The Liberal Politics & Current Events Book Club discussion
Reality-Based Chat. Speak!
Dan wrote: "Mark, we used to have a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, a limited edition published in 1928. It originally was published in 1487 and I wonder how many of the religious fanatics ever have heard of ..."I've actually encountered some spectacular lunatics who were quite familiar with it... but leaving that aside, I'm impressed that you had a 1928 limited edition, which, I imagine, would currently command quite a bundle. I'd ask (just out of curiosity) how on earth you happened to come by it, but of course, I know you were a bookstore owner.
I still have our book database, every book we ever listed for sale, tens of thousands. Our entry for this book doesn't indicate a source, which means we bought it at an auction, or on a house call, or from someone who walked in with it. We sold it for $300.00, but that was ten years ago. We also had Reginald Scot's THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT, published in 1584 (our copy from 1930) which was the antidote to Maleficarum written by an atheist who clearly thought the whole idea of witches was nuts and had some fun pointing out how crazy it was. The book was suppressed by James I, (another witch hunter) who tried to have all copies burned.
This one sold for $500 because I think it was even more scarce than Maleficarum.
I just rechecked the date of the sale of Malificarum and it was in 2003.
Dan wrote: "I just rechecked the date of the sale of Malificarum and it was in 2003."Interestingly to me, the Malleus Maleficarum and The Discoverie of Witchcraft can both be obtained in Kindle ebook form for 99¢! It was your description of the satirical character of the latter that had impelled me to want to read it. I'm not interested in re-reading the Malleus Maleficarum (which I found adequately psychotic the first time around, 44 years ago :)), but it's nice to know that, through the wonder of electronic publishing, truly deranged, sexually-repressed religious lunatics possessed of an impulse to burn people (which might, come to think of it, be a pretty good description of elements of the Tea Party) can now have their literary needs accommodated at a phenomenal discount! :) Now, were it but possible to purchase e-torches and e-pitchforks, they'd be all set... (It's really unfortunate that so few of them can read.)
CBS News: Boehner "certainly" prepared to let DHS funding run outPersonally, I have no particular problem with Boehner's allowing funding for Vaterland* Sicherheitsdienst to run out, and since I think Boehner would "certainly be prepared" (and is) to let millions die prostrate in the streets for want of healthcare, and to ship immigrants to Mars, no "preparedness" of his would particularly surprise me. But since it's obvious that his game here is to force shutdown of Obama's executive actions on immigration, I really think the Democrats should call his bluff (especially given that Homeland Security is probably the only form of governmental expenditure that actually does "warm his cockles," so he's cutting off his own proverbial nose), and if he wants to hold his breath until he turns blue, then I think I think we should let him.
* Have I mentioned how much the introduction of the word, "Homeland," enraged me at its inception, and what I knew it portended? So I'm not going to cavil to use the original German.
I just submitted another article to Truth-out.org, a new chapter in my book titled "What Trickle Down Economics Has Done to America: The Rich Are Getting All the Money." They really are.The article includes nine charts of data and data analysis showing what the subtitle of the first part of the article means: "That Improving Economy is Further Away than it Appears."
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Mark: I always have hated that term "homeland" for exactly the same reasons you expressed. We are militarizing our country. When you look at the federal budget you can understand why some people describe our government as an "insurance company with an army."
Hi Mark, I never thought of the term "homeland" like that before. Thanks. It makes me feel even more spooked by Boehner than I did before.
We created that Homeland Security Department after 9/11, and we should be suspicious of anything that we created in response to 9/11.Dan, I know that our greatest Presidents are not necessarily the most experienced. The most experienced in my lifetime have been LBJ, Nixon, and Papa Bush. Of those three, obviously LBJ is by far the best. I just think there should be a middle ground between the same old folks (Clinton, Bush) and someone who wasn't even in an elected office until a few years ago. Obama was clearly planning to be President some day; he just was recruited to run a bit early because the establishment folks didn't want the Clintons. I wonder if the establishment people are trying to recruit Warren to take on Clinton the way they did Obama. How they feel will certainly make a difference in what she decides to do. For some reason, I don't think the Washington D.C. Democrats (Reid, Durbin, etc.) are as enamored with her as at least some of them were with Obama.
Lisa wrote: "Hi Mark, I never thought of the term "homeland" like that before. Thanks. It makes me feel even more spooked by Boehner than I did before."Lisa,
I'm very glad you share my dismay, because we should all have been recoiling in abject horror for about 14 years.
