University Of Michigan Gets Lost In The Tall SJW Weeds
The University of Michigan, my alma mater, will spend $85 million on "diversity" efforts over the next five years, including a disturbing cultural sensitivity program that will monitor students' progress in being indoctrinated.
Guess who's paying! Derek Draplin writes at Michigan Capital Confidential:
Roughly $31 million of the new spending will be paid from the university's general fund, most of which comes from tuition and fees paid by students and appropriations granted by state lawmakers.The rest will come from private donors, returns on university investments proceeds and other sources, according to U-M officials.
Earlier this year university officials increased tuition by 3.9 percent for in-state undergraduates at the Ann Arbor campus. This is more than double the rate of inflation, as well as the rate of increase lawmakers granted in appropriations for the Ann Arbor campus.
There will be surveys! And a tattle-tale phone line!
The university's increased diversity spending will pay for new programs and surveys.More money will be spent, for example, on resources dealing with "bias-related incidents," including a bias-reporting hotline. "These efforts," the plan says, "will offer critical support for all students involved in crisis, bias-related incidents or situations related to a challenging campus climate."
And yippee...another administrator!
The plan will also create a new full-time administrative position - titled a vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer (VPEI-CDO) - which "will serve as a leadership voice on diversity, equity and inclusion for the entire university." The person who holds that position will also implement the plan.
A comment on that Michigan Capital Confidential piece:
Susan Heathfield
No problem. I am no longer donating to UM or MSU and they are being dropped from my will. Good luck with that.
And from the Michigan Daily -- two, four, six, eight, can you spell in-doc-trin-ate?
The training will require a preliminary assessment to evaluate the students' cultural sensitivity levels.
Robby Soave has the right ideas about this, writing at Reason:
There are two great ways to increased actual diversity at the university. One, lower tuition, so that disadvantaged students can actually afford to attend. Two, prioritize the hiring of faculty members who hold a diverse range of views (at most universities, this would mean hiring more conservative and libertarian professors).UM, like so many other institutions, isn't actually committed to increasing diversity. It's committed to spending a lot of money on five-year-plans filled with meaningless buzzwords. And it's committed to contracting, rather than expanding, the range of acceptable opinions on campus.
As for this notion of bringing in a "diverse" student body, you can't just bring the right color faces in; they have to not flunk out.
Preventing that in any meaningful way doesn't start with "let's Band-Aid the college campus up with some colorful faces"; it starts way, way before that -- in elementary schools and in homes with intact families. But, hey, it's easier to just throw close to $100 million dollars around at the University of Michigan.
Got to keep up with the Jonesers...
http://www.city-journal.org/html/multiculti-u-13544.html
One hopes the university gulag is approaching Peak Dryrot.
Lastango at October 10, 2016 10:53 PM
The Mich Governor and Legislature could quickly end this (if they wanted to). In the Appropriation, include a provision limiting the tuition increase to 1%, forbidding spending on the program or hiring anyone to perform its functions, and call in the Trustees for uncomfortable public hearings, along with the Chancellor, some Deans and Vice Deans, and leave no doubt that until the persons responsible for approving the program are terminated (not including retirement or transfer), their budgets (especially travel and entertainment) will be cut in amounts sufficient to cover any necessary "diversity" programs the administration proposes. Until those responsible for setting up such programs and making others pay for them face consequences, there will be no changes. Republicans were given control of the Mich government on the promise of bringing sound fiscal policies and some sanity to government spending and programs. Talk is cheap. Here's a chance to show that the campaign rhetoric wasn't empty sound.
Wfjag at October 11, 2016 4:28 AM
"-- two, four, six, eight, can you spell in-doc-trin-ate?"
LOL! Great line!
Bob in Texas at October 11, 2016 5:14 AM
Great piece you linked at City Journal by Heather Mac Donald, Lastango.
Amy Alkon at October 11, 2016 5:17 AM
Hey, those 6 figure diversity dean positions aren't going to pay for themselves, yaknow?
