Category: ZT & PC

JillMatrix comments on George Will’s comments about why kids are still doing horribly at History.

And George Will says, I sh*t you not, that a major reason that U.S. students are not good at history is that the information is being kept from them because “so many of the heros are white men.”

She takes his comment as meaning that “American history studies have been diluted by including facts about women and people of other ethnicities.” She demurs, feeling that it’s mainly that people don’t value history.

She may be right. But let me make a feeble stab at defending George Will. I wrote the first draft of this in her comments, but I wrote enough to prompt me to write it here.

History, to be useful and interesting, must make sense. It must hang together, have meaning, create a tapestry. Threads and fabric swatches are interesting, maybe even pretty, but not real useful.

In that sense, history as a Bunch of Dead White Guys may actually make some sense. That’s not a politically correct thing to say, but to the extent that history is about facts, not niceness or politeness or making people feel good, I think it’s true.

Yes, it’s neat to know what life was like for a Jewish Lesbian of Color in 18th Century Vermont. I even daresay that people should know about that person. People should know a lot of things, but there’s limited time (not to mention, to echo JillMatrix’s point, interest) to learn history, so you have to pick and choose your battles.

The fact is, very few Jewish Lesbians of Color in 18th Century were elected President or had much influence outside of their immediate friends and family. That doesn’t mean our hypothetical subject wasn’t a good, valuable, worthwhile person, just not a good, valuable, worthwhile historic figure. It’s neat to know about people of all sorts, including this hypothetical person, but it doesn’t give you much sense of the flow of history outside of that one person’s life.

Dead White Guys have been in charge of things, both in this country and outside of it, for quite a while. It’s not stretching a point to say that they’ve had a disproportionate amount of historical influence. That may be (in fact, certainly is) unjust, but so was the San Francisco Earthquake. Pretending that either didn’t happen doesn’t teach you anything.

What Will may be driving at in a clumsy way is that by trying to make sure that half the people taught about in American History are non-white, non-male, non-Protestant, and non-rich, we’ve taught kids about a lot of fascinating individuals, but not much about history, or how the times of Squanto relate to the times of Frederick Douglass relate to the times of Susan B. Anthony (let alone to the times of a lot less significant individuals, carefully chosen for their ethnicity, gender, or interest to the writers of the history texts).

That’s not to say that Squanto, Douglass, or Anthony, or a random slave, a random settler woman, a random Native American warrior, or a random Hispanic settler in 17th Century California weren’t good, useful and/or brilliant people, or that students shouldn’t be taught about them. But if they are taught about them at the exclusion of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln or either Roosevelt, something’s pretty important is going to be lost from that historic tapestry.

We’re not talking about memorizing dates and wars and Presidents — or maybe we are, because even though I sucked at doing that, it’s useful to know in what order things happened, if nothing else. Memorizing Presidents for the sake of doing so is kind of goofy — just like memorizing state capitols is. But it’s useful to know that Jackson came after Jefferson, but before Lincoln, because, damn, it’s hard to understand the Civil War, the Westward Expansion, or the international relations of the newborn US without knowing that.

What’s happened in developing current history curricula is that it’s been a matter of picking and choosing folks on a basis other than “How does this person fit into the story of the US? How does knowing about who this person was and what they did help us understand what came before, and what came after?” Instead, people are chosen to fit in with Black History Month, or with other politically polite and esteem-enhancing criteria in mind. History thus becomes a way to make people feel good about themselves, or to provide role models to people of their own race, ethnicity, religion or gender.

But that’s not what history is about. History is about learning how we got to where we are today, and maybe where we’re headed tomorrow. It’s impossible, perhaps, to divorce history from ideology, but to simply give in and let ideology dictate history is to put us in the same camp as the old Politburo hacks, frantically erasing Trotsky out of the chronicles of the Revolution, and then changing the spin on Stalin after Kruschev took over, and then damning Kruschev when he, in turn, fell. Historical thought always evolves with time, but the more tinkering you explicitly do with it, the more of a house of cards you’re building.

It may very well be that a coherent, useful, educational curriculum of history can be developed that studies (if not celebrates, because history is not about celebration, either) historical figures in proportion to their modern presence in the population. We’ve only been trying for thirty years to do so, and much of that effort has been distorted by political concerns outweighing historical ones. We should keep trying — but we should be realistic as well. Dead White Guys have run things for a long time (that’s kind of the point of a lot of rhetoric from the Left, right?). To then try to teach how things have been in the past while not talking about Dead White Guys seems sort of … well, unrealistic.

