Tag Archives: education

quick hit: idzie on "gaps" in education

03 Saturday Apr 2010

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Blogger Idzie over at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write has a piece up about the idea that home education or unschooling is problematic because people who don’t go to school run a greater risk of suffering from “gaps” in their knowledge. She writes

This [fear] strikes me as coming from such a very schooly mindset: a mindset that says that schools have the answer. That everything chosen for the school curriculum is Important, and MUST be learned at some point or other for the learner to be a properly functioning member of society! It comes from a presumption that the government [or the authority, I would add, behind a private school — whether religious or non-religious] knows everything that’s essential knowledge for every human being. And it comes from the belief that there IS one essential body of knowledge out there to be learned!

. . .

As far as I’m concerned, a healthy community is made up of many people with many different skills, experiences, and knowledge bases. The things that are important for each individual to learn are those important to that individual. The idea of “gaps in knowledge” at all is pretty ridiculous, actually, when everyone can agree that there is a colossal amount of information out there. No one can hope to absorb any more than a tiny fraction of the accumulated knowledge available to them, so everyone no matter what their education will have “gaps”! It’s just a matter of whether the knowledge you do have is of your own choosing, knowledge that is meaningful and worthwhile to you, or whether it’s chosen by someone else, and forced down your throat “for your own good”.

Check out the whole post over at Idzie’s blog.

feminist values: commenting on comments

01 Thursday Apr 2010

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Just before I left for Oregon, I got into a conversation with a commenter, aHuman, on my post about discussing feminism with anti feminists. The conversation got interrupted by my research trip, but this past week after I came home I stumbled across a comment thread at Feministe that touched on an issue similar to one that aHuman brought up toward the end of our exchange: what is the nature of a feminist value system?

More specifically, aHuman responded to an analogy I made about “feminist” being an umbrella concept kind of like “Christian,” in that self-identified feminists don’t necessarily agree with every single other feminist, yet they share a few core tenets (for more, see the comment thread). In response, aHuman wrote

I find it very revealing that you draw parallels between feminism and Christianity. Well there are very good reasons for why religion is kept strictly out of politics and law in all western democracies (certainly the USA). So I’d like to call for an equal treatment under the constitution of feminism with all other religions. That meaning mostly, that anyone can be a member and believe in it or not, but it cannot and should not have any say in politics or education.

Religions are belief systems, not a theory and not an academic discipline.

Actually I’m not that harsh with feminism. I don’t classify it as a belief system but as a political ideology. If anything, I’d compare it with Marxism. Either way, it certainly is not an academic discipline or even a theory.

And this underlines my point about the radical members of feminism. If feminism was an academic discipline or a scientific theory, then those radicals would have been treated far more harshly and critically than they have been. They would have never had enough attention to get a public voice.

There is a lot to unpack in this comment, obviously. For starters, in order to determine whether feminism is a “belief system,” “theory” or “academic discipline” we’d have to decide what we meant by each of those terms and whether they were mutually exclusive. I have no final word on this, but I do have a very personal response that has to do with how I think about feminism (my primary political identity) in relation to my academic work, and how I think about feminism in relation to metaphysical belief systems (religion). And I’m going to try and share some of them. But first, I offer a second comment from Jill over at Feministe who was responding to a commenter in the comment thread of a blog post on dating while feminist. The commenter asked

It’s an interesting point. Is feminism even more integral to feminists than their culture and their religion (or lack thereof)?

And Jill replies

I’m sure the answer to that question differs from feminist to feminist. For me, my culture and my religious beliefs have probably shaped me as a person more than or at least as much as feminism has. But when I’m looking for a partner, shared values vis a vis feminism are much, much more important to me than shared cultural or religious backgrounds/beliefs. Feminism is distinct from other opinions or traditions that I hold because it is a lens that I choose to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity in a place that often feels really fundamentally unfair and ass-backwards. I need a partner to be able to understand that.

I particularly like Jill’s description of the feminist lens as what she chooses “to use to view and pick apart and critique the world around me. It is, for me, the way in which I can maintain my sanity.” I like it because, for me, this was why conscious, political feminism (a conscious critique of cultural frameworks and social structures, as opposed to my childhood “girls and boys are equally capable, worthy human beings” feminism) spoke to me as a teenager. I could feel what was wrong, but I didn’t have the language to articulate it effectively, particularly in the face of conservative Christian adults who were arguing that queer sexuality was immoral and women should be subservient to men, at least spiritually if not materially. Feminist theory provided me with a language to talk about these feelings, and a political framework through which to try and change what was making the world feel (on the worst days) uninhabitable.

