…on Darleen’s post noting Duke’s revised sexual misconduct policy, which — as is generally the case with progressive ventures — newly “defines” sexual misconduct by way of what an interpreter can do with a set of signifiers (in essence, eschewing the more difficult work of sussing intent for the simpler work of coddling personalized outrage, whether real or imagined, and regardless of who is doing the imagining) .
Most of you are familiar with what I believe to be the systemic problems that proceed from adopting and/or legitimizing such a dangerous (and semiotically incoherent) hermeneutic maneuver, with “meaning” reduced to whatever the most powerful “interpretive community” asserts it to be.
At the university level, where identity politics is celebrated and institutionalized, this maneuver is particularly heinous: students are frequently denied due process and are “taught” (often tacitly, by design) that the best way to avoid finding themselves before a tribunal is to keep up on “progressive”-approved speech, and to mind the dictates of “authentic” representatives of the various identity groups whose campus political power is granted by virtue of their having been allowed to define what constitutes “authenticity” in the first place. Taking control of an identity group narrative by will in order to banish those within that group who disagree with the group-sanctioned narrative, is a decidedly anti-intellectual endeavor masquerading as the height of liberal intellectualism.
But I’ve discussed all that before at some length, so I won’t belabor the points.
Here, I just want to touch on the mindset that gives birth to — and then institutionalizes — such a herdest idea of how meaning is “discovered” and put to use.
The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.
Which is why eventually they go after anything that can be made to look like an “ism” to “reasonable people,” and why, once they’ve exhausted that (interpretive) supply, they’ll move on to thoughts, which they’ll be able to divine through “code words” or gestures, before finally plumbing the “subconscious” for evidence of hatreds.
This is how it works. And it is the inevitable end of a specific linguistic paradigm I’ve been at pains to beat back — including in our “own” camp, where it can’t help but weaken and eventually deconstruct the very ideals we claim to hold dear.
Banish me from polite society for pointing it out if you’d like; but ignoring the problem because it has an (R) attached is like pretending you have a healthy lawn because you keep the bindweed nicely trimmed.
My weed-lawn is LOVELY.
If it weren’t for the morning glory, my lawn wouldn’t be green at all come July. But that’s just screwing with the metaphor, so I won’t pursue it further.
The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.
That just needs to be repeated as many times as possible. Maybe we could make tee shirts.
The way it works is if you have the right sentiments and political thought, they will not come after you with this nonsens, but if you exprss the wrong sentiments, well then all kinds of bad things can ensue. It is a powerful hammer.
The left and the media love to go back to the fifties to the McCarthy witchhunts–but is this really any different? Actually in a lot of ways it is worse.
The left and the media love to go back to the fifties to the McCarthy witchhunts—but is this really any different?
McCarthy had the power of subpoena to call you before Congress. That’s pretty scary stuff. But it needs to be said that McCarthy did not create the blacklist in Hollywood — Hollywood did.
It’s the same spirit as the witchhunts (all of them) because it consists of a community that fears its very existence and so must root out the threat within.
It’s worse than McCarthy because no one is there to ask if the man has no shame. No one to put on the brakes. No one to show how naked the Emperor is.
Perhaps we might usefully discuss or review the history of isms as such, the isming of isms or ismism, how it got going, when it got going, where it got going and to what end it got its start? Thought hasn’t always been like this, not at all I think.
OT: The problem with McCarthy was not that there weren’t communists in Hollywood. There were then, and there are now. He just went a little (or a lot) too far is all. However, now that they own the narrative and the vehicle for its transmission, the left continues to push the notion that McCarthy was completely incorrect, which is not true.
I consider the problem of whether nor not to allow communists to preach and propagandize in this country orthogonal to the question of their existence. They were there, though.
Should’ve re-loaded first, I guess.
Which “isms” do you mean? The Great Triumvirate of Western Guilt — racism, sexism, homophobia — or anything ending with -ism — republicanism, tribalism, etc.?
“Ism as such” isn’t self explanatory enough?
Might check the OED.
More than likely, dicentra, anything they can label as facism. or conservatism. The rank and file left has eschewed thought for emotionalism. Buncha emos is what they is.
Long-time lurker; sporadic commenter.
An additional problem with the academy is that even if one does/says/refrains from saying all the things which may be perceived as “_____-ist,” one will still be deemed to be an “_____-ist,” merely by virtue of one’s membership in a group which is deemed to have more power. Of course, the groups defined as “powerful” tend to be those whose membership is defined by criteria outside the members’ control, i.e. skin color or gender. Thus, the reference to “code” words or phrases is used not only to demonstrate intent but unconscious “isms.”
Game, set and match.
Regards.
The suffixification of politics? Or the suffixification of life? Articulating the universe through suffixification. A particle as principle.
Game, set and match only if we allow it.
Which we do.
So “game, set and match” match.
Well, about 30 years ago Robert Fripp and David Byrne about “..isms” Under Heavy Manners
Byrne’s counsel to “remain in hell, without despair” seems like pretty good advice. And the notion of our being resplendent in divergence is an okay way to enter the New Year … loins girded against these weaselly group-think sack of bastards.
.
A perfect lawn is one species away from being a desert.
The university proggs could save a lot of trees if they would just boil their conduct diktats down to their essence: Whatever offends the Left is prohibited. Whatever offends the Right is compulsory.
I’m an ardent antiismist.
Meanwhile the various outrage clowns are trying to out due one another on who is the least racist.
CJ is now on a rant how someone accused him of being a child molestator and he is threatening legal action. Really, can you make this stuff up?
game, set, match indeed.
Er, Senator McCarthy never went after communists in Hollywood. Didn’t happen.
The Senator was after communists in the State Department. In the early-mid 1950s.
The Hollywood Blacklist sprang from the 1947 HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee investigation into CPUSA’s influence in Hollywood.
Conflating or confusing the two epitomizes the sort of historical ignorance that the left wants everybody to have.
Because if you don’t get the details right then it’s easy to believe, as one example, that the GOP is the party of the KKK and institutional racism. Or that Fascism is a “logical” outgrowth of laissez-faire capitalism.
@19:
See, dicentra?
The movements, they are so transparent. Next time somebody tries to point out that a certain somebody is behaving like another certain somebody, that first somebody will argue that such is NOT POSSIBLE, given that the second somebody banned the first somebody.
And a bunch of commenters will pretend the argument has merit.
— while taking care not to let the Emperor’s balls slap them on the nose.
Why do you hate Panama?
“The left and the media love to go back to the fifties to the McCarthy witchhunts–but is this really any different?”
Well, McCarthy actually found witches.
And don’t forget what the ovearching “ism” of the reactionary left really is: fascism.
Dunno LL, that one seems like a johnnie-come-lately by comparison to its antecedents, egalitarianism and communism.
The reference to Joe McCarthy is just because the left is so enamoured about how unamerican he was and then they do what they accuse McCarthy of in attacking those who disagree with them.
This post sounds suspiciously pseudo-intellectual. I don’t think it has an argument. I see flaws. Lots and lots of flaws.