I R A Darth Aggie at October 11, 2016 6:55 AM
We can look to the wisdom of Marx, Groucho Marx that is. "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."
That is the definition of "rent seeking". Select a road, build a gate, and collect tolls.
Correcting for a lack of diversity is rent seeking. Selecting on merit exposes group differences, a little from different group IQ and a lot from different group cultures. So, declare that these differences are imaginary and the prior selection on merit is a construct of white privilege. Instead of fixing the merit selection (assuming it needed fixing), create jobs to select according to race and culture, going against measures of merit.
This appeals to the majority of people who are average or below and is a political winner.
Andrew Garland at October 11, 2016 7:02 AM
Let's not spend the money on a science lab or new professors. Let's spend it on a diversity chair.
What do we really want out of our colleges and universities, social engineering or education?
If we want social engineering, we're going to pay the price laters. Our engineers will build bridges that collapse. Our accountants will not be able to balance a ledger. Our writers will churn out pablum. Our minds will turn to mush as no one will have read or viewed a single classic work of Western Civilization.
Toni Morrison is now considered equivalent to William Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway. Not because she's a good author, but because she ticks a box in the diversity checklist. That's not fair to her or to the students who won't be exposed to older, dead white male authors whose works are (and should be) canonical.
Conan the Grammarian at October 11, 2016 8:04 AM
Um, Conan, did it ever occur to you that students who seldom or never read novels unless ASSIGNED to read them aren't going to remember much of anything they're FORCED to read?
As Katha Pollitt said in her award-winning essay, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me":
http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/01/why-we-read-canon-to-the-right-of-me-by-katha-pollitt.html
"...In America today the assumption underlying the canon debate is that the books on the list are the only books that are going to be read, and if the list is dropped no books are going to be read. Becoming a textbook is a book's only chance; all sides take that for granted. And so all agree not to mention certain things that they themselves, as highly educated people and, one assumes, devoted readers, know perfectly well. For example, that if you read only twenty-five, or fifty, or a hundred books, you can't understand them, however well chosen they are. And that if you don't have an independent reading life -- and very few students do -- you won't LIKE reading the books on the list and will forget them the minute you finish them..."
Later on, she quotes from Randall Jarrell's 1953 essay "The Age of Criticism."
The whole essay is very much worth reading. Here are more excerpts:
"Now, I have to say that I dislike the radicals' vision intensely. How foolish to argue that Chekhov has nothing to say to a black woman -- or, for that matter, to me -- merely because he is Russian, long dead, a man. The notion that one reads to increase one's self-esteem sounds to me like more snake oil. Literature is not an aerobics class or a session at the therapist's…"
"...In that other country of real readers -- voluntary, active, self-determined readers -- a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly hidebound to put Hawthorne on the syllabus and not Toni Morrison. It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu -- a choice part arbitrary, part a nod to the national past, part, dare one say it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one read the books that are a little off-putting, that have got a little cold, that you might pass over because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life, but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up into institutional fodder for teenagers. Generations of high school students have been spoiled for George Eliot by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her if grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure.
"Of course, they rarely do..."
"...But is there any list of a few dozen books that can have such a magical effect, for good or for ill? Of course not. It's like arguing that a perfectly nutritional breakfast cereal is enough food for the whole day. And so the canon debate is really an argument about what books to cram down the resistant throats of a resentful captive populace of students; and the trick is never to mention the fact that, in such circumstances, one book is as good, or as bad, as another. Because, as the debaters know from their own experience as readers, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way -- if, indeed, they do so at all -- or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary run of humanity with larger vocabularies. Books cannot mold a common national purpose when, in fact, people are honestly divided about what kind of country they want -- and are divided, moreover, for very good and practical reasons, as they always have been.
"For these burly and strenuous purposes, books are all but useless. The way books affect us is an altogether more subtle, delicate, wayward and individual, not to say private, affair. And that reading is being made to bear such an inappropriate and simplistic burden speaks to the poverty both of culture and of frank political discussion in our time..."
lenona at October 11, 2016 8:53 AM
lenona,
I got lost. What was the point?