My very first academic class that specifically incorporated feminist theory was an intro level theology class on Christian Feminism, taught by a member of my liberal arts college’s Religion department (mostly Reformed, protestant Christian theology and history, although with some ecumenical and world religion offerings). Because of this, I’ve always been kind of taken aback by people who suggest that feminism is a religion. I heard a conservative Catholic faculty member — at a different institution — once argue that feminists couldn’t possibly be Christian because they held heretical religious views that were oppositional to Christian values. However, most of the self-identified feminists I’ve known personally over the years would identify themselves as religious — and often that religious identity is distinct from their feminist identity (that is, when asked about their spirituality, they would say they are Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or Wiccan, agnostic or atheist — not Feminist).

Feminism, as a lens through which to understand the world, does not attempt to answer questions about the metaphysical realm (what happens to us after death, whether there is a God, etc.). Feminist theology, regardless of the religious tradition from whence it springs, tackles these questions from a feminist perspective — but it is not in itself a spiritual orientation toward the world. Or, at least, I have not yet come upon a feminist who understands it as such. Feminism, as a analytical tool, attempts to understand how women and men are constrained by various cultural assumptions of sex and gender; as a political movement, feminism seeks to counter inequalities between human beings related to sex and gender (as well as supporting a wider range of intersecting issues such as race, disability, age, etc.) It is a values system, in that feminists make certain judgments about what is right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy, moral/immoral (whatever terms you choose). For example, feminists belief that human beings should all be valued equally. That is a value judgment.

However, it is not an inherently religious value judgment: one could make such an argument without drawing on any metaphysical beliefs whatsoever.

When it comes to my feminist self and my academic self, I would say that feminism informs my academic work, and is often the subject of my academic work, although the methodologies that I use depend on the project at hand. aHuman suggests that religion (and feminism, if it is treated as a religion) has no place in schools, yet I would point out that the study of religion and theology are both important academic disciplines, as are political science and philosophy. All of these disciplines understand the world through a particular framework (or frameworks), and yet all of them are seen as legitimate fields of academic study. Feminism, to my mind, falls into this category of something that can both be studied and serve as an analytical framework through which to study other subjects. In this way, it is similar to, say, postmodern philosophy, liberal economic theory, or Marxist theory. So I disagree with aHuman that feminism is something ill-suited to intellectual inquiry or academic research.

Returning to Jill’s reflections on the primacy of feminist values, or a feminist orientation toward the world, I am reminded of a paper I had to write in undergrad for our mandatory Senior Seminar (a capstone seminar that was supposed to help all final-year students integrate faith, scholarship, and vocation) in which I basically argued that I hold religious practice accountable to my feminist beliefs: that is, in my worldview, feminist humanism trumps religion. I don’t care (at least not a lot) whether someone chooses “feminist” as a political identity — but if they’re not acting in ways I believe reflect a fundamental belief that women (and all human beings, no matter how marginal) are human beings worthy of our care and attention as fellow persons, then I’m not okay with that. The same goes for any other religious or political philosophy: does it incorporate a conscious critique of power relations and a belief in the worth of all human beings? If not, I’m out.

In that way, yes. Feminism, both as a theoretical framework and as a political stance, trumps my religious/spiritual beliefs and also my cultural background as a core part of my identity. At the same time (bear with me) I’d also argue it’s somewhat incidental: an accident of time and place. While I believe that culture is a powerful force in shaping our identities, I am not enough of a postmodern purist to argue that we bring nothing unique of ourselves into the world. Feminism, as I encountered it, spoke to me, my Self. It suggested a world in which I could thrive. And I have yet to encounter another theory or movement for social change that offered a similar world: a world in which I was invited to be my Self, in the company of other Selves. This includes religion, which often demands of us not compassion and attention to valuing individual human beings, but policing behavior and judgment that diminishes Selves and our connection to God (if you believe in God) or the metaphysical world.

This isn’t to say I believe feminism is the “final word,” as in a closed, finished philosophy — it is ever-evolving in both theory and practice, and I feel I continue to grow with it. But I will say that feminism is my starting place. And so far, it hasn’t disappointed.

booknotes: right (part two)

03 Wednesday Mar 2010

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Part one of this review was posted last Wednesday.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t so much a review as an extended quotation from one of the student interviews excerpted in Right and commentary on that particular quotation. Senior Jeremiah Loring, interviewed in March of 2007, was asked Do you think what you are doing is analogous to the counterculture, to what hippies were doing in the ’60s, that it’s a new revolution? Since I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “counterculture” (and how various scholars and lay folks define it) for my thesis, I was particularly intrigued by Loring’s response.

