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If these people don't think that encouraging kids to stay in school and study is a good thing, maybe they should come live in my city where about half the kids who start high school fail to finish. My sister's class had over 1200 members at the beginning of high school and less than 600 graduated. I think the numbers have improved a little in the eight years since then, but not a lot. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who can help those young people to understand the importance of staying in school and studying has my support in that particular endeavor, whatever I think of their politics otherwise.
You and I both...so I wonder on what planet people are living that staying in school and studying are considered unAmerican.
It's like they're throwing out the baby and keeping the dirty bathwater.
I think at least some of them live on the planet where they feel threatened by people who aren't ignorant. I think some of them are the kind of people who simply don't want to have anyone else trying to confuse them with facts.
Oh, yes. Agree.
But I think they also live on a planet where they get some of their kicks by feeling superior to those who don't finish school (and with whom they don't want to compete for higher education or jobs.)
A couple of years ago, our Congresscritter (of the "other" party) spoke at my daughters' school. My daughters announced their intention to boo him when he spoke. My wife and I patiently explained, in detail, how and why such an action was inappropriate. Our children behaved themselves.
Of course, during the Fourth of July parade, our daughters have no compunction against telling him (or his workers) that no, they really don't want any of his stickers or pins, they'll wait for the other guy.
Good for you and your wife! I annoy my Congresscritter fairly often by email and snail mail, but I would not let my kid (assuming my kid was still in school) boo him if he showed up there. (Instead, he showed up at the richest schools in the district, not ours.) Though I'd bend his ear into accordion pleats if he came to town to talk to constituents...hmmm...he knows where I live, so maybe that's why he never shows his face here.
From: (Anonymous)
2009-09-03 10:44 pm (UTC)
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Amazed and appalled. Have been reading the vitriol and trying to understand what all the fuss is about. We desperately need to motivate our schoolchildren, especially those whose families don't understand the value of a solid education.
Sari
In my darker moments (wow, I have darker moments???) I suspect that those on the attack do not want the dropouts to stay in school, or any child to learn very much, because then they might have to face competition with those they like to think of as "below" them. Much easier to support building more "juvenile justice centers" and prisons.
After all, that kind has already found out that simply removing the quotas that once gave white males over 90% of the places at medical school and law school, and 100% of the places in some trades has meant losing some jobs to women and nonwhite males...something they complain about endlessly. If you motivate those sneered at for being truants and dropouts...if you really do get them working, studying, and finishing school...gee golly, that kid from the wrong side of the tracks might end up in the White House, while your pampered little brat is flipping burgers and still living at home with mom and dad.
But of course, that's only in my darker moments...
From: (Anonymous)
2009-09-03 11:48 pm (UTC)
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Well...the Texas State Board of Education doe not inspire confidence that all Texas children will be served equally. Your darker moments come close to reality.
Sari
Yeah, I know. And the idjits on the textbook commission clearly do not want children to have access to any facts they don't like.
So there was just a wee, tiny, infinitesimal bit of irony in that post...
From: (Anonymous)
2009-09-04 02:06 am (UTC)
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Textbooks, religion, and Cynthia Dunbar, former Tx BOE member and (still) opponent of public education. Golly gee, Elizabeth, we wouldn't want children to learn how to think for themselves.
Sari
I would ask how the !**! people who oppose public education get on the Texas Board of Education, except I know who our governor is and who the one before him was. Mr. Build-more-jails-and-shut-down-schools, both of them.
No child left behind by means of not letting any child go forward. Just keep them all ignorant, and no one can claim to have been left behind.
I've been following the textbook discussions closely. My daughter is in third grade, so I want her to be taught in science what is scientific, and I want anything religious (such as creationism) to be left out of the discussion unless of course the school wants to have a comparative religion course that includes Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, and any other religion that I haven't mentioned.
Also, I've also been watching the discussion on history books. Apparently, there is a big controversy about including more minority figures in Texas history. Personally, I think that historical figures regardless of race should be discussed, and the minority figures mentioned were indeed important historically (including Henry Cisneros who they decided to leave out because he had an affair).