Bob in Texas at October 11, 2016 9:39 AM
There is overt discrimination, and this is illegal. However, students are not in a position most of the time to be doing any such thing: they don't hire or fire people, for example. If the university campus is "challenging", as the memo says, then it is the fault of the faculty and administration, not the students.
This initiative seeks to make it illegal to have bad thoughts. It will try to eliminate badthink. But let's be clear: it will be ok to hate white people and men. It will seek to instill guilt in the same. Any opinions about anything not SJW will be forbidden, including politics (since Trump posters are "triggering" and "violent"). This is far too much meddling into the inner lives of people. Even churches don't intrude into your thoughts this much and admit that we are all sinners. Even in the strictest societies, it is almost entirely your behaviors that are regulated.
cc at October 11, 2016 9:39 AM
Diversity will require "separate but equal" living spaces, study spaces, and of course Black and LGBT tutors (you think they will let White kids do it?).
These will be "NO GO" zones ('cause whitey is evil and hurtful) and will be dangerous to those (white) not in the "group". (See Bernie/Clinton supporters stalk and attack Trump supporters as well as what seems to be the first response of BLM. Free speech you know.)
Where will the tutors come from? Will the grades awarded be truthful? How will this "rape culture" thingy work out in the Black and the LGBT dorms?
I think it couldn't happen to more deserving people, both scholars? and teachers.
Bob in Texas at October 11, 2016 9:46 AM
What's going to be both tragic and amusing is when the safe spaces decide that merely excluding white men isn't tribal enough, and they start excluding other minorities. The Black safe space will exclude Cubans, the Cuban one will exclude Mexicans, the Mexican one will exclude Koreans, and so on. They'll start fighting to see who gets the biggest piece of the pie (which, by their collective actions, they have ensured will be finite and forever shrinking). It'll get ugly.
At first, they will try to blame all of the problems on white men, but pretty soon there won't be any white men around to blame. That's when they will start applying purity tests to their own group. The impure will be deemed "virtually white" and subject to the same treatment as whites get. After a while there will be a large body of people who have been excluded from their own tribes. They will find that the only people who welcome them or are willing to be civil to them are whites, which they will find horribly confusing. Most of them will go to their graves refusing to believe it.
Cousin Dave at October 11, 2016 10:44 AM
Um, Conan, did it ever occur to you that students who seldom or never read novels unless ASSIGNED to read them aren't going to remember much of anything they're FORCED to read?
Much of education is based on force, Lenona.
If you leave it up to the pupils what to study, they'll study Pokeman, Katy Perry, and the latest in social media.
English lit? making change and/or balancing a check book? chemistry? geometry?? forgetaboutit.
They won't be even qualified to be a barista at Starbucks.
I R A Darth Aggie at October 11, 2016 11:37 AM
I am no longer donating to UM or MSU and they are being dropped from my will. Good luck with that.
Why would anyone donate money to a university? It's not a charity. I can see donating money to a needy and deserving student, but donating or leaving money to a college seems like leaving it to the Church: they have more money than you ever will, and they're not going to spend it wisely.
Kevin at October 11, 2016 11:39 AM
lenona, it's not the remembering things, it's the being exposed to them.
It's the unifying thread running through society when all students are exposed to the great works of Western Civilization.
When Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson used to make reference to ancient Greece of even a Shakespearean character or play, everyone understood what they were referring to, even if they didn't remember the story. Now, Shakespeare and Sophocles (and Mark Twain and Thomas Jefferson) are dismissed as "dead white guys." Today, we are lacking the unifying thread that was a common civilization.
Conan the Grammarian at October 11, 2016 12:16 PM
@Cousin Dave-reminds me of the Dr. Seuss Snitches with Stars story.
justme at October 11, 2016 3:15 PM
darned auto-correct: Sneetches
justme at October 11, 2016 3:17 PM
My point was, as Pollitt also said, that choosing which books to put on the mandatory list doesn't matter nearly as much as getting kids to LIKE reading for fun. Math, for example, is simply not the same thing - by and large, it's a tool. Highly useful, yes, but not something anyone expects you to do for fun - and you won't suffer if you don't.
