Following the procedure matters far more than the children do

Do you remember as a grade-schooler just how long those last few school days seemed to be? Even the teachers seemed to be moving in slow motion, with no sense of urgency that the last day of school couldn't get there soon enough. Well, feel some pity for the grade 4, 5, and 6 kids in the Chino Unified School District:

School's out for summer — except for hundreds of children in western San Bernardino County who, because of an administrative snafu, must make up 34 days of school this summer.

The fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at Rolling Ridge Elementary in Chino Hills and Dickson Elementary in Chino exceeded the state's requirement of minutes spent in the classroom, and the last day of school was supposed to be Thursday. But because of the complexities of state law and a clerical error on a spreadsheet, the Chino Unified School District will lose more than $7 million in state funds if classes end at the schools before July 31.

It goes without saying that the procedure ranks far higher in the grand universal scheme of things than the children who will be incarcerated for an additional month and a half. No learning objective will be accomplished here, except for a deep loathing for bureaucracy . . . which, come to think of it, is a pretty good lesson to learn, but you can learn it in a lot less than 34 days.

In other news, oui, c'est vrai!

A report in The National Post the other day goes directly to the point:

French immersion, touted as a way of uniting Canadians under the banner of official bilingualism, is increasingly seen as an elitist program that has instead created a de facto two-tiered public school system that caters to Canada's higher-achieving students.

Although some proponents of French immersion claim otherwise, studies show a side effect that favours students with higher learning abilities and fewer behavioural problems. Meanwhile, students with learning disabilities, those from low-income families, and newcomers to Canada are often counselled out of enrolling in French-immersion programs.

Is this actually news to anyone? Of course the French immersion program is elitist . . . it's the way the well-off have smuggled a quasi-separate school system into the public schools. Wasn't that exactly what the originators wanted?

According to a 2004 Statistics Canada report entitled French Immersion 30 Years Later, students in French-immersion programs tend to come from more affluent families than non-immersion students. They also perform significantly better on reading-assessment tests than non-immersion students, even when tested in English. The report also found that girls account for roughly 60% of students in French immersion in all provinces except Quebec.

Are we evil for calling Inuit people "Eskimos"?

By way of a link from Lydia McGrew, we find John C. Wright's objections to political correct speech:

I am aware of that [the origin of the word "eskimo"], and I do not care. In fact, I regard with particular hatred attempts to change the language to sooth the imaginary hurt feelings of various mascots of the political Left. Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate, particularly where no English speaker knows the meaning of the insult. (None, that is, but I: it refers to them as eaters of raw fish, a slight against their relative poverty).

Besides, what could be more insulting to me that to have the Eskimos refer to themselves as ‘the People’? What does that make me? A non-people?

But it would be immature to the point of insanity for me to pretend I am insulted by the mere existence of a word in their language. Likewise, here. Insult requires intent.

I ask any and all reader please to not make corrections of this type again. They offend me. They deeply offend me. [. . .]

Let me explain that I regard political correctness as worse than a lie.

A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.

Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.

Words really do have power, but not in a magical sense. Words have power because we use words to describe our own versions of reality. Being forced to substitute other peoples' words to describe your own reality is to allow those other people to not only influence but in some ways to control your reality.

If you successfully substitute the word 'Inuit' for 'Eskimo' on the grounds that 'Eskimo' is an insult, you will have successfully convinced the next generation that all their forefathers who used the word 'Eskimo' deliberately meant and fully intended an insult, or were foolish or negligent enough to utter an insult by accident. That conviction will be false, a lie, and you (in a small way, one more straw on the camel's back) will have helped to perpetrate it.

Exactly. While I do not agree with everything Mr. Wright discusses in the rest of his post, I can't find fault with the sentiments quoted above.

Lydia also included a link to P.J. O'Rourke's wonderful review of Guidelines For Bias-Free Writing (PDF):

The book arrived with an I.U. press release stating that, I quote, Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the book will be a better writer. Well, I spent a few minutes with the book, and I feel a spate of better writing coming on.

The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. This foolish and contemptible product of years wasted in mining the shafts of indignation has been published by the cow-besieged, basketball-sotted sleep-away camp for hick bourgeois offspring, Indiana University, under the aegis of its University Press, a traditional dumping ground for academic deadwood so bereft of talent, intelligence, and endeavor as to be useless even in the dull precincts of midwestern state college classrooms.