Ah yes, the ism industry thrives in academe, and like the climate cultists, the ism nazis are whores. Professing “womyn studies,” or some such bullshit, requires no real scholarship or teaching. All that is required is funding. Want to hear an ism nazi squeal? Don’t betray the relevant ism. Kill his or her funding.
Those who might immediately improve the situation, Administrators, alas, are complcit in the scam. Budgets are budgets.
A grassroots effort might make some headway. Parents, do not send your offspring to any institution purporting to offer a Bachelors in any flavor of ism studies. Your choices will be severly limited, but your budding scholars will thank you for it.
Here is the practical question, asked by a father getting ready to pony up the cash for an 18 year old’s college education. How do I advise my daughter to behave in such an atmosphere (The Academy)? Frankly, I’m at a loss, because a quarter century ago, my professors wanted me to argue with them. The students who brown-nosed, got the C’s. Do I tell my daughter to just suck it up, get a degree and work to change things on the outside, or do I tell her to sacrifice herself for the sanctity of logic and classical liberalism.
An easy question when your fifty years old and sitting at a computer typing comments on the internet. Tough when you’re staring at your kid’s face trying to come up with sound advice.
Regards.
Must edit. Add apostrophes and appropriate punctuation where needed.
Honestly? Try to talk her into getting an entry-level position in the field she’s interested in. Use the 100k+ it would have cost you all told to periodically bribe her bosses for some well-timed promotions.
Once that ball is rolling — she could just read about what interests her.
RDS
Depends on the field of study. Hard sciences? Go to school. Humanities? Go to an affordable local college, learn the lingo, and switch to a major that can earn you money.
Why do you hate Panama?
Itth lithp.
Alas, I’ve failed as a parent, what with all the reading of literature and stuff. She wants to major in English & German. I knew I should’ve let have that damn lemonade stand, then I’d be about 5 years away from a condo on St. Barts.
Regards.
Send your daughter to the conservative-leaning Hillsdale College, which accepts zero government dollars and is thus immune from the insanity that is so evident at most ivy covered indoctrination camps.
RDS
#4 daughter within 20 units of graduating… from San Francisco State U.
Guess what? She’s not only graduating with a business degree but with brains intact. As I said in my Christmas post, she has been royally pissed off at the [leftist juvenile] student “protesters” at her campus.
She wanted a 4 year college … we pretty much ponied up the first year tuition/room/board, but she has worked hard ever since to pay most of the way on her own (2 years as Resident Advisor – that was another eye opener for her) and now living off campus with 4 roommates, a job, fulltime classes and no free time (with occassional help from us).
My cousin (BA UC Santa Barbara, MBA Univ of Texas) says if he had to do it over again, it would be first 2 years at community college then transfer to 4 year — at community college you get your general ed taught by professors..at many a 4 year university, the general ed is taught by the professor’s TA. Also, too many kids are NOT emotionally ready for 4 year college straight out of high school. The drop out rate is spectacularly high. During daughter’s first freshman semester, she had to roll her roomate – pampered rich girl from Del Mar, out of her own vomit on her bed least she suffocate, more than once. Girl left at semester break and never returned.
Time for some aggressive interviewing, I think. Does she want to get a B.A. and then try to wave that degree around in hopes of flagging down an ordinary job, or does she want to pursue advanced degrees and actually learn interesting stuff about those languages that might lead to a career in an actual field?
If the former I’d say, tell her to get an A.A.S. at Crosstown Community College and then work her own @#$!! way to that useless B.A. It’ll be a lot more educational in much more meaningful ways.
If the latter I’d say, tell her to get an A.A.S. at Crosstown Community College and then work her own @#$!! way through grad school.
The kids I don’t have, hate me — which is why I didn’t have them.
@23
What, you’re trying to tell me that people are irrational morons based on stupid things?
The devil, you say!
People are starting to figure it out.
She wants to major in English & German.
It might be because she’s in the “learning for its own sake” camp. Which is what I was about when I was in college. I never understood why people saw a college education as a mere instrument to get a job rather than an opportunity to learn all kinds of interesting stuff simply because it was there.
There’s still an argument to be made for learning for its own sake. However, when I left college with an unfinished dissertation, I realized that I had No Marketable Skills. Reading through the want-ads was discouraging indeed.
My first job was as a secretary, and my second was better only because of nepotism — my brother was working there, he knew they wanted to hire someone to fill a secretary-grade slot but that could do writing and editing on the side (gubmint contractor, so they had to do stuff like that). The pay was double the other secretary job, so I took it, and there learned the skills to qualify me for the next job, which was technical writing, which was what I found I was best suited for.
Unfortunately, you need the undergrad degree to get good entry-level jobs these days because employers believe it means you learned something useful. You did: how to show up to class, how to handle a heavy workload, how to complete tasks you didn’t necessarily want to do, etc.
It’s possible for a student to make it through a literary studies program without becoming corrupted, but only if they have a heavier center of gravity elsewhere. I had the LDS Church (right there on campus, which contradicted the “religious people are just plain stupid” meme). Other people are well-grounded in their own sense of self.
But most of the people who are inclined toward literary studies are also vulnerable to the temptations it offers: arrogance, conceit, elitism, Marxism, intellectual laziness, and more arrogance.
Joe.
That’s Christof. The guy’s a couple tacos short of a combo plate. And I don’t know how grateful Jeff is about being dragged into Ace’s comment section over a fight we all want to be over.
dicenta, that is not my intent. Only to point out how the line, as predicted by Jeff, is completely blurred between certain bloggers.
fighting against dirty socialism is how I define me…
it’s like a quest.
“fighting against dirty socialism…”
So, f.a.d.s.ist, is it happyfeet?
very much so… I’m gravely concerned… at New Year’s we started talking about Iowa and this very pretty girl says she thought Iowa was very progressive and then not only was she not that pretty anymore she looked stupid. Also there was this other guy who said he voted for Obama to get money out of politics. I started drinking kind of a lot while I was talking to him and then I had to switch to diet coke for the rest of the night cause it wasn’t that kind of party.
Mr. Feet
Please kill the bright and shiny kind of socialism too.
They play Randy Newman’s I Love LA at Kings games when the Kings score a goal I just learned. Royalties to the A.S.C.A.P. royaleers, we might suppose, which is not a particularly socialistic sort of thing, though many of the members may themselves lean that-a-way, Randy Newman included. Caps down one.
You get up to kill the socialisms and first you have to pimp-slap Lindsey the climate change pansy and other assorted mavericks and by the time you get the socialisms cornerd you’re plum tuckered.
Otta be a video game.
Mr. Feet,
If you’re tired, you could just instill a sense of impending doom in the socialists. Sort of like the feeling they all get from listening to Barack these days.
Hmmm…That does make it sort of redundant, I guess.
barack’s christmas message was so inner city guidance counselor lame I wanted to puke… it was at that Hot Air place. here… brighter days are ahead of us? Clueless piece of shit trollop. Fuck you and your happy new year, cocksucker.
