As promised, I read my former classmate's YA novel over Christmas. As a frequent browser of the Barnes and Noble YA section, I bring you this and other news from the trenches of market-researched girldom:
Vampire sex mush is still in, and now even has an entire sub-section of its own called "paranormal romance." Melodramatic amoral "realism" is also still in, despite having probably exhausted its credibility. You know, the books where an innocent, straight-laced girl drinks one beer at a party and then ends up pregnant, a heroin junkie, and DEAD IN A GUTTER? Do girls still like these books? The convention is already 40 years old--authors too timid to suggest that maybe some adolescent behaviors are bad in principle, that they reveal a lack of restraint and prudence, say that make you a bad person, so they invent incredible (and, needless to say, incredibly unlikely) consequences to warn girls away from them. If conscience doesn't punish you for drinking that beer because conscience is too moralistic and the author doesn't want to seem judgmental, then the wrath of nature must. It seems like this illusion should wear off once girls realize that ending up pregnant or dead from a couple of beers is not, in fact, "realistic." And most girls know this by, what, age 13? So who's left to read these books except 10-year-olds and emotional voyeurs? Which, come to think of it, really encompasses a lot of girls.
Anyway, Sales's book admirably avoids both vampires and melodramatic amoral realism. No one dies from beer or pot. It also avoids the vulgarity, hyperactive sexuality, and adulation of low culture of the other books it shares shelf-space with at Barnes. There is no product positioning and no female characters who are, at the age of 16, utterly consumed by their passion for some guy in the grade ahead. Instead, the characters spend a lot of time doing homework. And, as some of you know, one of my greatest media-related desires is to see intelligence established in some way other than the mere repeated assertion that Character X is really smart, even though she never goes to class, does any homework, reads any books, or otherwise demonstrates the slightest intellectual inclination. Often, such characters will out of nowhere ace their SATs as a convenient testament to their latent genius. Like the outsized lust that would fit better in a novel with a voluptuous woman in the arms of a man with hair that could plausibly be described as a "mane" on the cover, this characterization of adolescence is a fail. Smart girls do a lot of homework. The characters in Mostly Good Girls do too, so I approve of this, although it still isn't all that intelligence portrayed could be.
And really, the writing is quite witty and the characters are well-formed. There are many things that are both funny and true (to, um, my own life, which is my only measure for YA lit), like the quest for dessert ("Personally, I will do many undesirable things, like babysit total demon children and eat dinner at my Uncle Rick's, if I believe a good dessert will come at the end of it"), and the badness of high school suicide poetry. On balance, I'm pretty sure that I also liked dessert more than any guy I met in high school. I realize I might unusual in this regard, but I think not extremely.
The only problem is that I have no idea what the point of the book is. There are two girls--one is the hard-working, level-headed narrator who wants to get good grades and date some cute guy, and the other is her best friend who is awesome at everything but then for some reason decides to sabotage herself because she feels she doesn't deserve her good luck, so after hooking up for a while with some loser Starbucks barista who lives in Somerville(!), she transfers from their exclusive prep school to public school (Brookline High!). Perhaps I fail to see the true magnitude of this precipitous fall from prep school to perfectly good public school, but I never understood why exactly Perfect Friend decided to fail (or, in her words, "to embrace [her] second, or third, or fiftieth best"), what this even means, or how exactly her behavior constitutes a notable failure in the end.
It's as though the plot of the story was supposed to be "stuff we did during junior year as narrated by witty, self-aware people" and then someone demanded that a poignant life-altering event involving elements of Modern Girl Dangers (of which there are three: sex, drugs, and bad grades) be worked in. I realize this is a convention of the genre. Ordinarily, I can accept this because even cheesy constraints can sometimes be a basis for inventiveness (as in, for example, Buffy!). The problem is that the convention of YA lead almost without exception to treacly garbage, and the pushback against this garbage is disproportionately weak.
