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Tag Archives: education

to me, being "progressive" actually means supporting family diversity and resource equity — not just putting the kids in public school

17 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

being the change, children, education, politics, random ranting, work-life balance

So Dana Goldstein has a piece over at Slate.com about how “progressive homeschooling” is an oxymoron because parents who remove their children from the public school system are thumbing their noses at civic responsibility. She argues that: 

[Liberal homeschooling and unschooling] is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.

The idea that education outside of school is the sole province of crazed Christian fundies and upper-middle-class elites would certainly surprise my partner, whose family lived below the poverty line for much of her childhood and yet still chose to home-educate her until ninth grade. It would likely also surprise the family of my best friend growing up, whose mother was a divorced parent who worked part-time and yet still homeschooled her two daughters throughout their childhood. The notion that homeschooling requires “at least one parent … to take significant time away from paid work” to function would surprise another friend of mine whose parents both worked from home and thus shared the parenting and income-earning responsibilities equally when their children were young.

I realize that anecdotes do little to refute data, and it is certainly irrefutable that financial and cultural resources (i.e. social privilege) confer choices.  The ability to sit down as a family and co-create a home life that runs counter to the dominant culture is, no doubt about it, much, much easier when (and therefore, more prevalent in families where) you’re not juggling multiple minimum-wage jobs, worried about losing your mortgage, or wondering whether you can afford to get that needed root canal. This ability to not only name our desires but also (at least to a point) act upon them is a function of class privilege, and in evidence among families where children attend public school as it is among families who make other arrangements.

Sure, there are homeschooling families who are privileged assholes (I’ve met some of them), but privileged assholery is not a symptom of home-education. It’s a symptom of, well, being a privileged asshole.

See, I think Goldstein’s argument about how education that takes place outside of school (whether we call it “homeschooling,” “unschooling,” or something else entirely) is crap progressivism turns family diversity into a proxy for talking about class. Because class is really hard to talk about in American culture. We don’t want to talk about the unequal distribution of economic resources, and how we’ve lost the war on poverty (or just surrendered to it). We cling to the notion that education (via public schools, or charter schools, or elite prep schools, whatever) is the pathway out of that inequality when, in fact, better distribution of economic resources is the pathway out of that problem.

Maybe schools should be better. I’m not, as a person who grew up outside of school, opposed to that. My siblings both made use of the public high school in our town. A lot of families I know who have engaged, or currently are engaging, in some type of home-based education avail themselves of the public school resources they pay taxes to support. Home-educated kids often go to colleges, some of which are state-supported. Goldstein sets up a world in which there are two oppositional communities: families who use public schools, and families who home-educate. This simply isn’t what the world looks like. While I don’t necessarily fault her for this outsider’s assumption — much of the literature in the lefty home-education movement does see institutional schooling as fundamentally flawed and/or inhumane — that narrative ignores the reality that these two populations are flexible, fluid, and inter-twined to a high degree.

Since homeschooling families stopped living in fear of prosecution if they were discovered by local authorities, many kids move back and forth between out-of-school learning and institutional learning. Whether it’s participating in extracurricular activities, attending one or two classes a term, going to school for a year or two to try out that way of life, or some other creative option, civic involvement in the form of using public school resources is often a daily reality for home- and un-schooling families these days. There are public school teachers home-educating their kids, and former unschoolers teaching in public schools. Goldstein’s all-or-nothing argument values rhetoric over reality.

That’s the “we’re more normal than you think” point. Now I want to make the “why are you scapegoating our non-normative lives?” one. Goldstein’s argument is that all “good” or truly progressive families should support the public school system by sending the school-age members of the family to school. Because:

Government is the only institution with the power and scale to intervene in the massive undertaking of better educating American children, 90 percent of whom currently attend public schools. (And it’s worth remembering that schools provide not just education, but basic child care while parents are at work.) Lefty homeschoolers might be preaching sound social values to their children, but they aren’t practicing them. If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.

I agree with Goldstein that high-quality socialized childcare and education should be available to families that want them. And I imagine that a majority of families would take advantage of those resources, if the continued feminist-led campaign for affordable high-quality daycare is any indication. The life choices of middle- and upper-middle-class families who have viable options suggest that few families these days would opt for full-time parenting and out-of-school learning for their youngest members. So I don’t think full-scale flight from institutional schooling is any realistic vision of America’s future. As much as it might personally pain me to say it, unschooling will never be a majority family-life choice.

But neither will polyamory, or open marriage. And data suggest that even acknowledging human sexual variety (and right-wing fears to the contrary) the majority of households in our country will never be headed by couples, threesomes, or moresomes of the same sex and gender identity. Dykes To Watch Out For is (again disappointingly!) the wet dream of our future utopia only in my little corner of the universe.

Yet I doubt Goldstein would argue that supporting the ability of people to form consenting, mutually-supporting relationship agreements of whatever kind works best for the folks in question is not a “progressive” (dare I say liberal? leftist? radical?) value. If families work best when they are organized to meet the needs of their constituent members, then it seems common-sensical that there would be no one-size-fits-all solution to dependent care-giving, to wage-earning, to physical home arrangement, to negotiations over who does what, when, where, and with whom.

