Now that my cover is blown I feel inhibited from saying much about this (and looking after my 3 year old daughter means I don’t have time today anyway) but there’s lots of interesting stuff about childcare, nannies, and the mommy wars out there. Caitlin Flanagan’s rivetting piece in The Atlantic is finally online, and a follow up exhange of letters with Barbara Ehrenreich and Sara Mosle is very interesting. Laura at Apartment 11D has several posts on the debate which vary in temper but are all worth reading. Her initial take on the Barbara Ehrenreich letter is that it is defensive, and biased against stay-at-home moms, but I think she is misreading it — so, I think, does Russell Arben Fox, who takes Ehrenreich to be inserting the signifcance of class into the debate. I don’t think Ehrenreich is biased against stay-at-home-moms, but I do think she buys into a more productivist ethic than Russell and Laura (and I) subscribe to. Good stuff all.
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Harry
This story about the inflation of high school diplomas simply states what anyone working in a US high school knows — graduation simply requires attendance plus a modicum of obedience. Failing that, it helps to have parents who are willing to make life sufficiently difficult for administrators and teachers that they will give you a passing grade anyway. There are multiple culprits. One is the ludicrous system of having classroom teachers be the sole assigners of grades. I spent Sunday watching two teachers spend 90 minutes preparing for a meeting one of them was having on Monday with a parent of a student. The sole purpose of the meeting was to negotiate over the grade. The teacher had assigned a B and the parent was not satisfied. In the end, the parent refused to be satisfied (having recalculated the grade herself) and is insisting on a meeting with the Principal. My prediction — the parent will win, because the Principal will think — ‘this is a complete waste of my time, caving on this won’t make things any worse between me and the teacher, and it’ll get this p-i-t-a off my back’. Total waste — about 5 hours of school teachers and principal’s time. (I don’t care about the student’s or parent’s time — lets assume that harassing teachers is their hobby).
My daughter (who is reliable about these things) informs me that several girls in her school are called Madison. Now, I know it can be hard to think up a good name for a kid, but simply slapping them with the name of their birthplace seems excessively unimaginative. Its also seems like free-riding — what if everybody did it? I hope that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d lived in the Bronx, Bognor Regis, or Llandrindod Wells.
I should declare an interest. If my parents had engaged in this abusive practice, I would now share the name of an incredibly lame Radio 4 sitcom.
Laura has two interesting posts, the first on the desirability of equal-split houseworking and parenting, and how difficult it is to achieve (prompted by reading Naomi Wolf’s self indulgent whinings about the issue); the second a collection of vignettes from her readers about how they try to manage equal-split houseworking and parenting (and, in some cases, fail). Generally, it seems, the women do more than half. Laura’s response to Wolf is interesting, and less daring from her than it would be from me:
bq. My first thoughts were to advise all my single friends to stay away from careerist husbands. Girls, go for the slackers. They might not make senior partner, but they’ll make your dinner and play with the kids. You might not be able to afford a house in a town with a good school district, but so what. He’s made lasagna for dinner.
Kevin Drum’s seemingly innocent question about why kids don’t walk to school anymore has prompted some interesting discussions about what makes for a good childhood. This is a discussion liberals often like to avoid because they don’t want to appear to be judgmental about other people’s parenting practices, and especially fear accusations of being racist, elitist, or culturally imperialist. For example, the claim that so-called ‘middle-class parenting practices’ (which include talking to your kids, reasoning with them rather than demanding blind obedience, ensuring, if one is divorced, that they maintain contact with their other initial parent) are responsible for success in school is often criticized not for being untrue but for blaming the parents (or the poor, or racial minorities).
But this is one of those areas where we have to make value judgments. We make them personally in our own decisions about how to raise our own kids, because we want to give them better rather than worse childhoods. And we have to make judgments about what makes for a better rather than worse childhoods for policy purposes. One comment in Keiran’s thread noted that new housing developments frequently have no sidewalks. The zoning board, in those cases, has assumed either that it is ok for children to be entirely restricted to private spaces, or that they will be so restricted anyway so why force developers to waste money on sidewalks? It is right to criticize the zoning board (not the developer) for failing properly to incorporate quality-of-childhood issues into their decisions.
This is a request for help. A student came to me with Will Durant’s list of 100 necessary books which he (the student) thinks needs updating. He, the student, wants to know what books the educated person should have read, that have been published since 1970. I am just about the worst person for him to come to, since unlike all my CT colleagues I am narrowly read and utterly lacking in erudition in subjects other than cricket, children’s TV, the history of the far left, and my professional interests. But you, the readers, are a different matter, and I have access to you. So, submissions, please, of the two books you think every educated person should have read, published 1970 or later. Your reward will be in heaven…
I just came across the following interesting quote from Harvey Mansfield:
bq. Procreation is considered to be part of a perfect or complete human life
He is quoted in the course of Stephen Macedo’s absolute blinder of an essay, “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind” (Georgetown Law Journal, 1995, no internet access, I’m afraid). Although Mansfield distances himself from the view (‘is considered to be’), its fair to assume that he is committing himself to it, given that he is using it to oppose homosexuality in general and gay marriage in particular. Macedo deals well — no, brilliantly — with Mansfield and his ilk, but part of the brilliance of his essay is that he concedes so much to the conservatives, yet still comes up with homosexuality defended as morally innocent, and homosexual marriage defended as a positive good. So part of his strategy is to concede the vital importance of procreation to human flourishing.