They don’t play I Love LA when the opposition scores. Knotted up at one. Look at that bum over there he’s down on his knees.
Cocksucker? Trollop? Clueless?
You can’t talk to America’s beloved First Black Female Prom Queen President that way!
Some boys from the union will be by your house on 1668 Glendale drive just as soon as their break is over.
I almost corrected Cristoph’s misrepresentations, then realized, why bother? He just wants the attention.
He’s contemptible and I fear it’s a transitive property, Mr. W.
christoph is hard to read all the way through… he’s like the stephenie meyer of commenting.
Morons, tautologically, will be morons cranky-d. There’s little to be done about it.
he’s like the stephenie meyer of commenting.
I can’t confirm or deny that, ‘feets, having never read her stuff. So how do YOU know?
I got to page 16 of New Moon.
It was at the hospital after I finished my burger we walked over and got at Dairy Queen. I remember also they had these fried jalapeno things that were kind of tasty but I thought they could have used a bit of ranch.
That’s going on a bumper sticker.
Some additional thoughts, RDS:
Despite the fact that I emerged from college with “no marketable skills,” and despite the fact that much of what I was exposed to was dreck, I can still unequivocally say that I don’t regret having done it.
(1) I did have marketable skills, it turns out. I was good at research, good at taking information from many disparate sources and rewriting it into a coherent form. However, I am not sure how much of that I learned in college and how much I was just born with and then honed in college.
(2) I swam with the big fish (Cornell Ph.D. program) and held my own. That was important for me to know.
(3) I was able to see for myself, with no filters applied, that with postmodernism there’s no “there” there. Watching people fawn over naked Emperors with one’s own eyes is quite an experience.
(4) Having been raised in Utah and having attended BYU for my BA and MA, there was always going to be the question in the back of my head about whether I believed what I believed because I believed it or because that’s just how I was raised. There was always that question as to whether everyone else knew something I didn’t and that’s why they believed what they believed instead of what I believed. It was important for me to go to an entirely secular school (the Ivy League being ground zero for postmodernism) and see what I could see, swim the currents myself, and emerge having determined for myself what was and was not going on.
My former BYU colleagues who stayed on to teach humanities say that it’s important for people like them to be in the discipline, even at the fringes, so that there’s more than one voice out there. How much good they’re doing I don’t know, but to the extent they present an example to other students of people who are well-educated and also NOT Marxists, they’re valuable. I know it helped me to see that Being Smart didn’t inevitably lead to Being Marxist.
So if your daughter is not very interested in being accepted by peer groups, if she’s got the inner strength (or the Asperger Syndrome :D ) to not abandon principles for popularity, she’ll be OK in that line of study. If she’s easily swayed by her peer group, then she should MINOR in literature while majoring in engineering or something solid.
I hesitate to tell people “don’t even go there” because then they’re left vulnerable to the argument that they reject postmodernism because someone else told them to. Jeff is a good example of what happens when you’re armed with THEIR concepts and terminology and then turn it against them.
And by good example, I mean he suffers slings and arrows from his putative peer group and then from the right he gets “your sentences are too long.”
In other news, Mark Steyn identifies the other axis of evil: Great Britain.
Christoph:
This guy’s irony meter goes to 11.
Saturdays @ 4pm is the Great Wasteland of broadcast TV. And cable too, I bet. There oughta be a law.
Christoph is so far around the bend that any irony is 100% unintentional. He’s right to put scare quotes around “unreasonable,” given his inability to find definitions that approximate those in our dimension, where Spock has no goatee.
There oughta be a law.
there’s hulu
That is because you are not a tweener girl. Because that is the target audience of New Moon.
No Hulu. I went to the Hughniverse and am listening to his annual six-hour review of the History of Ideas with Larry Arnn of Hillsdale college.
Hillsdale would provide a good liberal arts education (and a good one is good to have, believe me). BYU is also a good place to get a well-rounded undergrad education without the heavy taint of postmodernism. They do admit non-Mormons, and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s easier to get into BYU-Idaho than BYU-Provo.
“I went to the Hughniverse”
that’s where browns fans go when they die
In which case I would recommend you freelance. Most of the cool professors I know like to drink, find out where their favorite bars are and chat them up at happy hour. It is much more fun, and cheaper, than actually going to class.
Wait.
Spock shaved?
In which case I would recommend you freelance.
Yeah, but it helps to hit deadlines with papers, write to an assignment, and get critiqued, even if you have to write tripe.
And besides, the LIBRARIES. Just wandering through the stacks is a good experience. Furthermore, if you’ve jumped through the official hoops, it’s much more satisfying when you slam an arrogant SOB for his arrogant SOB-ness.
In other words, it helps when someone who is impressed by the letters after his name thinks he’s won just because you don’t have letters after yours.
And then when it turns out that you do, the smack-down leaves a redder mark.
Happyfeet, I had to read all three books, along with two other teachers to reach consensus on whether they should be shelved in the Jr. High section of my library. First was okayed by the three of us. Second was okayed with reservations (one complaint from a parent and it’s gone). The third one, I swear we all slammed the book shut on the exact same page and said “oh HELL no” That would be the page where the blushing bride wakes up the morning after her wedding night, all covered with scrapes and bruises. The groom looks at her in horror, and she says to him (and I quote) “Oh honey, I know you didn’t mean it.” No. Way. In. Hell.
All good points. It is pretty funny to see a pompous professor get blind-sided at a bar by some dude wearing steel toe boots with saw dust in is hair, too. One of the reasons I like living in a college town.
that’s where browns fans go when they die
Not a Browns fan, and I have no use for Ohio in my life. I’m just there for the pie.
If ya’ll are throwing Hillsdale out there in a learning for learning’s sake sweepstakes, lemme put in a good word for St. John’s College. Not inexpensive, I think, but there’s nothing else like it in the US of A.
St. John’s College
Is that the one in St. Cloud MN? One of my friends taught Spanish Lit there for a bit and met her hubby there.
This St. John’s, campuses in Annapolis (across the street from USNA) and Sante Fe.
Hard to imagine how it could possibly be any more satisfying than I find it to be, and my degree is in Useless Knowledge from the University of Do-People-Really-Go-to-College-There!?
…of course, I also have a two-year degree from the University of Do-People-There-Really-Go-to-College?
Orrin Hatch is generally a moron, but in this case he gets it right: Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional. (n/t neo-neocon)
I’m pretty sure that there’s something about the theory of language in the concept of “constitutionality.” If only there were a blog somewhere that addresses such points.
McGehee
There is satisfaction to be gained in Not Being In The Club and then showing them up.
There is also satisfaction to be gained in Being One Of Them And Knowing First-Hand That They’re Fools.
Fish in a barrel phenomenon, no doubt.
My friends, “prior authorization” for all speech and acts is the only solution, and the “final” one. So take the vow with me now, even before Congress acts so as to gain most favorable standing among the Authorizers! It shouldn’t be hard to maintain silence for a while, right? Or even permanently!