I haven't checked, but I believe its use was instigated by Goebbel's student, Rove, immediately post-9/11, though the actual original student of Reich-style psyops hardly matters. I speak German, I couldn't fail immediately to see the reason, I'm sensitive to the issue, and quite honestly, I've been enraged ever since, as increasingly more lexical items lifted directly from that unspeakably heinous regime have been embraced with abandon, their origins obscured by Americans' unfamiliarity with German (and history, for that matter), though I'm relieved, Dan, to know that I wasn't the only one who noticed, because it seems the parallel has never once been reported, Gott hilf uns!
Maybe because I love history, and I've tried to learn as much as I possibly can, I am enormously dismayed the lack of importance it seems to have to most others. I don't remember that being the case when I was a kid. History was one of those things you just learned in school along with math, chemistry and English. I also learned it at home because my mother was a history addict and we had many history books.But the adults I knew as a kid seemed to know a lot more history than most adults I know today. What happened?
Speaking of German, I'm deriving a great deal of schadenfreude from the kerfuffle that Boehner has created by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress. Prediction: It's only a matter of time before Netanyahu finds some suddenly pressing engagement that will force him to indefinitely postpone his visit.
Paul wrote: "Speaking of German, I'm deriving a great deal of schadenfreude from the kerfuffle that Boehner has created by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress. Prediction: It's o..."All Middle Eastern issues aside, it is absolutely mind-boggling that the Speaker of the House would operate under the delusion that he is endowed with presidential diplomatic powers. Of course, in the litany of Boehner's phenomenally hubristic delusions -- if anybody is bothering to enumerate, because, really, we are getting into transfinite math, here -- this would count as perhaps the twelve-gazillionth. (There is no such thing as a "gazillion," but neither is there any such thing as a Speaker with presidential diplomatic powers.) Perhaps, next, Boehner will find a nice bedroom in the White House to sleep in (he might like to desecrate Lincoln's by his presence; Abe would undoubtedly turn over in his grave), and attempt to make use of the Oval Office.
Even Israeli diplomats have characterized Boehner's actions as violative of "normal protocol," and three Jewish Democratic House members wrote Boehner to say they were "extremely disheartened by your recent attempt to politicize support for Israel." Why they failed to include the phrase, "and you are an utter equine posterior," has not been explained, but I suppose they were moved by preternatural extremities of civility and politeness.
Boehner could play himself in a movie satire of Congress.
Dan wrote: "Boehner could play himself in a movie satire of Congress."It's an inspired suggestion, Dan, but I think Congress is a "movie satire of Congress." (having attained to the wondrous, inherently satirical status of bicameral "Republicanness.") :)
Boehner's actions have become increasingly interesting. I think I might post a poll, so that people can speculate on his next probable move.
Dan wrote: "Maybe because I love history, and I've tried to learn as much as I possibly can, I am enormously dismayed the lack of importance it seems to have to most others. I don't remember that being the But the adults I knew as a kid seemed to know a lot more history than most adults I know today. What happened? ..."I think it may have to do with what I was able to chronicle, year-by-year, in the status of the cortices of incoming freshmen -- specifically, that they were increasingly innocent of... um, information. I think the Republicans, by dint of their forty years of assiduous efforts to undermine public education, have saved our children's cortices from the dangerous pollutant of empirical data about the world... or the number of toes they have.
Here is an interesting piece, which I have reposted on progressiveamericanthought.blogspot.comhttp://wisdomvoices.com/forgetting-ou...
Dan wrote: "Here is an interesting piece, which I have reposted on progressiveamericanthought.blogspot.comhttp://wisdomvoices.com/forgetting-ou......"
All of this is precisely true, Dan, though I currently see no means by which it can be arrested. Only private colleges and universities with large endowments and wealthy alums willing to cover the shortfall resulting from the withdrawal of government funding for research will not be eviscerated. Harvard and Stanford will withstand this. The plutocrats are not concerned in the least because *their* children will attend the massively-endowed private institutions, usually as legacies irrespective of their level of academic competence, and those colleges and universities will likewise continue to fund the education of non-affluent geniuses. So it's unproblematical if you're the scion of a plutocrat or have an IQ of 212.