In fact, it seems fundamentally non-progressive to argue for a one-size-fits-all model for parenting and education — which is what Goldstein is essentially doing when she argues that good liberals should all use public schools. How is that different from the conservative argument, all evidence to the contrary, that children thrive best in a two-parent household in which one parent is a man and the other is a woman? How is that different from the argument mothers are innately suited to care for dependents? How is that different from asserting that the heterosexual dyad is the only type of union that should be recognized by the sate?  It’s not. It simply replaces one restrictive notion of good parenting with another. Instead, we should be recognizing that “good” parenting, and meaningful education, will inevitably have as many embodied forms as there are human beings to embody them.

I’d argue that, rather than re-hashing the tired argument that non-school-based learning is inevitably the preserve of the elite, we should be asking ourselves how to more equitably share our resources so that all families will have the highest degree of agency to decide how to put together the activities of parenting, employment, and learning. Bickering about which site for learning is optimal for most obscures the reality that no single site of learning will ever be optimal for all. It also perpetuates the myth that public school education can fix the problems of inequality — when, in fact, only fixing the problems of inequality will fix the problem of inequality.

Don’t make children and parents whose lives are atypical scapegoats for a society that has failed, en masse. to deal with its issues of class privilege.

the porn debate: first thoughts

11 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

being the change, education, feminism, friends, gender and sexuality, moral panic, smut, the body

but is it porn?

Last night, thanks to my friend Minerva, who is currently at the Boston University School of Public Health, I was able to attend a screening at BUSPH of The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality, and Relationships (2008) and the subsequent Q&A-cum-debate with anti-porn activist and author Gail Dines and sexuality educator Carol Queen. Lots to process. I’ll be writing a review of the film and a more coherent summary and reaction to the debate portion of the evening once I’ve had some time to organize my thoughts. But meanwhile, are a few first responses.

  • The Price of Pleasure had an agenda which wasn’t very subtle — and that was to make porn appear monochromatic, exploitative, and seedy. This wasn’t a surprise, but I found myself fascinated by the way the construction of the film itself conveyed that narrative. More about this in the review. It was a fairly masterful piece of propaganda … if you didn’t sit there with your media literacy lenses on and go “what just a minute!” (And if anyone wonders what the scary voice man does between election cycles, he was totally hired to do the voice over in this documentary).
  • I was struck by the level of powerlessness expressed by people interviewed in the film, by Gail Dines in the Q&A, and by some of the audience members who asked questions. Commercially-produced video porn is depicted as an all-powerful, pervasive, thought-controlling medium that somehow renders consumers (and even non-consumers) incapable of imagining or practicing alternative sexualities. Since my experience has been that a) avoiding porn one doesn’t like is relatively simple, and b) finding or creating porn one does like is also pretty easy, I can’t say I understand this line of reasoning. Having just finished Amy Schalet’s new book Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (review forthcoming) I can’t help wondering if this feeling of helplessness doesn’t go back to what Schalet terms the “dramatization” (vs. normalization) of sex in American culture.
  • I understand there’s a larger argument being made about how the narratives in porn reflect and shape some of the crappy narratives of our society (for example, society is racist and sexist — surprise! porn is also racist and sexist), but I don’t understand why the solution presented is not the two-fold critique and creation solution we’d use in virtually any other field. That is, 1) encourage people to watch porn with a critical eye, much like Jenn Pozner encourages people to watch reality television with a critical eye (see Reality Bites Back), and 2) support the creation of better porn. See for example the feminist porn awards and the recent piece by Erika Christakis, Is it Time for Fair Trade Porn? For some reason, when it comes to porn, all of our usual skills for working to change culture are jettisoned out the window? That doesn’t seem right to me.
  • I continue to be frustrated by the way “porn” and even “sexually explicit material” has become short-hand for “video pornography.” I took an online survey recently designed to capture information about women’s consumption of online porn — and it became apparent almost instantly that they were assuming the porn in question was filmed live-action sequences. Why aren’t we talking about sexually explicit fiction and nonfiction, photographs, erotic audio, and other materials that depict sexual activities and are designed to elicit arousal? This isn’t to say video porn is bad either, but I feel our analysis of the genre might be more nuanced if we looked across mediums, rather than focusing just on film.
  • If Carol Queen hadn’t been there, no one in the room would have spoken to the fact that pornography is, in fact, not solely a product of the heterosexual male imagination, created for consumption by heterosexual men. The discourse about porn in the film and throughout most of the Q&A rested on the erasure of women and queer folks who create and consume erotic material without being coerced or exploited into doing so by the patriarchal overlords. Dines seems to believe that in her perfect (socialist feminist) universe, no one would make porn she didn’t like, because of course no one would voluntarily make pornography that squicks her out. I didn’t hear any evidence last night that Dines would have been able to make sense of me as a queer woman who creates and consumes erotic materials, in both solitary and relational contexts. Who has both an incredibly egalitarian, loving sexual relationship with another woman and enjoys some kinky and rough sex fantasies, which work together symbiotically to enrich my relational life. In Dines’ narrative of porn, my experience is rendered completely invisible — and while one person’s experience does not a data-set make, that dissonance makes me doubt her theory’s explanatory power.
  • Also, while we’re at it, men who enjoy sex with women are not, in fact, controlled by their dicks — and men’s penes aren’t somehow inherently threatening and oppressive to women who enjoy having sex with men. Male sexuality is not some mysterious, all-powerful, aggressive, violent, controlling force that must be contained and managed externally (i.e. “domesticated”). I believe people of all sexes, sexualities, and genders, are equally capable of exploring their sexual desires in ways that aren’t — for lack of a better word — “antisocial.”

