An open letter to grad students from Francis Bacon

The derogations therefore which grow to learning from the fortune or condition of learned men, are either in respect of scarcity of means, or in respect of privateness of life and meanness of employments. Concerning want, and that it is the case of learned men usually to begin with little, and not to grow rich so fast as other men, by reason they convert not their labours chiefly to lucre and increase, it were good to leave the commonplace in commendation of povery to some friar to handle, to whom much was attributed by Machiavel in this point when he said, "That the kingdom of the clergy had been long before at an end, if the reputation and reverence towards the poverty of friars had not borne out the scandal of the superfluities and excesses of bishops and prelates.” 

--Bacon, The Advancement of Learning 

Forever young, and ruled by the college dean

Phoebe and Sarah brought this contrarian-lite Eric Posner article defending campus speech regulations on the grounds that their targets are kinda-sorta semi-legally minors to my attention yesterday:

Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives. Many critics of these codes discern this transformation but misinterpret it. They complain that universities are treating adults like children. The problem is that universities have been treating children like adults...[Blahblah brain science says]...High schools are accustomed to dealing with the cognitive limitations of their charges. They see their mission as advancing the autonomy of students rather than assuming that it is already in place. They socialize as well as educate children to act civilly by punishing them if they don’t. Universities have gradually realized that they must take the same approach to college students.

Miss Self-Important has written against the infantilization of adults before, but must disclaim that, as far as minors go, she has no objection to exercising all the authority over them. Over time, this is increasingly unlikely to be successful, since as Locke points out, in “that boiling boisterous part of life,” adolescents “think themselves too much men to be governed by others.” But, you know, give it a try if you want. However, for the same reasons that Locke extends adults complete authority over minors, he argues for the strict observation of the legal age of majority: liberty hinges on the presumption (excluding "lunatics and idiots") of a capacity for self-rule, since if we had to individually prove our maturity to the government before being admitted to full citizenship, the government would soon discover its very great interest in denying our competence (for our own good, of course). So the first difficulty with Posner's provocation is that a vague, socially-determined age of majority set at "21 or 22" is precisely the kind of ambiguous rule that opens the door to the paternal authoritarian state that Locke feared.

But this is actually not the main difficulty. Some college students are legal minors in addition to Posner's "social" minors, though more are semi-minors in terms of parental responsibility for tuition*, but, as Posner points out, private universities may make more or less whatever rules of conduct they wish, a right which is unrelated to the ages of those who are subject to those rules. Private firms may enforce speech codes over unambiguous adults, which is why the faculty and staff at universities are just as much subject to all these regulations as the students. That right, and not the ages of students, is what Posner's argument turns on. No question about the extent of free speech on campuses can be answered by appealing to the childishness of students. Determinations about what can be taught, researched, and written at universities don't have anything to do with how mature or immature kids-these-days are. They're made to advance the purposes of the institutions themselves, and these purposes do not include baby-sitting.

This is why the argument collapses when Posner justifies speech restrictions by appealing to students' supposed immaturity: 

While critics sometimes give the impression that lefty professors and clueless administrators originated the speech and sex codes, the truth is that universities adopted them because that’s what most students want. If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they? ....

The modern speech and sex codes have surfaced as those waters recede back to sea. What is most interesting is that this reaction comes not from parents and administrators, but from students themselves, who, apparently recognizing that their parents and schools have not fully prepared them for independence, want universities to resume their traditional role in loco parentis. 

But wait, why do we care what "students themselves" demand when we've just expended many words to demonstrate that their demands and preferences shouldn't matter because they are children. Only mature adults are in a position to decide for them what they should learn and under what conditions. And if those adults think it's in the children's best interest to have disciplinary procedures with high burdens of proof or exposure to offense, then who's to say they're wrong?

And moreover, which adults? The secondary school model which Posner extols here for its salutary pedagogical sensitivity to adolescent immaturity also permits parents and non-experts a great deal of say in school governance. In public schools, boards of (often) parents and (even more often) non-academics govern school curricula and procedures, and other parents can be very effective in adjusting these curricula and procedures if they object. Private schools are not run by elected boards, but there too, parent associations are very powerful. Now, would Posner also like the curriculum and policies of UChicago to be substantially determined by the parents of current students? And why not? Why should faculty, who after all study obscure equations and ancient Mesopotamian holes in the ground and know nothing about their children's developmental needs, get to determine the rules under which these tender babes are to be educated?