“From where the Sun now sets, I will obtain prior authorization forever. Or if it then be impossible to even try, I will simply await instructions……forever, hoorah!”
My friends, “prior authorization” for all speech and acts is the only solution, and the “final” one.
Oh, I can think of one that comes after that. I can think of a few.
Speaking of the pantybomber, on the one hand we have Lefty bloggers downplaying the dangerousness of the jihadis, to wit, Spence Ackerman, who Tweets:
Ace takes him apart here:
And then Mark Steyn Mark Steyn encapsulates what’s funny and what’s not with the pantybomber.
Two Mark Steyns for the price of one.
he’s like the stephenie meyer of commenting.
I can’t confirm or deny that, ‘feets, having never read her stuff. So how do YOU know?
Ba haa haa haa.
[denies having read ’em all – I’ll deny it to your faces, I will]
But, in my defense, I’m a reading slut. I’ll read anything.
‘cept Gravity’s Rainbow.
I’m sure there is a correlation there, I’m just not comfortable exploring.
I am an antiautodidact; I never taught myself nothing.
I’ve seen no thorough explanation as to why the suicide bomber’s explosive did not detonate on that airplane, though I don’t expect to see any official such explanation issuing forth from the government of the United States, as such information would certainly help Al Qaeda correct its mistakes. But detonation events are generally measured in milliseconds, taking place far too fast for anyone in proximity to them to act to stop them.
Still, without an explanation, many people are content to pretend that the bomber was stopped by a Dutchman named Jasper Schuringa; to pretend that Mr Schuringa was a hero of some sort; that the system worked by including passengers acting in self-defense. More fools they. People will die due to thinking like this. The victory was won when Abdullmutallab stepped on that plane.
#31 RDS, Have a talk with her along these lines:
Congratulations, my child! You are finally going off to college. One day you were in diapers, and now you’re headed off into the wide world. In a sense, my work is done. For the first time you will be making your day-to-day decisions without input from me. You are not yet an adult, but neither are you an adolescent any longer. You will face the challenges that all young people face when they are on their own: self-discipline, work, finding your way in life. I trust you will use this time to prepare for adulthood, rather than to prolong your adolescence. These four years will seem like an eternity-before, during, and after them. It is your last and best opportunity to connect with large numbers of your peers, to get your share of sheer magic out of life. I wish you much success and fulfillment during your time there.
College is not like it was when I was there, however. Don’t misunderstand; I didn’t live in a golden age. I had some courses that were clinkers, some teachers that were stinkers, some friends who turned out to be sheer bastards, some times when I shamed myself. But that happens to everyone, and will also happen to you. What I am concerned about are the PC police. The curriculum-corers. The array of leftists who have seized control of so many universities, and who may prevent you from getting *my* money’s worth of education for you. Consider these tips I’ve written out for you, and though I hope you never need to use them, remember that forewarned is forearmed.
· I am sending you to college to become civilized. That is, I am sending you there to get steeped in the great record of The West, mankind’s most successful attempt to shake free of the degradation and chaos of bare savagery. People who want to destroy civilization are call “barbarians”. They are dangerous, none more so than barbarians with PhD’s. Don’t turn up your nose at a chance to learn something, but don’t confuse an open mind with a hole in your head, either.
· Political Correctness, like its foreign uncle Communism, is the negation of liberty masquerading as the attainment of liberation. Anything that must be done in lockstep may be good or bad, depending on circumstances-but it is never freedom.
· In any given state of affairs, five per cent of the people pull one way, five per cent pull another way, and the remaining 90 per cent are largely content to go along with whoever seems to be pulling the hardest. So don’t let the bastards shove you around! For everyone who takes your side, figure about three other people who sympathize, but aren’t quite brave enough to say so.
· Some professors will use standard English to deride standard English, Western ideas of human rights to denounce human rights in the West, scientific reasoning to deplore science, religious language to sneer at your religion. Such people may imagine themselves to be incisive critics, even voices of conscience. In truth, they are hothouse blossoms, as ignorant of their American blessings as fish are ignorant of water. The sincere ones, I mean. There are plenty others who have found it necessary to parrot this jargon simply in order to obtain employment. The lot of them should have no moral authority with you. Try not to snicker, though.
· There used to be a thing called American Philosophy. Your philosophy courses, if you take any beyond the introductory surveys, will consist mostly of the thought of French deconstructionists and their literal-minded American disciples. But you may have a chance to get introduced to people like William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Take the chance.
· You will most likely be required to swallow and regurgitate a considerable amount of feminist scholarship. The academic feminism you will likely encounter may be roughly broken down into four categories.
1) Mythological feminism. There never was a primordial female Eden. And women have never been all slaves. Man and woman both have the capacity for good and evil. The relations between the sexes, like the relations among any set of people, have been a mix of sordidness and saintliness throughout history. We have always been either at each others’ throats or in each others’ arms.
2) Hard-left feminism. Since at least the 1960s, when Marxism made its way back into American intellectual life, the destruction (“transformation”, in their parlance) of the family has been a goal of the feminists. Don’t ask me how or why, but it is evident that the religious inquisitor of the Middle Ages has been reborn as the militant political agitator in our own day. This is why, as a child, you saw episodes of Sesame Street and other “educational” programming minimizing the stature and benefits of a family headed by a husband and wife. Now you’re in for the grown-up version of the same destructive propaganda. To these people, every nest is a cage. Question all statistics. Chances are that they are incomplete, misconstrued or, like the famous Super Bowl wife-battering hoax, just plain lies.
3) Selective feminism. You will have to sit through a lot of blather about how frightened “the patriarchy” is of “strong women.” Most of the “strong women” trotted out will be leftists or proto-leftists. Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor of Aquitane, the Confederate home front, none of these strong women will be held up as examples of strength or endurance. Most had families and loved them, and did not produce agitprop for leftist causes, therefore in feminist eyes they never existed.
4) Self-pitying feminism. After hearing about all the “strong women”, you will be told what helpless victims women are today. Democracy and tradition are evil, they’ll say. Nothing good happens to women, unless a radicalized government bureaucracy and judiciary make it happen by edict, they’ll say. I have raised you to be a proud American. In the Third Rate World, where women really are treated as awfully as feminists pretend Americans are, feminism may be a force for good. “May”, I stress. But in America, feminism is a cultural luxury, made possible by the boundless freedom this country enjoys. Other people may wish to accept the manacles, to stop their hands from shaking. But you must remember the times I told you to wipe your nose and quit feeling sorry for yourself. You are nobody’s victim, nor has anyone ever been your victim.
· He who says he is without sin is a fool. So too he who says he is by definition incapable of racism is a godamighty fool. But he’s probably being well paid for saying so, if he is on the faculty.
· I have raised you to give people of other races and backgrounds the basic respect that any person is entitled to, in addition to the respect that they have to earn from you by their character. However, as in grade school, you will meet some of these people who have been raised to hate and resent you because of your race and background. Remember that you cannot change poisoned hearts. What will be new to you is that the university administration will think it right, good, and necessary to give these people special treatment, deference in all matters of controversy, and in general treat them like sacred cats in the temple. It’s a shameful sight, watching grownups in authority being turned into dancing bears whenever resentful brats snap their fingers. But that’s part of your education.