Adults both produce and judge the merits of books intended for children, and children--contrary to the claims of realists that the reason that children don't like to read is because traditional books are boring and only books in which all the characters die of heroin overdoses can hold their attention--actually read whatever adults give them. (It's also true that some children don't read at all, but those children have also, for 40 years, failed to be won over to the activity by the publication of increasingly vulgar and melodramatic fiction. YA books about gang rape and drug addiction basically share their readership with Jane Austen--that is, they are aimed at girls who read, and those girls do so more or less indiscriminately.*)
Children, unlike adults, are a captive audience whose tastes are shaped by book marketing far more than those of adults. Fiction doesn't yet reflect to them a world they already know and whose truth they can judge by the standard of experience; it projects an image of what the world (and they themselves) should and will be like in anticipation of their experience of it. So girls don't reject bad YA lit when that's what dominates the world of books available to them; instead, they assume that this is what books basically are, and that their contents are what their near-future will and perhaps should be. It's either this, it seems, or dragons, and even I would rather read about anorexic meth addicts than dragons.
As a result, there seems to be very little incentive to break with treacle-inducing convention in YA lit and a lot of incentive to disparage the intellect of readers. But just because girls will read almost anything doesn't mean they should be offered only lowest common denominator stuff, if only because it forms them more effectively than beach reading does adults. I realize that the existence of libraries makes offerings cumulative--they have as much access to Austen as to Twilight--even as publishers have to constantly put out new material. Still, there are clearly better writers than Meg Cabot and the woman who wrote the Crank series out there who understand adolescent girldom as something other than either a period of endless horror or of endless shopping. Mostly Good Girls almost gets there, and clearly is an effort to avoid some of the genre's worst diseases. But I suspect Leila Sales can do better. She has great style; she should just come up with a plot worthy of it. Also, maybe better cover art.
*Yes, yes, I know that like five adolescent girls in the entire country are exclusive readers of scifi and fantasy. Fine, let what I say be inapplicable to them, and that still leaves 90 percent of the teen girl book market.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Trader Joe's, my love
I can't believe I was not alerted to this article before. In Chicago and DC, I liked Trader Joe's well enough, but except for a few select items (specifically, avocados and beer), it was still more expensive than the local supermarket chains. True, it had some cool options that Jewel and Giant lacked, but because it was out of the way and inconvenient, I rarely went. Then I moved to Boston, where even the local supermarket chain cost as much as Whole Foods, and suddenly Trader Joe's was glorious, conveniently-located, cheap food land of both excitement and staples. After my entire refrigerator and pantry was populated by its items, I too started to wonder what was happening in Monrovia, CA (also, where Monrovia, CA even was). Given that all of Trader Joes' products seem to be warehoused there, I imagined that the whole place was some kind of company town--a wonderland of cheap beer and sweetened dried green mangoes.
Last, year, Trader Joe's sold an extremely excellent paid thai starter-in-a-box that came with the fish-soy-tamarind sauce mix and the rice noodles, and required that you add in the fresh ingredients yourself. This was such a great idea! Do you know how hard it is to find tamarind pulp in a grocery store to make pad thai from scratch? SO HARD. On the other hand, do you know how gross and salty the pre-made, microwaveable pad thai-in-a-box meals are? SO GROSS. This starter was the most perfect pad thai thing ever made! And it made two portions each time--lunch AND dinner! So great! And then...they stopped stocking it.
This is the downside of Trader Joe's. You come to love some item, to entrust maybe all of your meal-consumption to it, to rely on it for all your sustenance, and then one day, it's gone. The pad thai starter disappeared over a year ago, but when I go to Trader Joe's now, I still visit the place on the shelf where it used to live, hoping that the benevolent will of the Trader Joe's Gods decides to have it re-stocked it while I'm not looking. In the meantime, I have to make pad thai from scratch, without the tamarind, which I still haven't found anywhere, not even Trader Joe's. It's not as good.
In defense of product turnover, I do love the new green mangoes, although unlike the pad thai, they can't become both lunch and dinner every day.
