Notes on the Junction City Scandinavian Festival

I went to this today. It was.... interesting. You couldn't have pried my sociologist's hat off with a case of dynamite. What follows is a rather messy exposition of some of my thoughts that occurred during and after my visit. I have this feeling that based on past experience I'm not going to spend any time cleaning them up, so I'm just going to post them.

I definitely had some preconceptions/expectations going in: That it would be even whiter than the rest of Oregon (both culturally and demographically), that the people attending would be heavier than average (due to the likely food – lots of sweets, dairy and meat, with a distinct lack of fruit and vegetables), that there would be a lot of solid colors on clothing, and that the strength of the relationship between what would be on display and actual Scandinavian anything could range from decent to very, very weak., but was unlikely to be really strong.

Sadly, I feel like some of those preconceptions were not invalid. The exceptions: the crowd was no whiter than the rest of Oregon, nor more overweight (as far as I could tell on both counts). That said, I left with a lot of questions about the depth of the connection to Scandinavian culture (more on that later). The food also lacked vegetables or fruit, on the whole – the onions in the meat pies were about all I spotted. (By the way, the meat pie I had was really, really frackin' good. Then again, meat + gravy + pastry crust is hard to beat). Also, I suspect neither elephant ears nor bananas dipped in chocolate are Scandinavian in origin.... but they are fair food.

The whole preconception thing made me uncomfortable. Does holding either these preconceptions or preconceptions in general make me a bad person? Maybe..... what it does suggest is that I romanticize non-white culture, which is a very, very stupid and bad thing to do.

The other way to look at it as that the reason I was laughing on the inside for most of the afternoon (and I was) was that the culture on display was uncritically white, and for some reason, it came across as a parody to me. I just couldn't/can't believe people were genuinely (and not ironically) excited about it. That should tell you something about how I view mainstream culture in America, especially television.

An aside: Interestingly, this whole train of thought makes me think that Scandinavian culture is a component of whiteness. This is news, considering that “what does it mean to be white?” is often a question met with silence. Curious.

A second aside: I don't mean to imply that no one can be genuinely interested in the culture of ethnicities that have been assimilated into whiteness. Rather, it's the uncritical nature of the interest that gets me. After all, the older I get, the more interested I get in Irish culture – and I'm part Irish.

One question that was raised early on goes something like this: How do people continue to retain their connection to the culture of the place they came from? In this case, since the shift was, for the most part, hundreds of years ago, the question almost morphs into “in what ways, if any, does the presentation of Scandinavian culture change as the result of the time passed since one moves away from Scandinavia?”

Another question that came up: Given the history of Scandinavia as a whole, how was this particular vision of Scandinavia decided on? Certainly, my (limited) experience in Sweden looks nothing like what was at the Festival. This question I think I have something of an answer for: The culture that was celebrated was the culture present when immigrants moved to the US, more or less. Case in point: There is a Christian church service as part of the festival on Sunday morning. I saw nothing in the Festival that made any mention of the pre-Christian Scandinavia; it all seemed to be from, say, the 18th century. I would have been interested in any pre-Christian indigenous religions, for example... but, as noted, what was really on display was a particular time period/part of Scandinavian culture.

Some other things that came up:

What parts of Scandinavian culture are on display, and what are not? On display: Foods – mostly meat, dairy and dessert; art – mostly crafts, a few paintings; dance; etc. Missing: Why those things are the way they are, why they are important, what they were linked to: climate, geography, available resources, living in the rhythms of the land – and agriculture, always agriculture and the natural cycle of life in the specific region.

The Vikings – not many were on display, but how many of those wearing the horns (because very few went all-out; it was mostly the horns) think about the Vikings in terms of lives lost, people killed, etc? Not many, I suspect, as it's still perfectly acceptable in American culture to romanticize or otherwise value war, natch.

Dancing – I spent a lot of time thinking about this one, as the people I knew at the Festival were all into dance in one form or another. A friend and I talked about how regional differences in dances, individual (and clothes) were obscured by the labeling of dances by nation, for example. We talked about ways in which dances might spread. Also, I thought a lot about how to separate the fact that while the people participating in the various dances may have been having a lot of fun, and rightly so, those dances did not necessarily represent any meaningful connection to a specific culture. Of course, that notion was challenged by the obvious: How do I know that? I don't, not really, but it seems pretty straightforward when placed in the context of the Festival as a whole: Face it..... it was a celebration of surface culture. There was very little to indicate why the Scandinavian culture was the way it was, what conditions drove it, etc. (It's here that I start thinking about agriculture and climate again, as well as, for some reason, Samhain or Lammas.) Watching the dancing (and there was a lot of dancing), I was also confronted with an example of how traditions are passed on, and what traditions get passed on, etc.

Oh, and my favorite person at the festival? The hipster-ish guy with a horned Viking helmet. Somehow, it completed the outfit rather nicely. I think it was the combination of tiny, tiny hips and a helmet....

Strangest festival moment: When, as part of the evening pageantry, a group of performers danced around a witch who was tied to a stake... and on fire. I can't decide if I think that was insane and insulting, or just silly.

I want to conclude this by noting that even if I am coming across as caustic and highly critical (and I am), I still had a lot of fun. It was good to see people I know, the food was tasty, and it was definitely an interesting experience. I just couldn't take all the whiteness uncritically/seriously.

Add one pinch of Habermas to taste

From the incredible AutoAdmit case:

Bartow believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses.

Um, yes. Unquestionably, especially our cultural responses.

Or, as Jeff Goldblum once argued in Jurassic Park: "We were so busy worrying about whether or not we could, we never stopped to think whether or not we should."

Or, as an instructor of mine once argued in a debate about whether or not cloning was ethical: What we think is ethical or not doesn't matter, as someone, somewhere, is going to do it anyway, and what's important is not our approval or disapproval, but having a coherent, comprehensive response.

I think the latter holds true here.

Habermas, of course, would probably categorize this as a byproduct of the colonization of the lifeworld (if that goes over your head.... don't worry about it).

Completely coincidentally, filed under "things that caused me no end of angst as a teenager."

Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and Social Hope, page 19:

I take this near unanimity among my critics to show that most people - even a lot of purportedly liberated postmodernists - still hanker for something like what I wanted when I was 15: a way of holding reality and justice in a single vision

Oh, was that ever me.

Continuing on directly:

More specifically, they want to unite their sense of moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the ultimate determinants of our fate. They want to see love, power and justice as coming together deep down in the nature of things, or in the human soul, or in the structure of language, or somewhere. They want some sort of guarantee that their intellectual acuity, and those special ecstatic moments which that acuity sometimes affords, are of some relevance to their moral convictions. They still think that virtue and knowledge are somehow linked - that being right about philosophical matters is important for right action. I think this is important only occasionally and incidentally.

I like Rorty already. Thanks, JAO.

The Man from Hope

Nope, not Bill Clinton - Barack Obama.

I don't have the time or brain capacity to really think about this, but as I read another asinine comment about how Obama must be a bad candidate (or false idol, depending on your preferred level of histrionics) because he talks about hope and change, I realized something:

The subtext of attacking a candidate because they talk about the values of hope and change is pretty monstrous.