I have always liked the idea of a counterculture. That’s how Christianity should be. Not a subculture, because a subculture is something that, when a culture moves to the right or to the left, the subculture moves with it. However, a counterculture is everything that is outside of it, and we are solid. Regardless of where the culture goes, we are staying put. I think our society lacks that consistency. We have been blown by the wind of fashion. In this last election the nation had a left-leaning sweep, which was expressed in the polls. We tend to have a wishy-washy society. I think that’s expressed in politics by the growing number of moderates who do not have a consistent voting pattern, and I think it shows that they have lost a sense of principle trying to base their votes and actions on something solid and concrete. Christianity provides us with an anchor: if the culture moves, we are going to be pro-life. We are not going to change. The whole culture can leave us, and we are still going to stand there and say that abortion is wrong. If the time comes when everyone is saying abortion is wrong, and it’s outlawed, then we are fine. But, if it leaves us again, then we have to stand where we were before, because the Bible is eternal, and the word of God never fades.

Leaving aside the specific example of abortion, I was struck by two aspects of Loring’s definition of “culture” and “counterculture.” One was the way in which he describes counterculture as “everything that is outside” of culture. While I get the gist of his argument, I would argue this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the impetus for countercultural activity: that is, it is inherently oppositional. It is counter; it derives its purpose, at least in part, from offering a values system or worldview that is at odds from the dominant culture. The relationship between dominant culture and counterculture, then, is a dynamic one: as the dominant culture shifts, so too does the counterculture. This understanding of a counterculture is quite different from Loring’s concept of a counterculture that exists eternally, unmoving, outside of “culture.”

And that, indeed, is the second point of note in Loring’s response: he fails to identify is own Christian worldview as a culture — instead, it is outside of culture entirely. “The culture” and “the whole culture” are set up in opposition to his particular Christian evangelical, politically conservative understanding of the universe. I would argue that it is much more fruitful to understand cultures (sub, counter and otherwise identified) as cultures, your own or not. This is because cultures do actually change over time, and can be studied from an historical perspective — and even if Loring’s Christian counterculture holds eternal values (as he argues they do), from my perspective as an historian I would suggest that the way those values are expressed changes over time — and that those changes are worth situating in a cultural context.

Finally, I do think that the interviewer’s question is a valid one, and that there are legitimate, fruitful comparisons to be made between the type of resistance to modernity mounted by the 1960s counterculturalists and that articulated by the current fundegelicals (as my friend Amy used to call them). Indeed, I think it’s a shame that folks within both countercultures (if you will) don’t more often explore the values they have in common, as well as eying each other suspiciously from opposite ends of the “culture wars” spectrum. I’m not quite sure what would come of such a mutual assessment of shared values, but possibly it could help to clear up some of the confusion Rosin and others have over the nuances of home education, Christian fundamentalist-evangelicalism, and the struggle for political power.

booknotes: right (part one)

25 Thursday Feb 2010

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Jona Frank’s recent work of photojournalism, Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League, uses images to explore the world of Patrick Henry College. Patrick Henry is a four-year college founded in 2000 by Michael Ferris specifically to be “the Christian equivelant of the Ivy League,” as journalist Hanna Rosin writes in her introduction.

I discovered Right through this photo essay at Mother Jones (if you’re interested in seeing some of the images from the book) and since I’ve read Hanna Rosin’s earlier book on the subject — and am fascinated with home education and the Christian right generally — I knew I had to check out the book. Despite the fact Hanna looked askance when I brought it home.

This is actually going to be a two-part review. The second part focuses on a lengthy quotation from one of the student interviews; watch for that coming in a couple of days. Here, I’d like to make a couple observations about the way in which the photographer and two essayists (Hanna Rosin and Colin Westerbeck) approach their subject.

I am not practiced in visual analysis, and therefore feel slightly out of my depth in reviewing a book composed largely of images. The photographs are largely composed, rather than action shots, and highlight individual students, some of whom are photographed multiple times and several of whom were interviewed, with their responses providing text for the book.

I was left with the distinct feeling that the photographer and contributors (Rosin and Westerbeck) had missed an opportunity to really unpack some of the complexity of their subject. This is a frequent frustration I have with treatments of both the modern home education movement and recent American religious history: that both get characterized in broad strokes with little attention to nuance, and taken at once too seriously as a potential threat to mainstream society and treated gingerly as mysterious outliers rather than human beings with real effect on our world.

Rosin, as I have pointed out before, consistently collapses all home educators under the umbrella of Christian evangelical right-wing homeschooling — a lack of distinction that does a disservice both to the practice of home education and to the specific experience of those who home educate for explicitly Christian reasons. “The homeschooling movement,” she writes, for example, “is full of nostalgia for a prelapsarian age, before the Pull or even sewing machines. The result is that sometimes families seem frozen in an indeterminate earlier time” (9). While skepticism about the effects of modernity and industrialization on human life is certainly present in some homeschooling families, on the political left as well as the political right, I would argue that it is reductionist to speak of The Homeschooling Movement as a singular entity with one philosophical orientation toward technological and social change.