I come to this conversation with my own experience of pornography, obviously. I’ve seen a vanishingly small amount of video porn — most of it filtered through secondary sources like documentaries or embedded within feature films (where we just call them “sex scenes”). I’ve never experienced sexually explicit materials in the context of emotional coercion or physical abuse, and have never felt the presence of sexually explicit materials compromised my intimate relationships. Aside from some early childhood peer-to-peer situations that made me passingly uncomfortable (and probably deserve a post at some point), I’ve basically felt like I had bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination. My teenage years and young adulthood were characterized by self-directed exploration of human sexuality and my own sexual desires, mostly through fiction and non-fiction, and solitary sex. When I didn’t find sexually explicit narratives that satisfied me, I decided to create my own.

Did I have sexual struggles? Certainly. I was reflexively anti-porn early on because I’d imbibed the cultural narrative of “porn” as relationship destroying, the last resort of the lonely, as anti-feminist objectification. At the same time, I was discovering that mild bondage scenarios and actual mild bondage were a huge turn-on for me. Together, these two conflicting messages me feel like a bad feminist, and made me feel overwhelmed by my own sexual desires. But if pornography hadn’t been demonized by those around me, maybe I would have realized before my mid-twenties that fantasizing about ceding control in a sexual situation isn’t the same as wanting to be literally helpless. I don’t wish my younger self hadn’t been exposed to bondage imagery or narratives — I wish I’d been given better tools with which to analyze both it and my responses to what I saw.

I just don’t experience the existence of sexually explicit materials — even if its porn I’m turned off by — as threatening to my own sexual self-determination or my ability to find, and form meaningful connection with, other sexually-compatible human beings. I don’t see “porn” as an enemy.

Overall, I wish we — as a culture — could move beyond the moral panic that sexually-explicit material seems to engender in a fairly high percentage of the population  and talk instead about all of the tools we already have at our disposal to critique unhelpful cultural narratives in porn, to advocate for workers’ rights, and to develop our own sense of sexual self-determination. I heard Carol Queen making a bid for that shift to take place last night, and I heard Gail Dines resisting it with all her rhetorical might.
Since writing this post, I’ve published a review of the film, The Price of Pleasure, and a more thorough summary and analysis of the debate itself. Finally, some thoughts on the positive potential of porn.

congratulations doctor jay!

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

education, friends, holidays

Joseph Tychonievich, Ph.D.
(taken May 2005, wearing my hat)

Earlier today, my friend Joseph successfully defended his PhD dissertation in horticulture, plant breeding, and plant genetics before his advisory committee at Michigan State University. We’re drinking a fine zinfandel tonight in his honor. Congratulations!

Verbena bonariensis with bronze fennel
photo by Joseph

articlenote: setting the record straight

09 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

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Tags

british isles, children, education

Thanks to a recent issue of Education Revolution E-News, I was alerted to the existence of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, a free online resource for scholars in the field and interested others. Yay! More stuff to read! The journal has been going since 2007 and all five of the annual volumes to-date are available in HTML and PDF form. Yes: I’ll be working my way through the back catalog.

But today, I want to highlight an article from the current issue: “Setting the Record Straight: Interviews With a Hundred British Home Educating Families,” by Paula Rothermel (JUAL 5, 2011: 20-57). I was super excited when I saw this article because it sounded very much like the type of research I thought about doing back in 2006, when I applied for a Marshall scholarship to do an independent research project in England under the supervision of Professor Clive Harber. The scholarship didn’t come through (obviously), but I’ve remained interested in research on home education and Rothermel’s comprehensive study of the styles and outcomes of home-based education does keep cropping up. On my reading list is her recently-available e-book Home Education: Rationales, Practices, and Outcomes (Thesis UK, 2011), which is an in-depth exploration of home educated based on interviews done with one hundred British families who had chosen to homeschool in some way, shape, or form. “Setting the Record Straight” (html, PDF) is a summary of the findings from that project, and Rothermel makes a few really interesting initial observations. Continue reading →

30 @ 30: school [#8]

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

children, education, family, thirty at thirty, work-life balance

When it comes to school, I did things somewhat backward. In that, as a child, I didn’t go to school … and then, as a grown-up, I spent about twelve years (give or take) in institutions of higher education. As a student.

As regular readers of this blog know, my siblings and I were home educated from birth to college (in my case) and high school (in my siblings’ cases, part-time and full-time respectively). You can read more coherently about that experience, from my perspective in an interview I gave last December. I’ll try not to repeat myself here.

What I’m going to talk about in this post, specifically, is what “school” meant to me as a child, and then what it was like to be a student as a teenager and young adult — when I hadn’t grown up learning to conceive of myself in that way. And then what it was like to graduate from college, be a not-student briefly, and then return to student life as a graduate student (briefly: fucking hard).