Specifically, by attacking Obama's platform in such a way, people are implicitly suggesting that we can't hope for a better future, that we don't have the capacity to work together to solve problems.

It's a near-genius and completely FUBARed (and Orwellian!) tactic, because it suggests the opposite: That the good life can only be achieved by hate and war.

Herbert Marcuse is laughing his ass of somewhere right now.

[LCSD] Another View of Sand Ridge and PIE

(This might be of interest to those readers who normally ignore my Lebanon posts.)

I attended a gathering of friends today. We talked about social change and anarchism. A lot. We - I - also played with kittens quite a bit. (Hey, some things are important.)

We talked strategy and tactics. We talked about diversity, co-optation, resources, the environment, hierarchy, and a whole host of other things.

We talked - and I talked about Sand Ridge Charter School.

I was surprised as anyone else. After all, what could Sand Ridge have to do with any of the above?

Well, it turns out I fleshed out another way to look at what PIE has done. I'm not sure how well this analysis will hold up, but I'm going to put it out there and see what happens.

First, the basic argument:

Democratic Socialists often propose to reform society by transforming existing institutions - political parties, local offices, civic groups.

Anarchists, on the other hand, often (but not always) propose to build alternative institutions that disregard existing power structures entirely (the old IWW saying of "building the new society in the shell of the old").

These two positions, as you might suspect, are often opposed. I suggested at one point that they needed to work together.

I did so because it seems to me that people interested in activism are often to busy keeping their lives together to have the free time or resources to devote to activist projects, and if people didn't have to struggle so much just to get by, they/we might be more inclined to raise some hell.

In other words, I suggested that local institutions - say, city councils, school boards, watershed councils, etc. - be taken over and transformed not with the intent to transform society (see co-optation, danger of) or even with the intent to be run successfully if traditionally, but instead used to create an environment in which activism can flourish and stands a greater chance of being successful - the idea being that this is where people interested in building alternative institutions can begin to work.

After all, the master's tools can't fully demolish the master's house... but they can remodel it quite nicely and make it quite dysfunctional by normal standards if need be. (See, for example, the Bush Administration's all-out war on competent governance - it's the one war they are winning.)

So that is the argument in abstract. I used as an example of the first part of the argument - taking over a local institution with a different goal than simply doing a good job running the place - what has happened in Lebanon with Sand Ridge, PIE and Rick Alexander. And for the record, I'm not at all convinced this was a conscious plan or effort on their part; rather, I am hoping this will offer another way to explain recent events.

So the goal in this case is to create an alternative to the HS with the explicit belief that doing so will meet with official disapproval/resistance (a belief I happen to think is completely false, but whatever).

I'm going to try and explain this in steps:

1. Get one or more member elected to the school board. In this case, Rick Alexander, Josh Wineteer and half of Debi Shimmin. (It also helps that a charter school is, in the abstract, a good or at least decent idea.)

2. Get some folks to apply through official channels to create a charter school. Use existing laws. Don't let on that you have goals or will use methods that will run afoul of existing regulations or are otherwise unacceptable.

(Steps one and two can be done in any order or at the same time.)

3. Get approval for your charter school. Proceed to using your influence with the official arm of the state - in this case the LCSD School Board - to bend the rules in your favor.

4. When someone points out that what you're doing is wrong or illegal, proceed to use the institutional power you've gathered as a club against any opposition. Communicate illegally with other board members. Feel free to ignore laws that might hinder your pet project from being successful. Motion and vote to renew the charter without even discussing dozens of potential and real contract violations. Try to get anyone who might get in the way of your desired outcome out of the way (like getting Robinson and other administrative personnel out of the negotiations for contract renewal). Deny you're doing anything wrong and accuse your opponents of dishonesty until you are blue in the face. Rinse. Repeat.

5. That's basically it - I think this is just about where we're at in the process.

Of course, this whole strategy is based on flying under the radar of anyone with the authority to come in and override one's friends on the local board. In this case, that means the State of Oregon - as in, if the ODE gets wind of all the contract violations, there's not going to be a damn thing Rick Alexander or Jay Jackson can do about it. PIE and Sand Ridge will either comply or simply disappear.

I was pretty amused by this little thought exercise. I'm still not entirely convinced of its accuracy, but at first glance it seems disturbingly on target. (I'm also not really pleased that it seems to apply so well to something I think is a disaster of process and procedure.)

But there it lies. Please ask questions or comment =)

One last note: I am leaving out a few evaluative details; this is meant to be a somewhat charitable explanation in regards to PIE et al. I might come back later and add my conclusions (and what I think is wrong with PIE's process under this model).

Defining a Generation - Or, At Least, Making a Snarky Comment on Same

From a recent email conversation with my friend bz (reprinted with permission) regarding the website Jezebel and the people behind it:

They're between the working poor and lower middle class, a lot of them (Chase and I began describing ourselves as such like a year ago), but it varies. It's like new money, but instead of folks who came into monetary wealth without effort, it's college degrees. I mean, think about the glut of folks who went through their four years and learned shit, right? They didn't really try too hard, because seriously, what the hell is college practically mandatory for anyway. But like, everyone did the same thing, and so folks are just floating around with these brains and y'know—ideas?—but there's not much for them outside of tiny houses, jobs not quite fulfilling and a society that isn't sure any more what the general proper way of conducting oneself is. [emphasis added]

I think she is getting at something that definitely affects me (and a whole lot of other people): The collapse of the American Dream and the security that goes with it... and the fact that it's not being replaced with much more than a fractured vision of the good life filled with anomie.

To be clear, there is a damned big upside to that: Freedom.

But freedom - choice - can be a scary thing sometimes, as it implies a need to take responsibility for one's actions.

My generation, it seems, is doing a great job putting that off.

Thanks, Judd Apatow.

Also, have I mentioned that Jezebel is awesome?

Mahabba

Via Feministe, this excellent essay on agape love in Islam. I'm going to go ahead and give away the punchline, but please do read the whole thing:

Mahabba differs from agape in one crucial respect: because serving and approaching the beloved is a form of ongoing personal struggle, mahabba is a form of jihad. A far cry from the violent and indiscriminate ‘small jihad’ preached by militants, mahabba is a form of el jihad el kebir, the greater jihad, or jihad against one’s own ego. [emphasis added] It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in an age of lesser jihad mahabba has fallen out of practice and almost out of memory; so universally neglected that when Islam is accused of lacking a concept of divine brotherhood, few Muslims have the intellectual wherewithal to protest. But Adhaf Soueif is right: at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow. The struggle to serve God out of love, and one another out of love, is the jihad of human potential against the jihad of violent ideology; if resurrected, it has the power to change the world.

Notice how jihad means a lot more than 'holy war'? Me too - I have been told many times that, properly translated, it means 'struggle', of which struggle against others is merely a small part. The biggest struggle is always internal, against and with one's own self.

Also, I think Adhaf Soueif is exactly right as well, in both a deconstructionist way and the way in which every idea, properly understood, includes its limits and opposition.

D'Souza's Rhetorical Tricks Regarding Free Will

I was following the links over at the recent Philosopher's Carnival, and I ran into this post (warning: Incredibly long and wonderfully dense) which led to this op-ed by Dinesh D'Souza.