Last, year, Trader Joe's sold an extremely excellent paid thai starter-in-a-box that came with the fish-soy-tamarind sauce mix and the rice noodles, and required that you add in the fresh ingredients yourself. This was such a great idea! Do you know how hard it is to find tamarind pulp in a grocery store to make pad thai from scratch? SO HARD. On the other hand, do you know how gross and salty the pre-made, microwaveable pad thai-in-a-box meals are? SO GROSS. This starter was the most perfect pad thai thing ever made! And it made two portions each time--lunch AND dinner! So great! And then...they stopped stocking it.
This is the downside of Trader Joe's. You come to love some item, to entrust maybe all of your meal-consumption to it, to rely on it for all your sustenance, and then one day, it's gone. The pad thai starter disappeared over a year ago, but when I go to Trader Joe's now, I still visit the place on the shelf where it used to live, hoping that the benevolent will of the Trader Joe's Gods decides to have it re-stocked it while I'm not looking. In the meantime, I have to make pad thai from scratch, without the tamarind, which I still haven't found anywhere, not even Trader Joe's. It's not as good.
In defense of product turnover, I do love the new green mangoes, although unlike the pad thai, they can't become both lunch and dinner every day.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
The new commercial domesticity: Miss Self-Important tries to make stuff
Many of the women I know (who are my age; I don't actually know very many people older than me, which I suppose is strange in its own right) have, since graduating from college, succumbed to some kind of hand-making disease which involves channeling primal housewife urges in every context where something could be bought, and insisting on making it instead.
Don't get me wrong; this isn't a moral scourge. In fact, the general trend to hand-make stuff led to the creation of Etsy (which is, notably, totally dominated by women), which is maybe the third or fourth greatest Internet Thing ever, after Amazon and Google and Lolcats. I have benefited a great deal from other women's crafting urges. But it's still a strange impulse to me, since my reaction to the post-college mode of acquiring things was not wonder at how many commercial products could be handmade instead, but wonder that I could actually afford to purchase commercial products. The awe and glory of having a real income for the first time in ever made me think, "I can now purchase soap any time I want, anywhere I want!", not "I can now purchase lye and glycerin and boil them for hours to make my own soap!" Making stuff that costs almost nothing at a supermarket is for poor people in places without supermarkets, not people with a weekly paycheck full of relief from necessity, like me (or, the me that used to get a weekly paycheck).
There are many universalizing arguments advanced for The New Commercial Domesticity (which is local! organic! healthy! sustainable! neighborly! anti-corporate!), but they all seem to be excuses for the urge of the young and hip to--as the name of an old and uncannily accurate Facebook group once phrased it--"Aestheticize My Life As a Means of Justifying My Existence." The primal housewife is channeled to customize not just traditionally decorative objects but everything one owns and consumes an aesthetic representation of the self. My pencil case was purchased only after an exhaustive winnowing of options not compatible with my style aspirations. I buy into this ideology (see pencil case) so far as it involves the purchasing end of things, not so much in the sphere of domestic aesthetics (in this sphere, thrift still largely trumps aesthetics), but very much in the sphere of gift exchange. Every Christmas, I leech off the impressive domestic craft talentz of at least a dozen women on Etsy so that I can send people gifts that demonstrate that I took account of each one's individual aesthetic aspirations. (And I did, peeps! I spent a lot of time thinking about what to get you!)
Still, buying other people's handmade goods, while an essential part of the New Commercial Domesticity, is not alone sufficient (alas, a problem plaguing shopping as a solution to Social Problems in general). It's just substituting organic lip balm from the local bee farm for Chapstick. Since the whole thing is at bottom opposed to commerce and consumption, it aspires to be a large-scale in-kind exchange rather than a market. It's just that, as you might imagine, money is a really convenient form of exchange. But the way to compensate for that unfortunate fact is to contribute your own goods to the market--to make and sell, and use the proceeds to buy what others make. Amateurs welcome! Cue to my female friends, who make many things, but not yet their living on Etsy. (You might notice that this is basically a voluntary and redundant replication of the origins of capitalism. But isn't that the point? To make for yourself things that already widely exist pre-made? Including soap and the present political order?)