· You will encounter various forms of primitivism. Multiculturalists and diversity hounds, like children, are attracted to bright colors. So you will see utterly ordinary middle-class young people decked out in Mexican wedding shirts, llama hair ponchos, kente headcloths, Pert-conditioned dreadlocks, Birkenstocks, beads, bangles, badges, buttons, etc. The idea is that they wish to sweep away all the hypocrisies and encrustations of the modern world and get back to the simple essence of life in tune with nature. None of them really mean it, else they wouldn’t be at a university. For the students, it’s a phase; for the faculty, it’s a pose. None of them would care to forego First World standards of societal organization: liberty, tolerance–or dentistry, for that matter.
· There is more *genuine* diversity between Toscanini and Furtwangler, between Ingres and Delacroix, between Einstein and Bohr, between Shaw and Wilde, between Mencken and Chesterton, than among any given busload of multiculturalists. If any teacher in any class dismisses a person, movement, idea, or era as Dead White European Males, go immediately to the registrar and demand a refund, because you’ll know you are being cheated something scandalous.
· Beware of reality inversions. If you are asked to ponder a question like “What causes poverty?”, you may be sure that the questioner has a severely distorted view of history-or is shepherding you into an ideological corral. Poverty has been the norm for most people most of the time up until the last score of decades. “What causes wealth?” is a much more fruitful question, and it does not constrain you to wear any leftist hairshirts.
· Society’s enemies are radicals’ mascots. One college even has an endowed sociology chair named after a famous American traitor. Vagrants, criminals, semi-criminal entertainers, career government charity recipients, all will be held up for your sympathy, or to excite your anger against productive society. (When your teachers start blithering about “root causes” of social ills, listen carefully for any causes “rooted” in personal responsibility. There will most likely be none.) Other countries have suffered from real tyrannies, and have produced real prophets, martyrs, and freedom fighters. Your teacher, being irritated at thinking of his own insignificance compared to those brave souls, searches for an analogous role for himself. Since he lives in the freest nation in history, he alights upon his nation’s enemies, into whom he projects his fantasies of revolution.
· Learn to see through cant. “If you’re not part of the solution; you’re part of the problem” will be hurled at you from time to time. Invite the activist to consider that his solution may be part of the problem. Or someone may feel very brave and noble by saying, “Given the choice between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I would betray my country.” You can point out that by betraying one’s country one is also betraying one’s friends. Remember that talk may be expensive in college, but it carries even less culpability than in real life. Radicals prefer to be unaccountable for their words and deeds, which is why they cluster in universities and government bureaucracies.
· Finally, dig deep in the university library! Your classrooms may be a PC wasteland, but even the most deracinated radical has not yet dared to burn the libraries. The Western heritage is in there, if you take time to search it out. Good luck, my child!
On the other thread sdferr mentioned the word “culture”. Definition #4 is interesting in the context of those fields of study.
So which one is it to be. Enlightenment or Vo-ed. That is how the choice is portrayed. You can guess who decided that it gets defined in that way. Cultured people.
The mortality rate for smart people is hovering right at 100 percent too.
/Best of the Web
#94 sdferr,
Succeed or fail, I wouldn’t have any problem calling Mr. Schuringa a hero. Just like Todd Beamer was a hero, even though he & his fellows didn’t succeed in rescuing Flight 92.
I don’t expect to see any official such explanation issuing forth from the government of the United States, as such information would certainly help Al Qaeda correct its mistakes.
Since when did that stop the gubmint from opening its yap?
I don’t begrudge calling Schuringa a hero, so long as doing so doesn’t cloud people’s judgment of what took place Christmas Day, which clouding, I’m fairly certain, has been pressed into service as a cover for the failures we all can see if we look.
TSI:
Hear, hear! That comment needs to be enshrined like that one commencement address that talks about wearing enough sunscreen. (With the appropriate footnote that mentions vitamin D deficiency in white people.)
TSI
Awesome. Please post that comment as a frontpage post of it’s own (do a jump after your opening paragraph) It is something every parent of a college bound kid should say.
The only thing I would add is the Serenity Prayer.
“I’ve seen no thorough explanation as to why the suicide bomber’s explosive did not detonate on that airplane”
maybe de bomb was a feint using a respondent to a nigerian jihad scam
Thanks dicentra! It was actually a guest post of mine, some months back.
I’d also add to TSI’s advice that the word “privilege” gets tossed around a lot, always as an epithet towards white people, all of whom have it and have therefore been corrupted by it.
What they fail to distinguish (among the many things they always fail to distinguish) is that for “privilege” to be corruptive, you have to be conspicuously privileged against people you personally know.
For example, in Old Europe, the nobility knew that they were the only ones who could ride in fine carriages and wear fine clothes and learn Latin and French and play the piano and own lands and go fox hunting and serve in Parliament. They had servants in their houses (other white Europeans) who had to Know Their Place, who were most definitely not allowed to wear the fine clothes or ride in the fine carriages. There was an ample and pervasive cultural mythology that supported the disparity in privilege, and the mythology was spoken of openly.
Furthermore, the nobility was allowed to openly insult the poorer classes, and it was unseemly for the poorer classes to stand up for themeselves in the least.
Did you live in such a world? Were brown people expected to defer to you? Were you allowed to attend school whereas societal rules prevented them from doing so? Did the adults in your life say that being white meant you were better than the brown children, who would never (and should never) rise above their current lot? Were you allowed to openly insult brown people for being brown and they could not stand up for themselves?
If you were white and raised in the Jim Crow south, then yes, you experienced privilege. If you were raised in suburbia later than 1965, you most certianly did not.
Having the good luck to be born to parents who pushed education and the work ethic is not privilege unless other parents are not allowed to do the same.
Thanks Darleen! I originally posted it here, g-d, three years ago!
dicentra,
Another philosophical lie to go along with “privilege” is “unconscious racism”. Tell the professors that, unless I chose you for my confessor, get the F! out of my soul.
unconscious racism
Good luck shaking that one lose. If they can’t expound on the content of your soul — over your protestations, preferably — what purpose do their lives serve?
None, which is why they won’t ever give it up.
They define themselves as not you — even though to get there they have first to admit to being you, only without the delusions, and with the new sense of purpose that comes with not being the you you still are.
Except when they are. Which is any time they pretend they are not. At which point they are you, and so can’t be not you.
Must be some nice rot-gut you got going there, Jeff.
Care to share? (What you mean, not what you’re drinking.)
Protestations of innocence are evidence of guilt.
why argue with idiots?
Charles is a poor blogger and he knows it:
why argue with idiots?
If you get good at it, you can write a best-selling book…
Someother blogger’s definition of racist is proving to be elastic too. With “friends” like them, who needs Johnson and Sullivan?