I don't really like what I've seen of D'Souza - my impression is that he's been fed, clothed, and housed by the wingnut welfare machine since his time at Dartmouth - and what I just read doesn't do anything to disprove that notion.

D'Souza's claim, at face value, is that the idea of free will somehow leads to the existence of the immaterial world. It's a wonderfully readable argument (he is a good writer) designed to prove a negative and then sell it as a positive.

I'm not buying. In fact, I'm sort of insulted. But I'm not surprised...

[Puts on hip waders and digs in.]

D'Souza:

There is a powerful strain of atheism that teaches that human beings are nothing more than matter. In this materialistic view, the soul is a fiction, a "ghost in the machine" that has been invented by religion for its own purposes. After all, we never encounter this ghost within the material frame of human beings.

What we do encounter is brains, arteries, blood and organs. These are all made up of the same atoms and molecules as trees and stones and are assembled by a process of evolution and natural selection into this intricate machine we call Homo sapiens. From this perspective, man is a kind of intelligent robot, a carbon-based computer. Consequently, man should be understood in the same material terms that we understand software programs.

I've heard of this, mainly from a friend of mine in a PhD program in the snowy north. D'Souza's labeling of the position "atheist" is a rhetorical move designed to set it in opposition to the "Christian" position (not "religious" - D'Souza is all about Christianity) even though the two positions are not really all that opposed. His labeling of the position "powerful" is designed to make the reader impressed when he "defeats" the position.

I'd also call it a rather simplistic explanation better attributed to determinism. I would call what D'Souza describes "scientific determinism."

The point is that D'Souza is already arguing, arguably, against at least a partial strawman; he's working on one small corner of belief and then claiming a victory against all atheism.

Moving on:

Morality is an empirical fact no less real than any other experience in the world.

I was going to add the context to this quote, but I realized it still makes no sense. How is morality an empirical fact? Only from the perspective that what we perceive as real is real - and that's a perspective that I can almost guarantee that D'Souza, who argues for a Platonic understanding of reality, does not buy into. It fits one of my crazy Sociology profs, who repeated it constantly, better.

Some consistency would be nice.

Here's what really got me:

Kant follows this train of reasoning to its remarkable conclusion. We enjoy at least some measure of freedom in the operation of our will. This freedom means doing what we want to do or what we ought to do, as opposed to what we have to do. Freedom implies autonomy, which Kant distinguishes from subservience to natural inclination. So at least some of what we think and do is not governed by the necessity imposed by the laws of science. If I give a dollar to a man on the street, the movements of our bodies are determined by nature, but my choice to give and his choice to take are free decisions that we both make.

It follows that there is an aspect of our humanity that belongs to the world of science, and there is an aspect of our humanity that is outside the reach of scientific laws. Simultaneously, we inhabit the realm of the phenomenal, which is the material realm, and also the realm of the noumenal, which is the realm of freedom. It is the noumenal realm, the realm outside space and time, that makes possible free choices that are implemented within the realm of space and time. Materialism tries to understand us in two dimensions, whereas in reality we inhabit three.

Notice the jump between the paragraphs?

Actually, the latter does not follow from the former. D'Souza just proved that there is something we don't currently understand (does he really think his scientific determinist atheists don't have a rejoinder to his simple argument? No - he's omitted any obvious counterarguments to make himself appear smarter), not that there is something we can't ever understand. Good lord, does he think scientists are done discovering new fundamental parts of the material world?

D'Souza seems to think that by proving the existence of something we can't fully explain using existing Western science - free will - that he has in fact proved the existence of the soul and the spiritual world. Nope. Sorry.

I'll say this: He's written a heck of an undergraduate essay on Kant. See Duck at DuckRabbit for why D'Souza gets Kant at a very simplistic level.

Professionalism, Special 'Teacher Standards' Edition

From an anonymous emailer:

Education goes beyond that though. You are expected to be so wholesome. Teachers, even today, may find themselves in a conversation with the person who performs their evaluation if they are reported to have been seen leaving a bar, smoking a cigarette, buying a lottery ticket, or any number of other legal activities that are nobody's business when away from the workplace.

I think this is correct. Unlike many other jobs (even other public sector jobs), K-12 teachers are - still! - expected to have stellar private lives, using a relatively conservative set of criteria. They - we? - are expected to achieve a "higher moral standard." (Note: I am not advocating what the teacher at the link did; I am noting that the school district in question specifically stated that they expected teachers to be held to a higher moral standard.)

This raised lots of question for me; I will list the questions in bold and my answers in italics. If you have answers to the questions, or simply want to comment on my answers, please do (and please indicate which question you are responding to).

Questions:

If we can be specific, what are the components of the "higher moral standard" that teachers must meet?

Well, I know someone who keeps their tattoos covered...I don't see many teachers with piercings outside their ears, though I can think of one person with a facial piercing...I don't know of any teachers personally who are openly LGBT, though that may be a function of the district I am in...I also imagine there are social sanctions for being non-monogamous/in an open relationship or marriage...finally, I imagine teachers must be incredibly circumspect about smoking/drinking/gambling/etc. The point is that teachers must be careful when doing anything that's not in line with the dominant cultural paradigm.

Are they written down anywhere?

Probably varies by district. I'd imagine they are to some extent, but more likely is the inclusion of a broader phrase or guideline such as "maintain a professional relationship with students" (i.e. don't talk about one's personal life) that doesn't allow or deny specific behaviors (though I suspect that enforcement of specific guidelines would be difficult as they may be found to infringe on free speech and other personal freedoms).

Is there a uniformity to them, or do they vary?

See above answer.

If they vary, from where to where and how much?

I would imagine they reflect the dominant culture of the region. For example, standards in Texas and standards in NYC are probably going to differ substantially. In fact, I wonder if the urban-rural split could be the dominant determinant.

How do we divide up the public/private split for a teacher's life, and is that division different than other public sector folks?

I think it is different. I think teachers are expected to remain much more circumspect about their personal lives (politicians possibly excepted, and even then I'm not sure), with the motivation perhaps being that one cannot create a neutral learning environment if one's students know too much. However, I think this is unfair to both teacher and students - it forces teachers to essentially act like something other than human beings with thoughts, feelings, and emotions while in the classroom (of course, we ask this of students regularly as well; I'm also amazed at what happens when I convince students their personal life is not only off limits, but a relevant source to draw on in relation to the material of the day). It forces the people in the classroom to act like Its rather than Thous.

I am of the belief that what is important is not always what the teacher believes, but whether or not the teacher creates an environment in which a student can disagree with a teacher without fear of retribution. To be honest, many of the students I encounter refuse to speak freely on the grounds that they fear getting in trouble. This says some disturbing, but typical, things about the way in which the teaching profession as a whole views the idea of power.

And I'll preemptively say that anyone who comments to claim that we should ask teachers to remove themselves from the equation while working will be published. Just don't expect me to politely agree with you.

Do classified and/or administrative staff get held to the same standards as teachers?

Tricky question. I'm not sure. Anyone takers out there?

If they don't, is that fair?

Ummm... see above answer.

Are the standards teachers held to fair, or just, in the first place?

No, for all the reasons I've already stated.