Likewise, I was struck by the wariness that Frank brought to her project, as voiced in her own narrative essay toward the end of the book.  She describes the difficulty of creating portraits of young people groomed for public service and intensely conscious of the image they are projecting in the outside world. She then turns to the uneasiness that the self-assurance of these young people engenders in her.

Elisa, in her trench coat, is self-assured and ready . . . One month after this photo was taken, she will be married, her name changed, school will be over, and she will be in her life, on her path. She’s done everything right. Yet when I look at that picture, I feel concern for her. It all seems so fast and she seems so young. But herein lies my fascination with the sense of assuredness these kids possess. Maybe she is not so young. Maybe she is tired of waiting.

The assuredness confuses me. I had vague notions that I would marry and have a family when I was twenty-two, but both were far off. What I wanted was exploration, travel, stories, youth hostels and road trips, part-time jobs and film school. Before commitment I yearned for freedom. This is part of being young in America, or so I believed, until I went to Patrick Henry (143).

I appreciate Frank’s candidness about her own complex response to the different path to adulthood that Patrick Henry students have taken: home educated young people, particularly those who come from families that take a critical stance to mainstream American culture (regardless of political orientation) often do reject notions of adolescence that are so ingrained in the American psyche that they seem commonsensical. For example, the idea that adolescence and young adulthood are “naturally” a period of rebellion and freedom from “commitment” — and that somehow that lack of commitment to experiences that are coded “adult” experiences (marriage, parenthood, careers) is crucial to identity formation.

I would argue, instead, that it is an experience perhaps crucial to a certain kind of identity formation. One with think of as natural, perhaps inevitable.  The normal state of being. Home-educated young people often make the world aware, simply by their presence, how much of what we take to be “normal” is, in fact, a product of particular decisions about childcare, education, and the expected path to full participation in society. As a feminist, I really do believe in the personal and political are interconnected.Certainly there are connections to be made between the chosen life path of Patrick Henry students and their (by and large, although not monolitic) right-wing politics. Yet the correlation is far from uniform. We can, after all, be just as self-assured about following life trajectory wholly at odds with the ideals that Patrick Henry students espouse.

Who knows. Maybe there’s a book to be written there somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll end up writing it myself.

the logic of children & other thoughts on learning

17 Wednesday Feb 2010

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My mother, now that we kids are all long out of the house (my youngest sister is a senior in college this spring), works as a childcare provider for a family in the neighborhood. Both parents are teachers in the public schools, and this past weekend my mother sent this great anecdote that I thought I would share with y’all.

K [the mother] told me a hilarious story about science lessons in her kindergarten. They had apparently finished a mandated unit on the concept of “force.” And there was a test at the end. One of the questions asked them what would they use to get a ball to move, the answer being “force,” but overwhelmingly the kids said she would need a dog. I love it. Interestingly, K was discouraged by this. But I said, just refuse the grounds of the test. They can’t identify something as vague as “force,” even if they can talk about it. The demand is inappropriate. Nothing is wrong with exposing them to the vocabulary, but expecting them to manipulate so abstractly is maybe useless to them.

I actually think the kids provided a perfectly logical response to the question posed, given their experience in the world (and, I would bet, the illustrations in the teaching packet used). So they actually have the answer correct: want the ball to move? You need something to move it! It’s not going to leap into action on its own (that is, it requires outside “force” to give it momentum). What have you seen make a ball move? A dog playing fetch!

This story reminded me of a story in New York Magazine that I saw while browsing at the newsstand in Trident Booksellers, “Junior Meritocracy,” by Jennifer Senior, which explores the (apparently highly competitive?) world of kindergarten entrance exams. The article is interesting (though, if you’re a test-skeptic like me, somewhat stressful to read) and I recommend clicking through. In a nutshell, Senior describes the culture of competitive kindergarten and then talks to sociologists who point out what (to me, anyway) seems like the obvious:

“People have the idea that with these tests you can cancel out socioeconomic background and get to some real thing in the kid,” agrees Nicholas Lemann, dean of the journalism school at Columbia and author of The Big Test, a history of the SAT. “That’s a chimera. If you’re a 4-year-old performing well on these tests, it’s either because you have fabulous genetic material or because you have cultural advantages. But either way, the point is: You’re doing better because of your parents.”