I spent most of my career teaching at a private liberal arts college, however, that was very reputable but not massively-endowed. So ineluctably, at variance with the inclination of faculty and administration both, our student body became increasingly affluent. Even as a private institution, we were still affected by cuts in the availability of loans and grant money for non-überrich prospective students. We maintained our standards at the cost of reducing the socioeconomic diversity of the student body. But that was two decades ago. The situation has only grown immeasurably worse since then, even for private institutions. As for public ones, the express intent is, as you say, to "drown them in the bathwater."
But that reflects only what goes on in post-secondary education. From my perspective, the problem was not in the quality of our pedagogy or research, but in the quality of the incoming students we had to work with. Look, this has always been a prodigiously anti-intellectual country: it appears to be in our genome. So public education, when it had the requisite funding, was succeeding in an uphill fight on a very steep gradient against entrenched anti-intellectualism. Even fifty years ago, it was not-quite-admissible (for male children, anyway) to exhibit an interest in reading. Public schools had desperately to fight this cultural aversion to acquiring knowledge or engaging in dreaded cogitation, but to their enduring credit and honor, where the funds were available, they did it. When I started teaching, a typical student of mine (with, say, 1250 SAT‘s) would have read broadly, would have known things. My science students, upon entering the college, would have been able to hold forth much more unproblematically on matters of history... and of literature (even if tilted more in the direction of science fiction). As of when I retired, my typical incoming advisee (with SAT's of 1300) would have read virtually no book that had not been assigned. Could have identified neither Jane Austen nor James Joyce, and could not have listed the last five presidents, or distinguished, necessarily, between the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. So that was the product of good suburban public (and a good many private) high schools at that time (and Stanley Kaplan: hence the scores). What do you think it is like now? What do you think it will be like once they've drowned the babies of all ages? Because starved public universities will not be able to remediate the educational deficiencies of the products of public high schools, themselves starved to the point of inanition by these further acts of Republican savagery. And that's Just. Exactly. What. They. Want.
As one of the elements of the book proposal I am preparing to send to agents, I have to write a lot about myself and what I will do to promote the book, etc. I was checking how much stuff about me already is on the Internet. A lot, several pages on Google it turns out. However, of all things, there was a list of honor roll students from my seventh grade. There were a lot of them, probably half the class. I was on the list, but way down the list. I had one of those life-changing teachers in seventh grade who inspired me and from then on I was a much better student.That class also was very special. For some reason it had a high percentage of well above average IQs. (My mother had taught at one of the feeder elementary schools and many, like me, had learned to read from her). This was a rural school and probably 95 percent of the parents never went to college, and only about one seventh of my class went to college.
However, apropos your comment about boys, I looked through that list and I recall most of the kids. There were a lot of bright boys on that list. Because this particular class had so many bright kids, we were kept together all the way through high school, with some accelerated programs. However, by the time senior year came, there only were about 25 left, and only three boys, including me. All those other bright boys had dropped by the wayside for one reason or another.
It wasn't cool to be a bright boy. There were a lot of toughs in the school and they bulled bright boys. I played football and wrestled and when they bullied me I hit back - once each year is all it took. But many of the others just stopped being good students and no one bothered them.
Incidentally, the strangest thing about that list of seventh grade honor students, the girl at the top of the list still had the highest GPA at graduation from high school. Many years later I heard she was a contestant on Jeopardy.
Here is a long article in Atlantic that provides more insight and information about ISIS than I have read anywhere else. It is a must read to try to understand what really is going on there.http://www.theatlantic.com/features/a...
Dan wrote: " It wasn't cool to be a bright boy ..."Ne'er hath truer words been spoken. (But by girls only: by third grade, it was quite evident that the only form of communication admissible for male children was grunting, shoving and gut-punching. Unlike you, I would rather have drunk hemlock than played football, but my saving grace was that I could run slightly faster than Roger Bannister.)
In the comments section of the latest poll (don't forget to vote!), Gail kindly mentioned this:If you saw the PewResearch poll on preferred traits for POTUS candidates, based on party affiliation, Boehner's ambitions fit right in with your comment Barb. Find it here: http://pewrsr.ch/1tpixUe
Money quote from that poll:
"Underscoring the importance of religion within the GOP, a candidate not believing in God is the top negative trait for Republicans and Republican leaners."
Noting a few other key points:
"A gay or lesbian candidate would have trouble winning the Republican nomination"
"A candidate being a woman ranks highly as a positive trait among just 11% of Republicans."
"Republicans respond positively to a candidate who is an evangelical Christian"
"Republican and Republican leaners respond strongly to military experience: 58% say they would be more likely to support a candidate with military experience."
and
"The parties differ in evaluating the value of business experience. For Republicans and Republican leaners, it is the second most popular trait"
So, briefly to summarize, the Republicans would really like a straight, male, evangelical Christian CEO who knows how to deploy a missile launcher.