And at the least, U.S. society needs to discover some consistency in what we expect from teachers and education staff: Is it strictly academic? What about moral/ethical/personal development? What about "instilling values" in students?

I know this is an ongoing debate and that there's no real answer, but some open discussion and a shared understanding of the issues, if nothing else, would be nice.

A thought regarding the Lebanon School District

An observation: Sherrie Springer (and to an extent Jim Robinson) wield the advice from the District's legal counsel like a club.

Thing is, it's a club that no one outside the board ever sees. It's perpetually hidden, but everyone is told to trust that it's there and that it says what Sprenger says it does (yeah yeah yeah - I get that the whole board sees the advice, but that doesn't seem to matter to either the other board members or the public). I get the feeling that not only was the public's trust for Sprenger never very high, but that her use of this method has eroded it to just about zero. Possibly negative.

For example: Near the end of Monday's meeting, Sprenger cited the advice from legal counsel as a reason not to entertain the motion to let Kim Fandiño speak - but also cited attorney-client privilege as a reason not to explain the content of the legal advice. While Sprenger is technically correct (as evidenced by the fact that the rest of the board did the same thing even though it obviously disgusts them to have to do so), it leaves KF in the position of having been told no and yet not knowing why, which, despite the understandable legality, is an essentially unjust position.

Furthermore, it's an unjust position brought about by the intersection of two board policies - cyberbullying and the complaint procedures - complicated by the fact that LT is an anonymous blogger. I have to admit that so far I'm not happy with how the conflict between the policies has been handled, because I think it's been resolved in such a way as to cause maximum damage to Kim's position - and whether or not that's intentional on the part of district's legal counsel and/or Jim Robinson, it is being perceived as intentional and political. And while Robinson cannot control every perception of his actions (nor should he have to) it would seem in his best interest to reach out a little and do some P.R. on this one.

Robinson pointed out during the meeting (and this is referenced in this Express story) that by allowing Kim to have a hearing, he would risk violating district complaint policy.

It goes as follows: Kim filed her complaint at level three and moved it to level four when she appealed to the board. Robinson pointed out that she skipped levels one and two, both of which require notification and conversation with the person named in the complaint. Robinson then claimed that if Kim were to identify or claim to identify the blogger in her hearing, and the blogger turned out to be a district employee, Kim would have violated complaint procedure, thus causing an injustice to the employee.

Essentially, Robinson is claiming that allowing Kim a hearing regarding her complaint violating district policy would itself be a violation of district policy, and he and/or legal counsel have decided that the potential of violating the possible employee's complaint rights outweighs Kim's rights. Which is fine if one believes that no cyberbullying has occured, and that Kim should take her case to a civil court (which is what Robinson has said on multiple occasions).

HOWEVER, given that so many people - Kim, Debi, Josh, and Rick come to mind, as well as Ginger Allen and, I suspect, lots and lots of teachers - think that what LT has written is "cyberbullying" (it may be mean, but nothing I have read constitutes cyberbullying OR libel in my mind), Robinson and Sprenger's refusals to do anything but state their positions and ruthlessly use hidden legal advice to defend it is a very, very bad idea politically and PR-wise. It's going to cause the dislike and hatred of them to ratchet up another notch, undeserved or not, because the public perception is very clearly that Kim is not getting anything resembling justice out of this.

And if there's anything that matters in a place like Lebanon, it's that (punitive) justice gets done.

One last thing: I imagine that many of the folks involved in this case are not all that familiar with libel law or the difference between a public and private figure contained therein. I also imagine they are not used to having someone criticize their actions. While I understand that it can be very difficult to deal with what feels like a personal attack, what's going on in this district is nothing compared to what happens in larger locales where there is far more public scrutiny of the actions of public figures (which, like it or not, comes with the jobs of school board member and LEA President). At some point, one has to learn to evaluate criticism for any truth it contains, cull that truth and see if it's worth responding to in some fashion, and forget about the rest. Dwelling on what some anonymous blogger says about you is just stress that no one needs, and I say that without a trace of irony.

Assumptions

It just struck me that not only are assumptions are often factually wrong, but they are epistemologically wrong as well - we use them as if they were knowledge, but they are in fact just stand-ins for real knowledge.

More Tools for Communication That Might Apply to Lebanon

I dug some handouts out of a binder from a training I attended once - and I still think they are some of the best concepts around to start to understand how our own communications styles and how they effect other people. I'd like to try and explain the two main concepts contained in said handouts in this post - but beware, this is first in terms of format for me, so I'm not sure how this is going to turn out. Plus, it turns out I'm a really bad lecturer in all formats.

I should give credit to Eric H.F. Law, who I believe was the originator of these. Also, much of the language is taken directly from the handout with little to no modification.

Concept #1: Power Distance Communication.

These can be separated into High and Low Power Distance, but I should note that they are a continuum rather than two discrete forms. Also, it should be noted up front that one person is not bound to one particular style, but can both change over time and change depending on the situation.

High Power Distance: Individuals who view the world with a high power distance believe that there is inequality in the world and accept that as a fact of life. Signs of high power distance may include (1) a lower trust level, (2) higher levels of desired protocol, (3) a desire to figure out the role of everyone in the room before participating, and (4) a need for more context before action can be taken.

How HPD can play out: People who are high power may have to work harder at building a safe environment (which is necessary for open and honest communication); they may be happier if they are together rather than interspersed with low power distance folks, at least at first. High power folks are more likely to be concerned with "what's in it for them." High power people have little tolerance for folks who think everyone in the room is equal. Finally, since lower power distance folks think of low-level high power folks as weak, said low-level folks may get run over quite a bit initially.

By the way, these attributes are generally understood as applying to group work, the workplace, etc - how folks interact with each other in social situations. In this case, think of a school board working group, a staff meeting at the district office, or even a teacher's meeting in one of the academies are Lebanon High School.

Low Power Distance: These folks believe that power is shared by many and high power people are either elitist (if they are at the top) or weak (if they are at the bottom). Lower Power Distance people may (1) downplay the importance of hierarchy, (2) have a low level of protocol, (3) feel that people should try to look less powerful than they are, and/or (4) feel that people can also gain power through education.

How LPD can play out: LPD folks may simply speak out rather than raise their hands or follow other protocols designed to maintain or maximize order; this may result in their dominating discussions. If a discussion enters the realm of difference, low power folks may show disdain for comments that either valorize the rich or anyone else at the top of a hierarchy.

Examples of these: I would think that something like a law office would be very high power distance, as it contains lots of hierarchy. Certainly military training can create situations that are VERY high power distance, with strict protocols surrounding peoples' roles and who can say what, and when, and to whom. I would think coaches also often follow a high power distance model, with an insistence on everyone knowing the ropes and rules, especially those governing who is in charge (always the coach).

Now contrast that with a group of teachers that get together for lunch every day. Yes, they are aware that some of them have more seniority than others, but by and large, the potential exists for the space created to be one in which everyone is treated as an equal, and formal rules governing the group can be tossed in favor of informal (and sometimes assumed) rules.

I don't mean to imply, however, that something we might normally think of as high power distance can't be low power distance. A staff meeting with teachers, administrators, and district office officials present can turn out to be a very low power distance affair.