And what is this nonsense-in-a-box about the noble desire to be "in an environment where they needn't worry about being offended or raped"? As if anyone has ever longed to be in an environment where they had to worry constantly about being raped. But no such worry-free environment has been created by the new rules, which have only proliferated investigative and punitive measures. Posner consistently conflates irrelevant problems like politicizing the classroom with the actual aims of speech and sex codes. These have very little to do with professors who "blab on about their opinions," but aim to regulate the personal relationships among students and between faculty and students by determining how they should interact with one another. Professor Leftist Revolutionary can continue to bloviate all he wants about his glorious time in the Central American guerrilla movement of his choice so long as he refers to his students by the correct pronouns, doesn't mention any jungle activity that might recall their traumas, and maybe permits his syllabus to be determined by students' identities. (Partisans of the other side may feel free to replace this scenario with a Professor Reactionary.)

Posner concludes that he has solved the culture wars:

Libertarians should take heart that the market in private education offers students a diverse assortment of ideological cultures in which they can be indoctrinated. Conservatives should rejoice that moral instruction and social control have been reintroduced to the universities after a 40-year drought. Both groups should be pleased that students are kept from harm’s way, and kept from doing harm, until they are ready to accept the responsibilities of adults.

Problematically, however, "diverse ideological cultures" won't keep students "from harm's way" or "from doing harm." They will deal with the problem of harm diversely and with diverse results. If students are minors in need of protection, we cannot leave them to the mercy of "ideological cultures" that reject the very premise that it is their job to protect students, or those that have unorthodox ideas about what "protection" entails. What will really keep these crazed and impulsive but simultaneously risk-averse and terrified students of Posner's description from doing harm and out of harm's way is locking them up in single monastic cells with all sharp objects removed for four years so that they can do nothing but their schoolwork. Safety first.

*Thanks to Phoebe for noticing my brain melt.

Is American politics boring?

Withywindle thinks so. (By "American politics," I mean the subfield of political science, not actual politics. I realize that, with this admission, everyone reading this will instantly fall asleep.)

I will not attempt to defend the subfield here by a weaselly appeal to the sub-sub-field of American political development, which is a political science version of American history, so clearly it can't be boring (to Withywindle)! Nor will I tell you how interesting it is to teach American politics to undergrads in order to discover the patterns in their ignorance (but never my own of course!) of our basic governing institutions which may hearken our near-future political doom (for instance, few of them appear to know that federalism still exists). Instead, I will stick with defending the scholarship of the dusty standby sub-sub-fields - Congress, the Presidency, the Courts. I read (or, letsbereal, skimmed) a lot of books and articles in these fields for my comps that were indeed very boring. But not all! Two very interesting books that are both very much academic American politics in that they involve theories or models (as distinct from writing about the politics of America that adheres to no such disciplinary expectations) are Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make and Whittington's Foundations of Judicial Supremacy, though it's true that in a way they are one book about two branches. But the book I think really redeems the entire subfield of American politics because it is fascinating even while being about the discipline's most boring topic (thereby cosmically compensating for all the boring books about more interesting topics) is Wilson's Bureaucracy.

I read parts of Bureaucracy for my exams and I think I taught the section on the dilemmas of the Watertown DMV once, and then I got sick in the vacation-like period between this Christmas and New Year's, so I decided to go back and read it through. And it was surprisingly compelling. The book had the general rhetorical effect of making me very complacent about government dysfunction. Wilson offers a thousand reasons that government agencies can't get any better than they are (no spoilers), though my favorite paradox still remains that of the beleaguered Watertown DMV, which could do everything imaginable to increase efficiency - hire more clerks, update their technology, monetarily reward good service - but when it finally achieves excellence, it will simply be swamped again by the people who would otherwise have gone to the Boston DMVs but heard this one was better, and the whole process would have to begin again. The devil blocks every exit. By the end, one is surprised and grateful that government agencies have ever accomplished anything at all, especially militarily.