The saying goes “that which you tax you get less of and that which you subsidize you will get more of”. Once something is defined as a “problem” and a bureaucracy is established to “solve” it you have guaranteed eternal life to the “problem”. Bureaucracies exist to continue to exist.
That last .0001% of the original “problem” is always the most pernicious. The most time consuming and expensive to root out. And the .000001% left then, well that is going to really cost, but it is so worth it, it’s the worst part yet. Don’t believe it? Just ask the experts, they have been working on that problem for many years, many, many years.
“If you get good at it, you can write a best-selling book”
the david brooks is alot of fun. but then dc is a bunch of idiots. save the country defeat idiots
I’m still trying to understand why Jeff allowed Buzzfeed to scoop him on The 30 Most Important Cats of 2009. They being Jeff’s especial passion, cats.
Bureaucracies exist to continue to exist.
And to engage in mission creep to expand their powers. And to make the rules so invasively Byzantine that their necessity can no longer be challenged.
C. Orff, sexual misconduct:
Bureaucracies are parasites, helpful or benign in small size and numbers, that never die and reproduce so as to eventually kill their own host. Grasshoppers that turn locust.
dicentra @ #105
“privilege” is just another word plucked by collectivists to be kneaded and molded into an inevitable club. The biggest bit of drivel has to be the squalid “essay” White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.
When I first read it, going down her “list of invisible privilege” I kept thinking… um, NO. These are just the conditions of being a member of the majority group. Be Japanese in Japan and see if that list of “white privilege” isn’t true for them.
What the Universities are selling is not education except in the “hard science and engineering” degrees where a certain level is needed or the fake shines through. They are selling “status” which was always a part of the sale but has become, in many of the various schools or colleges making up the University, the main or only product actually sold.
The packaging still reads “education” but the product inside is now is 99% status and almost education free. Like an inflated currency, it now requires a wheelbarrow load to buy that loaf of bread that used to be had for some spare change.
Save your money. Lie on your application.
There are those who say that…uh…that’s what…uh…I did and now I am President of the …uh…the…um…all 57 United States.
Thanks…uh…Jeff.
This is firedoglake, right?
Thank God I was able to transfer my GI Bill benefits to my kids – now they can take the first two years of college (should they decide to go) and get what they want out of it. After that, then they must decide where that ends up. If one wants an officer’s commission, one must have the degree, too. Gack.
To answer RDS’s question less glibly and perhaps more practically, I’d counsel that for every major your daughter takes up in the Humanities, you require, for your patronage, that she take up a major in either business or the hard sciences.
So if she wants to study English and German (my wife majored in English and Italian, and minored in women’s studies), she’ll have to study Business and, say, biology.
The best bet would be to minor in English and German, and major in business and biology; and then if she has electives left over or wants to continue her education later, she can complete the other two majors.
To use my wife as an example once again: she has now moved pretty high up at her company, but she can’t go get an MBA because she doesn’t have the business degree on which to build (even though she has the practical business experience).
If I had it to do all over, I’d have majored in Business / Finance, and minored in English. You can always read books on your own, and by the time you’re an English minor, you have the tools to get much out of them without having yet mastered the tools necessary to destroy them.
An Black wat speakin’de good English bees not de “reel” Black. We keeps dem reels in er a Dem’ inner city gettoes. Causin’ o’ de’ privilegees!
“Sainthood” is a peculiar status. There are two absolute rules:
1) If you claim it for yourself, you’re a liar.
2) If you apply for it in your own person, you’re disqualified.
Regards,
Ric
A lifetime observing bureaucracies and committees in action is what made me a polytheist. A bureaucracy of Gods would explain a lot.
JeffG
The reason #4 daughter picked SFSU was because of its art and film departments. She is very creative, paints, designs and writes well. But she has never wanted to be a “starving artiste”. She has assisted in art direction on a couple of independent films, sold some of her paintings on ebay for a little extra cash and is getting a Business degree with her emphasis on advertising and marketing.
Which makes my dad – retired ad man and water colorist – very proud she’s following in his footsteps.
Ric:
Seems to me we could use that same criteria with regards to people seeking the presidency. Feel free to embellish with a dollop of clinical insanity. ;-)
Ah done maxed out at English A+ fore ah realizen ah done bees bamboozelized agans – wasin hepin my erm authenenizin an bit an reparationizin wasin in de taro cards!
I’m the first in my family to go to college, Darleen. If I had my way, I’d be the last — though I wouldn’t deny my son the social benefits.
For the most part, you can get the same education these days online or from a bookstore. The university as an institution has been working hard to rid itself of independent thinkers, at least in my areas of expertise. Go along, get along “historicists” preaching progressive politics disguised as critical thinking is about the sum total of a couple hundred of years of literary study as a discipline. Feed all the great literature through a political prism, come away with dozens upon dozens of SEKs, each one arguing that we must “liberate” the text from the authoritarian control of its producer (with themselves acting as your Sherpas, for a modest fee and tenure).
And while analytical philosophy is back en vogue these days in departments of Philosophy, the bottom line is still an attempt at deconstructing the Enlightenment and replacing it with a polished up Brazil run by “benevolent” bureaucrats.
College taught me what I didn’t want to do. It gave me the experience I hope can use to help my children avoid the mistakes that I made that may have caused me unnecessary grief over the years. But since they all seem to take after their mother, I may be able to use all the cash in my Dave Ramsey “Bail Money” envelope to take early retirement.
Of course, my grandkids may be assholes, who knows?
Watch this short (7:45 min) video for a glimpse of what a formal education can be — I believe — ought to be. Now granted, it is a sales pitch of a sort, putting the school’s best foot forward as it were, but it is also an honest attempt to convey to its audience something that the audience can have no idea of, as nothing like it exists in anyone’s general experience of schooling today. And indeed, were anyone to see this and then attend the school they would no doubt still be overwhelmed by the difference in their expectations and the stunning reality of the experience itself. The pace and rigor of the demands on the mind cannot be captured easily in film and in any event would likely scare the bejeezus out of most rational applicants, whereas the idea is to draw such applicants in, not frighten them away.
JeffG, sdferr
What I think really is missing is the failure of education before kids make it to college.
There is absolutely no reason high school kids shouldn’t graduate WITHOUT some advanced math (up to including trig), science (bio & chem) plus labs, HISTORY (NOT social science) and grounding in Western Literature as well as being fully capable of writing coherent essays.
Good lord, I would love to set up a private or charter high school where I would eschew most textbooks, require the teachers to teach from primary sources and hold everyone individually accountable for their behavior (not ‘thoughts’).
Oh… and every student would also have to participate in one sport AND take music.
Classic Liberal education WITHOUT Proggie nonsense.
:::sigh::: a girl can dream?
oopss…… I really should preview my comments…
should be: “There is absolutely no reason high school kids should graduate WITHOUT some advanced math”
David Thompson weighs in on the fight with identity politics, citing this post:
There’s more, which, go see.
This is what I meant by the inflation comment. More years and more money to get the same item.