So to begin: When I was a child, I thought not attending school was normal. Well, no. It’s not that simple. I understood — from the questions I got from grown-ups, from the stream of children walking to the neighborhood schools (Catholic and public), from the basic fact that children in books almost unerringly attended school — that school was something many children did. But when my mother asked me, once, when I was about five how many children I thought homeschooled I told her after a moment’s reflection that “about half” seemed a likely number.

This probably, in all fairness, reflected the statistics in our immediate circle of acquaintances. But obviously was not reliable data for the population more generally.

School, to me as a child, was something that other children did. And I honestly never thought about it much as an activity I could, should — or might want to  — engage in. It sounded boring, and required getting up early leaving all the projects I had going at home in order to do other projects. That seemed inconvenient at best, and threatening at worst. I remember being pissy about the crossing guards who were stationed at the street corners in my neighborhood before and after school, and for the children going home at lunch — I used to defy their instructions on principle because I wanted them to understand they couldn’t control me because I wasn’t one of “their” kids.

I was a pain like that, growing up.

I liked being the one in charge.

So school, until I was seventeen, was this thing I didn’t do. Couldn’t possibly fit into my busy schedule, which included stuff like volunteering at the local history museum and working part-time at a children’s bookstore, writing novels and traveling with family. At the time my schooled friends were taking the SATs and applying to colleges, I was seriously on the fence about even going to college at all. I was thinking about alternatives like full-time employment and apprenticeships. But thanks to my dad’s job I was able to enroll in a first-year writing course without matriculating, and since my career options at the time included “novelist” as well as “bookshop owner” and “museum curator,” I figured that was a good a place as any to try this school business and see if there was anything to it.

I fell instantly and utterly in love. With the class, with creative writing, with my professor, with the campus events we were required to attend as part of our coursework (film series, symposia, guest speakers), with being part of a larger conversation. I loved the routine of getting up on those autumn mornings, going for a run, getting ready for work, and then walking the six blocks to campus for my 8am class before turning up for my shift at the store. Yes, I struggled over assignments. Yes, I was terrified of failing at this school thing. Yes, I inevitably came across as weird and probably more than a little threatening to my fellow first-years who turned up in their pyjama pants, bleary-eyed from late night socializing or early-morning athletics training.

But that first year of college (I took first-year college writing in the fall of 1998; Christian feminism and creative nonfiction in the spring of 1999) was also utterly exhausting. The 1998-1999 school year was a politically charged year on campus, about which I’ve written before.  I found the semester schedule a roller coaster ride of intensity and deadlines and never-enough-time-for-a-job-well-done. I couldn’t imagine how students were able to complete the work for four or five courses at a time, when the hours it took for me to complete the reading and writing for one or two courses felt like a full-time job. I hated having work graded (and actually requested that faculty refrain from marking my work with a letter grade during those early years). I hated the apathy and/or competitiveness of my peers.

College did get me to places like this
(Coniston Water, Cumbria, England, 30 March 2004)

I went back. For seven years, I went back. But while there were things I loved about college I can’t say I ever found the point of equilibrium between these two poles of ecstasy and despair. I threatened to drop out of school literally every semester I attended. All through undergrad, and then again in graduate school. It was always a deliberate decision to walk back in the door the following term.

It’s hard to talk about why the experience was so difficult for me. Yes, it got better. And yes, there were always reasons to stay: amazingly dedicated, energetic, and insightful professors; articulate, thoughtful, and generous fellow students; resources to pursue the ideas that galvanized me; opportunities to travel, to present papers, and connect with fellow scholars and like-minded folks. When I talk about the poisoned feeling in my bloodstream whenever I’m in institutional spaces of education, I know it hurts a lot of people near and dear to me, who are doing good work in those spaces, and who have found a home there — for better or worse. I’ve learned over the years to make it as personal an observation as I can, though obviously my critique of institutional schooling is broader than a simple “I don’t thrive there.” I think many people don’t thrive there, and yes, I have a problem with that. But many people do … so I don’t know what to do with that.

When I returned to grad school in 2007, after two years of incredibly freeing non-school life, I was taken aback by how much I resented the return to academia — even as I was excited about launching my library science career. My emotional, mental and physical health had almost immediately improved when I graduated from college in 2005: I’d started sleeping better, eating better, feeling more energetic and experiencing a stronger libido; my mood felt more stable and positive, even in the face of uncertain job prospects.  And my first year in graduate school (combined, to be fair, with a cross-country move) brought on nausea, shortness of breath, weight loss, and other symptoms of fairly extreme anxiety.  As early as the road trip out to Boston, I was already writing in my journal about the misgivings I had about returning to school and the feelings of claustrophobia and regression they engendered. I felt like I was returning to being a teenager again, somehow erasing the experiences of the intervening decade.

It was not a good feeling.

This was hands-down the best part of graduate school,
apart from meeting Hanna there.

I got through it. I’m not sure, yet, whether to look upon graduate school as an improvement on undergrad or vice versa. Without the economic luxury of being a full-time student (as I had been in undergrad), I was forced (and intentionally chose) to maintain a life outside of school that was ultimately much more meaningful than what happened inside the walls of Simmons, both professionally and personally. I will be forever grateful to the Simmons dual-degree program for making the space I needed to begin my research on the Oregon Extension; at the same time, the project itself was borne out of the way in which my psyche responds to institutional education — as a coping mechanism to help me exist in a hostile environment. But I left graduate school no more enamored with the structures of school than I had been in college. And while the sea-change in well-being post-graduate school hasn’t been as marked as it was after I finished my BA, I have noticed a definite turn for the better when it comes to my own emotional and mental stability, my energy level, and the juggling act of work-life balance that follows us everywhere. As the students flood back into Boston this fall and classes begin again, I am unambivalently thankful not to be in their midst. Even as I make plans to pick up my research and writing once more.