I’ve never had much sympathy for Native American groups that complain about sports teams that use various “Indian” themes for their team names. It seems to open a whole can of worms for other, parallel complaints. As if to prove me right (ahem), now comes word that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) thinks Austin HS in Minnesota ought to change its name from the “Packers,” since being named after slaughterhouse workers is “nothing to be proud of.”

They suggest (one can only hope tongue-in-cheek) the “Pickers” might promote a healthier diet.

The story, ironically, is on the pages for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which refuses to print the names of Native-American-dubbed sports teams. Presumably they are still going to print the name of the nearby Green Bay football franchise.

OpinionJournal suggests that animal rights groups will ultimately demand that teams named after animals be renamed as well (since it’s so inherently demeaning), and that ultimately all we’ll be left with is “those dumb abstractions like the New York Liberty and the Orlando Magic.”

Until, of course, the Fundies start objecting to teams named after “magic,” and people who see American culture as jingoistic object to “liberty” as a team name.

Cool. Not only were seven fourth graders suspended from school for playing “army and aliens,” which game involved “shooting” at each other with pointed fingers, but the school questioned the kids on whether or not their parents own guns, too.

Last time I checked, that was still legal.

Better yet, the story notes that this took place at Dry Creek Elementary School, only mile or two from my house (though, mercifully, not in our school district).

The kids in question were sent home with their parents for the day, though it was not formally listed as a “suspension.” They were also sentenced to a week’s lunchtime detention, on public display. For shooting at each other with their fingers.

(They’re lucky. In some schools they could have been suspended or even expelled.)

The school and the Cherry Creek School District both, of course, defend their action as appropriate and in keeping with their dedication toward safety. The rules which the kids evidently broke?

The Student Policy and Discipline Handbook defines “violent and aggressive behavior” as “threats directed, either orally (including by telephone), by non-verbal gesture, or in writing, at an individual, his or her family or a group.” Under “intimidation/bullying,” the code includes “any written or verbal expression, physical act or gesture, or a pattern thereof, that is intended to cause distress upon one or more students.”
Even without the school policy, zero tolerance is the law in Colorado, considered at the forefront of the movement. Colorado law mandates expulsion for students who “carry, bring, use or possess a firearm or firearm facsimile at school.”
Nowhere does the law mention fingers, but Mrs. Mickle [the principal] said the conduct code gives administrators the latitude to deal with problems as they arise. “It’s definitely not spelled out in the district discipline policy because we can’t predict what every student is going to do,” she said. “That’s what we’re here for: to interpret those details.”

Ah. Is that what you’re there for?

Of course, the touted strength of ZT policies is that they are supposed to avoid any sort of namby-pamby interpretation of the rules by laying out in black and white what is always disallowed. Mrs. Mickle’s stance seems to be that it’s perfectly acceptable to extend those rules even further, as the administration sees fit.

That sounds like a valuable lesson in civics, yessirree.

The kids, of course, had never been in trouble before, and even though finger-pointing was not explicitly spelled out in the rules, it would have been tantamount to capitulation to the terrorists for the administration to simply warn the kids that what they were doing was wrong.

But that’s why they call it zero tolerance. “‘No tolerance’ means more than just a warning, because that would mean tolerance,” Mrs. Mickle said.

As to the inquiry as to whether any of the families had guns in the home?

“The district must know whether a student has the means to carry out a threat of violence to help us determine the level of the threat of violence against other students or staff,” said Ms. Amole, the spokeswoman.

Let me make sure I understand. Kids playing “army and aliens” during recess constituted a “threat of violence” to “other students or staff,” therefore the district was entitled to find out if the kids had access to real guns at home, just in case they … what, came back to school and played “army and aliens” with real guns?

This is getting more and more absurd, and, frankly, more and more scary.

When I was in elementary school, I …

… was guilty of felonious assault, since when I was seven, I believe I, too, poked a kid with a pencil and broke skin. I certainly should have been arrested and expelled, too.

… angrily drew doodles of teachers with arrows through their heads, obviously a death threat. Such terrorist threats ought to have led to my suspension, too.

… played Cops and Robbers, shooting other kids with my finger. I, too, ought to have been suspended for such a violent and disruptive game.

I’m ready for my punishment now. Come and get me, you bastards.

I only wish I’d had the balls in high school to answer a stupid essay question with an essay that pointed out that it was a stupid essay question. Even if that provoked an even more stupid reaction from the school administration.

Except that, mercifully, I never had such stupid questions on my essay exams. And I wouldn’t have had the balls, anyway, even though I was such a violent, disruptive, threatening, terroristic, felon in elementary school.