One of the main reasons for going to one of the “top” Universities was that they attracted the best, the brightest stars in a certain field as professors. To learn from the best you had to go where the best taught.
This started to break down even in the sixties when I was in undergrad school. The some of the best instructors had their morning lecture videotaped and it was then sent to classrooms all over campus throughout the day. Most of us got a grad-assistant in the classroom and watched the lecture on a TV. Then you could ask the TA questions and they handed out the assignments. Though not perfect it worked if the main professor was not only good at his field but a good teacher too.
With the internet this kind of thing could be extended farther. Learn from the best. Besides even at an elite school how many of the students actually get a class taught by one of the stars? Not many I would bet.
Which “isms” do you mean? The Great Triumvirate of Western Guilt — racism, sexism, homophobia — or anything ending with -ism — republicanism, tribalism, etc.?
The real advance of the West is the discarding of tribalism. The left is very loudly beating its drums for its return.
You are spot on with the analysis, but I have read so many stories like this. Last one was about Brown University. I don’t find articles about students taking the offensive, fighting back, trying to reverse or change these ridiculous policies. Is there a good reason for that?
University students have been placed in the position of supplicants humbly asking to be allowed to receive their degrees. They are not in a position to fight back.
This is because the ones now running the institutions were allowed to fight and be offensive when they were students. They are not now going to be put in the position that they once placed the administrators back in the 60’s.
Is there a good reason for that?
Also, most students are perfectly fine with the stupidity; it’s only a small minority of students who would want to fight back, and they are dread conservatives, who are by definition racists, and therefore indefensible.
Math, science and at least two of the harder “soft” sciences were still pretty clear of this bs as of the early 90s.
And, this was while one Barack Obama was apparently on campus. (The only time I walked across the midway was to watch Reefer Madness when the Law School film geeks showed it.)
As to Darleen’s #139, I kinda disagree. The only reason why adv chem, calc, and all those classes were worthwhile in high school is that the class didn’t move at the speed of 20 extra kids who could have cared less.
Insty linked this. I think it describes the most important political action taking place in the world in the last quarter century, possibly longer. These are not our events — though if successful they will affect us profoundly and much of the rest of the world as well — they are as yet distinctly Iranian events rooted in Iranian politics and faith. At the same time however, they may prove to be representative human events more broadly taken, events with the sort of power of those upon which our polity is founded, events that resonate far and wide for decades and perhaps centuries to come. This brave, insistent struggle for freedom, this fight to throw off the chains of the tyrant cannot help but move the hearts of like-minded people who see it.
What, therefore, must we think of our cold bystanding President, who can look on this struggle and yet seem to wish for the status quo ante? Is he mad?
sdferr, in reference to the St. John’s great books pitch, the U of C had a similar idea with, what we referred to as, “the core”.
From Plato to Weber, all original texts in all the core classes. Took roughly the first two years.
I read somewhere that they were thinking about dropping the core sometime back. No idea if they did or if they just watered it down.
Do they still remember Robert Maynard Hutchins there bh? Is his liberal arts program still extant?
oops, didn’t refresh and crossed with you, bh.
There was a good deal of cross pollination from U of C and St. John’s as the program at SJC got going back in 1937 or whenever it was bh. Hutchins and Adler, Barr and Buchanan, Van Doren and others were in fairly constant communication with one another as I understood it.
Yeah, sdferr, though we didn’t know it as his work, as such.
Truth be told, though I know who you’re talking about, and yeah, he shaped the school, he’s just a guy who had a portrait up in the room (southeast corner of the main quad, right across from the hospital, above the humanities coffee shop) my buddy sang humorous songs about the Old Testament the first time I ever drank tequila.
Sideshow Barack, second fiddles while Iran burns.
I read one or two of his books on liberal arts education way back when is why I knew of him, and that only because I was evangelistically enthusiastic about SJC. Still am, I guess.
Sorry, though no one cares, the southwest corner, and not really the corner either, more like the southwest side below the walkway. Lots of one o one classes there.
I think he’s sick, geoffb. Really, sick at soul.
Heh, people forget history even quicker than it can be made, sdferr.
The convocations are held at Rockefeller Chapel and I heard a kid behind me saying he thought it was inappropriate that we’d be in a church to graduate.
Never occurred to him that he had just attended an at least somewhat Baptist school the last four years.
“second fiddles”
Heh, clever.
When we speak of education we rarely speak of educating people to understand their own ignorance though, do we? That no matter the pride they may have in what they think they know, that knowing that they do not know and what they do not know is often a far more salient feature of a good education.
“When we speak of education we rarely speak of educating people to understand their own ignorance though, do we? That no matter the pride they may have in what they think they know, that knowing that they do not know and what they do not know is often a far more salient feature of a good education.”
Thought I’d repeat it entirely, as it’s worth repeating. If I’m guilty of repeating myself, it is from often saying I’m agnostic about more than God. Me, you and ol’ the-non-Aldous Huxley, we’re cool like that.
When I was a kid, I knew nothing and figured I knew about 30% of it all. Now I know greatly more and can’t even estimate how infinitesimally small it actually is.
Shorter me: if I live long enough, I might be able to actually comprehend my ignorance.
Here’s Barr in 1958 on the same subject.
Barr, if I remember right, was educated as a semiotician back in the early years of the 20th century. I heard a story that his Phd thesis disappointed his committee (who couldn’t make heads or tails of it, evidently) but A.N. Whitehead read it and said that if the committee couldn’t understand it, that was so much the worse for them.
We’ve spoken of this before, sdferr. On empiricism, to give it a title.
Option A) all but math is greater and lesser tautologies, Option B) though all but the presupposed is then unprovable, we move past and the pudding is the proof. Bumblebees fly, though we know not why.
I don’t think I can move past it.
Luckily for me, I really, really like math.
Disclaimer: metaphorically speaking, math is still entirely self-referential.
But, as it claims nothing more, it’s not a fallacy, it’s a charm.
Oh, and, Go Packers!
I’ve inadvertently misidentified Buchanan for Barr, pardon. Both references above need to be reversed, it’s Scott Buchanan in both cases.
How f’in cold is it up there in winterland? It’s got to be close to 38° down here, which, lemme say, my banana trees aren’t liking one bit. And it’s freezin my ass off.
5 degrees right now, dipping negative at night lately. No wind though. Not that bad, I only really dislike the cold when it snows.
Math is a perfectly precise map, every detail lovingly drawn in. Around all the edges is written, “Here there be dragons, possibly”.
Math is the language of the natural world, science. The mind is a larger place than that. Dragon is spoken here. That is what I am trying to learn.
On the education of highschoolers, one thing I’ve always thought is that teaching geometry say, we would be a lot better off using Euclid straight up rather than the shit for textbooks that I’ve seen. This may be possible in other courses of study too, though I doubt using Descartes to teach Algebra would work quite as well.
My thermometer read 1.2 this morning. It is now 20, a heat wave. Took out the garbage cans to the street in a t-shirt. Balmy.
“Math is the language of the natural world, science.”