I know that it is likely there will be a lack of facts both in science and history, and I plan on making sure that my daughter gets to hear what the idjits leave out.
And of course prisons are a very lucrative industry = especially the private rent-a-prisons. And prisons take up so much of the budget that there is less and less money for schools that would produce 1) and informed electorate and 2) perhaps educate kids so that they would know how to live lives that steer clear of the criminal 'justice' system.
Having an uninformed electorate that doesn't vote benefits who..................
I think you're being unkind to snakes with the comparison . . .
Probably. OTOH I said meaner than snakes, not mean AS snakes, which lets most snakes off the hook but not _Crotalus atrox_. I have experience with C. atrox. A proddy C. atrox (not all of them are proddy) is one of our local wildlife's more...um...aggressive...creatures. (C. atrox: western diamondback rattlesnake. Also known as the coontail rattlesnake for the strips just before the rattles.) They'll buzz you off from twenty feet away if they're really in a nasty mood--it's not just "Don't tread on me" but "Get off my land, I don't even want you within sight or sound."
I've had other snakes within a couple of feet who just looked at me and stuck out their tongues (I know, I know, they're tasting the air...it just looks like "Nyah-nyah-nyah!") Some flee in panic, others lie there (on warm spring days especially) radiating "Don't see me and I won't have to move..." The big rat snake that had been in our attic but was in the dead tree in the front yard went up the tree fast and then hung over several limbs while I took pictures before deciding the local paparazzi were just too annoying and taking a dive into a juniper bush. But the rattlers are never neutral about what they consider intruders. I had a big one, one time, move away from the tractor--but with its tail up and buzzing loud enough to hear over the diesel engine every inch of its retreat. As soon as it got under a bush, it coiled up, ready to strike, just daring me to run the tractor into the bush. Which of course I didn't.
So when I say some people are meaner than snakes, I mean "meaner than a proddy western diamondback rattlesnake." While knowing full well that the majority of our native snakes aren't mean at all. To people, anyway. It's better not to be a small frog or a bird's egg or a baby squirrel.
I have lived in areas with Crotalus species. They can be "tetchy" . . .
On language usage -- to me, "meaner than snakes" says that snakes (in general) are mean and the people described exceed even that standard. Interpretation varies. Since we now live in an area without poisonous snakes, Wife tries to educate the public out of snake phobia. Uphill climb.
Living on the other side of the pond, talk about Obamas "socialist ideology" is just hilarious. Of course, here a "left-wing liberal" is an oxymoron...
Here in Australia, too. Our right-wing party calls itself the Liberals, and 'socialism' is much less of a dirty word than 'privatisation'. As for the Republicans' attitude to anything Obama says or does, I think the most likely explanation is that they're following Marx. Groucho, not Karl, of course.
The Republicans have hitched their wagon to the most reactionary elements in the country (focused on the rural south - the infamous "Southern Strategy") to such a degree that said elements have taken over the "wagon." Due to the evolution of acceptable social norms both inside and outside of the USA, this strategy is suffering serious demographic and electoral issues, but the people driving the wagon are too committed to their position to back down. Human dominance games can be monumentally stupid this way.
There's a lot of historical irony here.
Oh, yes, there's historical irony.
Well, the thing about dominance games (in any species) is that once you go to dominance, you've lost learning and thinking. It's reactive. Shove/shove back. Yell/yell louder. Hit/hit harder. Who's the real thousand pound gorilla, the real alpha wolf, the real alpha mare (or, for that matter, the top hen in the chicken house?) The best horse I ever owned got in a kick=boxing match with a mare two hands taller...and K- would not back down until had bone-deep wounds on her forelegs and deep cuts elsewhere (she was barefoot; the other horse wore shoes.) They were fighting for herd dominance after the previous alpha mare was shipped out. Later, healthy again, K- dominated a gelding close to twice her weight and again two hands taller.