(Via OpinionJournal)

Kids at an elementary school pass around a home-made candy powder, consisting of Kool-Aid, cinnamon, sugar and other similar insidious substances. The school district solution: treat it the same as if they were passing around heroin.

While some parents have said the powder’s ingredients were widely known, Parrish said it was passed off as hidden contraband.
“If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck,” she said.

I’ve also heard it said that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

I realize that it is perhaps beyond the abilities of school districts to (a) consider motivation when students do things, and (b) maintain some sort of grip on reality. But let’s consider, for a moment, what this is teaching kids.

How about it’s teaching them, “It doesn’t matter whether you are innocent or guilty, just whether you appear to be innocent or guilty.” Or, “It doesn’t matter whether what you are doing is illegal, just whether some authority thinks that it is illegal.”

I suspect they don’t teach civics classes any more, either.

An independent hearing examiner has ordered a straight-A sixth grader not be expelled for having brought a steak knife to class. The knife was to cut an onion for a science experiment. The twelve-year-old has been suspended since 12 March.

“My goodness me,” she said, “if we haven’t gotten the message to him that he made a mistake already – which, in fact, he’s admitted – by suspending him for 15 days, we need our heads examined.”

Of course, not everyone is happy with the decision, which will no doubt rain blood and ruin upon civilization.

Attorney Joseph Hill, the district’s expulsions coordinator, called Briggs’ decision “a mistake,” saying, “it sends the wrong message.”
District administrators testified that zero-tolerance policies must be enforced consistently. While they agreed that Christian had no criminal intent, they said motive was irrelevant – any weapon that ends up at school for any reason could fall into the wrong hands.

Right. So could staplers. And scissors. And the cars that the faculty arrive in. And sharp keys. And …

In an initial letter to Christian’s parents last month, Cherokee Principal Karen Seno said she would recommend a one-year expulsion. During Monday’s hearing, Superintendent Art Rainwater said his recommendation to the School Board would be to expel Christian until only the end of this school year. The boy could return earlier if he completed either a psychological exam or an anger management class.

Right. Because clearly the kid was psychologically disturbed. He should have planned to cut open the onion with the power of his mind.

The knife Christian brought to school has a 4-inch serrated blade and a sharp point. Rainwater said he believed strongly that “it could cause substantial injury or death.”

Clever observation, Sherlock. Perhaps CPS should be called to the boy’s house in order to save him from the dangerous environment where such weapons are freely available.

Although knives are sometimes used by middle school students in cooking classes, they are used under the supervision of teachers – a critical difference, Rainwater said. In this case, the teacher didn’t know about the knife.

You mean to say that the district actually admits to putting weapons that “could cause substantial injury or death” into the hands of students with teacher approval? Maybe we should call in CPS there!

Hill, the district’s attorney, said Christian’s character was never in question, only his unfortunate behavior on March 11.

“Which is why we wanted to expel him.”

“(Schools) are much safer,” said Steve Fernan, coordinator for safe and drug-free schools for the state Department of Public Instruction. Of all states in one recent survey, “(Wisconsin) had the lowest levels and most precipitous drops among students carrying weapons, fighting in schools and students staying home because they did not feel safe,” he said.
Since zero-tolerance policies became popular in Wisconsin, the number of students expelled has tripled, from about 450 during the 1991-92 school year to 1,472 in the 2000-01 school year.

Yeah. Kicking out those homicidal honors students from middle school certainly is useful at lending an element of terror to keep everyone treading on egg shells.

Don’t get me wrong. If this kid had brought a knife to school and attacked a kid — or even brought a knife to school in anticipating of using it in combat — I’d be up there cheering to see him booted out. And, sure, it’s a lot tougher to look at silly little things like motivation and character and circumstances in evaluating offenses.

But leaving those little evaluations out lead to miscarriages of justice like this effort by the school board to kick out a kid that event the teacher who “caught” him thought should not be expelled.

These are kids, folks. We have to assume that they will make mistakes. That makes justice, mercy, and understanding all the more important in providing them discipline.

A fifth grade honor student is the latest victim of Zero Tolerance policies.

Ten-year-old Hailie Whatley was sitting on a bench with two other fifth-graders outside of Webster Elementary School about two weeks ago during a break from test taking.
The honor student was trying to figure out a way to cheer up a crying classmate sitting next to her, the girl’s mother said.
Within hours, however, the Webster girl was sitting in the principal’s office facing accusations that she threatened to kill the girl.
According to Marty Whatley, her daughter Hailie was hoping to encourage her schoolmate with a role-playing game she called “Civil War.” Designating herself a Confederate soldier, Hailie picked up an Oak leaf and pointed it like a gun at the other girl, the so-called “Yankee soldier.”