In short, if you read the whole essay, you'll find that there are plenty of reasons that "exposure" in school isn't even half of what kids need in order to remember what they digest, spit out, and forget over the summer.
Bottom line: Yes, the reading list matters a bit (as Pollitt admitted), but there are more good novels every year, just as there's more history every decade, so if you're a parent, quit fussing over what the teachers aren't making kids read and convince your kids to read fiction and non-fiction on their own. Any teen who has never willingly sat through a Shakespeare play will not be helped in college by being "exposed" to mandatory readings.
lenona at October 11, 2016 3:39 PM
Let's look at the canon question from another angle. Instead of asking what books we want others to read, let's ask why we read books ourselves. I think the canon debaters are being a little disingenuous here, are suppressing, in the interest of their own agendas, their personal experience of reading. Sure, we read to understand our American culture and history, and we also read to recover neglected masterpieces, and to learn more about the accomplishments of our subgroup and thereby, as I've admitted about myself, increase our self-esteem. But what about reading for the aesthetic pleasures of language, form, image? What about reading to learn something new, to have a vicarious adventure, to follow the workings of an interesting, if possible skewed, narrow and ill-tempered mind? What about reading for the story? For an expanded sense of sheer human variety? There are a thousand reasons why a book might have a claim on our time and attention other than its canonization. I once infuriated an acquaintance by asserting that Trollope, although in many ways a lesser writer than Dickens, possessed some wonderful qualities Dickens lacked: a more realistic view of women, a more skeptical view of good intentions, a subtler sense of humor, a drier vision of life which I myself found congenial. You'd think I'd advocated throwing Dickens out and replacing him with a toaster. Because Dickens is a certified Great Writer, and Trollope is not.
lenona at October 11, 2016 3:40 PM
Sorry, I got kicked off. That last post is another excerpt from Pollitt's essay.
She followed that paragraph with:
"Am I saying anything different from what Randall Jarrell said in his great 1953 essay 'The Age of Criticism'? Not really, so I'll quote him. Speaking of the literary gatherings of the era, Jarrell wrote:
'If, at such parties, you wanted to talk about Ulysses or The Castle or The Brothers Karamazov or The Great Gatsby or Graham Greene's last novel -- Important books -- you were at the right place. (Though you weren't so well off if you wanted to talk about Remembrance of Things Past. Important, but too long.) But if you wanted to talk about Turgenev's novelettes, or The House of the Dead, or Lavengro, or Life on the Mississippi, or The Old Wives' Tale, or The Golovlyov Family, or Cunningham-Grahame's stories, or Saint-Simon's memoirs, or Lost Illusions, or The Beggar's Opera, or Eugen Onegin, or Little Dorrit, or the Burnt Njal Saga, or Persuasion, or The Inspector-General, or Oblomov, or Peer Gynt, or Far from the Madding Crowd, or Out of Africa, or the Parallel Lives, or A Dreary Story, or Debits and Credits, or Arabia Deserta, or Elective Affinities, or Schweik, or -- any of a thousand good or interesting but Unimportant books, you couldn't expect a very ready knowledge or sympathy from most of the readers there. They had looked at the big sights, the current sights, hard, with guides and glasses; and those walks in the country, over unfrequented or thrice-familiar territory, all alone -- those walks from which most of the joy and good of reading come -- were walks that they hadn't gone on very often.'