But perhaps I’m biased. What, after all, is wrong with a project of this ilk? Academic language is supposed to be exact and neutral, a sort of mathematics of ideas, with information recorded in a complete and explicit manner, the record formulated into theories, and attempts made to prove those formulae valid or not. The preface to Guidelines says, “Our aim is simply to encourage sensitivity to usages that may be imprecise, misleading, and needlessly offensive.” And few scholars would care to have their usages so viewed, myself excluded.

How the media's mistakes became "the truth"

It's been ten years since the Columbine massacre, and (for those who remember any details) much of what passes for common knowledge about the attack is wrong, as Greg Toppo explains:

They weren't goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver's Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren't in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and "fags."

Their rampage put schools on alert for "enemies lists" made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren't on antidepressant medication and didn't target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers' journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

The way the media covered the horrific event, and the emphasis placed on certain "facts" had wide ranging effects elsewhere:

At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock 'n' roll, for starters.

Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.

Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts — a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: "Twenty-five dead in Colorado."

A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months — sometimes years — as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.

The delay in clearing the record meant that school authorities in other areas were often stampeded into ridiculous disciplinary measures that did nothing to improve student safety, but often increased alienation and mistrust between the students and their teachers and school administrators.

If the original suppositions had been true, the actions of many school principals and board administrators would have made copycat attacks more likely, not less: by increasing suspicion of "loners" and students who were further from the norm in fashion, reading tastes, and all the myraid other ways teenagers try to express themselves.

H/T to Jesse Walker, who also noted:

The persistance of such myths may be as interesting as the myths itself. Many of the tales that Toppo attacks were actually debunked in the immediate aftermath of the killings. In an editorial I filed less than a month after the massacre, I wrote this:

In the weeks since the Littleton slaughter, we've learned that most of what the media initially told us about the Columbine killers wasn't true. They weren't Nazis. They weren't especially racist. They weren't necessarily Goths. They might not even have been members of the clique of outcasts called the Trench Coat Mafia, which, by the way, wasn't originally called the Trench Coat Mafia.

Dual-purpose advertising

Lois McMaster Bujold sent this to her mailing list. I concur:

Found through a link in this also-good article — having spent time in Catalonia, central Spain, and Asturias, I found it generally interesting as well. But the prize is the Spanish TV condom ad. Why can't we have things like this on American TV, where it is so desperately needed?

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/kissing-with-tongues/

I also liked the other lesson the ad taught, about how one stands up to toxic authority.

QotD: Modern Superstitions

A new Harris poll finds that 28 percent of you believe in witches and 40 percent of the public — including 46 percent of women — believe that ghosts are hovering in the so-called "real" world. Over 20 percent of you have claimed to have actually witnessed a poltergeist.

I, too, may believe in miracles (like 73 percent of you) to rationalize the haphazard existence of mankind. I may believe in Beelzebub (61 percent) because human cruelty could never go on without supernatural prodding. And I believe in hell (59 percent) because some people deserve to fry. I get it.

I get it because I was born under the 11th astrological sign in the Zodiac, Aquarius. According to experts, Aquarians are, among many other wonderful things, "tolerant," "opinionated," "far-sighted," "revolutionary" . . . and so on. Our character and personality quirks are predetermined by a study of random stars and planets that happen to be detectable from Earth.

Believe it or not, 20 percent of the American public believes in this gibberish. And, trust me, they will not rest until Dennis Kucinich is president.

In fact, with troubling economic times upon us, conspiracy theories, peculiar beliefs and harebrained philosophies will only flourish.

Gita Johar, a professor at the Columbia Business School, recently explained to Wired magazine that increasingly, once-normal rational adults are turning to psychics for guidance. "You have an illusion then that you can then control the outcome," she explains. "People want the illusion of control."

David Harsanyi, "I don't trust you people", Denver Post, 2008-12-16

Forward into the (educational) past!