For the first seventeen years of my life, school was simply something that didn’t apply to me. For the past thirteen years, it’s been an inescapable part of where I wanted to go and how I had to get there. Now, I have the chance to exist on the outside again. I think, though, the scars will linger. And I mean that in a positive as well as negative way: scars as markers of how experience changes us. It will color how I study and think about education and learning, about schooling and unschooling. It will inform how I think about the ways in which we, as a culture, choose to organize human life and make sense of our existence.

Many people in my life maintain, with great personal conviction, that I will make my way back to the classroom again — either as a student or as a faculty member. I myself am far from sure. For the first seventeen years of my life, I explored the world without the framework of school. I’m kinda looking forward to getting back into that rhythm, seeing how the old clothes fit.

booknotes: the truth about boys and girls

26 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

children, education, feminism, masculinity, science

I have recently discovered NetGalley, an online resource for requesting e-book versions of forthcoming titles from a wide variety of publishers. As a blogger and librarian, I was able to sign upi for an account and I’ve requested a handful of titles. It’s my first true foray into the work of e-book reading. Verdict so far: meh on e-books in general, but I’m totally down with electronic advance review copies. It makes distributing ARCs so much more cost effective for publishers, which in turn makes it much more likely they’ll be willing to share them with bloggers who might review the book but have no purchasing budget.

The first galley I read was The Truth About Boys and Girls: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett. Rivers and Barnett are the team that brought us Same Difference (2004), which tackles the work of scientists who claim that men and women are innately different in their psychological makeup. The Truth About Boys and Girls picks up this same subject, but focuses specifically on the way claims about innate gender difference are a) unsupported by rigorous scientific research, and b) continue to have potent persuasive power among parents, teachers, policymakers, and others involved in shaping the everyday life of children. This thesis is not going to be news to anyone who moves in feminist circles, so I would caution that unless you want to stay current on all the publications in this area, a quick skim of this book is likely all that is in order. Maybe I’m biased toward the overly technical and detailed, but when it comes to reviews of the relevant scientific research on this subject, I’ve found Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brainstorm and Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender to be the best critiques out there.

Still, this is a highly-readable book that might serve as an introduction to the topic, particularly those who feel at sea fairly quickly amidst scientific jargon. The chapters are arranged to take on the major areas of supposed gender difference: ability with maths, ability with language, empathy and caring, physical aggression, and several chapters at the end specifically targeted toward the rising popularity of sex-segregated classrooms (and the myth that sex-segregation enhances learning for both boys and girls).

The most frightening take-away from this book, I found, was the reminder that our world is becoming more not less invested in the idea of innate gender difference. As Barnett and Rivers point out in their introduction, “It’s ironic that as neuroscience tells us more and more about the similarity of our brains, popular culture incessantly beams the opposite message, drowning out the real story” (5). Both girls and boys are harmed by these difference stereotypes (girls consistently being told they will under-perform in math and science, for example, thus increasing the likelihood due to stereotype threat that they will meet those low expectations). However, it’s particularly striking to see how — in our current cultural climate, at least — boys are particularly vulnerable to the straightjacket of gendered expectations. Girls, at least, have alternate and fairly prominent voices advocating for them: they might get relentlessly marketed to by the Disney princess line and told they can’t do math because their brains don’t work that way … but they also (most likely) have adults in their lives who encourage them to play soccer, ride bicycles, or take on leadership roles. The “boy crisis” panic of recent years, rather than focusing on the harm that gender stereotyping does to boys has actually focused mostly on reinforcing those stereotypes in ever-more extreme ways:

Out of this crucible of alarm, a particular image of the ‘typical’ boy has emerged in many media reports: he’s unable to focus, can’t sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, loves sports and video games, and gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys do exist — it has long been established that boys suffer more from attention deficit disorder than girls do — and they need all the help they can get. But research shows that this picture does not reflect the typical boy. Boys, in fact, are as different from one another as they are from girls. Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys would be taught in boot-camp fashion (78).

And a few pages later, summarizing the recommendations of author Leonard Sax:

A boy who likes to read, who does not enjoy contact sports, and who does not have a lot of close male friends has a problem, even if he thinks he is happy (89).

Although the authors don’t overtly connect such panic about masculine behavior to homophobia, I have to say the above sentence fairly screams with “oh my god what if he has teh gay!” Later on, in the chapter about “rough and tumble” play, the authors do note that adult interpretation of children’s play as conforming to gender stereotypes might actually be subverting them or otherwise working around those expectations in interesting ways. Rough and tumble play, they suggest “gives boys an acceptable medium for being physically close in cultural or social environments that otherwise discourage such behavior” (114). Obviously this doesn’t mean that all physical closeness is homoerotic to the participants, but it does suggest that in a society that discourages boys from physical intimacy with one another and/or with girls — physical closeness that most human beings need regardless of gender — play that adults read as “masculine” and aggressive might actually be a way of meeting the human need for touch.