Good to know.
Didn't we just have one of those before Obama? Do Republicans really want a repeat of that? I don't think so, but I don't think people think through things when they are quizzed in polls. They react instinctively rather than rationally. Instinctively, many - I won't say most - Republicans are anti-gay, religious, fearful of various enemies and thus favorable towards protectors like police and the military, and favor a more traditional relationship between the sexes even though most of them don't have it today.
To really understand the minds of conservatives, read "The Reactionary Mind," by Corin Robin. He gets into the psychological, emotional and intellectual bases of conservatism. They really are different from us.
Krishna wrote: "Dan it wasn't cool to be a bright student?????????Then I guess they don't get the right meaning of being 'cool'. And it really happens? Being bullied for this??"
Krishna, your profile is private, but I'm assuming you must not live in the States. The center of a nuclear fusion reactor is not less "cool" than growing up male in the United States and evincing suspicious signs of an IQ in excess of 3.
Krishna wrote: "Mark I am not from US and a student in India of class10. So I know student psychology. Those who are dumb, they get bullied, and I know it. Good students are always respected everywhere by everyone..."In the US, though girls who are bright may sometimes be ostracized for being "geeky," conspicuously intelligent boys who are not also prize fighters will be lucky to escape from public school with their lives. This is conceivably the most fathomlessly anti-intellectual country in the world, and bright children are loathed. (You may have noticed our propensity for electing politicians who deny evolution and global warming, and claim to believe that the world is 6,000 years old? There is a reason for this.)
ETA:
I felt I should add, in fairness, that they are only off by 4.5 billion years.
It is perhaps once again worth citing this book: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
Krishna wrote: "What u r saying, cannot happen in a country like US!!"At this point, I am starting to think you are engaging in parody... but that's ok: the attitudes of Americans towards intelligence (and science and reason) deserve to be treated with derision.
The great American historian, Richard Hofstadter, published "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" 50 years ago. It is a classic study of this characteristic of Americans that has been around for a very long time. http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectu...
Dan wrote: "Didn't we just have one of those before Obama? Do Republicans really want a repeat of that? I don't think so, but I don't think people think through things when they are quizzed in polls. They reac..."Precisely! Republicans have larger amygdalae. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biolog...) Robin's book is, by all accounts, excellent (but regrettably not available in ebook form, so that perhaps only wealthy conservatives -- who would mostly hate it -- will be able to buy it! :)).
Though previously mentioned, these two books are perhaps also worth citing, at this point:
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
Robin's book is available in a Kindle edition. That's what I read. http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Min...
Even though I have a Kindle, I also have Kindle PC software on my desktop and laptop computers. I have discovered a really practical use for my Kindle. I get a lot of recipes from the Internet. Instead of printing them out, I send them to my Kindle. It's great and I'm not adding to the clutter in my kitchen.The laptop has a bigger screen, making it easier to read in a chair. I can copy quotes, etc. from my desktop Kindle PC to whatever I am writing. It automatically records the Kindle location in the bibliographical material it also automatically adds. Pretty cool.
Dan wrote: "Robin's book is available in a Kindle edition. That's what I read. http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Min......"
Thanks for the correction and the link, Dan! Somewhat inexplicably, when I did a search on Amazon, I only came up with this:
http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Min...
Perhaps searches involving the word "reactionary" will only bring up the older version of a text! :) :)
Krishna wrote: "OK, this thing may happen in a few schools, i agree. But if it was everywhere, then how US is the science superpower of the world. This implies that science is given importance there. Then how it i..."No, it's true. Most US high school graduates are virtually mathematically illiterate, relatively speaking, which has affected our undergraduate programs, and it's why US graduate programs in the sciences have been compelled to import students from abroad (e.g., from countries such as yours). Last year, 70.3% of all graduate students in electrical engineering in the United States were "foreign." See this (from "Inside Higher Ed"): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2...
Krishna wrote: "I guess politicians need to think about it. Why aren't they?"I'd be tempted to say that it's because they were educated in the United States, but in fact, the reason is that Republicans, overwhelmingly, hate public education, don't want to fund it, and are currently attempting to do away with it. And of course, many American voters, having been educated in the schools that the Republicans have savagely deprived of funding, are now stupid enough to vote for them (and to root enthusiastically for their own economic evisceration).