Rather than promoting a meritocracy, in other words, these tests instead retard one. They reflect the world as it’s already stratified—and then perpetuate that same stratification.

Since getting involved in the debate at Yes Means Yes over the culture of home education last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the powerful assumption made by Americans (and Americans of the liberal persuasion particularly, I venture to suggest) that education (specifically universal public education) is the solution to all of the inequality that exists in our country. This was certainly the point of view Gregory Butler (commenter “Movies, Reviewed”) put forward over at Yes Means Yes: that mandatory public schooling would guarantee universal cultural harmony . . . or at the very least, protect us from the stress of living in a society in which not everyone shares identical values. The idea that education (in the specific package of schooling) is the key to life success has the status of common sense: we seldom question this notion, and therefore scramble — like these parents of prospective kindergarten students — to give children the advantage of what is seen as the best schooling (whatever we feel that to be).

I’m skeptical. While I value learning deeply, I am also wary of buying into the notion that schools are the best educative space in which to invest as a solution to the inequities that (yes, absolutely) exist in our culture. If nothing else, I am mindful of the legacy of turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressive educators like Jane Addams and John Dewey who (while, don’t get me wrong, put forward many wonderful ideas about how to reshape learning environments to better suit the children who inhabited them) held up public schooling as a way to Americanize the influx of immigrants who were seen as jeopardizing America’s social stability and national character.

Possibly more thoughts to come on this. Meanwhile, rest easy in the knowledge that when faced with the task of how to move a ball, you know what to do: go find the nearest golden retriever!

*image credit: Dienstelle 75 @ New York Magazine.

in which I write comments on others’ blogs

05 Friday Feb 2010

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I’ve cut back on the amount of commenting I do on blog threads lately, mostly because I just don’t have the time to commit to serious reading and response and follow-up. But earlier this week I clicked on over to the interesting (read: heated) discussion going down at the blog Yes Means Yes on a thread written by Thomas about “Public School, Homeschool, Parents and Gender Roles.” The whole thread is a fun/irritating read (if you dislike generalizations, be warned); after reading through it I felt compelled to offer the following personal perspective (here slightly edited for clarity).

Movie, Reviewed asked: “I’ve heard accounts of homeschool kids having problems relating to their peers precisely because they didn’t have the social experience of school and were therefore isolated from the mainstream of American youth culture.

I’d be interested to hear from folks who were homeschooled about their experiences with that.”

My response:

I was home educated from birth on (and, as an older child, chose to continue learning at home until college) and while I can’t begin to tackle all of the stereotypes and generalizations Movie, Reviewed is making about a very heterogeneous subculture, I can speak about my own personal experience making social connections beyond my family.

I have always been a very intense one-to-one relationship sort of person. From a very young age I preferred time spent with one or two other people to large groups of folks, which I found overwhelming. I don’t believe this is because of my home education, but rather a personality thing that my home education allowed me to build on as a strength, rather than getting me stereotyped as “antisocial.” Throughout my life, I have been able to choose and invest in friendships with a diverse bunch of folks irregardless of age; I have always been confused by the emphasis in our society on fitting in with one’s age-peers; I prefer spending time with people at all different stages of life since in my experience it leads to much more diverse conversations and opportunities to see things from new perspectives.

My girlfriend and I have conversations about the relationship of homeschooled kids to mainstream youth culture. She learned at home until high school and then went to a public school in 9th grade. Somehow, we still manage to communicate successfully and have a meaningful relationship. True, she has certain cultural references from her youth that I don’t have (just as I have cultural references from mine she doesn’t). Much like if I had grown up in a different country, I have a different body of knowledge than she does that, in the end, just means we have a more diversified pool of experience to draw upon. I don’t feel that it means I have somehow lost out in some vital, debilitating way to “mainstream” adolescent experience.

I would make two further, relatively brief, observations.

The first is that unless you choose as a parent to remove your children from the society of others altogether and isolate them in a remote geographic location with no internet or media connections, there is little danger of them not imbibing some measure of dominant cultural understanding. By definition, dominant cultures demand some level of understanding even from those who are forced (or choose) to live on their margins. So I feel that the panic about home-educated kids not experiencing mainstream culture is at least overblown if not totally disconnected from the reality of a highly inter-connected world.

The second point I would make is to question the assumption that “relating” in the sense of “agreeing with” or “having the same experiences as” one’s peers is a worthy goal to have for one’s children. Many home educators choose to allow their kids to learn outside of the institution of school precisely because they are wary of the values that are imbued in institutional education, or wary of the lessons their children might learn about power and worth from the hidden curriculum of school spaces (for example from bullies whose manipulative behavior goes unseen and unchecked). Home education is often consciously, unabashedly counter-culture in its aims (although, as I suggested at the beginning of my comment, the direction of that counter-culture impulse is far from uniform). So to reiterate: Movie, Reviewed’s concern over home-educated children not meshing well with their schooled peers seems to assume that it is in the best interest of the home-educated kids to alter their behavior in the directed of the schooled kids; I would turn the question back around and ask why the change in behavior shouldn’t come from the other direction.