As a result, Whately was suspended for a day. Which is actually remarkably lenient for a ZT infraction.

I’m not sure which is worse — that such play could deserve a suspension, or that (according to the principal) “The (girl who reported the incident) felt very threatened by the situation,” and that this somehow lends credence to the punishment.

As a follow-up to the New Jersey speeding study from yesterday, the results of the study have been released, as well as further info on the methodology. The US Justice Dept. promises a study of whether the study is to be relied upon.

A class action suit has been filed in Boston against three large corporations for their connection to slavery in the 19th Century and earlier. The suit reads, in part, “The practice of slavery constituted an ‘immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans’ life, liberty, African citizenship rights, cultural heritage’ and it further deprived them of the fruits of their own labor.” The three companies, the suit claims, profited from slavery, and are therefore liable for compensation and damages.

FleetBank (which, until recently, held our mortage) is named in the suit. It’s predecessor, Providance Bank of Rhode Is., was founded by (and loaned substantial sums to) one John Brown, who owned, among other things, some slave ships.

Aetna insurance has a predecessor that issued life insurance to slave owners against the loss of their slaves (with a rider that denied coverage in case of lynching, suicide, or death by overwork).

CSX is a successor of a number of smaller railroad companies what were built by, or operated with, slave labor.

Slavery was bad. It was evil. Certainly by modern lights in our society it would be inexcusable.

But can these three companies — or the dozen others yet to be named, according to the plaintiffs — be held responsible for what was done almost 150 years ago, generations ago by both human and corporate standards? Or 200? Or up to almost 400 years ago?

Could I be sued for the crimes of my great, great grandfather? Or his father? Or his? And should I be?

And while I would say the vast majority of Americans today would condemn the African slave trade, at the time it was not only legally permitted, but subject to quite a bit of societal, moral, and ethical debate. While it is an over-simplification to say that the US was actually torn into civil war over it, the slave question was certainly part of that conflict.

So if these companies did something that was legal, that was considered moral and socially acceptible by many (even most) at the time (particularly depending on when in the two-hundred-plus year history of slavery in North America one considers), why should they now be legally compelled to face “jury trial, the appointment of an independent historic commission, restitution of the descendants’ slave labor, disgorgement of illicit profits and compensatory and punitive damages to be determined at trial”?

Now, if these companies choose to do something (and Aetna has evidently considered doing so) on their own, whether for publicity or out of some sense of corporate shame, that is certainly their prerogative, and we might even applaud it. But it doesn’t seem to me to be an ethical standard, let alone a legal one, that any corporation should have to be held to.

Times change. People, and laws, and moral change. It’s one thing to look at companies directly linked to the Holocaust and demand reparations (though even there you can argue the justice of it) for those who suffered and for their children.

But to turn the clock back as far as this suit does … well, then you can only ask who next? I’ll bet I have folks in my Spanish parentage who faced discrimination in hiring or accomodation. Or my Irish heritage. Or my Italian heritage. Whom can I sue for that injustice?

Or, conversely, should I be responsible, were I a shareholder in CSX, Fleet, or Aetna (and, for all I know, I am, via a mutual fund) for something which I didn’t do?

The argument is made, of course, that the impact of slavery on the descendents of those African slaves was so much greater than any individual injustice, and so much more pernicious and pervasive in its long-lasting effects that it warrents reaching back that far.

But it’s not a matter of the actions of individual companies (let alone individual slave traders, -holders, or folks who built the ships or forged the manicles). If there is to be guilt and shame and restitution assigned, it needs to be taken on by our society as a whole. To the extent that slave labor helped build this country during its first eighty years (and for the centuries before it was a country), there is nobody in the US today who has not benefited or profited from it in some fashion.

If someone has to pay, it’s all of us — including, paradoxically, descendents of slaves themselves. Let’s not pretend otherwise by trying to assign blame to some identifiable companies that (a) were involved, as so many other companies and individuals at the time were, and (b) are big, deep-pocket targets.

If you’re a high school student and help donate a bunch of your grandmother’s household items to Goodwill, make sure you don’t let a 10-inch unserrated bread knife fall out of a box into the bed of your pick-up. A school security guard might notice it and report you, and then, the next thing you know, you might be expelled from your high school, banned from setting foot there for a year, and sent to school with all the druggies and criminals.

At least that’s what happened to Taylor Hess.

H-E-B district officials maintained throughout the Hess hearing that students’ safety must be the overriding factor in any situation where a weapon is found on campus.
“I do feel he [Hess] put students at risk, whether he knowingly did that or not,” Dianne Byrnes, H-E-B director of alternative education programs, said at the hearing.