This is the kind of argument I appreciate when its background is the incessant clamor of all my media, journalistic and social, about the uniquely urgent crises of The Now. For Wilson, everything (except the non-SSI side of the Social Security Administration, which he frequently reminds us is perfectly competent and effective because its functions are so clear and easy to perform) always runs in crisis mode, it always has and it always will, so that in the end, the crises of The Now will probably be resolved by some combination of incompetence, error, unclarity, obstructionism, and organizational failure, and we will "muddle through by the seats of our pants," as one of my college professors used to say, oblivious to its infelicity, to explain every instance of English success at anything, including its continuing existence.

17th century solutions for 21st century problems: internet mobbing

Michelle Goldberg, via JTL:

Social media has done away with all that. Nobody gets a presumption of good faith anymore, and we’re all subject to loud, public judgment by people who might not share any of our underlying assumptions about the way the world works or the rules of intellectual debate. In the past, The Baffler might have published something that pissed off feminist readers, but most of those readers would share The Baffler’s broader worldview, and would be less likely to excoriate it. Even if they wanted to publish a response, there wouldn’t be many venues except the publication’s own letters section. Outsiders simply wouldn’t notice. 

There is value, of course, in the new regime. The price of bigotry is much higher, the ethical blind spots concealed by clubby consensus are much more easily exposed. But the pressure to conform is also far more intense. The distance between what writers—or, at least, some writers—say to each other and what they say publicly is growing. That’s not oppression, but it is a loss.

This is essentially a description of the problems of over-exposure. I've been thinking about this for a while with respect to student journalism, which illuminates the problem more clearly, since most people will agree that no mere college student deserves be subjected to an online mob for writing a dumb op-ed, even if they're less certain about the extent to which a professional writer could be said to "deserve" such a response. I obviously link student journalism here all the time, though I prefer reportage of the absurd to op-eds. But I also think we were all a lot better off before student newspapers went online.

This was briefly A Topic last spring when that Princeton guy's essay on privilege earned him the vociferous scorn/praise of the entire country and old-new TNR ran a piece attacking adult media for giving this guy a platform. But they never had! They covered the coverage, which we might say (and Phoebe did say) was bad form, but the essay was published in a college magazine. The problem is that college writing is too accessible to, and too eagerly overexposed by the "semi-professional" media (the really professional media only gets to it after it's gone viral). Phoebe pointed out that these are not children and they're old enough to consent to the publication of their work. There is no question of violated privacy in these cases. But there is a question of what effect subjecting 1) inexperienced student writers and 2) even professional writers to the levels of public scorn previously reserved for politicians accused of pedophilia will have on journalism.

The optimistic possibility is that it will toughen writers up. In these early days of massive, personally threatening smear campaigns, writers will still be sensitive, but after such attacks become a regular feature of the job, it's possible that writers will shrug them off more easily and continue to write what they will. After all, the pain is acute but rarely long-lasting; the internet mob needs to be fed regularly, and so rarely spends very long draining a particular victim before being attracted to the blood of another.

The pessimistic possibility is that instead of toughening up sane people who, on account of possessing normal levels of pain, guilt, and fear, react rather poorly to these sorts of attacks, these publishing conditions will instead elevate writers who are not quite as sane and who can withstand such attacks because they enjoy or at least don't mind being the objects of intense universal scorn.* This is something I've particularly wondered about student journalism - whether early and frequent over-exposure to vicious and pointless criticism will inure younger writers to all criticism, hardening their faith in their own (immature) instincts and raising their estimation of writing that is mere provocation and offense.

If Goldberg's account is right, then some types of writing are better when they come out of many small and partially closed-off institutions in which the basic assumptions necessary to build arguments on are broadly accepted, because every debate can't be over fundamentals. Like clubs and cliques, they flourish under conditions that are not perfectly transparent and to some degree exclusive. Exclusion need not be active rejection of would-be members; self-selection is sufficient, as all members of high school social loser cliques know. Subscription to a publication, for example, is a form of self-selecting inclusion. (But active rejection does raise a club's stock, as all sorority girls know.) This dynamic is reflected in the casual experience of  how much more useful and productive it is to argue with your own partisans, and how common it is for even the most sincere "bipartisan" discussion about any concrete topic to end in a standstill over questions like, "But what even is freedom?" These questions have their place, but re-arguing them incessantly is neither useful nor interesting. Even the objections to an argument are often more incisive and compelling when they come from the writer's own side than when they come from the opposition.** So good political writing (maybe also other kinds of writing?) might rely to some extent on what Goldberg calls "ethical blind spots concealed by clubby consensus."

