, too. And has anybody ever questioned that kids might be carrying knives because they are scared of each other, thanks namely to the preposterous way in which they are presented in the media?

Women are not funny

Christopher Hitchens has an intriguing article in Vanity Fair, which investigates the reason why there is a gender gap when it comes to humor. I agree with most of his insights and I think that the reason why women "aren't" as funny as men is that to be funny you need to be fearless and to have a safe place to fall in case you fall. Women are too busy, too worried, too anxious, too insecure to be funny and more importantly, they don't have to be funny (which is different from being fun) because humor can be considered unsexy and can be intimidating. Money quote:

In other words, for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. Whereas with a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humor department.

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants.

Food for thought: Is Holocaust denial just about ignorance?

“Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it. […]For generations, the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed — that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such? In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he shall not want for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why they deny the Holocaust.”

Colorblind society, myths and realities

John Fund has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused the president of the University of Michigan, Mary Sue Coleman, of taking a George Wallace approaching to civil rights. He argues her of standing in the way of America becoming a colorblind society by continuing to support "racial preferences" in spite of the fact that Michigan has passed a law, which makes them illegal. Money quote:

We've come a long way since 1964, when the late civil rights hero Hubert Humphrey stood on the Senate floor and told his colleagues that if the civil rights bill contained "any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there."

Four decades later, supporters of racial preferences imposed by government agencies are blocking legal efforts to establish the color-blind society that Martin Luther King envisioned. Dr. King's dream is alive in Michigan, and in other states, but a large number of people seem interested in stirring up a nightmare of massive resistance. Such efforts are likely not only to only fail, but to harden the public's opposition to divisive racial quotas.

The problem, which I have with John Fund and others, who argue against affirmative action, is that they go too far by arguing that its supporters are like segregationists or by refusing to acknowledge that we don't live in a colorblind society and that something has to be done in order to achieve that goal. John Fund's main point is that everything that needed to be done has been done and that minorities now need to be on their own for there are no longer any obstacles in becoming functional members of society, which they cannot overcome on their own. I am willing to accept to go along with those who argue that affirmative action isn't the answer and that it has divided America more than it has helped minority. However, those making that argument shouldn't stop their examination of the role of race in America at that point and content themselves with judging means, which have been used to redress wrong and to condemn their ineffectiveness. They should propose ways to achieve a colorblind society unless of course the point of their criticism of affirmative actions is that nothing should be done for action would always be more harmful than inaction. I disagree for I think that when a goal is as noble as achieving a colorblind society or rather a colorful society where having a different skin color or being of a different ethnic won't matter society must do everything that it can to achieve it.

The best of yesterday: the return of Separate, but equal

The best post I read yesterday was the one by James Balkin on the Bush administration support for regulations that will allow schools to have separate schools for boys and girls. Balkin is right to point that this is a step backward not forward and I even go a step further and argue that such a move isn’t one in support of traditional values (which is an oxymoron in my view), but rather one against modernity and progress. By taking such a position, the Bush administration is in fact arguing that boys and girls are not only difference, but that they can live and leave in the presence of one another as if putting them in the same schools can only have bad consequences (sex, pregnancy, …etc.). The point is if one agrees that our society cannot separate men and women in real life, at work, at churches, at theaters, etc why would they separate them at school? Balkin makes those same arguments and provides more background and more facts to show the policy cannot be constitutional. Money quote:

Today, when we think about proposals for single-sex schooling, we should keep in mind that both elements of race and class will inevitably be involved. One should have no illusions that simply because single-sex education seems benign in schools like Wellesley or Smith that it necessarily is so when it is transposed out of the paradigm of elite women's education and placed in the setting of inner-city schools In the urban setting, single-sex education tempts school administrators to focus on the interests of black boys to the detriment of black girls. It repeats in racialized form the familiar idea that girls are the cause of boys' lack of educational success and that boys must be kept free of distraction. Single-sex education may seem to serve the goals of class equality and upward mobility because it gives poor families something that only rich families were once able to afford, as well as offering the promise of discipline and moral rectitude. Yet it can also unwittingly become a method of preserving traditional gender roles for women.

[…] As for the possibility that single-race schools might improve educational opportunity, the answer is quite simple: America already has plenty of single-race schools. They have been produced by the de facto segregation that reigns in this country fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education. A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government estimates that more than a third of the nation's black schoolchildren currently attend schools with a minority enrollment of 90- 100%, and the percentage of black schoolchildren who attend such schools has been rising since the mid 1980's. There is no evidence that this de facto segregation has worked to the advantage of black and Latino children. If it has worked to the advantage of white children in suburban school districts, it is because those schools generally have vastly superior resources. […] Separation of the races, like separation of the sexes, is a diversion from the real issue: educational equality in funding, resources, and attention.