And, of course, I should note again that these are concepts that generally apply to people's perspectives; as a result, you might find yourself in a group made up of folks who are all over the continuum and have very different ideas about how the group should or does work. How those perspective mesh, conflict, and play out is often very different, even with the same group meeting multiple times. The point is simply to be aware that different people view the protocols and practices of communication differently, and moreover, that these views can change over time and in different contexts. As a result, I think it's important to pay attention to where you are at on the Power Distance continuum as well as where others appear to be at. It can prevent folks from talking past each other, or getting embroiled in disagreements about how to communicate rather than what information needs to be communicated.

Concept #2: High & Low Context Communications

This concept goes really well, I think, with the first. Context Communications is, essentially, being aware of how much context is transmitted between people along with the information that's going back and forth.

High Context Communicators: When people communicate, most of the information is either in the physical context (body language) or internalized in the person. Therefore, implicit messages are critical. High context people may struggle initially in a new setting as they have to reorient themselves within the new shared context.

How this can play out: A high context communicator might feel the need to speak uninterrupted to get their point across; this may take some time, making others impatient. They may also need more extensive directions put in a context they can work with.

Low Context Communicators: These are pretty common in U.S. society. The low context individual values the explicit codes and pays less attention to the information embedded in messages. They will often need little contexting time; they feel that they can confront new situations with requiring a great amount of time and detailed programming; finally, they may have difficulty functioning in a high-context environment where contexts are constantly in play, since low context folks often are often unaware of their internal context.

How this plays out: Basically, low context folks just want the answer (think more "yes/no" than the "why"). They don't want all the context, which they often perceive as extraneous or wasteful.

When I was introduced to this concept, I was asked to envision a tower. At top of the tower is the piece or pieces of information that need to be communicated between people. The rest of the tower, the foundation, the framework, all the floors up to the top - those are the context that is needed for the information to make sense. A high context person will often feel the need to communicate the entire tower from the bottom up before communicating the information itself. The tower is the contextual information that is perceived as required for the desired piece of information to make sense. If the person listening interrupts, this can be perceived as a need to build a bigger tower - to include more contextualizing information along with the desired information, because it suggests to the high context person that the questioner didn't really understand what was going on.

Needless to say, this can be infuriating for low context folks who just want a 'yes' or 'no' or other short answer.

The way I understand it, low context folks tend to assume the shared context, the tower, between people or groups. As a result, low contexters tend to view all the other communication, the tower-building, as a repetitive waste of time.

It was mentioned above that many folks in the U.S. are low context. I would argue (and it's here that I out myself as preferring high context) that what this indicates is that folks in the U.S. feel like they have a shared context in which to understand and master new information. Personally, I consider this a bad assumption in any group, much less larger groups that may contain people from significantly different backgrounds.

In fact, when wedded with power, I consider low context communications to be one way in which things like white or male privilege are manifested and transmitted: People of color and white women are expected to share the context created by the privileged white male while not being allowed to change or modify the "shared" context at all. Then the "shared" context is considered universal. It can work this way when any kind of power differential between individuals or groups is present, even if all the folks present are, say, white guys - there are certainly other axes along which power is transmitted.

Again, as with the power distance concept, the context communications concept is something that both exists on a continuum and is very mutable and flexible. One person can change over time in the way they communicate, and they can also change depending on the situation they are in. For example, a group of really close-knit friends or coworkers may have developed a shared context around certain subjects over time, allowing their communication to be successfully low context. On the other hand, some of those same folks may adopt a high-context attitude with their students, or in larger staff meetings. Similarly, groups of professional and classified education staff may have their own shared context - but it's important to remember that the context-building in this case needs to be a self-aware and self-conscious process; otherwise, it's easy to get back to that point where a shared context is assumed, and that becomes a barrier to communication.

Concluding Thoughts

I think both of these concepts have a lot of potential when it comes to Lebanon and the problems that have plagued it over the last decade. Certainly there are genuine differences of opinion when it comes to pedagogy and education policy, but (and this is especially true of the last several months) those differences hardly ever get really aired, since communication is, I think, so incredibly poor between folks right now.

Sitting down and thinking, as an individual, about where one falls on these continuums, especially in what contexts, and even thinking about where you think other people fall, is also a good first step to learning how to communicate with one's coworkers and other educational staff more effectively. I know that folks often want to resist doing the internal and introspective work that I'm suggesting, but I cannot express how important that work is: One cannot make others change. One can only change oneself and try and support others as they do the same.

Lebanon Truth wrote a post in which they criticized Rick Alexander (rightly, I think) for not being willing to sit down and read a book on how to be a better school board. While I think the choice of book is hilariously (and seriously) appropriate, I would argue that in addition, what is important for the currently disparate and contentious group of five individuals that are trying to oversee the LCSD is that they take the time outside of board meetings and working groups to get to know each other as people and develop some sort of shared context, some common ground (and maybe some shared values), which they can use as a basis for their work in the future. I have the feeling that Rick Alexander has no intention of doing something like that, as it would require him to actually a) learn about the rest of the board, and b) open himself up to them. But relating to other human beings on a personal level is, I think, a prerequisite for being effective in a work-related situation.

Thoughts on Subbing, Part III

(Note: I suck at HTML and formatting in general, even with a WYSIWYG setup like blogger uses. I am sorry. I might edit the formatting of this piece in the future, but that might just make it worse.)

In the first two posts, I talked a bit about the character of the high school I subbed at - small town, small schools/academy setup, etc. In this post, somewhat inspired by recent events in the district, I want to comment on the academy system more generally.

Specifically, I have been thinking about the fact that the district superintendent just got placed on indefinite paid administrative leave by folks who have spent a lot of time either bashing the academy system or getting their support from folks who bash the academy system. While those folks who voted to send the Superintendent to mow his lawn did not say it was because of the academy system directly, it is hard to believe that the biggest controversy of the last several years has nothing to do with it.

From the setup, it appears I am about to defend said system, but I'm not sure. I want to lay out the pros and cons as I see them, and see what happens.

*Puts on policy wonk hat.*

Pros (and these are the pros as I see them, not as how they are touted by supporters of the idea; the same goes for the cons):

• Increased attendance, decreased tardies - or at least the potential for this. In some parts of the school, it appeared that tardies and unexcused absences were down; in others, they had stayed the same or risen. From what I saw, the biggest gains were made due to the diligence of one person, not the academy system; even given that, I think the academy system helps here, since it allowed the person in question to be responsible for 300-400 students instead of 1400, which allowed her to be much more effective. The fact that she was extremely thorough and diligent also helped - I saw staff in other parts of the school who were much more lax about following the rule of law, and the result, based on what I was told by one teacher, was that those areas of the school that didn't enforce the rules so tightly had absence and tardy rates that weren't going down.

• Staff get to know students better, since they are more-or-less reduced to dealing with a small portion of the overall student body rather than the full 1400 people. This allows for more personalized attention with a decreased chance for students to fall through the proverbial cracks. Anecdotally, this was backed up - several teachers I talked to said that the number of students dropping out in their academy had decreased since the previous year. Furthermore, these teachers implicitly credited the fact that they were all working as a team more than they had before the implementation of the academy system, and could therefore more easily track students who were in trouble.