But, if the internet has made such clubbiness impossible by removing the audience-sorting mechanisms that subscriptions and physical copy once provided, and these institutions wish to persist as clubs rather than universal organizations with no members, then perhaps they will have to revert to some old-timey workarounds. For student journalists, who never relied on subscriptions in the first place, that would mean returning to physical copy so that only your equally stupid classmates will have sufficient incentive to discover and deride your stupid opinions. For professional writers, we might consider that in the 17th century, people who wanted to convey thoughts that could get them imprisoned or exiled sometimes did it by circulating manuscripts (not the fancy kind) through their friends instead of publishing their work through a bookseller. This didn't obviate the dangers of committing thought to paper, of course, but it minimized it. There would only be a few copies of your wayward opinions floating around, and the chances that they might fall into the wrong hands were thus diminished. In the late 20th century, the manuscript form was inadvertently transmuted into the "zine" in some quarters and the "academic book" in others. The former was a very cheap but extremely physically inaccessible manuscript, whereas the latter was in principle widely accessible, but so prohibitively expensive and forbidding that it was in fact rarely accessed. Although neither was expressly created for the purpose of providing cover for clubby speech, they are both well-constituted to have this effect. So, just a suggestion.

Besides, ever since the beginning of the internet, people have been worrying that it's going to destroy real friendship. Maybe the perverse result of making published writing a danger zone of 17th century proportions will be to force writers to rely on actual friends if they hope to disseminate their ideas. Or maybe, this new development in public discourse will demonstrate the utility of the old subscription + print magazine format in a way that the previous efforts to defend print media by fetishizing how amazing it feels to touch paper utterly failed to do.


*Sayeth Locke, clearly anticipating Johnson: "He must be of a strange and unusual constitution, who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society...Nobody that has the least thought or sense of a man about him, can live in society under the constant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars, and those he converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be made up of irreconcileable contradictions, who can take pleasure in company, and yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions."
**Exhibit A: Criticism of Straussians from Straussians vs. criticism of Straussians from conspiratorial paranoiacs.

The privilege of silence

This is from Alex Pareene's frenzied cannibalization of Jonathan Chait:

It's not just angry Twitter nobodies, either! "[Political correctness] also makes money," Chait says, using, as his example, one BuzzFeed post about microaggressions that has "received more than 2 million views." I'm guessing that Chait makes quite a bit more money than the person who compiled that post. In fact, that's true of nearly everyone who is presented as a victim of political correctness in Chait's essay, from millionaire comedian Bill Maher to the anonymous professor at a prestigious university: They all enjoy superior social status to the people who are supposedly silencing or terrifying them. It's hard to see how democracy was significantly harmed by Condoleezza Rice not giving a commencement address.

Well, I'd like to know the answer. Is democracy harmed by Condoleezza Rice not giving a commencement address? What is this democracy being described? It seems not to be a formal question of suffrage but of some more amorphous social status equality. The undercurrent of Pareene's gleeful screed is that people who already have "superior social status" don't need to speak (in the broad sense, not just at university commencements), because they already have so much influence, whereas those without "status" are the ones requiring an amplifier. Now, if you reduce "status" to money, as Pareene wants to do here, then you can perhaps sound reasonable saying that the rich should not have so many outlets to speak b/c their money speaks for them, whereas the poor should have all the public microphones because they have no money to buy influence. TNR for the people!

But "social status" is precisely that sort of slippery thing that doesn't simply equate with money. What gives a university professor or a journalist or a policy advisor or even "millionaire comedian Bill Maher" their status is not their incomes, but their speech. They all won their superior social status by speaking. Pareene's response is that it is precisely their ambition to influence through speech that renders their speech suspect. Because they've spent their lives speaking and achieved a reputation for it, their speech should be quieted by the unpracticed producers of I guess Buzzfeed posts who, by virtue of lacking such ambitions, possess more authentic voices. (Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, apparently, a man of no ambition or practice in the arts of rhetoric.) On one hand, we should amplify marginalized voices by hiring them at places like the Atlantic and TNR, but on the other hand, they're no longer marginal once they're on these mastheads. So, huh.