Incorporating hand-making into gift-giving is a big challenge since 1) I am not extremely crafty, and 2) I am extremely cheap, and it's rarely cheaper to buy all the ingredients and packaging for a hand-made gift than to buy the gift whole. But on occasions when one must shop for people with expensive tastes that cannot be satisfied by my gift budget and who live nearby (shipping is expensive), it can be cost-effective. Hand-made things suggest the expenditure of housewifey effort and time that is hard to quantify into a price tag. And it's hard not to be appreciative when people give you things they made, as long as those people are over the age of 12 and their creations don't consist of popsicle sticks and dry macaroni.
Thus, my effort for this Christmas, for the person who will be cat-sitting for the next two weeks:
(Coconut brigadeiros and chocolate truffles)
(Bow-tying technique could use work)
And do you know what Sebastian said when I showed this to him? "Why did you spend so much time on this? Can't you just buy her chocolates?" At least we can be assured that, even if women tried to reinvent the wheel and hand-make everything, men might still keep the principle of practicality alive.
Don't get me wrong; this isn't a moral scourge. In fact, the general trend to hand-make stuff led to the creation of Etsy (which is, notably, totally dominated by women), which is maybe the third or fourth greatest Internet Thing ever, after Amazon and Google and Lolcats. I have benefited a great deal from other women's crafting urges. But it's still a strange impulse to me, since my reaction to the post-college mode of acquiring things was not wonder at how many commercial products could be handmade instead, but wonder that I could actually afford to purchase commercial products. The awe and glory of having a real income for the first time in ever made me think, "I can now purchase soap any time I want, anywhere I want!", not "I can now purchase lye and glycerin and boil them for hours to make my own soap!" Making stuff that costs almost nothing at a supermarket is for poor people in places without supermarkets, not people with a weekly paycheck full of relief from necessity, like me (or, the me that used to get a weekly paycheck).
There are many universalizing arguments advanced for The New Commercial Domesticity (which is local! organic! healthy! sustainable! neighborly! anti-corporate!), but they all seem to be excuses for the urge of the young and hip to--as the name of an old and uncannily accurate Facebook group once phrased it--"Aestheticize My Life As a Means of Justifying My Existence." The primal housewife is channeled to customize not just traditionally decorative objects but everything one owns and consumes an aesthetic representation of the self. My pencil case was purchased only after an exhaustive winnowing of options not compatible with my style aspirations. I buy into this ideology (see pencil case) so far as it involves the purchasing end of things, not so much in the sphere of domestic aesthetics (in this sphere, thrift still largely trumps aesthetics), but very much in the sphere of gift exchange. Every Christmas, I leech off the impressive domestic craft talentz of at least a dozen women on Etsy so that I can send people gifts that demonstrate that I took account of each one's individual aesthetic aspirations. (And I did, peeps! I spent a lot of time thinking about what to get you!)
Still, buying other people's handmade goods, while an essential part of the New Commercial Domesticity, is not alone sufficient (alas, a problem plaguing shopping as a solution to Social Problems in general). It's just substituting organic lip balm from the local bee farm for Chapstick. Since the whole thing is at bottom opposed to commerce and consumption, it aspires to be a large-scale in-kind exchange rather than a market. It's just that, as you might imagine, money is a really convenient form of exchange. But the way to compensate for that unfortunate fact is to contribute your own goods to the market--to make and sell, and use the proceeds to buy what others make. Amateurs welcome! Cue to my female friends, who make many things, but not yet their living on Etsy. (You might notice that this is basically a voluntary and redundant replication of the origins of capitalism. But isn't that the point? To make for yourself things that already widely exist pre-made? Including soap and the present political order?)
Incorporating hand-making into gift-giving is a big challenge since 1) I am not extremely crafty, and 2) I am extremely cheap, and it's rarely cheaper to buy all the ingredients and packaging for a hand-made gift than to buy the gift whole. But on occasions when one must shop for people with expensive tastes that cannot be satisfied by my gift budget and who live nearby (shipping is expensive), it can be cost-effective. Hand-made things suggest the expenditure of housewifey effort and time that is hard to quantify into a price tag. And it's hard not to be appreciative when people give you things they made, as long as those people are over the age of 12 and their creations don't consist of popsicle sticks and dry macaroni.