An alternative strategy, common among liberals, would be to deny the relevance of the claim to formulating policy.
Go to Erik Olin Wright’s website where he has today placed some delightful stories he made up for his children and nephews, nieces etc. You need Windows Media Player. If, like my kids, yours like to listen to tapes of stories you can easily download and play them these. Libertarians beware — they might turn your kids into analytical Marxists. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. (Warning: I’ve no idea how much traffic he’s prepared for so it may not all be plain sailing).
For those of you who just want to read his papers, you’re boring, but they are here.
The US administration defends the rights of its citizens to be untroubled by discomforting information. Why? Do they think people will listen to WHO? Question for those who know more about this than I do: does obesity cost governments money all things considered, or does it save them money by causing earlier death resulting in lower claims on social security/pensions etc?
As the primaries creep up on us (in the US), I want to make a point against the primary system that seems obvious to me but I’ve not heard made elsewhere. It is simply this: it constitutes an unwarranted violation of the principle of freedom of association.
Via Laura at Apartment 11D I got to this post about Barbie by Tim Burke. His main complaint is that Barbie is inflexible, doesn’t stand up alone, and is in general less interesting than boy’s toys. Fair enough, though I suspect that these features all serve her rather well as a fantasy toy. Barbie is, mercifully, no longer part of my life. My elder daughter (7) went through a 3-week Barbie phase, and refers to her less subtle friends (descriptively, not dismissively) as ‘Barbie girls’. My younger (2) occasionally gets the elder’s Barbies out to play with, but is going through a jigsaw puzzle obsession at the moment, and anyway prefers tea-sets and playing with her sister (who is more flexible, and more tolerant, than Barbie). But when Barbie was more of an issue I noted that in my (admittedly quirky) circle, fathers expressed enormous hostility to Barbie; whereas mothers tended to be much less judgemental (presumably on the ‘well, I played with her and she never did me any harm’ principle, though its not clear to me why they think they are the best judges of that). In the same circle, by the way, hostility to Britney Spears is entirely gender neutral (and extreme). I don’t share the hostility to Britney, largely because my elder is so clueless that she believed Britney to be a basketball player until last month. Anyway, is the gendered nature of the hostility to Barbie a general phenomenon?
The New Statesman (subscription required) just published this article about why school vouchers would not have a beneficial impact in Britain. I wrote it in a fit of irritation after hearing the know-all Melanie Phillips on the radio expressing her support for vouchers, and invoking the Swedish and Dutch experiences. The Swedish voucher scheme has been evaluated positively (and frequently) by Bergstrom and Sandstrom. But it is tiny, and if you read the version of their study put out by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation you’ll find no evidence of improved scores, and that it is regulated in a way that is unimaginable in the US or UK. The Dutch experience is very different — most children attend private schools on what is effectively a voucher system, but the State subjects all schools to heavy regulation, and the vouchers are highly progressive (schools get paid much more for low-income kids, kids from homes with low levels of parental education, kids from non-Dutch speaking homes). The Netherlands is consistently a pretty high performer in international comparisons of children’s achievement. But there is no particular reason to think this is due to their having private schools. The virtual elimination of child poverty, for example, might be responsible. My response to Phillips on the comparison is this: you give us high marginal tax rates, low levels of inequality and child poverty, etc, and I’ll give you progressive school vouchers.
Anyway, that’s the background — the article ignores the other Northern Europeans, and concentrates on the differences between the US and the UK. Here it is:
I can’t tell how far this story has got out of Wisconsin, but it is pretty amusing. Bishop Burke of La Crosse has issued a statement denying communion to legislators who vote pro-choice. You can imagine that quasi-Catholic legislators are annoyed, and so are their Democratic colleagues. There’s been lots of nonsense on the radio about the threat to separation of church and state, revealing that people really don’t understand the point of separation, which is to protect religious believers from discrimination by the state and other faiths, not to protect them from their own church (we have laws against murder, etc, to do that). The legislators are free to leave the church if they disagree with it, or if they want to take a job which requires them to act against its policies. Burke is simply illuminating the reality of the choice. Good luck to him.
The latest issue of the Arizona Law Review is available online, seemingly with no subscription needed. It’s an interdisciplinary issue on Youth, Voice and Power, with several interesting papers, all pretty accessible. Despite the liberationist-sounding title, most of the papers are pretty soberly paternalistic. They’re all worth reading, but the two I learned most from are by Tamar Schapiro and Robert Emery.
If you don’t like being guilt-tripped skip this. The rest of you get your credit cards out. Here’s the deal. Figure out how much you are spending on Christmas/Holiday cheer. Figure out how much has been spent on you. Add the two figures together. Halve that figure and plug it in to the OxfamAmerica form or the Oxfam UK form (depending where you pay taxes — for other countries you can reach your own country by negotiating from the OxfamAmerica home page). (Note: if, like me, no-one spends anything on you at Christmas the decent thing to do is to skip the adding and halving stages.) If you are a utilitarian this is the best thing you can do, if you are a Kantian it is also the best thing as long as you don’t enjoy it (that’s a joke — I know Kantianism isn’t really like that).
Next year I’ll do this early in December so you can avoid giving presents to people you don’t like and, instead, send them an email saying you’ve donated X amount to Oxfam in their name.
Donations from non-celebrators of Christmas are also, I believe, welcome.