Pareene, to the degree that he makes any sense at all here, demands a sort of bifurcation: status disjointed from influence. Those with high status (= money) are obliged to yield the podium in order to even things out for those of low status, who will be compensated with opportunities to complain about their lack. So, aspiring young person, you have a choice: you can use your talents to attain a comfortable life of silent disengagement, or a wretched and impoverished one from which you will be permitted to engage in public harangue of the silent privileged. That's democracy. So, which will it be?

On the broader dynamic of speech policing, I refer you to Julian Sanchez's depiction of the social process whereby the center-left position in all questions is demolished first by the center-left's own temerity in the face of the rhetoric of the far-left, then by their fear of being identified with the right. But I think if we slot actual people into his abstract in-group and out-group positions, we might have to conclude that the degeneration of which Chait complains is his own fault.

Snow day!

Cambridge, oblizzerated:

Mt. Auburn St., being skiied

Harvard Sq., being empty except for us

Widener Library, being sledded by us

About those FERPA admissions records requests

I read the NYT article about Stanford students requesting their college admissions records last week, and the Crimson ran a story on this phenomenon at Harvard this week, and I'm still puzzled about why this is a thing, or what students want from these records.

I didn't know you could get this information from private colleges, so I guess that's news in a way, but I did know you could get it from public schools, and in fact filed my own request with my school district many years ago to see my K-12 temporary records, mainly out of curiosity after I received a notice that they'd be purged five years after high school completion unless rescued by me. These records were moderately amusing, but then, I'd also racked up a disciplinary record in middle and high school which was reflected in these files. There were grammatically problematic "progress reports" (an Orwellian name for notices of failure) from my teachers threatening me with D's in gym class unless I "demenstrated more effort in the upcomming soccer unit" and things like that.

But what is there to discover in your elite college admissions file other than the grades and scores you already know and the glowing praise of your high school recommendation letters? They offer you no clue about why you didn't get accepted elsewhere, since you can only see files from the school you've matriculated at. And even if you find out from them that some admissions counselor was skeptical of you, the admissions office has no further bearing on your college career. So why the big push to see these files?

The very intelligent, rational parrot

To bore you further on the subject of Locke, here is a great passage about the rational parrot:

An animal is a living organized body; and consequently the same animal, as we have observed, is the same continued life communicated to different particles of matter, as they happen successively to be united to that organized living body. And whatever is talked of other definitions, ingenuous observation puts it past doubt, that the idea in our minds, of which the sound man in our mouths is the sign, is nothing else but of an animal of such a certain form: since I think I may be confident, that whoever should see a creature of his own shape and make, though it had no more reason all its life than a cat or a parrot, would call him still a man; or whoever should hear a cat or a parrot discourse, reason and philosophize, would call or think it nothing but a cat or a parrot; and say, the one was a dull, irrational man, and the other a very intelligent rational parrot. 

A relation we have in an author of great note is sufficient to countenance the supposition of a rational parrot. His words are: 

“I had a mind to know from prince Maurice’s own mouth the account of a common, but much credited story, that I heard so often from many others, of an old parrot he had in Brazil during his government there, that spoke, and asked, and answered common questions like a reasonable creature: so that those of his train there generally concluded it to be witchery or possession; and one of his chaplains, who lived long afterwards in Holland, would never from that time endure a parrot, but said, they all had a devil in them. I had heard many particulars of this story, and assevered by people hard to be discredited, which made me ask prince Maurice what there was of it. He said, with his usual plainness and dryness in talk, there was something true, but a great deal false of what had been reported. I desired to know of him what there was of the first? 