I'm not opposed to competitiveness and winning, myself--too much fire in my own blood to be a pure stand-aside, let's-all-just-be-reasonable individual. From childhood, when I had to do it for survival, I've been prone to react to a shove by knocking the shover down, as various bullies found out. ("Never start a fight: always finish one.") But I am capable of looking at the potential outcomes and deciding that this issue (whatever it is) isn't best seen as a dominance game...and then sitting down to learn more, so I can think more. Sometimes it takes a lot of lecturing myself (there's a situation now where I'm putting up with much more than I want to, to get something done.) Getting to that point--being able to see beyond the dominance situation--is the only way to free oneself from manipulation by others.
Yes. You have to be willing to fight, or you will be too easy to push around, and you have to be willing to back down, or you will be too easy to control.
Right now, we have one party that won't back down (and is being heavily manipulated by a small subset of its membership), and another that is very unwilling to fight (and is being pushed around alot).
Let's be real: these "people" don't want their kids seeing a black man (much less a "liberal" one) being admirable. The real "indoctrination" they fear comes from having contact with someone who refuses to fit the frightened, ignorant little world they've constructed for themselves.
I would love for some school system/teacher/parent to say, "You know what? Learning to listen carefully and respectfully to someone you might disagree with is the foundation of civil society and essential to the process of learning. It's called thinking for yourself." And then make attendance at the speech mandatory.
All this nastiness and meanness makes me want to move to the country far from everything...oh, wait. We already did that.
See, you said "a civil society," "listening respectfully to someone you might disagree with" and "thinking for yourself." The people who are doing this don't care about civility, they refuse to listen to (or even endure the presence of) someone they disagree with, and the concept of thinking for themselves scares the shit out of them. Three strikes, not listening, NAZINAZINAZI!!!!
Okay, does anyone else here scratch his/her/its/their head at the thought of people fighting for the freedom to be told what to do?
(I hate doing this "us and them" crap, but I'm not the one who's shouting down the very guy I almost elected president a few months back because he's not rabid enough for me anymore. By their very actions, such people have forced us to remove "them" from the company of "us." They don't want to be there, period.)
Yes! Agreed!
As for "moving to the country far from everything..." Yeah. Did that.
As Solzhenitsyn wrote in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, "the line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every human heart" so the nastiness and meanness are there in potentia wherever we are. Including alone at the computer (scary thought.)
Maybe especially alone at the computer. But, see, I don't think we can ever get past the nastiness and meanness until someone decides to...listen. And learn. And how can we insist that "they" need to do that if we aren't willing to do it ourselves? And (maybe more to the point here) how can we teach our children--the children of this country, I mean, not just our own children--how to live together unless we teach them to listen with respect and think and question for themselves?
Unfortunately some flack at the Dept. of Education sent out pre-speech study guides that included discussion points of 'how I can help Pres. Obama' rather than 'how I can help the ecology' or 'how I can achieve my education goals'.
So the actual purpose of the speech was completely thrown out in this chance to panic and have another hissy-fit.
Many years back, one of Texas' early literary lights said that public education would go downhill in a hurry once it was controlled by Departments of Education.
When I was in graduate school, I was privy to an argument between my thesis director and the education department at that university over the certification for biology teachers. The education department wanted them to have more hours of education courses and fewer hours of biology courses. Turf war.
In terms of teaching biology, a biologist has more to offer than someone with 6 hours of biology and an education degree. But academic turf war meant that the education department didn't want to lose any clout compared to the biology department...or any other.
Of course discussion points (if you have to have discussion points...if you can't just let kids experience hearing a literate, intelligent president talk) should reference the substance of the talk and be enriched by other sources of information. "What challenges did Obama face growing up that are similar to those students in this school face?" (Students across the country have dealt with being multiracial, being the child of a single parent, being poor, moving from place to place, difficulty fitting into a new school, etc.) "Do you share any of the challenges that Obama faced? What strategies have you used to meet those challenges? Do you use the same strategies Obama used? What dreams or goals have you had, that you felt were impossible because of family background, poverty? Before now, have you felt that studying and staying in school could break through those barriers? How do you feel now that someone like Obama is in the White House? Is hard work and staying in school always enough?" etc.
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