Like Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender, Rivers and Barnett emphasize the degree to which children perform gender based on the modeling and perceived expectations of the adults around them. For example, they note that the majority of research of the group behavior of children is conducted in school settings — sites where adults are constantly reminding children that they are gendered beings (from the greeting of “good morning boys and girls!” to sorting children into male and female groups for recess).  Recent research on play behavior among children has found that in spaces where gender is not brought to the fore by adults — for example in unstructured neighborhood play — children are less likely to fall into gendered patterns of behavior, and to seek playmates across gender lines.

“In short,” Barnett and Rivers write toward the end of The Truth, “the differences within each sex are greater than the differences between the sexes. It makes no sense to talk about boys and girls as if they were homogeneous groups that are different enough to warrant separate educational treatment” (180). “Not only do single-sex public schools violate constitutional principles, but they deprive our children of important learning opportunities and run the very real risk of reinforcing the toxic sex stereotypes that are rampant in our society” by encouraging children to think that boys and girls are so wholly alien from one another they can’t even learn side-by-side.

Hopefully our society will get the message sooner or later. In the meantime, I can only say that I’m glad that there are so many feminist parents out there who are encouraging their daughters and sons to carry on bravely being who they are rather than what the outside world insists they ought to become.

booknotes: helping teens stop violence

05 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

children, education, gender and sexuality, human rights, politics, racialization

My latest early reviewer book from LibraryThing was the 20th anniversary edition of Allan Creighton and Paul Kivel’s Helping Teens Stop Violence, Build Community, and Stand for Justice (Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 2011). The authors have worked together in the field of violence prevention and social justice activism since the mid-1970s. This book is a workbook for adults seeking to work with young people, specifically teenagers, to identify and combat the various types of institutional and cultural injustice they encounter in their lives. “Professional literature about adolescents, social-service priorities, and funding trends all [emphasize] programs that [build] self-esteem,” the authors observe. “Many youth workers convey to young people that if they just had higher self-esteem, they could overcome any obstacle and succeed at anything they set out to do,” ignoring the institutionalized, systemic injustices young people as well as adults face in securing life necessities and building a satisfying life for themselves and their families (60). We do a grave disservice to youth, the authors argue, by implying that if they are struggling it is largely because of personal failure when, in fact, the problem is an imbalance of power:

Our problem [when we were young people ourselves] was not based on low self-esteem or any of the other psychologically defined problems. Rather, we had no real power over our lives. Without power to protect ourselves, we were constantly restricted, disrespected, and abused by adults. Everywhere we went, adults had the authority to decide how we should dress, where we could be, and who we could be with. They decided our future through daily decisions including discipline, records, diagnoses, arrests, report cards, evaluations, and allowences, or just by ignoring, interrupting, or neglecting us.(60-61)

The imbalance, of course, is not just one of age but also intersects with many other inequalities from which adults also suffer: poverty, sexism, racism, religious bigotry, discrimination based on disability and sexual orientation or gender identity … the list is a long and familiar one. Creighton and Kivel call on adult allies to work with youth in identifying these power imbalances and combat them. Those who benefit from inequality seek to divide the attention and alliances of those who are struggling to get by under oppressive systems. By forging networks of support among ourselves at the bottom of the inequality pyramid, the authors suggest, we can more effectively enact lasting social change as well as survive in present day far-less-than-optimal conditions.

Since the book is designed primarily as a workbook for group trainings, those who are reading Helping Teens Stop Violence outside of that context may find themselves skimming a bit and taking note of various exercises for later usefulness, rather than reading in a straightforward manner. I found myself skipping around quite a bit, once I’d read the introduction and gathered the gist of the authors’ perspective and approach. Some general impressions:

  • The authors have made an effort throughout to discuss the ways in which different types of injustice overlap and interact, so that even though (for example) a given chapter may be about “class” the exercises continually push us to think about how things like race, sexual orientation, immigrant status, etc., shape our class identities and economic opportunities.
  • As someone who is continually frustrated with the invisibility of ageism in our culture — even among groups of people willing to discuss and dismantle other “isms” such as sexism and racism, or address homophobia and access issues for folks with disabilities — I was really excited to see the first few chapters devoted to age-based discrimination, and exercises designed to get adults remembering their own teenage years and the lack of agency they had as young people in a world controlled by adults.
  • The authors emphasize the fluidity of what they call “target” and “non-target” categories (i.e. various types of social privilege), reminding us that our social status and agency is highly dependent on context and can change as the context changes — so that each of us have experienced both being part of a target group and being part of a non-target (privileged) group at various points in our lives.
  • Even without using this book as a workbook with a group, as it was intended, the various exercises often contain useful suggestions for how to intervene in situations where you see oppression happening in order to name it and (hopefully) stop the cycle of violence from continuing.
  • They also offer some good guidelines for having constructive and saf(er) discussions about difficult topics, recognizing that “we have all been hurt in various ways and have had lots of experience of not being listened to well, so we have developed a billion ways to protect ourselves from getting close to each other and becoming vulnerable to further hurt” (170). By structuring discussions in ways that may seem a bit stilted at first, groups can build enough trust by which they can have productive conversations about prejudice, violence, and institutionalized inequality.