Speaking of putting students at risk, another incredibly goofy aspect of many schools ZT policy on medications is forcing asthmatics to keep their emergency inhalers in the school nurse’s office, rather than at hand, as this Reason magazine article discusses.

I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been “breaking the law” for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would “confiscate” it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. “So now what we need to do,” he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, “is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law.” My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. “When your daughter is at school,” Principal Baker said, “I am the ultimate authority concerning her health.”

Yeah. That makes me feel much better. Especially as the article describes many cases of mishandling of meds in school offices (especially since school nurses are, these days, rare than hen’s teeth).

And, for those who don’t already get it, it can also be a matter of life and death — a lesson that shouldn’t be lost on paranoid school districts.

In her letter to the Bristol Township School Board, Nancy Sander referred to the 1991 death of a New Orleans high school student, Catrina Lewis, who was delayed by security guards before being allowed to get her inhaler from the office. When it didn’t help, she asked school staff to call an ambulance; instead they spent a half-hour trying to call her mother first. Catrina’s sister, another student, finally called 911 herself, but emergency help arrived too late. In 1996, a New Orleans judge ordered Lawless High School’s acting principal, a school counselor, and the school board to pay $1 million in damages to Catrina’s family.

You’ll be glad to know that if you have kids going to Lewis Elementary School in Barstow, Calif., you won’t have to worry that they will be exposed to the dangers of playing Cops & Robbers. School officials have banned running around using your fingers as “guns” — though, if asked, they claim to merely be temporarily halting the game until guidelines can be set up.

Bang-bang.

The Attorney General’s screening off of (horrors!) partly nekkid sculptures in the Great Hall of the Justice Dept. has properly been criticized by many. Of course, as this article notes, similar draping has been done elsewhere in recent years, just from a different motivation.

Vermont tends to consider itself a quite progressive state — but the state government was years ahead of John Ashcroft in covering up works of art. In 1993, female employees in a state office building complained that they were being sexually harassed by a mural of Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World, because the painting depicted native women without shirts. State officials hung bedsheets over the harassing mural.
The Central Intelligence Agency is supposed to be led by courageous people who defend American freedom. But in 1993, when the CIA planned a headquarter display of paintings by the artist Carmen Trujillo, and some employees objected that some of the paintings showed women’s breasts, and were thus “verging on sexual harassment,” the Agency’s leadership meekly cancelled the exhibition.

Is it any more defensible doing this because someone is offended from a sexual harrassment standpoint than that it offends their religous sensibilities? Not to my mind.

Perhaps I lack the correct body parts or cultural heritage to appreciate this properly, but I do find this more than a little depressing.

(Via InstaPundit)

A fellow holds an opinion contrary to general public opinion. He declares that opinion in public, arousing the ire of passersby, who gather about him, blocking the sidewalk and spilling into the street.

The police arrive. They arrest … the fellow holding the contrary opinion.

Bzzzzt.

The position of the police and of the district attorney is that, by holding forth on a controversial subject, the fellow knew he would create a disturbance, and therefore is liable to prosecution for disturbing the peace and blocking pedestrian and vehicular traffic — even though the disturbance and the blockage came from those who opposed the fellow’s position, none of whom were arrested.

Bzzzzt.

It’s autocratic states that prosecute people for holding controversial opinions, not the US. It’s dictatorships, or repressive governments, who consider creating a public disturbance through one’s opinions to be a crime.

If folks were standing in the street or blocking the sidewalk, they were the ones who needed arrests or citation, not the person they were, in turn, protesting.

And, frankly, it doesn’t make any difference what the fellow’s opinion was about. The First Amendment doesn’t protect just popular speech. It most particularly protects speech that is unpopular.

The defendant says he is being punished merely for expressing unpopular views in a public place. The judge, however, insists that his views are not at issue. “It is the reaction which speech engenders, not the content of the speech, that is the heart of disorderly conduct,” he declared. It’s reasonable to assume, said the judge, that he knew he was going to create “public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.” By his thinking, if someone becomes disorderly because he’s angry over what Harvey said, then Harvey rather than his listener is in violation of the law.
But the 1st Amendment does not protect Harvey’s right to say only things that won’t upset anyone, or to say them only in places where no one will care enough to stop to listen.

No freedom is absolute, and there are plenty of ways that the fellow could have expressed his opinion that would warrent arrest or citation (if he chose to stand in the middle of the street himself and do it, for example). But being arrested and prosecuted for voicing an opinion that disturbs people and causes them to act in a disorderly fashion strikes me as just plain wrong.

Bad show, New York.

(Via InstaPundit)