"I suspect that most canon debaters have taken those solitary rambles, if only out of boredom -- how many times, after all, can you reread the Aeneid, or Mrs. Dalloway, or Cotton Comes to Harlem (to pick one book from each column)? But those walks don't count, because of another assumption all sides hold in common, which is that the purpose of reading is none of the many varied and delicious satisfactions I've mentioned; it's medicinal. The chief end of reading is to produce a desirable kind of person and a desirable kind of society. A respectful, high-minded citizen of a unified society for the conservatives, an up-to-date and flexible sort for the liberals, a subgroup-identified, robustly confident one for the radicals. How pragmatic, how moralistic, how American! The culture debaters turn out to share a secret suspicion of culture itself, as well as the antipornographer's belief that there is a simple, one-to-one correlation between books and behavior. Read the conservatives' list and produce a nation of sexists and racists -- or a nation of philosopher kings. Read the liberals list and produce a nation of spineless relativists -- or a nation of open-minded world citizens. Read the radicals' list and produce a nation of psychobabblers and ancestor-worshippers -- or a nation of stalwart proud-to-be-me pluralists."
And earlier, she says:
"...But then I think of myself as a child, leafing through anthologies of poetry for the names of women. I never would have admitted that I needed a role model, even if that awful term had existed back in the prehistory of which I speak, but why was I so excited to find a female name, even when, as was often the case, it was attached to a poem of no interest to me whatsoever? Anna Laetitia Barbauld, author of 'Life! I know not what thou art / But know that thou and I must part!'; Lady Anne Lindsay, writer of plaintive ballads in incomprehensible Scots dialect, and the other minor female poets included by chivalrous Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the old Oxford Book of English Verse: I have to admit it, just by their presence in that august volume they did something for me. And although it had not much to do with reading or writing, it was an important thing they did..."
"...Something is being overlooked: the state of reading, and books, and literature in our country at this time. Why, ask yourself, is everyone so hot under the collar about what to put on the required-reading shelf? It is because while we have been arguing so fiercely about which books make the best medicine, the patient has been slipping deeper and deeper into a coma."
lenona at October 11, 2016 3:48 PM
BTW, I can think of at least one evil name in world history that no one, for pretty much a century, has expected teens to know as well as the names of Hitler and Stalin - but maybe it's high time they were taught that name. It's Leopold II, of Belgium, the "Butcher of the Congo." At the least, learning about him would help kids to think twice before admiring many beautiful monuments in Europe and wonder just how they came to be built. (One can't help but suspect that the reason teachers don't teach about him much in the U.S. - aside from the color of his victims, of course - is that very few of Leopold's African victims have descendants living in the U.S., unlike the descendants of slaves - so they don't see why they or their students should care about what happened.)
Though, as the author of "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa" (1998) pointed out, Leopold wasn't worse than many. From another poster:
"I certainly don't want to be seen as defending Leopold, but he actually wasn't much different from his contemporaries. I've read Hochschild's book (King Leopold's Ghost), and it is a great book in so many ways. The first 17 chapters of the book lay out the case against Leopold, but then the last 2 chapters make it clear that what Belgium did wasn't any worse than what other countries did - and, in fact, that France was more brutal in Africa than Belgium was. And much the same can be said of Germany and the UK.
"It seems to me that Leopold's main problem was that he got caught. And the reason he got caught is that one particular guy (E. D. Morel) made it his life's work to get him. And, given that Morel was British and Protestant, it could well be the case that he (Morel) did it out of rivalry and spite against a Catholic foreigner. I'm not saying that Morel was a bad guy, quite the opposite in fact, but the fact remains that if Morel hadn't existed, Leopold would probably have gotten away with it..."
lenona at October 11, 2016 4:03 PM
$85 million!
Just think of all the pop tarts you could buy with that loot.
And students would like those better than the PC "Kool-Aid".
charles at October 11, 2016 6:20 PM
"But what about reading for the aesthetic pleasures of language, form, image? What about reading to learn something new, to have a vicarious adventure, to follow the workings of an interesting, if possible skewed, narrow and ill-tempered mind? What about reading for the story? For an expanded sense of sheer human variety? "
Indeed, for adults. But how do you think they learned to appreciate those things? If you think children will just naturally pick up complex novels and read them, you're delusional. That running-around-in-the-daisy-fields-naked form of education just flat does not work. (Amy published a quote a few weeks ago from an author who appeared to be advocating the "self discovery" style of education. The article contained an allusion to William Blake. The author did not, I assure you, learn about William Blake from picking daisies.)