• Location - physically placing each academy in a separate part of the school allows for decreased time between classes, which has a myriad of social consequences, but also affects tardies and presumably skipping, even if to a small degree. It also, theoretically, allows for greater cohesion among students who share an academy. I am not sure if I saw this, or if I saw cohesion based on shared interests or previously formed friendships or social groups.

• Greater opportunities for a cohesive curriculum across departments and/or opportunities for team teaching. I saw the former in spades in at least one academy, and in another there was an amazing team-taught class. The possibility to make the curriculum comprehensive and coherent at the academy level is, for me, one of the biggest selling points of this system. I never experienced anything like that until college, when I would end with classes that complimented each other. While I think it's less obvious to students in high school, I certainly think the ability to coordinate is greater - and the fact that it can be conscious coordination, even to the point of telling students what's happening, is very useful.

• Greater diversity of class offerings. This is pretty interesting, since it also relies on the fact that the academy system requires more teachers - meaning that it's not really the academy part that results in more classes but the increased number of classes being taught. So I'd call it a semi-pro. One thing, though - it is certainly true; word has it there is going to be Sociology and Anthropology/Archeology taught there next year, two things I'd never expect to see...now if only they could add a Critical Thinking/Philosophy class...
  

So those are a few pros. I am sure there are more, but given my limited experience, that's probably enough. So, on to the negatives.

Cons

• Gender. This is the big one for me. I know that high school can be a harsh and dangerous place, one where gender roles are enforced with such ruthless efficiency as to give the Mafia or the military pause, but still. I think the academy system really exacerbated the way students experienced gender, especially when it came to the different ways that people presented masculinity and femininity. For instance, one academy was very male-dominated (85-90% male); are those students going to leave high school with the same ideas about gender, sexuality, and women that they would have in a school that didn't have this kind of artificial segregation? I doubt it. Furthermore, I got the sense that life for women in that system was pretty difficult. Many of them showed signs of having adapted to being more masculine, and while some of them seemed to relish in their newfound freedom, for others it came across as a nasty set of behavior guidelines.

In another academy, women were pretty dominant, and I noticed that the males were far more flexible in their presentation of gender, i.e. suggestions that they were anything but hypermasculine weren't met with grunts and raised fists. My point is actually one I can crib from a teacher at the school who tried to talk to their students about where they learn about things like love and relationships: Look who they are learning these things from. It's not anything like a representative sample of their peers - heck, it's not even as representative as it was pre-academy.

And this has larger ramifications than gender; many of these students are going to graduate with much narrower view of the possibility of human personalities than they should. Students seem to have developed a dominant view for what people should be like based on what academy they are in; I think this sort of stereotyping is a very bad thing, as it actually reinforces larger stereotypes (in this case nerd, hick, 'emo fag', etc.) by not placing students face-to-face with people who can shatter those stereotypes.

• Class Stratification - Part of the stereotyping is, of course, stereotyping people's intelligence. This, too, has negative consequences, especially for those students who start believing they are dumber than they are. Also, if I remember correctly there was an incredibly large difference across academies in rates of college attendance; it seemed to track almost perfectly with the presence of females in the academy (more females, more college-bound students).
  

One of my pet peeves about this kind of system is that it essentially asks 14-year-olds to pick a career path, something that I think is the worst kind of stupid (it reinforces existing class inequality and stratification - how many people just want to do what their parents do or only have exposure to what their parents do at that age, especially males?). Most people don't know what they want to do for their entire life at that age, and as far as I know, most people change professional careers multiple times (to say nothing of college majors). Therefore, asking students to pick something like this so early is criminal in my mind. I know my own experience with electives - Journalism & Newspaper, Chemistry up through the AP class, the entire Electronics series, and four years of German - could not have taken place today, as three of those series are in different academies and German has been eliminated entirely. Put frankly, high school is not a time to pick a career. It is a time to learn, grow, experiment, and dabble (just like college, I might add). Life skills are far more important than career skills at this point.

This is one objection I've never heard proponents of an academy system really respond to; sure, the goal is to get college attendance rates and academic difficulty equal across all academies, but there are larger structural forces working against that, and there is a giant disparity present at the moment in this area, especially where I was.

• Increased Anonymity Outside Your Academy - a teacher pointed out to me that there are now hundreds of students who can waltz into his area of the school, wreak havoc, and leave, and he would have no idea who they were. The point, of course, is that with increased awareness of and time spent with those students in your academy come less knowledge of the student body as a whole. Relatively minor, maybe, but still worth noting.

• Increased resource requirements - all of a sudden there are multiple offices with multiple policies, not to mention three of almost every department. From an NEA article:

But like most good education reforms, this one can be done well or badly. “Small schools can be great, but they do take more resources,” says Oakland, California, math teacher Jack Gerson. His big high school was chopped into three small ones. “Now we have three principals, three attendance clerks, three offices,” says Gerson, and yet Oakland is slashing its school budget.

Like giving schools more resources is a bad thing. I understand that it's not likely to happen, not even under a Democratic Administration, but let's be clear: School funding needs to be increased by at least 100%, regardless of policy. Nevertheless, I am counting it as con since it's likely to force districts to stretch their resources even thinner.

Honestly? On the whole, I'm not a fan of the academy system, at least no in its current iteration. I also ran across something that I think could easily happen where I worked, and maybe already is (it would especially true if resource allocation is unequal for any length of time):

Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan professor and co-author of a new book about five big-school conversions, cautions that the phenomenon is still so new it's hard to draw hard conclusions about its value.

One troubling finding, Lee said, was that social stratification at all five schools increased, with the motivated students with good grades gravitating toward one or two of the smaller units, and unmotivated students to others.

"The students and teachers all recognized that there was one subunit where all the loser kids were," Lee said. "We had kids say: 'We know we're losers, and here we are all together in the loser academy.' "

That is a big deal.

More from the NEA article:

Many cities are imposing small schools from the top down, but success depends on giving teachers a leading role, says journalism teacher Stan Karp, who led a small school in Patterson, New Jersey, and now works on a state taskforce writing guidelines for small, urban high schools. “Where the rubber meets the road is in the teacher teams. They’re on the front lines,” he says. “They need support and autonomy.” [emphasis mine]

That’s why it’s important for Association members to be proactive when a small school conversion is in the works, says Smith. “The union needs to call people together and move out front. Have a discussion with members and talk about the pros and the potential challenges. This needs to be done with us, not to us.”

If they are not talking about the LCSD, they should be. I'm getting hints that part of the problem was in fact the top-down administering of this shift, and that the resentment it caused has never been dealt with. Do you hear that?

“They need support and autonomy.”

That is perhaps the single most important thing that I can say about teachers and teaching in the short term. Yes, there are horrible teachers out there, but everyone suffers when the hammer comes down on innovation. Heck, everyone suffers when the hammers comes down and there's a memo attached to it that results in massive changes to the school. Changes of this magnitude are very, very hard, if not impossible, to do from above, and it takes an extremely delicate touch and, ultimately, the support of teachers. From what I hear, Jim Robinson had - and has - neither.

Conclusion

One reason I wrote this post is to reiterate larger point about the ongoing disaster that is the LCSD. I have tried to provide, as substantially as possible, some of the ups and downs of the current system.