Stepping back even further from Movie, Reviewed’s framework, I would suggest that “relating” to others in the world is less about uniform experience and behavior than it is about the process of developing skills for encountering others different from ourselves. Skills such as listening, curiosity, empathy, patience, self-awareness, self-confidence, and humility. Taken together, these can help us learn from those whose background and life experiences are vastly different from our own. In that alternate frame of reference, the particular site in which those skills are learned (at home, in a school) are largely irrelevant: home-based education has potential to equip young people to venture out into the world curious about the diversity they will find there.

In my own experience, not being confined to a classroom for X number of hours a day socializing mostly with people of my same age actually broadened, rather than narrowed, the realm of my social relations. In contrast to my schooled friends, I spent much more time interacting with people who were younger and older than I, and who spent their days doing different things than I did. I don’t feel impoverished because of that, nor do I feel unequipped to navigate the realm of the “grown-up” world: it is the world in which I have lived my whole life.

I realize home education per se will not magically make this sort of openness to experience and social interaction happen . . . but I also think it is dangerous to assume that schools, public or private, will either. Neither are a panacea for addressing the inequalities of our society or the impoverishing social isolation that many people feel. I think the answers to those issues need to happen on a deep cultural level rather than putting our faith in one particular institutional framework (public schooling, after all, is a relatively recent invention!).

honestly not sure what to think

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

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So I saw this story come across my feeds last week, about a German family who’ve won the right to stay in the United States because of their decision to home educate their children.

A US judge has granted ­political asylum to a German family who said they had fled the country to avoid persecution for home schooling their children.

In the first reported case of its kind, Tennessee immigration judge Lawrence Burman ruled that the family of seven have a legitimate fear of prosecution for their beliefs. Germany requires parents to enroll their children in school in most cases and has levied fines against those who ­educate their children at home.

So on the one hand, let me make it clear that I’m absolutely behind the idea that parents have the human right to determine the education of their children (see Article 26.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). As long as the kids aren’t being abused — and I don’t believe the act of home educating alone constitutes abuse — than the reasons the parents choose to home educate are none of my beeswax. And I believe it’s wrong that school-based education is mandatory anywhere in the world.

However, I admit that my first reaction to this story was: aren’t there other people with more pressing need to escape human rights violations than a family from Europe who want to keep their children out of school? According to the Guardian story, there were over 40,000 applications for political asylum to the U.S. in 2008 and only one in four were granted. Surely some of those who were denied asylum were escaping horrors far worse than compulsory school-based education (and this is coming from someone with a confirmed allergy to institutional schooling).

The other thing that bugs me is the fact that the German family is identified in the story as Christians being “persecuted for their beliefs,” and were defended in court by a lawyer from the Home School Legal Defense Association, a conservative Christian organization. The founder of the HSLDA is also the founder of Patrick Henry College, a politically-conservative institution explicitly catering to Christian home-schooled teenagers who are interested in a career in politics. Patrick Henry College sent an unprecedented number of interns to the White House during the Bush administration, and involvement with a particular administration does not mean blanket approval of all of said administrations policies, I do not believe that the folks who support the HSLDA and Patrick Henry College are, say, big supporters of easing immigration restrictions generally. Would the HSLDA have been so quick to offer legal support to a Japanese family who practiced Shinto, or a Mexican family who Catholic, or a Scottish family who wanted to free range parent without reference to religion? I guess I’m just wondering how much this case of asylum is about education and how much it’s about the resonance of this particular family’s story with the story of many Euro-Americans (as well as the founding mythos of our nation as one established by Europeans fleeing religious persecution in their native land).

language and authority: two links

29 Friday Jan 2010

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Two stories have crossed my desk lately along themes of language and social hierarchy, which is something I find both endlessly fascinating and endlessly frustrating.

As a child who resisted standardized spelling for many years (I knew what I was saying, what was the point of spelling a word the way someone else wanted it spelled?) and who was close friends with a couple of wizard spellers (the kind of girls who were perfectionists about spelling and grammar and didn’t hesitate to point out where I deviated from the norm) I’m acutely aware of the way “correct” language use can be wielded as a social and political weapon. Steerforth at Age of Uncertainty writes about this very dilemma from the perspective of his own English, working-class childhood in A Touch of Class,

The unpalatable truth is that I harbour a prejudice – one that has its origins in early childhood.