Helping Teens Stop Violence will obviously be most useful to those who have immediate practical application for its suggested exercises and the resources listed in the back of the book (though I found their resource lists a rather odd mix, with curious gaps — particularly when it comes to the available literature on violence in education and violence against youth). However, it’s a worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in the practical aspects of social justice work at the grassroots level, and who is interested in thinking a bit more deeply about the way in which our culture has institutionalized ageism and systematically disenfranchises young people and children.

in which I’m unexpectedly proud…

23 Saturday Jul 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

education, simmons, thesis

… to receive this in today’s post:

My work simply would not have been possible without the generosity of everyone who shared their oral histories and personal papers with me. Thank you, everyone! My work simply would not have been possible without the generosity of everyone who shared their oral histories and personal papers with me. Thank you, everyone! And I promise I will get over my bashfulness and post a link to the PDF of my thesis tomorrow over at the OE Oral History project blog.

UPDATE: Here is the post: how to live: the oregon extension as experiment in living, 1964–1980 [thesis]. A link to the PDF in DropBox can be found after the jump.

booknotes: feel-bad education

02 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

children, education, politics

Alfie Kohn’s latest collection of essays, Feel-Bad Education; and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (Boston: Beacon, 2011) was one of the books I read while on vacation in Michigan last week. Kohn as been writing “contrarian” books on schooling and childcare for going on two decades now, and anyone who has read his previous work will find little of surprise in this latest volume, which contains mostly previously-published pieces from between 2004-2010. However, for those of us who don’t subscribe to the wide variety of education periodicals he wrote them for, this book is a great opportunity to sit down and read them in one sitting (and not on the internets!).

I’m not sure how Kohn reads to a skeptic. Ever since devouring his No Contest (1989) and Punished By Rewards (1993) as a teenager, I’ve been following Kohn’s work, which dovetails more or less with my own understanding of human motivation, effective learning, and what it means to live the good life. In other words, when it comes to me he’s preaching to the converted. However, I suspect that Kohn might be one of those authors who — while fitting in very well with the philosophy of self-directed education I prefer — is able to speak about radical childcare and pedagogy without reflexively alienating those who choose more mainstream (institutional) forms of education and childcare. In large part because unlike many other activists in this area, he hasn’t given up on schools as institutions, and continues to believe that teachers within the system of formal education can implement more holistic modes of facilitating learning.

The essays are organized thematically, but all more or less stand on their own. A few specific essays stood out in my own estimation, and I thought I’d use the remainder of this post to highlight those. I encourage you to read the book yourself and find the ones that speak to you! (When I’ve been able, I’ve linked to the online versions of these articles found at Kohn’s website)

In the first section, Progessivism and Beyond, is the essay “Getting-Hit-On-the-Head Lessons,” which argues that the “better get used to it” argument for saddling young children with unappealing tasks (as preparation for, it seems, an adulthood of drudgery) is based in some pretty faulty assumptions about how human beings cope with what my friends and I sometimes refer to as the “fuck my life” experiences of living:

This leads us to the most important, though rarely articulated, assumption on which BGUTI [better-get-used-to-it] rests – that, psychologically speaking, the best way to prepare kids for the bad things they’re going to encounter later is to do bad things to them now. I’m reminded of the Monty Python sketch that features Getting Hit on the Head lessons. When the student recoils and cries out, the instructor says, “No, no, no. Hold your head like this, then go, ‘Waaah!’ Try it again” – and gives him another smack. Presumably this is extremely useful training . . . for getting hit on the head again.

But people don’t really get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. In fact, it is experience with success and unconditional acceptance that helps one to deal constructively with later deprivation. Imposing competition or standardized tests or homework on children just because other people will do the same to them when they’re older is about as sensible as saying that, because there are lots of carcinogens in the environment, we should feed kids as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they’re small to get them ready.

To me, the BGUTI principle extends beyond homework to such experiences as fraternity pledging, street harassment, and the grueling experience of medical school residency rotations. BGUTI is basically just hazing … for life. It reminds me of a recent post my friend Molly @ first the egg wrote about the willingness of adults to minimize the suffering they experienced at the hands of bullies when they were children, because they feel like somehow the bullying experience made them stronger.

In section three, Climate & Connections: How Does School Feel to the Students? there is a delightfully insightful essay titled “The Value of Negative Learning,” in which Kohn ponders what it takes to make a radical educational activist — given that the majority of contrarian educators themselves grew up within the mainstream mode of education. He writes:

So how is it that some folks emerge with an understanding that traditional education is unhealthy for children and other living things, and with some insight about why that’s true (and what might make more sense instead), and with a commitment to show the rest of us a better way? How did they get here from there?

I suspect the key is a phenomenon that might be called “negative learning,” in which people regard an unfortunate situation as a chance to figure out what not to do. They sit in awful classrooms and pay careful attention because they know they’re being exposed to an enormously useful anti-model. They say to themselves, “Here is someone who has a lot to teach me about how not to treat children.” Some people perfect this art of negative learning while they’re still in those environments; others do it retrospectively, questioning what was done to them earlier even if they never thought – or were unable – to do so before. Some people do it on their own; others need someone to lend them the lens that will allow them to look at things that way.

