Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"I see socialization as a sort of hourglass' - probably the biggest problem with her approach, it requires longitudinal study, and a much more fine grained analysis of the notion of peer group.

"I have been unable...to give you answers to you answers to these questions, because the research has not yet been done" - perhaps not in child development, but in classroom management these questions have been addressed, though probably no more effectively.

"Parents are meant to enjoy parenting" - we are? How did she come to this conclusion?

"Although these babies learn very little during their two years in their mother's arms, that does not keep them from learning, when the time, all the things they need to know to become successful adults" - are babies "in traditional societies' a good comparision for babies in modern societies? Language learning does have a critical period, what else does?

"After American Independence, it became a central tenet of American politics that it was the role of the government to protect the citizen's right to live an independent and self-sufficient life on a farmstead. This way of thinking still permeates American republicanism today" - and under Thatcher it came home, interesting how this reasonable ideal is subverted by big business.

"As enclosure had concentrated land in the hands of the wealthy, [yeoman farming] was a difficult ideal to fulfil at home, but in New England emigrants hoped to realise a version of the utopian commonwealth where 'the whole people were landlords'" - so, the Empire has been hungry for cash and land (land being the second choice) not food.

"During the Commonwealth, the ideology of agricultural improvement was reinvigourated by the definition of the pursuit of profit not as sinful covetousness, but as a contribution to the nation's wealth, now understood to be the sum of private wealth".

"It seemed an 'absurd folly to run all over the world in search of colonies in Virginia or Guiana, whilst Ireland was lying desolate'"

"The English cast themselves in the role of the new 'Romans': just as Roman settlers had civilised the barbourous ancient Briton's, so the English would civilise the Irish" - why was there an ethnic bar in the British Empire, than the Romans didn't have?

"The British Empire was born on Newfoundland's stony beaches." - gathering a catch that would ultimately be sold to Southern European's for cash.

"The Tudor military ration drew mainly on local food sorces: under Henry VIII, England was self-sufficient in staple foodstuffs" - the switch to salt cod then was motivated by cost not scarcity.

"Nowadays, Baumrinds followers do not do research on preschoolers: they concentrate on adolescents. The advantage is that adolescents can fill lengthy questionnaires" - what psychology urgently needs is independent observable behaviours, not subjective responses to ambiguous written questions.

"The theory behind foster care is that kids need families. I think they need a stable peer group more than they need families." - surely there of plenty of statistics that compare fostering v. orphanages - which do provide a stable peer group?

"It's the neighbourhood, not the family. If you look at kids within a given neighbourhood, the presence or absence of a father doesn't make much difference."

"I ask you to consider the possibility that what the 'experts' say today on the subject of why children sometimes turn out badly may just as misguided as what they were saying - with, please note of benevolent omniscience - a hundred years ago." - there is more than one in which this book anticipates the populist thinking now prevalent.

"Media depictions of smokers as rebels and risk-takers - of smoking as a way of saying "I don't care" - make cigarettes attractive to teens" - ok, I'm drowning in clichés here.

"The changers of cultures are people in their teens or early twenties who have an age group of their own. Groupness motivates them to be different from the generation of their parents and teachers" - I think scale and culture are important here. Certainly, the Hungarian teenagers I spent the last 20 years with strike me as significantly more conservative than my own teen group.

"If I had gone through the routine brainwashing process and become a member-in-good-standing of the academic community, I would never had realised...." - sounds like one of my clever but still immature charges. Academic psychology=brainwashing: I said the same about Divinity class when I was 15.

"And we should also always acknowledge that we are reading a translation - not the original text, and that there is another voice in the room, another mind at work, as we read" - she hasn't addressed this at all, in what sense God is the mind at work in the bible? In the end my impression is that the Bible is in some sense a product of the Hebrew language.

"What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and God, and between man and man - but most of all, between man and himself" - this is the conclusion of a plausible argument. It is shocking how changes in presentation - the numbering of verses, and the use of headings - can have such a significant impact on intepretation.

"[The struggle with God] is a story that is part of every man and woman who has ever felt the need to claw against destiny, to insist on a different future than what God appears to be offering." - Wow! A very different religion to the ecumenical Prostestantism I was raised on.

"...the idea that ordinary people would be able to read the Bible in their own language, and to make their own decisions about what it meant, was viewed as a threatening possibility." - there is also the argument that in order to truly understand the word of God, you have to understand the language of God.

[Who is wise? He who learns from every human being...Who is wealthy? He who is happy with his lot.]

"...I am not rebelling against tradition but following history that beleives that to truly understand anything you must duke it out, on the inside, both with yourself and with God."

"And yet in dropping these body parts from their translations, the translators may be losing an important component of the ancient world's understanding of the body: the physical as a reference point for the world around it." - Ancient world, or Hebrew world, does Latin and Greek work like this?

"Yet the meanings of these Hebrew names are lost in translation because the names are simply transliterated - not translated (although Eve's name is neither)"

"The essential connection between man and the earth is missing. Without the reader's knowing that Adam is ADAMA - the ground he...will eventually return to."

"No matter how many readers have read before him, the reader must read again, must investigate, must lift the veil to seek the face of the text, over and over again." - for discovery or reassurance?

xxxiii "Slowly I understood that the way I read is interwined with the way my family reads." - does it expand or limit the individual's horizons, if reading becomes a family tradition.

"A teacher's job is to unite students by giving them a common goal" ' - Miss Jean Brodie?