My parents were both working class, but aspired to move up the social ladder and focused their aspirations on me. As a young child I wasn’t allowed to play with the “rough boys” and whenever we walked past Teddington Social Club, my mother would point to the women inside playing Bingo and tell me how “common” they were.

. . .

It’s complicated, but I think that my parents’ obsession with making me speak “properly” left me with a deep-rooted prejudice about the local accent. During my teens I successfully rejected my parents views on race, gender and politics and came to regard myself as a liberal (with a small “l”).

Little did I realise that beneath my enlightened exterior, there lurked a bigot!

Likewise, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg of NPR’s Fresh Air muses about the recent kerfluffle over Harry Reid’s use of the word “Negro” in reference to Barack Obama, and his suggestion that Obama was more palatable to the American electorate because he sounded “white” (7:53).

In our culture speaking and writing in “standard” English opens certain doors (and closes others). Depending on what your goal is, at least knowing how to speak and write in these ways can be a powerful tool at your disposal. At the same time, it’s important to remember that “standard” is not exactly the same as “right”: we choose to give authority to certain modes of communication (and certain spellings of a word) through widespread agreement that these modes and spellings are the preferred form. They are not inherently right, and the people who deviate from those forms are not lesser persons because of their failure to conform.

English is notorious for its plasticity: the way it constantly evolves over time, shaping and reshaping the boundaries of language and authority. Steerforth points out in “A Touch of Class” that “In the past, there was no such thing as received pronunciation. We know this, because before spelling was standardised, people wrote phonetically. Then, in the Victorian age, accents began to be linked to social background and that’s where all the trouble began.” The story is more complicated than that, of course (as crazy as the Victorians are, they cannot be blamed for all the ills of the modern age!). As Simon Winchester points out in his absorbing history of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, the OED was in many ways the quintessential exercise in Victorian classification — and yet it also broke from previous dictionary endeavors by basing definitions and pronunciation on usage rather than on what its editors considered “proper.”

When I’m frustrated by speech patterns or grammar that confounds, I try to remember this history and remain humble . . . as long as the individual at the other end of the pen or conversation genuinely seems to be using speech to communicate rather than obfuscate. While acknowledging we find different language patterns disconcerting or frustrating seems totally legit to me, insisting our way is better and that children people speak or write the way that we happen to prefer is really just a way of asserting our authority. Why not enjoy our glorious nonconformity instead?

bullying = "childish"?: some reflections

21 Thursday Jan 2010

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Last week, Hanna found this story from the UK-based Independent on bullying at Universities and sent it to me (on the premise that I’m always interested in the education beat; see yesterday’s rant about “liberal” academies) and, indeed, I was interested and started drafting a post about the problem of bullying and what folks who report on and attempt to combat bullying might learn from feminists who talk about “rape culture.”

That’s still a post I might write, since I think the analogy — while imperfect — helps to illuminate the way in which bullying is a systemic problem, one that continues because it’s actually supported by a culture that condones and rewards bullying behavior.

But in the meantime, I kept coming back to the original Independent article because I was bothered by the way the problem of bullying was framed.

We all know bullying occurs in children’s playgrounds, inside and outside of secondary schools and sometimes even in the adult workplace, but what about University?

This supposed sanctuary of like minded scholars has become just another place in which people compete with each other for respect and social order, and bullying has followed with it.

A psychologist specialising in bullying, harassment and inter-personal relationships, Dr. Pauline Rennie-Peyton, recognises the possibility of being bullied in all stages of life, and confirms University is no exception.

“If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” she says.

“The problem with Universities and Colleges is that if we’re not careful, students there also become children. Just because bullying in Universities is not talked about, it doesn’t mean it is not happening. I have students [come to me] and they have to deal with racism, sexual and even intellectual jealousy.”

I think they get it right emphasizing that bullying behavior happens in many social environments and at all stages of life. What bothers me is the equation of bullying with a return to childhood. “If people are taken out of their element, they become children,” Dr. Rennie-Peyton says. And bullying is the natural result? Something just didn’t sit right with me there, and it kept getting in the way of the whole “rape culture” argument I was trying to make.

Luckily, a few days after the post had stalled, Idzie @ I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write came to my rescue with a well-timed blog post on being “childish.”

When people use that word, when they say “childish”, what they mean is that anything a child comes up with, any thought, opinion, emotion, is absolutely worthless and discard-able. To be a child is to have nothing of worth to show for yourself. It’s an expression of ageism at it’s very worst!

So when someone tells me that I’m being childish, they’re not only insulting children everywhere, they’re also telling me that my opinions are worthless. That they’re short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to.