He told me short and coldly, that he had heard of such an old parrot when he had been at Brazil; and though he believed nothing of it, and it was a good way off, yet he had so much curiosity as to send for it: that it was a very great and a very old one, and when it came first into the room where the prince was, with a great many Dutchmen about him, it said presently, What a company of white men are here! They asked it what it thought that man was, pointing to the prince? It answered, some general or other; when they brought it close to him, he asked it, D’ou venez vous? It answered, De Marinnan. The prince, A qui estes vous? The parrot, A un Portugais. Prince, Que fais tu la? Parrot, Je garde les poulles. The prince laughed, and said, Vous gardez les poulles? The parrot answered, Oui, moi; et je sçai bien faire; and made the chuck four or five times that people use to make to chickens when they call them. I set down the words of this worthy dialogue in French, just as prince Maurice said them to me. I asked him in what language the parrot spoke, and he said, in Brasilian; I asked whether he understood Brasilian; he said, no, but he had taken care to have two interpreters by him, the one a Dutchman that spoke Brasilian, and the other a Brasilian that spoke Dutch; that he asked them separately and privately, and both of them agreed in telling him just the same thing that the parrot had said. I could not but tell this odd story, because it is so much out of the way, and from the first hand, and what may pass for a good one; for I dare say this prince at least believed himself in all he told me, having ever passed for a very honest and pious man. I leave it to naturalists to reason, and to other men to believe, as they please upon it: however, it is not, perhaps, amiss to relieve or enliven a busy scene sometimes with such digressions, whether to the purpose or no.” 

The John Locke theme park for kids

Peeps, there is a theme park in Mexico (and elsewhere, but not the US) where children can pretend to be adults and role-play adult jobs and earn and allocate their property in responsible ways. They drive cars, pay taxes, and try one another in court for littering. The writer wants to criticize this endeavor for being too corporate capitalist and scripted, and its founder for being some sort of crypto-fascist, but it seems pretty fantastic to me, and moreover almost unbelievably Lockean. It's Lockean not just in its conception of how children learn and what they should learn, but it apparently also has Lockean political underpinnings:

KidZania tries to be sensitive to local mores, but López also sees a role for the company in implicitly promoting the values of a Western, market-driven democracy...A few years ago, López’s marketing department came up with an origin myth for KidZania: kids, having seen what a mess adults had made of the world, founded their own country, whose borders children cross every time they visit the park. A KidZanian Declaration of Independence was written, which outlines the six “rightz” of childhood: to be, to know, to create, to share, to care, and to play. It concludes with the national motto: “Get ready for a better world.” To López’s frustration, children who visit KidZania are largely unaware of this invented history. He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie...

Well, for what it's worth, Locke also says that children should not be taught much about politics until adolescence, and that childhood instruction should be of a more generally ethical character. Which this place is: "It was like being in a reimagined Las Vegas, with the celebration of virtue substituted for the celebration of sin." Virtue seems to be primarily of the civic variety and so potentially a bunch of tepid mush: 

KidZania worked with the local government to develop activities that are intended to promote good citizenship: road safety, health, awareness of civic institutions, environmental sustainability, and tolerance of difference among individuals and groups. The program emerged from a series of crime-reduction recommendations made by Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who had been hired as a consultant by the Mexico City government a decade ago.

Nonetheless, this is probably no worse than the environmentalist alarmism targeted at children at every city aquarium I've visited in the US in the past decade (a surprisingly large number). The civic-mindedness is a little un-Lockean, but I accept this modification because Kidzania still seems amazing. The closest experience I had to this as a kid was the children's museum outside Chicago, where I once went with a friend's family and which featured a grocery store with mini-carts and plastic food that was so deeply absorbing that I have no difficulty believing that Kuwaiti kids are truly entranced by the activity of faux-petrochemical engineering a helmet in a child-sized plastics plant. Or delivering DHL boxes. Yes, it sounds dull. But also, so is grocery shopping. And yet. And then there is this point:

“We are empowering them to become independent,” [Lopez] said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”

Apparently however, child profligacy varies by nation, and Japanese children entirely lack it. (Perhaps they should avoid expansion to Germany...) This quote is a bit unfair, since elsewhere the article admits that kids can also earn money in the park by doing jobs (like delivering DHL boxes), so it seems like Lopez wasn't suggesting that independence was for the sake of buying lots of stuff. In fact, it's not really clear from this article whether Kidzania features any shopping in the usual sense since no stores are described. In any case, compare the above sentiment with Locke, below:

Were matters ordered right, learning any thing they should be taught, might be made as much a recreation to their play, as their play is to their learning...For they love to be busy, and the change and variety is that which naturally delights them. The only odds is, in that which we call play they act at liberty, and employ their pains (whereof you may observe them never sparing) freely; but what they are to learn, is forced upon them; they are called, compelled, and driven to it.