Dan wrote: "I just submitted another article to Truth-out.org, a new chapter in my book titled "What Trickle Down Economics Has Done to America: The Rich Are Getting All the Money." They really are.The artic..."
Dan, I've just been foraging about truth-out (there's an interview with Frida Berrigan that is rather inspiring), but I wasn't able to locate your article, so I'm presuming it has yet to be posted. Please don't forget to provide us with a link when it does go up (or if it already has, but I missed it). I believe the only thing the Republicans have allowed to "trickle-down" is acid rain and toxic waste, though in a metaphorical sense... well, you get my drift.
I think I made this point earlier, but Krishna is new, so I'll make it again. Because I was a black girl in newly integrated schools in the South and then in a mostly white school in Illinois, I was not bullied for being academically successful. In fact, both my black and white peers thought I was cool because I made the honor roll. I was one of only two black students on the honor roll in my Kentucky school and usually the only one at the highly-ranked suburban high school in Illinois that I transferred to when I was a sophomore.But Dan and Mark are right, Krishna. The American culture in general is anti-intellectual. You can see it in novels by such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne (the villain in SCARLET LETTER is a scientist named Roger Chillingsworth), my favorite novelist Toni Morrison (the villain in BELOVED is called Schoolteacher), and Alice Walker (in her famous novel THE COLOR PURPLE, the dialect passages are much more interesting than the ones in Standard English).
But America is a diverse culture, and some ethnic groups value education more than others. Unfortunately, despite my experience, my folks generally value it even less than the average American. That's because it was illegal for us to learn to read and write when we were slaves, and that suspicion of education has carried through the generations. It's not a coincidence that most of the black students in Ivy League colleges today have parents who were African immigrants. In fact, it's worth noting that our President is the son of a white woman and an African; his family members are not descendants of slaves. I'm trying to encourage the blacks with whom I communicate to be more like Africans and Asians, to be as competitive in spelling contests and academic decathlons as they are in sports. It's a shame that almost all of the black males at UCLA are athletes, but it's not all the MAN's fault. Those black males should have been encouraged by their parents or guardians to spend as much time learning to read and write better as they spent running, jumping, and shooting basketballs.
Don't worry too much about the future, Krishna. We do have to think about climate change, but the anti-intellectual Republicans don't represent our future; they (McConnell and Boehner) represent our ugly past. Obama represents the future, which is diverse, smarter, younger, and better looking.
Mark: I forgot about the holiday yesterday when I sent it to them on Sunday. I got a message from them this morning saying they were backed up and it was going to take a while to get it reviewed. It's a complicated piece with nine graphics.
It is interesting to see how the emphasis in education has changed over the years. When I was a kid, there was a broader emphasis. In New York, to get a Regents high school degree a student had to have multiple courses in English, Math, Science and History, and one foreign language. The AP courses were just beginning and many colleges still didn't accept many of them. Most colleges and universities had basic requirements. If you were a math/science major you had to take a certain number of liberal arts courses. If you were a liberal arts major you had to take a certain number of math/science courses.
That broke down late in the 1960s primarily because of the Draft. There was tremendous pressure on colleges to keep students in. Any boy who dropped out was likely to get drafted and sent to Vietnam. So there was grade inflation and a reduction in required courses. It didn't happen everywhere, but it was fairly widespread.
Later, more emphasis began to be placed on courses of study that were more career-oriented. When I started college a good percentage of the students I knew - except for the engineers and pre-meds really were not that focused on career prep. I think that changed a great deal in 80s and 90s.
And there also was the explosion of the for-profit businesses offering almost pure training for various occupations. Regular colleges and universities began to offer programs that competed with those.
So, over a couple of generations, the emphasis on real education diminished, and we have a population with perhaps more knowledge of specific fields, but less general knowledge.
Dan wrote: "Even though I have a Kindle, I also have Kindle PC software on my desktop and laptop computers. I have discovered a really practical use for my Kindle. I get a lot of recipes from the Internet. Ins..."Dan wrote: "Even though I have a Kindle, I also have Kindle PC software on my desktop and laptop computers. I have discovered a really practical use for my Kindle. I get a lot of recipes from the Internet. Ins..."