Of course, a mind-numbing, spirit-killing school experience doesn’t reliably launch people into self-actualization, intellectual curiosity, or a career in alternative education. If it did, we’d want everyone to live through that. Nontraditional educators had to beat the odds, and they’ve set themselves the task of improving those odds for other children, creating places where the learning doesn’t have to be by negative example.

As someone who survived college in large part by intellectualizing the experience (there was good classroom learning and not-so-good classroom learning, but regardless I was taking mental notes on the culture of institutional learning) I was drawn to his image of the survivor as one who learns from the negative … but refuses to interpret that learning as necessary (the BGUTI argument). Rather, the “negative learner” never loses their sense of perspective: their belief that there can, and will be, other ways of growing. And the negative learner who turns into a social justice activist is the person who steps beyond questions of their own personal well-being and asks, “how can I make the world a better place for others too?”

In the final section, Beyond the Schools: Psychological Issues & Parenting, Kohn expands on the idea of unconditional acceptance as a path toward learning and social responsibility. The book-length version of this argument may be found in his book Unconditional Parenting (2005). My favorite article in this section was one called “Why Self-Discipline is Overrated.” The idea of self-discipline or self-regulation is one that often finds adherents in both conservative and liberal circles. Kohn argues that behind the rhetoric can often lie internalized feeling of inadequacy and anxiety that undermine true learning:

More generally, self-discipline can be less a sign of health than of vulnerability.  It may reflect a fear of being overwhelmed by external forces, or by one’s own desires, that must be suppressed through continual effort.  In effect, such individuals suffer from a fear of being out of control. 

He suggests that the reflexive fall-back of encouraging self-discipline as a moral value, even within otherwise liberal-progressive-radical (whatever-the-shit-label-we’re-using-today) circles undermines the very view of human nature that many WTSLWUT individuals would consciously espouse:

What’s interesting about all this is how many secular institutions and liberal individuals, who would strenuously object to the notion that children are self-centered little beasts that need to be tamed, nevertheless embrace a concept that springs from just such a premise. Some even make a point of rejecting old-fashioned coercion and punishment in favor of gentler methods. But if they’re nevertheless engaged in ensuring that children internalize our values – in effect, by installing a policeman inside each child – then they ought to admit that this isn’t the same thing as helping them to develop their own values, and it’s diametrically opposed to the goal of helping them to become independent thinkers. Control from within isn’t inherently more humane than control from without, particularly if the psychological effects aren’t all that different, as it appears they aren’t.

Even beyond the vision of human nature, a commitment to self-discipline may reflect a tacit allegiance to philosophical conservatism with its predictable complaint that our society — or its youth — has forgotten the value of hard work, the importance of duty, the need to accept personal responsibility, and so on. (Never mind that older people have been denouncing youthful slackers and “modern times” for centuries.) And this condemnation is typically accompanied by a prescriptive vision that endorses self-denial and sarcastically dismisses talk about self-exploration or self-esteem.

I hope that with these snippets of pieces I’ve whet your appetite for more, even if it’s only so that you go and read the whole piece in order to argue with it!

Stop back in this time next week for something a little fluffier reviewed: Napoleon … with dragons!

zinenotes: unschooling diaries no. 1

17 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

children, education, zines

I recently ordered the first volume of P.S. Pirro’s new zine, unschooling diaries (no. 1 “In Media Res”) from Mud River Press. It’s a lovely little 16-page booklet bound with twine. P.S. is a blogger, artist, author, and (as is evident from the title of the zine) an unschooler.

I’m a novice in the zine genre, so I won’t attempt to review this in the context of zines as an established medium, or the culture of self-published magazines. I will say that — as much as I love blogging and love reading other peoples’ ideas on the internet — there’s something tangibly delicious about actually holding a physical object that has been created by another human being. The texture of the paper and twine, the ink on the page. The font chosen, the images used. There’s something in that experience that I find uniquely pleasing.

Perhaps that’s the librarian in me talking? I dunno. But just the pleasure of holding an actual physical copy of unschooling diaries somehow seemed well worth the $3 cover price. Even before I opened the volume.

diaries reads like a cross between a chapbook and someone’s commonplace book. Each page contains a distinct thought or idea, although arranged together they do create something sustained and connected. Integrated. I think my favorite idea might have been this one (p. 2)

How to unschool
1. Don’t go to school
2. Find stuff you like to do
3. Do that stuff
Some unschoolers choose to go to school.
Find the operative word in that sentence.
Hint. If it isn’t a choice,
it isn’t unschooling.
There are dogmatic homeschoolers just like there are dogmatic believers in schooling. I’ve always appreciated that my folks consciously chose not to go the dogmatic route, and instead worked with my siblings to find a middle way … both of them ultimately attended public school (one part-time, one full-time). And yet my parents still considered our family a “homeschooling” family. Because the point was that we were forming a life that worked for us, and tailoring the learning experience for each of us kids. It’s about the philosophy of childcare and about how we understand human nature and the relationship of human beings to the natural and social world. Not about whether or not you set foot in school spaces.
Anyways. That’s about all I can say about unschooling diaries thus far. If you’re interested, you can purchase your own copy at Mud River Press or follow P.S. at her blog: unschooling & other persuasions.
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