That is the subject of this book (and the only wonder whether that I’ve encountered). In any case, a profound shift had taken place: it is very difficult to recover the stance that did without the use of modern mathematics as the basis of natural science.
I agree with what you say, Geoff. I’m trying to do the same.
Heh, sdferr, the Jesuits had us reading Elements in the 8th grade. No kidding. That and our bad Latin.
Heh, I have to move to the temperate regions east of Lake Michigan it seems, Geoff. I like the wine from St. Julian’s. Any jobs around there?
I must be getting old. Had Algebra in 8th, Plane Geometry in 9th. Advanced Algebra in 10th and Solid Geometry and Trig in 11th and 12th. Biology in 8th and 10th. Chem in 9th and 11th. Physics in 12th. I wish they had offered Calculus.
Damn, I’m glad to hear that bh. I’d long ago despaired of what seemed to me an obvious resort to clarity and precision. But then I’d burn down most school boards given my druthers.
This is Michigan, jobs, what are those thing of which you speak.
Truthfully, I have no idea for a quant.
Well, sdferr, it might be that at a parochial school in the 80’s, we didn’t waste money with buying new books every couple decades. In fact, I might be the last living human to say “primer” in the year 2048. Who knows.
For me, Geoff, it was algebra and geometry in 8th grade. Then in high school it was adv algebra then adv geometry in 9th. Trig and “math for physics” in 10th. Pre-calc and statistics in 11th. Calc in 12th. Same kinda schedule for science. In both, by junior year, the class sizes were between 2 to 5.
Parochial school. All that and really terrible Latin.
Do high schools teach celestial mechanics or any basic bits of astronomy these days? They didn’t when I attended, I know. But it seems to me as though kids should have at least some grounding in the subject, don’t you think?
I mean, what better place to undertake mutually agreeable adolescent sexual misconduct and learn it’s discontents than on a blanket under the stars, no?
Wish I’d had you school, even with the terrible Latin. Class size was 30 or so. Early baby boom, grad ’66, lots of kids, not lots of classrooms. Good teachers though.
I had quite a few friends in the local Catholic school, but we never talked of classes, only of teachers.
You’d have to break that down, sdferr. We went a bit into spherical harmonics as a theological idea. No astronomy though.
I like the idea of kids having a grounding in it as I like cross education. Let them learn about the spheres by accident with Newtonian physics. Trace it from Aristotle to Copernicus.
Kepler’s beautiful (though specious) fitting of the Euclidean regular solids into the orbits of the planets would be a kick to teach the kiddies along with fitting condoms onto bananas, eh?
Heh, I was easily post baby boom, Geoff. There were many older people for each younger person at church. Heck, I was an alter boy and I served many more funerals than weddings and baptisms, even back then. Hence, small class size and great education.
I really can’t say on the celestial mechanics. I remember an orrery in some classroom but I took a lot of Summer science classes and had learned all that before Jr. High so I can’t say. I do remember our school system had an outdoor camp-farm on a lake that everyone went to for a week or so in late elementary, 5th-6th. We went in winter and at night went to the center of the frozen lake with star maps to find and see the constellations.
Astronomy must be a great deal easier to teach today I’d think, what with the internet and the great instruments and their products at one’s fingertips. I know NASA has an established K-12 program that’s been running for at least 15 yrs or so, possibly longer. But even merely a daily dose of APOD would be far more than what we got.
Speaking of which, wowie wowsers, check out today’s edition.
“Kepler’s beautiful (though specious) fitting of the Euclidean regular solids into the orbits of the planets would be a kick to teach the kiddies along with fitting condoms onto bananas, eh?”
What! I can’t believe you want to teach infants about sex ed!
(kidding)
I’m silly in my head, sdferr. Really, I am. In an older age, I’d have followed Pythagoras around. Later, if I was Kepler’s buddy, I’d have said, “Keps, that’s awesome.”
Geoff, doing that as a child, no luminary interference in rural wisconsin, got me into astronomy and then physics in my free reading.
That’s what I deservedly get for referring to 16-17 yr olds as kiddies, I think (but of course, by then it’s too late anyhow as they’ve already gotten the basics from their devil pals).
I lived on a rural lake in the nineties. Come home from work after midnight. The sky on the cold clear winter nights is so amazing. So deep you can just fall in forever. You never see it in town.
My mother taught 7th-8th grade. I remember that age and feeling so grownup. Then when I was 19 I had to trade cars with Mom. Went to her classroom, I shocked the kids, long haired hippie comes up and hugs the teacher, but they shocked me, was I that much of a little kid in 8th grade too?
Yeah, I know what you meant, sdferr. I just occasionally make jokes like that so that others might read it and give you a more sympathetic read.
Must have been beautiful, Geoff. My youngest sister left Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, with me over the holidays. Pathos, blah, blah, pathos, but then, as the guy is out of his mind without oxygen, he talks about seeing the stars from Mt. Everest. Really the only evocative passage for me. But, yeah, wow, imagine seeing the heavens from the top of the world.
Watching a toddler belonging to some friends one day (at the Lima bean festival at Cape May, it was) I got to witness her first encounter with the phenomenon or concept “sticky” when she, sitting on a street curb, picked up a piece of discarded chewing gum and came to find out, the damned thing wouldn’t let go of her finger. A wondrous and funny thing that was to see, a distinct privilege to view an education in progress. So may it be for the teachers among us, I hope.
Now, I don’t wish to complain but I fully expected in my early twenties to have had the chance by now, forty years later, to spend at least a holiday weekend on the moon. Not going to get to cross that one off, nope.
Of course this is spoken by someone who has never even flown in a plane. My wife intends to change that.
Just now encountered this link at Maggie’s Farm. Funny.
Shatner!
Okay, ‘night S and G.
That was a nice moment sdferr. Parents get that but get lost in the day to day. Grandparents are the ones that get those moments often.
#197, There is hope, thankfully.
G’nite bh
I should turn in too. Close to 2am here.
Okay, the prequel to my good night, the core at the U of C was called the core because we all took it. It was required. This Yale nonsense takes half the time and is optional.
And, it’s just the bare basic requirement, you still have to take the classes for your actual major/s.
In summary, Yale is weak. That is all.
Prequel to the prequel, then, finally to sleep: I actually took a decent bit of non-guaifenesin-laced brochial dilators (wink) to finish the core while finishing the math required to get into econometrics as a junior. ‘Cause if you didn’t do that, you just wasted $80k.
This pressure exists, in various forms, in India, in Japan, at the U of C, at MIT, and at Caltech.
Yale? No.
Now, to sleep. After I snort a fat white line of a bronchial dilator.
Shorter me: if I live long enough, I might be able to actually comprehend my ignorance.
Whereas a great many Proggs are on course to die dumber than they were when they were born.
Thanks for giving me a chance to say that, bh.
@122 Darleen,
I got banned from Cracked.com for calling out that list of white privilege in no uncertain terms. They called it “trolling.”
[…] Jeff Goldstein notes why Duke’s infestation will persist. The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities. […]