Yes, I love all the Kindle apps, and like that I can read on my laptop, though I normally don't. The Kindle itself has extraordinarily good text-to-voice synthesis, which somewhat obviates purchasing of "professional narrations," but there are some very good ones (and my eyes do get tired). Have you tried Audible? (I realize this is somewhat OT, but I am not an "OT-nazi," and there is no one to castigate me but the moderator, who I vaguely think will refrain from doing so. Also, I doubt that Amazon will take profound exception to my mentioning their products. :)) (I found the 20-hour (!) narration of Klein's book quite good, incidentally -- even at 3x speed.) So if anyone who has yet to read it is looking for a crisply-enunciated narration of something, it's a good choice.)
I have the cheapest Kindle. I don't think it has any audible features. If I had known they were going to drop prices I would have gone for a more expensive one. I am not crazy about reading long works on this Kindle. The screen is a little too gray.
I just read this interesting article and wanted to share it with everyone. So many of the topics we have discussed are talked about in this article….http://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/13...
By the way, the article is kind of long but well worth the read, I think!
Mary wrote: "Don't worry too much about the future, Krishna. We do have to think about climate change, but the anti-intellectual Republicans don't represent our future; they (McConnell and Boehner) represent our ugly past. Obama represents the future, which is diverse, smarter, younger, and better looking."You're unambiguously right about the personages involved, Mary, and since I believe I last characterized Republicans as "less attractive than geckos with neurofibromatosis*," I can hardly disagree with you about Boehner and McConnell. (That Obama is younger, smarter and better-looking is inarguable, but that would still be true with the highest possible bar to clear, and Boehner and McConnell are at ground level.)
Ceteris paribus, I should be a lot more optimistic than you about the future, but since I'm immeasurably more pessimistic, I will confine myself to taking comfort in your capacity to feel optimistic, and hoping, very earnestly, that you are 100% right. But (and I direct this to Krishna), whatever the probabilities, Mary's outlook is much more productive than mine, so I encourage you to embrace her wisdom in this.
* Neurofibromatosis (type I) was the affliction of the very unfortunate, so-called "elephant man," John Merrick, a gentle soul spiritually about a billion times more attractive than Boehner or McConnell, his physical appearance notwithstanding, so I find a certain irony in making the comparison with these two representatives of a party whose symbol is an elephant. And that is why I did it.
Krishna wrote: "But as far as I know that students are better understood there and nothing had been generalized, which is a very good thing. It understands that everyone is not the same."I have very little familiarity with the educational system in your country, except by dint of having taught a number of students from there. But they seemed to be better prepared, on average, than American students, though the comparison may not have been fair, because in order to travel to the States and pay the exorbitant full tuition and board at my college, they would have had to come from very affluent families. (Of course, increasingly, most of my American-born students did, as well.)
If what you mean is that teachers in the States "understand" their students better, I don't know. Secondary school teachers are typically overwhelmed by overloads. I can only speak to my experience as a college professor, and where I taught, rather uncharacteristically, significant emphasis *was* placed on quality teaching and advising. (At major universities in the States, research publications and grant acquisitions are usually rewarded to a far greater extent than attention to quality teaching, but it varies by institution and by department.) I'm not sure whether your reference to "nothing generalized" is meant to refer also to ostensible greater individual attention here. There *was* considerable individual attention given to students where I taught, but we were an expensive private liberal arts college, and as I say, somewhat atypical.
If you meant, instead, to refer to incoming students' having a broader "general" education, I am afraid that is unlikely to be true, simply because -- to my perception -- they seemed to have a very deficient general education... even the ones who were very extraordinarily bright.
Wow! This conversation about education has been very interesting! I am not familiar with the educational systems in any other country either. As a matter of fact, I really can only address what I know about education right here in my little corner of western Pennsylvania!! :) I have to say though that from my experience, Mark, you seem to be spot on! My kids have all recently gone through the public education system here and I don't think that system did a fantastic job of preparing them for college!! But that leads me to a point I want to make….. I believe that the superiority of the educational system you are in DOES appear to be tied to how affluent your particular school district is. And isn't that the huge problem that has been following us for as many years as I can remember? Those students who live in more economically challenged areas seem to attend schools that do not have the resources needed for a stellar education. Of course, Mary and Mark, you are correct… Republicans have used this very fact as an excuse to try to push their 'charter schools' and have tried to privatize education which, in my opinion, would only make matters worse. Republicans have also tried to blame the difficulties in education on teachers' unions and I have to admit that if Wisconsin is an example of this, they seem to have done a pretty good job! I don't know if I am as optimistic as Mary but I DO agree that having a President that is so intelligent and well educated IS inspiring and somehow makes it 'cool' to be smart!! :) And Dan, I have two kids who are engineering majors and you're right.. their course schedules are very regimented and they take very few courses in humanities/arts ; and there is an emphasis on preparing them for actual careers. I don't remember where I read it, but I DID read an article discussing that students are actually pushing for eliminating 'irrelevant' courses from their curricula. They are understandably concerned about the cost of higher education and they wish to finish their educations faster.