The Costs of higher education is making America less of a meritocracy

Kathleen Pender, in the San Francisco Chronicle, has an article on some of the costs of higher education particularly of books. After reading it, I wonder if the fact that it costs so much to go to College in the United States isn't going to start to become more of an impediment to the creation of a more egalitarian society.  This might create a wider gap between the have and the have not because after all education is still the surest way to move out of poverty and to move up the social ladder.

Blink versus Think

Should you blink or should you think when taking a decision? We all know why Malcolm Gladwell's view of this is, which is that we make better or rather more accurate decision when we blink.  Michael LeGault has a book, Th!nk: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye, argues for think and against blinking by asserthing that it is important to ask hard questions and not to lose the ability to think critically about issues. But the question is that I have is whether when we blink, we do not think?

Separate, but equal

Some US states are moving backward in the march for integration of schools. In the history case of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court established that the doctrine of separate, but equal was unconstitutional and integration was an essential part to equality. Yet, The Nebraska legislature passed a law on Thursday that would divide the Ohmaha school system according to race. Ernie Chambers, the only African American state senator supported the law and argued that the law will help “blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority.” Laws such as this one just show that integration hasn’t worked, especially in the schools. However, I wonder if resegregration is the answer for how I do not see how separation can lead to improvements.

A clash between Reason vs. Superstition?

Religion seems to have power in modern societies that it has had before. Comedy Central forbade South Park's creators to show images of the Prophet Muhammad and instead, they made fun of their own network and Jesus instead.. I wrote a post a while ago about the fact that religions are increasingly considered to be above satire. There is an article in the Guardian that makes an interesting argument against religions schools in Great Britain. It argues, “Religion usually means class, race or tribe segregation,” and that “Every school that vanishes into the hands of the religions is gone for ever, exceedingly hard for a future government to get back.” To what extent is it true that religion enforces superstition over reason and legitimizes divisions within a society such as class and race?

Monkey sounds: race, crime, politics, and hypocrisy

I was able to hear parts of the statement of the District Attorney who is investigating the Duke Students who are alleged to have rape an African woman while using racial slurs. A student of North Carolina Central University made good points about the role that race is playing in this story. He made the assertion that the media has overemphasized the fact that she was an “exotic dancer” as to suggest that she has no values and that somehow she might have send the idea to those young men that she was ready for the taking and that she didn’t need to be respected. I think that he is right. The Duke Lacrosse team story might not be one of rape for we do not know what happened yet, but it is certainly one of race and of class. I think that the story would be treated differently if it had been a North Carolina Central University student, especially an African American one, was accused of having raped a Duke student. The sad thing about this story and about the race question is America is that people such as Cynthia McKinney are able to call a news conference that is covered by all cable news channels to exploit race issues to make political points. However, the real victims of racism are invisible and really have the attention that a Cynthia McKinney gets. This is the reason why the whole circus around Representative McKinney is a tragedy and that African Americans should disown her. She used race and screamed racism to raise her political profile and then when it became clear that it wasn’t going to work, she apologized. Racism isn’t a political tool. It is a potent and serious issue. People who use it nastily to manipulate public opinion and to raise their profile should be punished for doing so for they are diminishing the power that the word racism has or ought to have. Cynthia McKinney used race to get out of an embarrassing situation and for that reason, she should feel as much shame as those who do not take racism seriously. Because of them, an African woman in Durham, North Carolina, who was allegedly rape and humiliated because of the color of her skin cannot defend herself and cannot be given the full protections that the status of alleged racism and rape victim entitles her to receive.

Aids, Africa, and information

The Washington post has an article on Aids and Africa, which states that in some countries such as in Rwanda, the numbers of people with Aids were overstated. What should take conclude from this piece of information? Is the conclusion that there is no Aids epidemic in Africa and therefore the attention that is paid to the problem is too great compare to the reality? Or it the conclusion that data and research in Africa is done badly and that in the case of a disease as potent as Aids, it is necessary to have the right data not only to know the extent of the problem, but also to fight it. Information is priceless especially when the consequence of ignorance and of inaction is death.

How do witch-hunts start?

The Guardian had an article yesterday about American universities and on the denunciation of many professors as Anti-American liberals. The article compared the attacks on some American professors to McCarthyism, it makes the following point, “Few would argue there are direct parallels between the current assaults on liberals in academe and McCarthyism….But in other ways, argues Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes - McCarthyism in America, comparisons are apt. "In some respects it's more dangerous," she says. "McCarthyism dealt mainly with off-campus political activities. Now they focus on what is going on in the classroom. It's very dangerous because it's reaching into the core academic functions of the university, particularly in Middle-Eastern studies."” I wonder if she is right and if we are witnessing the beginning of a witch-hunt for liberals on American campuses.