Nick Gillespie pours some cold water on exaggerated claims being made in favour of single-sex classes:

Some immediate reactions: 1. Intimidation and flirting in grades 4-6? Sounds more like prison than school, but that's almost always the case, isn't it, at all levels of education, whether public or private? 2. Different kids will flourish under different regimes. The same goes for teachers. I'd hazard a guess that a good goal of educational policy would be to allow as many different arrangements as possible, thus increasing the odds that everyone finds a good fit. 3. Anything that doesn't fundamentally address the top-down, monopolistic nature of educational services is doomed to failure. 4. With the possible exception of, er, the financial industry, education is filled with the most phoney-baloney godawful research, stats, etc. There is a study out there that proves anything you want proven. And a school district acting on it. 5. Pushing public money down to the level of the student and giving them more options would be the best way to spend it. 6. Education should be paid for not by public money but by the people directly benefiting from it (e.g., parents, businesses, and others), and a variety of philanthropic efforts. 7. It is not clear that single-sex education actually improves academic achievement, but that is not and should not be the only way of evaluating education, especially when it's paid for by the people using it. Other factors, including parental and student and even teacher satisfaction, should be considered. 8. I need to go to get my seven year old son ready for his multi-gendered classroom.

My favourite comment is from "Reinmoose":

I think what I've learned from my years of schooling is that:
1. Having an all girls classroom is beneficial to girls because they learn differently from boys, and the system has been set up by men (obviously)
2. There is no difference between boys and girls!!! NO! END OF DISCUSSION!

How to construct an authoritarian youth movement

As usual, I'm a bit late to find this story in The Times, but it being a long weekend, some of you may not have seen it yet either.

This is a scene from Dennis Gansel's latest film, and, given his previous one, the acclaimed Before the Fall, about the Nazification of German youth, it's clear the director has a bone to pick. "I have a grandfather who was really supportive of Hitler," he confides. "He said, 'When I was your age, I was leading a division in Russia.' And I have very left-wing parents. So, as part of the third generation after the second world war, it is something I really want to explore."

In Die Welle (The Wave), the setting is present-day. Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) invites his students to participate in an experiment. Put their faith in him and he will deliver a unique insight into the mind-set of a citizen in a totalitarian state. What begins as a playful study in psychological manipulation — a few drills in collective behaviour, time trials in entering the room — soon runs away with itself. By midweek, Wenger is recoiling in horror. His acned darlings have been transformed into an ersatz Hitler Youth — the title's self-styled "Wave" — complete with uniform, badge, salute and an eagerness to jackboot all nonbelievers. "It isn't about politics at all," Gansel says. "It's more about group dynamics and psychology."

If the film sounds far-fetched, it isn't. Bar some dramatic licence, it is modelled on a very real experiment that took place in a schoolroom in Palo Alto, California, over one week in April 1967. Known as "The Third Wave", it achieved similarly sensational results, a textbook case for psychologists.

Update: Jon sent me a message saying "I am certain that a TV special on this was made some time in the late 70's or early 80's. I think this may have been it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083316/".

No wonder teaching in Britain is a high-stress occupation

Theodore Dalrymple discusses the educational and behavioural issues when you raise generations of children with little or no parental control:

If children are not taught self-control, they do not learn it. Violence against teachers is increasing: injuries suffered by teachers at the hands of pupils rose 20 percent between 2000 and 2006, and in one survey, which may or may not be representative, 53 percent of teachers had objects thrown at them, 26 percent had been attacked with furniture or equipment, 2 percent had been threatened with a knife, and 1 percent with a gun. Nearly 40 percent of teachers have taken time off to recover from violent incidents at students’ hands. About a quarter of British teachers have been assaulted by their students over the last year.

The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society. The signs of this fear are unmistakable on the faces of the elderly in public places. An involuntary look of distaste, even barely controlled terror, crosses their faces if a group of young teens approaches; then they try to look as if they are not really there, hoping to avoid trouble. And the children themselves are afraid. The police say that many children as young as eight are carrying knives for protection. Violent attacks by the young between ten and 17, usually on other children, have risen by 35 percent in the last four years.

The police, assuming that badly behaved children will become future criminals, have established probably the largest database of DNA profiles in the world: 1.1 million samples from children aged ten to 18, taken over the last decade, and at an accelerating rate (some law enforcement officials have advocated that every child should have a DNA profile on record). Since the criminal-justice system reacts to the commission of serious crimes hardly at all, however, British youth do not object to the gathering of the samples: they know that they largely act with impunity, profiles or no profiles.