I have one other thing to add to this discussion…. from my observations, it seems that parental involvement is also important to a child's success. Perhaps because of the dire economic situations many parents find themselves in (working multiple jobs , etc..),parental involvement does seem to be lacking. I don't believe children can be successful from and at the beginnings of their education without parental involvement.
Krishna wrote: "OK but as far as I can understand, we are maybe better prepared, but it is not effective. U say what is the result?? But whatever u do, u have an effective system."It won't be that way for long. I work in an elementary school. You would be appalled at how low the kids are. When I was in 4th grade 40 years ago, we all read at a 7-8th grade level. These 4th graders now struggle to read at 3rd grade level for the most part. They are ignorant about everything. Their parents are ignorant and they don't even care if their children learn anything as long as they get good "grades." Granted, we have a lot of minorities and under privileged kids, but it's really not much better across town in the high income district. More and more students entering college can't hande the college level texts that are required and have to take "remedial" classes in reading and math. We are being undermined by standardized testing which narrows the curriculum down to almost nothing. As we say, the curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. Creativity is being choked out because of "teaching to the test." Good teachers leave the field in droves every year because of low pay, high stress, and being viewed with derision in our society. Literally, teachers are looked down on by other professions. As in the popular saying in this country, "those who can do, those who can't, teach."
Okay, that's the end of my rant for today.
Krishna, I think perhaps you misunderstood. I wasn't blaming parents completely. I was simply adding the lack of parental involvement … for whatever reason.. to the discussion. I think it's a factor to consider. I realize that there are families where both parents work and their children are good students. However, I was speaking more to the huge number of households headed by single parents… mostly women and mostly working low paying jobs. But Mary and Barbara also make good points. There are parents (people) in our society who do not place a lot of value on education and therefore they do not emphasize that importance with their children. And you're correct…. we do NOT beat our children!! And that's a GOOD thing!!! :)
I went to a rural centralized high school in Western New York. I was in an accelerated class, as I mentioned earlier. However, I was not prepared for the college I went to, Johns Hopkins. Students from my high school did not usually go to the top colleges and Hopkins always is ranked among the top 10 to 20, and it is a very, very tough school. It was then and it still is. Most kids went to the state schools in New York, Pennsylvania or Michigan. So I struggled in my early years of college, and I had to take some time away from Hopkins. I went to a couple of state schools in New York. It was like going back to high school. After a year and a half I transferred back to Hopkins and by then I could handle it and got my degree.
But the differences between the colleges I attended were remarkable. One professor at Buffalo State said it was the difference between the students. However, most of the courses were not nearly as tough. I had a history course that had a multiple choice exam. At Hopkins history exams consisted of impossibly obscure identifications and essays. At the mid term exam of second semester world history, the professor (who later became chairman of the department) said to us: "This is the toughest exam we've ever given. We're going to separate the men from the boys." (Hopkins was all male then). I think out of 250 or so students in that class, three got As and 10 got Bs. The rest were divided between Cs and Ds. They didn't grade on a curve.
My daughter went to very good private schools and she also began college at Hopkins. She was well prepared for it, but she didn't like it and went on to other schools. I tried to tell her, but you know what kids are like!
As often happens when we're discussing complex issues, I agree and disagree with everybody. I agree that parental involvement is very important in helping students to succeed, but my parents were not involved in my academic career at all, and as I'm sure I've said in earlier posts, I lived with my maternal grandmother when I was fourteen and fifteen (also when I was four and five), and she was illiterate. I remember once when I was in college, I was up late, studying for an exam, and my mother told me to put the book under my pillow and go to sleep because that's what she did when she had an exam in high school. I responded, "Yeah, and that's why you were married at 18, had a baby at 19, and didn't go to college." But, given my personality, I am happy that my parents weren't teachers, monitoring my homework and badgering my teachers when I was in high school. I would have probably been a "C" student if they had. The one year that I taught high school, my least favorite parents were the ones who were teachers or Northwestern professors. The goodreads teachers are exceptions, of course, but I know from the experiences of some of my colleagues that some teachers' children perform in school the way many preachers' children behave in the world. It's called rebellion.Krishna, I appreciate what you're saying about our educational system. We complain about it here, but I used to point out to my students that many people from other countries come here to get their education. A few of my Chinese students (I taught at a state school in California) came here alone when they were still in high school. My school also had a program that sent two Linguistics/English as Second Language professors and several graduate students to China each summer to teach. And a few of my former students have taught in China, Mexico, Japan, and Korea after earning advanced degrees.