So here’s what I want to say (for now) about bullying, about bullying being framed as a child-like behavior, and about the idea that “becoming children” being a bad thing.

We choose, as a culture, to de-value being child-like, and to denigrate those who we believe are being “childish” (that is “short-sighted, uninformed, unimportant, and simply not worth paying any attention to”). It’s certainly true that children can exhibit all of these behaviors — just like any human being. All of us are, at times, short-sighted and uninformed. We all walk into situations where we feel out of our element. Yet these human qualities become strongly associated — through language like “childish” — with childhood. And because they are qualities our culture looks down upon (and experiences that make us feel uncomfortable: most people don’t like to feel out of their element) children themselves become targets of suspicion, ill-temper, and blame simply for being young.

(The flip-side of the bundle of negative connotations associated with “childish” is, of course, that infants and children are also the venerated objects of adoration by our culture: the near-universal signifier of all things cute and precious, when in fact they are simply human. It’s the childhood version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: children are either angelic objects to be cherished and protected or unruly demons to be feared and controlled — neither approach considers children as human beings worthy of our individual respect as fellow-persons).

Bullying isn’t something that naturally occurs in childhood — it happens because young people learn that they can get what they want by manipulating power relationships. And that shrewd manipulation of power relations wins them respect and authority — not just among their peers but among adults as well. Bullying is successful because our culture as a whole — not just some segregated “childish” culture — rewards bullying. We reward people who abuse their authority, and anyone who professes shock that bullying exists in grown-up spaces like university or work environments has really been deluding themselves.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think bullying is simply “human nature” and that speaking up or acting to prevent is will be ineffectual. After all, human beings do horrible things to each other that it is clearly in our “nature” to do (that is, we’re capable of doing them), but which it is also in our “nature” to resist and condemn. People of all ages are capable of small-minded, vicious, and even evil acts; we are also all capable of empathy, compassion, love, and healing. Let’s quit dividing the full range of human capacity up into artificial categories by age, just as we’ve started resisting the divisions of “masculine” and “feminine” attributes that pigeonhole multi-dimensional people into cramped boxes of gender-based expectations.

The limits of the "liberal" academy?

20 Wednesday Jan 2010

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It’s that time of year when all things academical start to grate on my nerves. So when lisa @ Sociological Images put up a post earlier today about a recent study by researchers Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse that seems to confirm the “professors skew liberal” stereotype, I grumbled my way over to check it out.

As studies go, it’s making the relatively modest claim that about 43% of professors self-identify as “liberal,” only 9% as “conservative,” while the remaining are dumped in the “moderate” pot. As Lisa writes:

The study measured a number of reasons why college professors may be more liberal. Among others, they argued that already liberal people may be drawn to academia because they perceive that academics are liberal. That is, just as women are drawn to teaching and men to construction work because these jobs are gendered, academia is a politically-typed job that draws people who identify as liberal already.

They also speculate that the relative low pay, given the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings, may lead professors to lean towards democratic principles of economic redistribution.

What caught my eye here was the emphasis on “democratic principles of economic redistribution.” While I’m not arguing this isn’t a laudable democratic concern, I notice that what is left out of the definition is any interest in deeper challenges to cultures of hierarchical authority (that is: a broader interest in small-d “democracy”). In fact, the argument seems to be that academics are pissed that “the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings” result in professional academics who — far from being invested in anti-hierarchical, democratic politics, are instead simply pissed off that their “high status” profession isn’t rewarded financially.

Not that there isn’t a reason to be pissed off about a system that requires a relatively high initial financial investment (re: student loans) when compared to future income. I just think that to equate that economic frustration with a more general “liberal” outlook on life points toward a very narrow definition of what liberal politics is about. In fact, it suggests that people who are upset about the so-called “liberal” academy should be far less threatened by academics than they profess to be: according to this study, anyway, even those 43% of faculty who self-identify as liberal may be less interested in questioning the hierarchical structure of society than they are about gaining access to it’s upper economic echelons. In other words, they just want a bigger piece of the pie.

What this study tells me, actually, rather than confirming the “liberal” stereotype, is that if I want radical questioning of hierarchical power relations — particularly as they relate to knowledge, education, and worth — I’m probably going to have to look somewhere other than academe. (Or at least not expect to be welcomed with open arms when I keep asking “what legitimizes your authority?”) Folks who are invested in the high social status their chosen profession brings them aren’t going to be too excited about questioning whether that status has any deeper meaning or legitimacy.

You can read more about the study at Inside Higher Ed and find a PDF of Gross and Fosse’s working paper, which I look forward to reading when I have the chance, at Neil Gross’s web page.