Thus, my effort for this Christmas, for the person who will be cat-sitting for the next two weeks:
And do you know what Sebastian said when I showed this to him? "Why did you spend so much time on this? Can't you just buy her chocolates?" At least we can be assured that, even if women tried to reinvent the wheel and hand-make everything, men might still keep the principle of practicality alive.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Best campus news story ever
Between muggings, fraud, and death, the Crimson brings you this delightful tale: 'Justice' Exam Blue Books Stolen From TF. This is precisely the kind of absurd scandal that should be rocking a college campus. What are the chances this actually happened, and the TF didn't just lose the exams somewhere and make up this story? I'm not sure, though it does seem pretty strange to break into a car and steal some undergrad exams, but not the car itself. Then again, maybe the exams are worth a lot in Asia...
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Open letter to the writers of Buffy
Dear writers of Buffy,
For five seasons, you managed to avoid getting all after-school special-y on some Major Social Issue, and then in season six, you give us Willow's "magic addiction" that just happens to look exactly like a heroin habit? And suddenly it's all compulsion, lying, screaming hysterics, and "withdrawal symptoms"? Please, gag me with a spoon.
And what exactly is nature of witchcraft on this show? Because you're always telling us how Willow is such a remarkably powerful witch, but it seems like even amateurs can successfully pull off powerful spells when they try. Anya conjured a room full of bunnies and a sword-fighting skeleton, Jonathan made himself Awesome, and Dawn brought her mother back from the dead without a whole lot of practice. So why does Willow have to spend two years perfecting her pencil float? And all the supposed side-effects of magic, aren't they a little less convincing than you make them sound? Willow's spells never actually go wrong because she does them wrong or isn't sufficiently powerful. A little spark leaping from the fireplace and onto a pile of brambles is just chance, not side effect or error. The whole magic construct just isn't as logical as the demon universe or the technologically-animated evil constructs. (Yes, I did just say that.)
Also, is it just me, or does the new vampy magic Willow kinda kill the show?
No love,
Miss Self-Important
For five seasons, you managed to avoid getting all after-school special-y on some Major Social Issue, and then in season six, you give us Willow's "magic addiction" that just happens to look exactly like a heroin habit? And suddenly it's all compulsion, lying, screaming hysterics, and "withdrawal symptoms"? Please, gag me with a spoon.
And what exactly is nature of witchcraft on this show? Because you're always telling us how Willow is such a remarkably powerful witch, but it seems like even amateurs can successfully pull off powerful spells when they try. Anya conjured a room full of bunnies and a sword-fighting skeleton, Jonathan made himself Awesome, and Dawn brought her mother back from the dead without a whole lot of practice. So why does Willow have to spend two years perfecting her pencil float? And all the supposed side-effects of magic, aren't they a little less convincing than you make them sound? Willow's spells never actually go wrong because she does them wrong or isn't sufficiently powerful. A little spark leaping from the fireplace and onto a pile of brambles is just chance, not side effect or error. The whole magic construct just isn't as logical as the demon universe or the technologically-animated evil constructs. (Yes, I did just say that.)
Also, is it just me, or does the new vampy magic Willow kinda kill the show?