And given that there are only so many educational hours available, there pretty much has to be some sort of canon. After all, some works will be more effective than others at illustrating the principles of the art, and some works will be more appropriate for different achievement levels. Here's a dirty little secret: those people who advocate eliminating the canon? They don't do it because they disagree with the notion of a canon. They disagree with it because they want to replace the canon with one of their own preferred narrative, one in which Western civilization is evil and the triumph of socialism is inevitable. This is true, almost without exception. (And in the world that they prefer, there will be no books to read, because when the masses read books, they get bourgeois thoughts. Can't have that.)
Cousin Dave at October 12, 2016 7:05 AM
Well "Fifty Shades of Grey" might get 'em interested in reading. Next step Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Bob in Texas at October 12, 2016 7:19 AM
lenona,
Left to their own devices the majority of kids would aught but read Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, and Stephen King. These are all fine books (except the Twilight series which is idiotic), but hardly the type to use as a foundation for civilization.
Like math and science, reading foundational books is not something the average student will stumble onto, nor gain any expertise about the more complex aspects without some kind of guidance or foundation of study. That's why we have an education system, to steer our progeny into studying subjects that lead to a better civilization and give them a foundation in these subjects - literature, music, art, engineering, science, et al.
Some will continue their study of these subjects, either in college or independently. Others will forget them almost immediately, but the good the exposure to them did will not be erased.
Even if you don't become a scientist or mathematician, study of the related subjects expands you brain's capacity to think.
The way we teach these subjects needs to be updated. Most kids sitting through a reading of Hamlet will be turned off Shakespeare for ever with the pointless and curiosity-killing deconstructionism that became de rigueur in the '70s.
The current fashion in education is to "teach them to think" without giving them a foundation of knowledge to draw upon while thinking. We do our children a disservice by not building for them a library of internal knowledge and exposure.
Conan the Grammarian at October 12, 2016 8:15 AM
If you think children will just naturally pick up complex novels and read them, you're delusional.
__________________________________________
Neither I nor Pollitt suggested that that happens by itself. Maybe it would be a good idea to read the whole essay - there's a reason it's highly acclaimed and won the National Magazine Award and the Whiting Foundation Writing Award. Besides which, she HAS taught poetry at Princeton and Barnard. Plus, "she has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi and Cornell."
Obviously, teachers have to choose the more highly critically acclaimed books for the mandatory reading lists in school - but by now, there are far more acclaimed books to choose from than before, in part because women and minorities have finally gotten a chance to use their talents, so reading their books has finally become important to understanding modern culture. Also, that shouldn't mean sneering at kids when you find out what graphic novels they're reading in their spare time, and when it comes to kids under ten, there should be SOME flexibility as to what individual kids get to read - so long as it's not below their grade level.
Two excellent books on getting kids to enjoy reading are Jim Trelease's "The Read-Aloud Handbook" and Mary Leonhardt's "Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don't." She's a 9th-grade teacher who's said she's lost track of the number of parents who come to her at the beginning of the school year and say sadly: "I just don't know why he doesn't like to read. We've read to him ever since he was a baby." She said that very often in those cases, the previous teacher was to blame.
I believe her. However, there's another problem - preteen kids who love to LISTEN to adults reading good literature aloud, but who can't be bothered to pick up books themselves - at least, not books without pictures in them. My hunch is that a lot of parents, in their enthusiasm for reading aloud, forget to demand something in return - namely, that kids who can read should read every other page or chapter aloud to the PARENT, simply so as to become accustomed to the habit. (In the same vein, Dr. Spock wrote that parents who prevent babies from feeding themselves with spoons between 12 and 24 months are going to find themselves with toddlers who refuse to feed themselves, since making the effort is no longer interesting to them at age 2.)