Obviously, the foreign students (like Obama's late father) who come here are the cream of the crop from their country, not only because they may come from privileged backgrounds but also because they are motivated to pursue the best education. It's not fair to compare African Americans, for instance, to the Nigerians who came to America for an education. We should be compared to the Nigerians who stayed home.
But, Krishna, I agree with my compatriots on corporal punishment. Parents do not have to beat their children to control them. More educated parents understand how to discipline children without beating or verbally abusing them. I was treated harshly as a child, and it still affects my relationship with my mother, although she will be 87 on Monday, and I will be 66 next month. I saw how two of my white educated female friends handled their rambunctious sons when they were children. Today, all of those formerly out-of-control boys are successful young men. My friend Suzanne's sons were Obamas (half-black); the older one painted on her wall when he was small, and once reached over my head, hit the remote control, and shut down the garage door as we were pulling into my garage. I yelled, but Suzanne remained calm. He earned his B.A. from the highly-ranked private school Pomona College (he had a full scholarship) and his M.A. from Princeton. The last time I heard from him he was working for the City of Newark. My friend Carola's youngest son once tried to shut the elevator door on her, and I cringed because I thought she was going to slap him. She just said, "you little devil" in a teasing voice. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke (his father had a Ph.D. in the same field from Cornell) and married a part-black, part-Asian woman who also has a Duke Ph.D. in chemistry.
Finally, Darlene, I skimmed that article. Because of my background, I am always suspicious of suggestions that the past was better than the present. The so-called founding fathers, some of whom may have been my ancestors, had slaves. The fifties may have been more peaceful for whites, but I could not ride in the front of buses until the end of that decade, and my folks couldn't eat in restaurants or stay in hotels until the sixties. I don't really care how the schools were desegregated and how we got Roe vs. Wade as long as we made progress.
I'm optimistic about the future because (as Howard Dean once said and as Martin Luther King was saying with his arc of the moral universe speech), the liberals win eventually. There are always backlashes, and sometimes they last for close to a hundred years, as happened with the Jim Crow backlash to Reconstruction, but eventually we win. That's why women and blacks can vote, and women can still get legal abortions. My friend Suzanne could marry a black man, and Carola's son Daniel could marry a mixed race woman. That's why gays can now marry. The politicians are worse right now, partly because of the backlash to Obama and partly because we lost at least one great Senator (Kennedy; I'm not so sure about Bird) just after Obama took office, but I don't want to go back to the bad old days.
Okay, I've said enough. I have to wish Toni Morrison a happy birthday on google+ and facebook.
If you read the Atlantic piece about ISIS, then you have to read this, a harsh criticism of the article:http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/0...
Like Mark, I don't know much (in fact, I know nothing) about the education system in your country, Krishna. Are you saying that students there are not required to attend school? I think we had a discussion of home schooling on this thread a few months ago. I agree with Barbara, by the way, that there has been too much emphasis on testing since that No Child Left Behind disaster. Testing tests our ability to take tests, which is a skill, just like spelling and writing.
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Mary, we haven't had a President in quite a while who really was very well qualified. George H.W. Bush certainly was, but he isn't going to rank high in the ratings of Presidents. The way our elections are run, qualifications seldom are even made issues. Each candidate is going to get at least 40 percent of the vote. The battle is over the remaining 20 percent, and half of those people vote instinctively, sometimes just because of one thing.
So often it is just a handful of issues, maybe even just one that turns the tide and it is fairly common for that issue to be bogus. John Kennedy, whose qualifications for the Presidency were very limited, used the "missile gap," as a major campaign issue when there wasn't one.
Ronald Reagan said government was the problem. He made it a whole lot worse.
Michael Dukakis rode a tank and made a fool of himself.
Obama, who clearly had very limited qualifications, was black, brilliant and could make great speeches. Those three things along with the economic disaster and McCain picking Palin got him elected.
Our great and near-great Presidents - Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson - with Lincoln excepted - by and large had much better preparation for the Presidency than the ones we've elected during the past 40 years.