H/T to Jon (my virtual landlord) for the link.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Possibly the best television representation of the parliamentary form of government. On second thought, strike the "possibly" from the previous sentence.

H/T to Andrew L. at The Latecomer.

Political musical chairs

Steve Chapman finds the world turned upside down as Barack Obama and John McCain swap stances over education:

I know, because admirers of Barack Obama tell me, that this year's election poses a choice between a candidate who represents a fresh approach to problems and one who offers a dreary continuation of the status quo. That much I understand. What I sometimes have trouble keeping straight is which candidate is which.

On the subject of elementary and secondary education, the two seem to have gotten their roles completely mixed up. Obama is the staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly, and he's allergic to anything that subverts it. John McCain, on the other hand, went before the NAACP last week to argue for something new and daring.

That something is to facilitate greater parental choice in education. McCain wants to expand a Washington, D.C. program that provides federally funded scholarships so poor students can attend private schools. More than 7,000 kids, he reported, have applied for these vouchers, but only 1,900 can be accommodated.

Obama promptly expressed disdain for McCain's proposal. The Republican, his campaign said, offered "recycled bromides" that would "undermine our public schools."

Combatting historical inaccuracy

Johnathan Pearce remembers his early history lessons:

Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting "Black Satanic Mills" version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time — 1976-77 — that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since.

One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson's frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left — Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety — view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally.

Now the word "yuck!" may be deemed racist

BBC News reports that the word "Yuck!" used by toddlers throughout the English-speaking world to show their lack of appreciation for certain foods may be a signal of racism:

[The 336-page National Children's Bureau guide] said: "A child may react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying, 'Yuck!"'.

That may indicate a lack of familiarity with that particular food, or "more seriously a reaction to a food associated with people from a particular ethnic or cultural community".

It also warned: "Racist incidents among children in early-years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships."

Staff should be watchful of children using racist language, it added.

This is a document that masterfully combines the ongoing program of infantilization of adults with an uncanny belief in the complexity and depth of understanding on the part of toddlers.

H/T to John Parry for the link.

Revisiting the history of feminism

Camille Paglia looks back at the origins of the feminist movement and the current state of play in the gender wars:

In conclusion, my proposals for reform are as follows. First of all, science must be made a fundamental component of all women's or gender studies programs. Second, every such program must be assessed by qualified faculty (not administrators or politicians) for ideological bias. The writings of conservative opponents of feminism, as well as of dissident feminists, must be included. Without such diversity, students are getting indoctrination, not education. Certainly among current dissident points of view is the abstinence movement, as an evangelical Protestant phenomenon and also as an argument set forth in Wendy Shalit's first book, A Return to Modesty, which created a storm when it was published nine years ago but whose influence can be detected in today's campus chastity clubs, including here at Harvard. As a veteran of pro-sex feminism who still endorses pornography and prostitution, I say more power to all these chaste young women who are defending their individuality and defying groupthink and social convention. That is true feminism!

My final recommendation for reform is a massive rollback of the paternalistic system of grievance committees and other meddlesome bureaucratic contrivances which have turned American college campuses into womblike customer-service resorts. The feminists of my baby-boom generation fought to tear down the intrusive in loco parentis rules that insultingly confined women in their dormitories at night. College administrators and academic committees have no competence whatever to investigate crimes, including sexual assault. If an offense has been committed, it should be reported to the police, so that the civil liberties of both the accuser and the accused can be protected. This is not to absolve young men from their duty to behave honorably. Hooliganism cannot be tolerated. But we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.

Burning times over in Ohio school

The bonehead Ohio teacher mentioned in the QotD on Monday has been fired from his job in Mount Vernon:

The Mount Vernon school board in central Ohio voted 5-0 late Friday to move ahead on firing a science teacher after an investigation showed he preached his Christian beliefs in class and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms.

The board's attorney, David Millstone, said John Freshwater would be entitled to a hearing to challenge the dismissal.

Kelly Hamilton, who represents Freshwater, told the Mount Vernon News he would request such a hearing and that Freshwater denied any wrongdoing.

But Freshwater still has defenders: "With the exception of the cross-burning episode. . . . I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district" said Dave Daubenmire.