No love,
Miss Self-Important
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Tidings
Phoebe may insist that the one remaining criterion of American, assimilated, secular, modern, probably inter-married Judaism is the refusal to celebrate Christmas, but I don't feel particular beholden to such pointless crusades any longer. I, for one, love Christmas. I love lights and trees and songs and presents and huge retail markdowns. This year, to demonstrate my long-standing but never before enacted love of Christmas, I purchased this very small tree at Trader Joe's (shown with cat for scaling):
It's not much, I realize. I also realize that it's crooked and fairly ugly. But it's a start. Next year, bigger tree and nicer lights. And cookie baking! There will also be cookie baking! But not this year, because this year, there are finals instead. Aspiration is about 90% of the Christmas spirit though, so I think I'm doing it right.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Extracurricular activities in grad school
My department requires that second-year grad students produce the entertainment for the annual holiday party. Here is what my cohort produced. It will be of interest to only an extremely small audience outside the department, and in fact, I can't even identify all the faculty featured in it.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Devolutions
This may explain what happened to the Midway Review:
John Podhoretz, Jonah, and others, have done a very good job highlighting the incoherence of the “No Labels” project—it’s basically a way to label as unconstructive people who disagree with the no labels crowd. John Miller also brings up O’Sullivan’s First Law (“all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing”) in this context.Oops, my bad.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
An open letter to my high school newspaper
Dear high school newspaper,
Isn't the purpose of going online-only to actually post some content online at some point? Just a thought.
Some love,
Miss Self-Important
UPDATE: Oops, I hadn't realized it moved and became a giant blog. I can't bring myself to update the link on my sidebar to this.
Isn't the purpose of going online-only to actually post some content online at some point? Just a thought.
Some love,
Miss Self-Important
UPDATE: Oops, I hadn't realized it moved and became a giant blog. I can't bring myself to update the link on my sidebar to this.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
An open letter to the characters on Buffy
Dear characters on Buffy,
Do you really expect me to believe that you have lived in Southern California all your lives and only two of you know how to drive by the age of 20? And one of those two is actually an old British guy? Look--vampires, demons, trolls, hellmouths--all that I am willing to believe. But your inability to drive crosses the boundary of the absurd.
No love,
Miss Self-Important
Do you really expect me to believe that you have lived in Southern California all your lives and only two of you know how to drive by the age of 20? And one of those two is actually an old British guy? Look--vampires, demons, trolls, hellmouths--all that I am willing to believe. But your inability to drive crosses the boundary of the absurd.
No love,
Miss Self-Important
Friday, December 03, 2010
Sleeping at Lamont
The Crimson responds to my despair with a photo series. Note the bare-footed guy! Not ok!
Thursday, December 02, 2010
I can has a better political theory of education?
I've been doing a lot of research this semester on homeschooling for reasons that, again, aren't really clear to me. In general, I think that public schooling is at once not as bad as it is made out to be and also much, much worse, so it's quite easy for me to endorse alternatives without getting all, "Down with the public schools!" about it. Barring huge changes in the labor market however, I doubt homeschooling will ever be extremely popular, which is all the more reason to let it be. This makes me a bad political theorist, since, as I've learned from my research, consequentialism is SLOPPY THINKING and we need RIGOROUS PRINCIPLES ROOTED IN TEH JUSTICE to evaluate every policy. However, the rigorous principle thinking seems to have led political theory into an abyss of craziness, wherein it rejects all private education as anti-democratic.
Much of this rejection flows from of the liberal academic fear of the religious right, which liberal academics pretend is a matter of abstract first principles rather than the merely partisan reaction to the last 30 years of American politics that it really is. It's true that a small but steady proportion of homeschoolers are actually lefty types who are totally in favor of all the lofty goals for children--autonomy, tolerance, self-motivation, etc.--that academic theorists think only public schools can effectively achieve, but these people are a collateral casualty of political theorists' fear of teh fundamentalists (a term that "in the literature," seems to describe anyone who identifies with a theology more conservative than Unitarianism). It is dangerous to let teh fundamentalists spend too much time with their children because they will teach them all kinds of horrible things, like hierarchy, authority, God, sin, and so on, resulting in a systematic suppression of their autonomy. Also, they are racists.