I have never seen anyone else do this, either in the paper or at a school board meeting. I am positive the district personnel are talking about the pros and results of the system, since they implemented it. However, I would expect the system's detractors to have SOME sort of evidence (after four years) to support their claims. I have seen or heard none, so I think it's out up or shut up time - and it should be clear by now that I think there is plenty of evidenced that academy system is far from perfect. It's just that the detractors don't seem to be even trying to make legitimate arguments in support of their points. (Yes, I am aware that my insistence on things like 'evidence' and 'coherent arguments' provide proof of my pretentiousness.)

Along those same lines, I went to the effort to try and organize my observations because I think it's something that both proponents of the small schools system and perhaps more importantly, the teachers and staff who work within the system, need to do. If there was one overriding thing I heard about the academy system, it was that it wasn't perfect - and therefore needed tweaking. I believe the people best suited to do that tweaking are, at least in part, the teachers on the ground. (Along with that, of course, I believe the students who are affected need to have a very big and very meaningful part in any sort of discussion.) I wasn't aware of any organized effort to initiate the sort of bottom-up, informal evaluation I am thinking about. For that matter, I didn't see any evidence of any sort of evaluation, though I am sure there is SOME kind of evaluation process in place. What I did hear was a lot of very information and anecdotal information, most of it pretty insightful and very relevant. I just didn't see it going anywhere.

(Note: Whether or not any of my comments and observations are worth anything is for the reader to decide. I will only say that I feel very strongly about the gendered aspects of the academy system, and indeed high school in general. The policy wonk/numbers game stuff is probably best left to people who believe in it more strongly than I do, but since it is a common metric for measuring this sort of thing, it's included.)

International Philosophy Or My Two Favorite Things Combined (Thanks to the British)

Yes, I realize posting has been light. Friends are down, etc. etc.

Also, I love this bit. Thanks to Luke for sending it along.

VDH - Sounds like a disease to me

From some guy with a blog (thanks, J), a column by Victor Davis Hanson, who is apparently a scholar...though I don't see any evidence of it based on this example.

Over at Engage, J takes the high road in asking questions about Hanson's column.

I am not going to take the high road. VDH is an idiot.

He gets me at the first paragraph:

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Um, there are actually lots of black people who don't like those words, either. Thing is, many of them are black women. When white folks make complaints like this, it suggests they haven't heard - or bothered to look for - any black people, male or female, who are speaking out against misogynistic language like this.

This sort of smug, self-righteous garbage makes me think someone like VDH here is a bit of a racist. Or, at the least, he's exercising some class and race privilege here - he gets to call people out for "not speaking out" about something, when really it's he who hasn't been listening.

And that's the opening paragraph. I don't think I'm going to like this column.

Moving on:

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

Wow.

While I *might* agree that Americans (or at least American college graduates) don't have a "broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history," I doubt I'd agree with this guy on why that's the case (and for the record, I don't think what Hanson is claiming has EVER been the case - it's a myth). I would blame it on massive reductions in funding for higher education and a push to make even four-year universities into technical schools where students aren't required to take a humanities core (which is a result of students attending college just to make more money and not to get "an education").

Oh, and Hanson's complaint about all the *-Studies departments? Totally irrelevant to his point. The classics classes are still there, at least in every curriculum I've ever seen, and furthermore, the classics classes are usually required as part of a humanities or undergraduate core, while the "Studies" classes are not. They are almost always electives.

On the other hand, it appears Hanson has a problem with the *-Studies' existence:

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

Uh-huh. While some courses are indeed set up for the students to deductively reach the professor's conclusions, insofar as this is a problem, it's a problem in all fields and departments, not just those things that VDH doesn't like. It's not like the "classics" courses don't have the exact same issue - what, like there is one correct, objective way to understand the history of white people, and that happens to be the way it's actually taught? Please.

Oh. Whoops. I guess Hanson does think there is one objective truth, since he complains that "The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority."

Um, that's rather a obviously bullshit statement if you've sat through any of the courses one presumes Hanson is talking about. (And I have. Lots of them.)

First, there's no way to make a blanket claim about all the possible courses in all these fields, which he is doing - note the use of the word "all." Bad VDH! Bad!

Second, he seems to be arguing against the most extreme form of relativism possible, one which lots (and lots and lots and lots) of "Cultural Studies" (to use a broad and inaccurate blanket label) professors who don't believe in this form of relativism any more than Hanson does. That's a logical fallacy called a strawman: Just make up an argument that's not very good or accurate to your opponent, demolish it, and declare victory. It's practically the most common tool used to deride and ignore anyone to the "left" of Joe Lieberman, especially on TV, where I we can't shout back.

I actually took a class on the epistemological foundations of knowledge (in a roundabout way) which really hammered home how this sort of relativism works - and why even someone like me would be better off without it. Suffice to say, there are lots of forms or types of relativism, and Hanson is picking on the most extreme version, which, while certainly used by somebody somewhere, cannot be generalized in the way he is claiming.

There's more:

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic.

You know what that sounds like? White supremacy. In this case, the way courses used to be taught - viewing everything through a European lens and focusing almost exclusively on the accomplishments and history of white people - can only be labeled as "traditional" or "objective" if those are synonyms with "Eurocentric."

Hanson also claims these courses were inductive, providing tools for students to use later in life. Obviously, then, he doesn't think the same of the "Cultural Studies" material. However, I would argue that it they are fact a whole new set of tools, developed by people focusing on different things than in the past, and using some different assumptions about the world. A major difference is the willingness to focus inward and also on the social aspect of humanity.

I will agree with Hanson that the tools he describes - language skills especially - are extremely useful and instrumental in today's world. I just don't think a) we're losing those because of some nebulously-defined "Cultural Studies" or b) those tools are enough to allow us to understand what's really going on in the world. And I suspect that the way Hanson visualizes those tools leaves a lot of people out in the cold.

Finally:

If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history?

If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons.

Hanson's massive and fundamental misunderstanding of relativism also leads to the tripe I just quoted. Find me a college professor who actually believes that, and I'll show you a scarecrow. What he's missing here, and I'm not quite sure how, is that there are still consequences in the everyday lives of almost everybody no matter what you believe, and I think most folks who are in favor of social justice know that. Given how often social justice advocates stamp their feet and scream their faces blue trying to draw attention to those in Darfur, Iran, or Palestine, for example - I would think that Hanson would surely know better.

Oh, and that little dig about Iraq? That's just fucked up (unless I am misunderstanding - the sentence is very convoluted). Hanson is apparently claiming that the lack of proper education for college graduates are what has allowed us to get mired down in Iraq in the first place, but that makes no sense: The folks who took lots of classes in the "Cultural Studies" area that Hanson derides are the same people that opposed Iraq in the first place, often on the basis of greater relative knowledge of the history and culture of a non-white, non-European area. In other words, us lousy relativists got it right, and the uptight Western Civ folks got it wrong.

Article Analysis: Gen-Y Workers and the Modern World

I got this from my mother, of all places, and I'm very glad she sent it along. While it was extremely interesting, I also thought it was at least 50% wrong.

What is it? An online article from Fortune magazine about Gen-Y workers and how "we're" different. I put that in quotes because while I don't really identify with the article a whole lot, I am in the age group, so I'm likely to be lumped in there.