Given how much kids are surrounded by instant gratification, it seems clear that teaching kids to enjoy anything that isn't about instant gratification is a very long-term, delicate process - but it has to be done, by both parents and teachers. Otherwise, the only stories they're going to remember are the ones they hear over and over - something teachers clearly don't have time for. Not to mention that learning to ENJOY the slow-paced activities of school and life in general - not just endure them as torture - is obviously essential to one's work ethic and maturity in general.
(One example of stories we know by rote would be Bible stories - and the only reason *I* knew most of the main stories was that I LIKED to read and the children's Bible - by Seymour Loveland - was actually in the house. No one read them to me. Even atheist Richard Dawkins has said that reading the Bible is highly important to understanding Western literature and culture - but he didn't say that it needs to be on any school's reading list, per se, and there are good reasons for that.)
Bottom line: The dumbing-down of society will continue until students themselves decide to fall in love with books without pictures in them (and read them in their SPARE time, not just assigned books) and you can't order people to fall in love with any pastime; you can only gently push them. By the time they're 18, chances are they're set in their ways.
___________________________________________
Left to their own devices the majority of kids would aught but read Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight, and Stephen King. These are all fine books (except the Twilight series which is idiotic), but hardly the type to use as a foundation for civilization.
____________________________________________
Obviously, there needs to be a strong limit on how much kids choose those books for book reports. I wasn't suggesting otherwise.
And if parents want them reading something other than fantasy in their SPARE time, that's more their job than the teachers' job.
Here's another interesting anecdote:
In a Feb. 2005 TIME cover article, it said:
...Kohn knows a college counselor hired by parents to help "package" their child, who had perfect board scores and a wonderful grade-point average. When it was time to work on the college essay, the counselor said, "Let's start with a book you read outside of school that really made a difference in your life." There was a moment of silence. Then the child responded, "Why would I read a book if I didn't have to?"
(Not to mention that zero love of reading often means zero interest in serious news stories - or the general world. That's hardly good for this country's future. Another tip I'd suggest: "no, you may not keep video games/TV/computers in your bedroom, because learning to love reading for hours at a time is more important than anything else. Even if you don't plan to go to college.")
lenona at October 12, 2016 9:48 AM
I believe Leopold was once the subject of an entire thread on this forum, complete with condemnatory posts and general horror at what was done to the Congolese on his orders.
Conan the Grammarian at October 12, 2016 1:27 PM
"Besides which, she HAS taught poetry at Princeton and Barnard. Plus, "she has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi and Cornell."
As far as I know, none of those schools has third graders.
Cousin Dave at October 13, 2016 6:13 AM
Remember when Deng Xiaoping ruled China? He created a hotline to be used in reporting dissidents, and a reward for turning them in so that they could be rounded up and "re-educated."
The hotline had to be discontinued after tens of millions of Chinese, many of them living outside China, started calling the hotline, asking about the reward and wasting as much of the operators' time as possible -- and then saying "I want to report Deng Xiaoping." Which of course was always followed by the operator shouting "You bastard!" and hanging up.
Wouldn't it just be a crying shame if the same thing starts happening to "bias incident hotlines" at every university that starts one?
jdgalt at October 15, 2016 12:52 PM
As far as I know, none of those schools has third graders.
___________________________________
And haven't we complained plenty of times here about students over 18 acting that age?
Plus, she raised a kid.
To put things another way, of course we want kids to eat healthful food as adults, and parents who put no limits on junk food aren't helping their kids to learn to love vegetables. That does NOT change the fact that there are plenty of ways to make kids hate healthful food (or good books), so parents and teachers alike need to figure out how to avoid those mistakes.
Here's one thing that most people agree on: It doesn't help to yell at kids for their tastes in leisure reading, per se. It's also important, as Jim Trelease pointed out, to let kids know that while there will be limits on how much screen time per day they can have, that does not mean they have to sit through a bedtime story if they don't want to. I.e., don't let reading seem like the thief of video game time - it only whets their appetite for the wrong thing. (In the same vein, it's a good idea not to let kids have a sugary dessert every night just because other kids do - and they need to learn they still have to eat dinner.)
lenona at October 16, 2016 12:28 PM
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