However plausible this sounds in theory (authoritarian parents = military upbringing, or something like that), I have a hard time connecting systematic suppression with anything that goes on in most American homes, even those of people who follow entire K-8 curricula based on the Sermon on the Mount. What would systematic suppression look like if parents still have personal, individual, and changing relationships with their children? I've never even met a person who could attest to having been systematically disciplined by his parents--the part of childrearing that is perhaps most amenable to systemization. Parents always make exceptions, slip up, negotiate, etc. Systematic suppression--systematic anything--would seem to be the particular specialty of bureaucratic institutions precisely because they depend on sets of rules instead of sets of individual relationships, and families could only make a second-best attempt. So how can you reasonably assert that, for example, autonomy can only flourish in schools while it can only be constrained in the home (even the homes of the hippie unschooling parents!)?
And, conveniently, sociology seems to be amenable to me on this question. I've read a couple of ethnographies of teh fundamentalist homeschooling families, and they've all borne out my skepticism about Teh Great Facist Indoctrination in which innocent children are being turned into obedient, doctrinaire, unthinking soldiers of the Tenth Crusade for the Purification of America. Basically, the ethnographies depict families whose children read the Bible way more than I did at their age, but otherwise have exactly the same give-and-take relationship with their parents that I and everyone I knew did, though theirs is less permissive. It turns out that homeschooling, even Christian homeschooling, unsurprisingly requires quite a lot of individualized response to children's interests and preferences. The image of homeschooling indoctrination robots that comes out of political theory doesn't appear at all in these ethnographies (although occasional rednecks do).
Political theorists have no interest in such observations because they don't follow from the logic of autonomy, defined as the ability to deconstruct all personal commitments and beliefs. The logic runs thus: being deconstructed by their children runs counter to the self-interest of parents, ergo parents can't facilitate autonomy, and the state must step in. Done. Now that we've established this, let's move on to grounding the state's right to do this.
By contrast, sociology deals with much more closely with education than the various "political theories of education," which consist almost entirely of abstract and vague sketches of what the ideal democratic or liberal educational universe should look like. We can learn, for example, that it should not discriminate by race or gender! In an ideal democratic world, all public schools should be high-performing! All children should learn and be happy! Schools should be run democratically, which will teach children to think critically and engage actively and also politically! Some more adverbs! You may be thinking, what would we do without political theory to show us the way? Sociology, on the other hand, has apparently not yet succumbed to the disease of "ideal theory" (or maybe it has now; I'm reading way old stuff), and instead considers such questions as, how influential are teachers and peers on children? What is the social structure of a school? How do teachers teach? How does discipline work?
Why can't political theory do this? Empirical work might seem like an obstacle but Coleman's empirical work is clearly driven by his very broad theory of education and not the other way around, so it need not be. Talking about boring curricular minutia might also seem like an impediment, but it wasn't for Locke and Rousseau, so the approach has a fairly impressive lineage. Over the past half-century, almost everything about the structure and purposes of public schooling has changed--curricula, teacher-student relationships, academic and non-academic expectation, students' social lives--and this is all politically consequential. In the meantime, it's completely crazy to think that a handful of teh fundamentalists (and the Amish!) are the source of the problems in American education, and to devote books and articles to debating just how much enforced secularism is too much, and call this and some vague imperative about "nondiscrimination" and "nonrepression" the political theory of education.
Much of this rejection flows from of the liberal academic fear of the religious right, which liberal academics pretend is a matter of abstract first principles rather than the merely partisan reaction to the last 30 years of American politics that it really is. It's true that a small but steady proportion of homeschoolers are actually lefty types who are totally in favor of all the lofty goals for children--autonomy, tolerance, self-motivation, etc.--that academic theorists think only public schools can effectively achieve, but these people are a collateral casualty of political theorists' fear of teh fundamentalists (a term that "in the literature," seems to describe anyone who identifies with a theology more conservative than Unitarianism). It is dangerous to let teh fundamentalists spend too much time with their children because they will teach them all kinds of horrible things, like hierarchy, authority, God, sin, and so on, resulting in a systematic suppression of their autonomy. Also, they are racists.