The fact that all the role-playing is scripted really sticks in the writer's craw, but ultimately the liberty of children is only "acting at liberty." Adults have to control behind the scenes. A courtroom with no script would result in no trial. Fine on most days, but not if you want to show kids how a trial works. So as far as the possibilities of acting at liberty are concerned, this place seems fantastic. I will take my future hypothetical and hypothetically Spanish-speaking children here to make them into good Lockeans.

Schooling movies

The main lesson I have learned from all television and movie depictions of school (any school - grade school, high school, college, even grad school) is that it's a place of incredible emotional and social growth where no one ever studies. Classes consist of four-minute lectures comprised of inspirational cliches from which everyone learns all there is to know about both the subject at hand and the world at large (because the former is a metaphor for the latter). Some characters are smart and others less so, which we learn when other characters refer to them as smart or less so. To gesture at the idea of studying, we are sometimes shown brief montages of page-turning and note-taking and coffee-drinking. Knowledge is actually a molecule that attaches itself to caffeine, for convenience of intake. But mainly, there are shenanigans being undertaken and non-academic personal crises unfolding and intense social bonds being forged. At the end of it all, the characters are always launched into exciting futures (elite colleges, law schools, jobs) that you'd think would've required something more than their strong social bonding records to secure.

But, I still totally watch these movies and shows, if for no other reason now than that Netflix has so few good options that aren't five-season, hundred-hour commitment shows. So recently, after watching Mystic Pizza, I followed Netflix's recommendation to watch Mona Lisa Smile. Ok, yes, Mystic Pizza was not a great film, but since it was very of its moment, it was at least possible to get a vague sense of America from it. I use this possibility to redeem my watching of many bad movies. But what manner of monstrosity is Mona Lisa Smile? It is a movie inspired by someone's having come across those 1950s advertisements for home appliances featuring grinning housewives and thought, "What if all these women are actually frustrated physics PhDs forced into housewifery by the slavish mores of the benighted past?" No matter that the women are models and not housewives, and unlikely to have ever taken physics. This imagined injustice can be imaginatively rectified through film! Let us imagine these housewifey models when they were yet on the cusp of doom, still studying physics in an elite New England college but already being pressured into marriage and a life of modeling vacuum cleaners in the pages of Redbook... How can we demonstrate to these pitiful young things that 2003 called, and it very much frowns on their choices?

And that is how Mona Lisa Smile came to be. Perhaps the entire philosophy of history of studio films consists in the view that what is essential about any moment in the past is its style of dress. If the clothes and hair are reproduced faithfully, the past has been accurately captured. But the main thing (which is to say, why I watched it) is that it's a school movie, and a real winner in that genre. It features very typical college students, the kinds of girls who memorize all their textbooks without ever cracking them. They are both brilliant and extremely stupid, since not one of them has ever thought to wonder what makes art good, so they must be instructed in the idea of feelings. The character tasked with leading these naifs is an art history grad student who not only never works on her dissertation but does not appear to have one, though that is apparently no barrier to academic employment. (She says that her "research" shows that Picasso will be just as important in the future as Michelangelo is in the present. I, for one, had not known that one of the subfields of art history was fortune-telling.) What is striking is that we are never given even one suggestion of what might make art good, despite the many harangues that Julia Roberts delivers to her class about the Meaning of Life. The problem may be that the Meaning of Life turns out to be version of "choose your choice," and has no connection to art as either a discipline or an activity. (No one in the film is inclined to choose art.) So the girls fail to grasp this meaning and get married anyway, and immediately after their weddings which everyone in greater Boston attends, they buy fully-furnished houses in the environs of Wellesley and their husbands are promoted to "junior partner" of something, having been lowly college students just the week before. So it turns out that in spite of the film's strenuous ideological axe-grinding, it shows us that in 1953, you really could have it all, and in one fell swoop.

One day, there will be a truly great school movie made that depicts how studying is not only the main thing people do in school, but also the pleasures of study and the way it illuminates the world, and not in an "X is a metaphor for LIFE" way. I'm certain it will happen. So I'm waiting.