Also, a disclaimer: there's bound to be more than a few stupid generalizations made by me throughout this post. Please point them out in a kind fashion if you find them. Thank you.

Let's start at the beginning - and I warn you, this is likely to be a long, long post. From early in the article:

They're ambitious, they're demanding and they question everything, so if there isn't a good reason for that long commute or late night, don't expect them to do it. When it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list - behind their families, their friends, their communities, their co-workers and, of course, themselves.

From the tone of the post, I read this as the author expressing surprise, or at least written as though it will be news to the people who the magazine is aimed at.

My response? Well, duh. And yes, I realize that this is the dominant cultural norm surrounding work, especially for folks who have personally experienced the 1950s-80s. However, it's no longer a major expectation of anyone I know. Why is there no company loyalty? Because it works both ways - folks I know are fully aware that many companies, especially large ones, don't give a rat's ass about individuals at the bottom of the food chain - and we also know that this lack of care is institutionalized and globalized. Find us a place that cares about its employees, and we're still suckers:

Dorsey recalls the time the president of an engineering firm called a new employee's mother and asked her to be there when her daughter started work Monday morning. "When her mom walked through the crowd, she was like, 'Oh, my God,' and her mom says to everyone, 'I took her to kindergarten, and now I'm here for her first day of work,'" Dorsey says. "The president took them on a tour of the company and explained to both of them why what new employees were doing was so important to the company. And the mom turns to her daughter and says, 'You are not allowed to quit this job. Real companies are not like this.'"

Thing is, this "new paradigm" still leaves in the place the old structure of wages and a hierarchical division of labor - i.e. modern capitalism. So as new as it is, the demands of "Gen-Y workers" are not really radical at all...they are something else. (But what? I'll get to that eventually, I promise.)

Next:

And speaking of fashion, this isn't a group you'll catch in flannel. They're all about quiet kitsch - a funky T-shirt under a blazer, artsy jewelry, silly socks - small statements that won't cause trouble. The most important decorations, though, are electronic - iPods, BlackBerrys, laptops - and they're like extra limbs. Nothing is more hilarious than catching a Gen Yer in public without one of those essentials. Let's just say most wouldn't have lasted long on Walden Pond.

Speak for yourself. The older I get, the more I like flannel, dammit - and this is an example of some pretty bad generalizing, though I suspect it's more accurate for certain demographics (large firms and business majors) than others. Again, my social circle, by and large, isn't really embracing these trends - though it is, I think, aware of them.

On the other hand, this is also a good example of an interesting compromise or concession on the part of "Gen-Y" folks: They keep their quirkiness, but they keep it hidden and willingly conform to the norms of professionalism, or at least some norms. Like the article says, they want to be weird, but they don't want to risk anything. Sigh. I'm not sure I can call that progress in good faith.

When it comes to Gen Y's intangible characteristics, the lexicon is less than flattering. Try "needy," "entitled." Despite a consensus that they're not slackers, there is a suspicion that they've avoided that moniker only by creating enough commotion to distract from the fact that they're really not that into "work."

Not into work? No?! Really? Why in the world would anyone not like work?

Give me a break - though to be fair, this seems directed at old white people who happen to be middle- or upper-level managers and who spent years, if not decades, doing crap-work just to get promoted to a position with meaning. It appears that Gen-Y folks don't like that model. Surprise, surprise.

The catch here is that at least for me, I define "work" as drudgery, make-work, repetitive, etc. I don't mind laboring - ask the grass seed farmers I used to work for - but, like the article says, I can't stand not to end a shift and realize I might as well not have done anything, because everything looks the same as when I started (can you say McJob?). Here's a little secret: Jobs don't have to suck. I promise. Envisioning a worker as someone that can be broken down statistically at corporate headquarters or someone who is essentially a profit-producing robot results in the kind of "jobs" that do, in fact, suck - they don't require any creative thinking or any problem-solving, and they don't result in a feeling of accomplishment when something does get done. For an example of how to organize work in such a way that keeps it meaningful and makes it empowering, see Michael Albert's Participatory Economics.

Moving on:

Of course, Gen Yers have been told since they were toddlers that they can be anything they can imagine. It's an idea they clung to as they grew up and as their outlook was shaken by the Columbine shootings and 9/11. More than the nuclear threat of their parents' day, those attacks were immediate, potentially personal, and completely unpredictable. And each new clip of Al Gore spreading inconvenient truths or of polar bears drowning from lack of ice told Gen Yers they were not promised a healthy, happy tomorrow. So they're determined to live their best lives now.

This paragraph digs at me a bit. My outlook wasn't really shaken by Columbine or 9/11 at all (sorry, I guess I didn't grow up in much of a bubble), and I had a moral/intellectual framework that was flexible enough to respond without freaking out, even then (and for that matter, I know plenty of older folks for whom 9/11 was not at all a surprise - they say that anyone with a knowledge of how the US acts in the world shouldn't have been surprised at what happened). I suppose it is possible that "9/11 changed everything" for Gen-Y, though I doubt it. I think older folks read this into younger folks because it challenged older folks more - their worldviews were more established than someone who graduated HS a few months after GWB took over. It also challenged the dominant media narrative in America, which sort of by default is supposed to reflect the "fact" that "everyone" changed, though I think that's quite obviously wrong.

As for the last couple of sentences...well, again, I'll save that for later. I think there's a large undercurrent running though the article that needs addressed separately, maybe even in a separate post that has to do with the perceived and/or real maturity of "today's youth." In fact, I think I'm going to end this post here; I'll have more to say later.

Newsflash: Teens Don't Care About the News

I would have told them that for free, but I suppose Harvard's got to do its own thing.

A key bit:

The poll, which had a margin of error of 2 percent to 3 percent, suggested that younger Americans may pay less attention to news because only one in 20 respondents claimed to “rely heavily” on a daily newspaper.

Additionally, the spread of soft news about pop culture is considered to have lured away young readers from hard news stories on politics and global events.

Predictably, the story digs up a quote from someone who blames it on the Internet. While I think that it's undeniable that the Internet allows people to filter their news, I think this sort of study and the folks who ask these questions are missing the point:

Why do people - young or old - choose to filter their news to match their political beliefs in the first place?

Looking for a technical solution (or even viewing the problem through a technological lens) to what is a decidedly non-technological problem seems foolish. So: Why do people feel the need or desire to filter their news, especially to make it match their existing political views?

I instinctively go for this answer: Because people aren't used to having their beliefs challenged. Having one's beliefs challenged - as opposed to reinforced - forces people to really think. And frankly, since I'm of the opinion that the American educational system actually represses critical thinking rather than foster it (at least from grade 6 on), I understand why people react the same way to challenging information they do to a bright light: They cringe, backpedal, and close their eyes.

Also, I think avoiding the news is a perfectly rational and understandable response to the news itself: I mean, have you watched that shit lately? All the serious stories are downers, and all the happy stories are about relatively inconsequential things. If I'm a high school student, why bother?

All this is a roundabout way of saying that people really like blaming us young'uns for not watching the news, but maybe they - and we - should start realizing the news sucks, and that something should be done about that. Trying to get more teens involved doesn't really get at the root of the problem.