However plausible this sounds in theory (authoritarian parents = military upbringing, or something like that), I have a hard time connecting systematic suppression with anything that goes on in most American homes, even those of people who follow entire K-8 curricula based on the Sermon on the Mount. What would systematic suppression look like if parents still have personal, individual, and changing relationships with their children? I've never even met a person who could attest to having been systematically disciplined by his parents--the part of childrearing that is perhaps most amenable to systemization. Parents always make exceptions, slip up, negotiate, etc. Systematic suppression--systematic anything--would seem to be the particular specialty of bureaucratic institutions precisely because they depend on sets of rules instead of sets of individual relationships, and families could only make a second-best attempt. So how can you reasonably assert that, for example, autonomy can only flourish in schools while it can only be constrained in the home (even the homes of the hippie unschooling parents!)?
And, conveniently, sociology seems to be amenable to me on this question. I've read a couple of ethnographies of teh fundamentalist homeschooling families, and they've all borne out my skepticism about Teh Great Facist Indoctrination in which innocent children are being turned into obedient, doctrinaire, unthinking soldiers of the Tenth Crusade for the Purification of America. Basically, the ethnographies depict families whose children read the Bible way more than I did at their age, but otherwise have exactly the same give-and-take relationship with their parents that I and everyone I knew did, though theirs is less permissive. It turns out that homeschooling, even Christian homeschooling, unsurprisingly requires quite a lot of individualized response to children's interests and preferences. The image of homeschooling indoctrination robots that comes out of political theory doesn't appear at all in these ethnographies (although occasional rednecks do).
Political theorists have no interest in such observations because they don't follow from the logic of autonomy, defined as the ability to deconstruct all personal commitments and beliefs. The logic runs thus: being deconstructed by their children runs counter to the self-interest of parents, ergo parents can't facilitate autonomy, and the state must step in. Done. Now that we've established this, let's move on to grounding the state's right to do this.
By contrast, sociology deals with much more closely with education than the various "political theories of education," which consist almost entirely of abstract and vague sketches of what the ideal democratic or liberal educational universe should look like. We can learn, for example, that it should not discriminate by race or gender! In an ideal democratic world, all public schools should be high-performing! All children should learn and be happy! Schools should be run democratically, which will teach children to think critically and engage actively and also politically! Some more adverbs! You may be thinking, what would we do without political theory to show us the way? Sociology, on the other hand, has apparently not yet succumbed to the disease of "ideal theory" (or maybe it has now; I'm reading way old stuff), and instead considers such questions as, how influential are teachers and peers on children? What is the social structure of a school? How do teachers teach? How does discipline work?
Why can't political theory do this? Empirical work might seem like an obstacle but Coleman's empirical work is clearly driven by his very broad theory of education and not the other way around, so it need not be. Talking about boring curricular minutia might also seem like an impediment, but it wasn't for Locke and Rousseau, so the approach has a fairly impressive lineage. Over the past half-century, almost everything about the structure and purposes of public schooling has changed--curricula, teacher-student relationships, academic and non-academic expectation, students' social lives--and this is all politically consequential. In the meantime, it's completely crazy to think that a handful of teh fundamentalists (and the Amish!) are the source of the problems in American education, and to devote books and articles to debating just how much enforced secularism is too much, and call this and some vague imperative about "nondiscrimination" and "nonrepression" the political theory of education.
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Writing the lobbing grenades paper
I'm almost finished with a paper--the first such that I've written--in which I undertake an energetic and sustained (40+ pages!) but unfocused attack on a school of thought I'll call "civic educationalism." This paper is pretty much a laundry list of every single error, contradiction, groundless assertion, and sleight-of-hand ideological insertion in a series of books and articles that I have no idea why I even read in the first place. The basic problem is that my thesis is that no one should be doing political theory this way, but that means that I make no argument until around page 39, when I offer some vague suggestions for other, better ways to think about these things, while crossing my fingers that something on pages 1-38 has actually convinced anyone. It is much like blindly lobbing a barrage of grenades over a wall, ducking while they explode, and going over later to check if any of them have managed to hit the target. It was kind of fun to write (at some point about 35 pages in, the momentum gained through such prolific grenade-lobbing may have led to my calling the authors names) but I wonder how effective this new tactic will be.
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