Month: July 2009

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

If the Chinese are anything like the Thais, a desire for whites is less about racism than it is appearance.  I have been working for the past four years in Thailand and having blonde hair and bluse eyes is a big advantage – not because they think that I can do the job better, but because I more closely fit the image of what a farang (foreigher) is and the school can parade me in front of the parents to show off their English language teacher.  Most Thais (even those educated in the West) are simply obsessed with light skin – competence has nothing to do with it.

Another reader adds:

This explanation is a bit off-track, particularly when it comes to hiring caucasian teachers. Schools want to hire white teachers because parents are willing to pay a premium to have their kids taught by native English teachers. They want their children to learn English with the proper accent. There are Chinese English teachers who do a great job and there are also those who have such thick accents, most English speakers wouldn't be able to understand them. And yes, there are plenty of non-white native English speakers; however, it's more believable to the parents if the teacher is caucasian. An Asian-looking teacher might be a native English speaker, but most parents wouldn't be able to receognize whether the teacher spoke English with a Chinese accent or not. On the other hand, there's little doubt that students are getting the "real deal" with a caucasian teacher.

 

Schools also put a premium on teachers from North America opposed to those from other English speaking regions. An American (or Canadian) accent is usually the most desirable accent to have, followed by British and then Australian. Kiwi and South African accents are at the bottom of the list (though still rated above an English teacher with a Chinese accent). The bias is rooted in parents wanting their children to learn the same kind of English that is most widely spoken throughout the world.

by Patrick Appel

A.L. posts on the Bush-era secret CIA program in the news lately. Spencer Ackerman has been all over the story and cautions that the facts might not be what they seem:

by Conor Friedersdorf

Alan Jacobs is pondering the appropriate high school curriculum for his son:

He’s headed into the eleventh grade, and while his education so far has given him a sound overview of Western cultural history, we’re concerned that he hasn’t had enough experience digging deeply into particular issues, doing wide-ranging research and coming up with sophisticated theses based on what he has learned. So we’ve decided to organize the coming school year around particular topics with interdisciplinary facets to them, starting in each case with one or two books that will in different ways orient him to the issues. Our focus will be on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, though any non-Western topics could reach back farther.

So, for instance, one topic will start with Voltaire’s Candide and, probably, Nicholas Shrady’s book on the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, The Last Day, and will involve philosophical optimism, the “problem of evil” for Christians and other religious believers, and associated topics. Another unit will involve sanitation and social class in Victorian England. Wes will start by reading Dickens’s Bleak House and Stephen Johnson’s The Ghost Map, and will expand his research from there.

On this side of the Atlantic, we might have Wes read Ellis’s Founding Brothers and Garry Wills’s Cincinnatus — he has already read the Federalist Papers, so it would be interesting to have that in the background.

The post goes on like that. At the end, Alan asks for feedback and advice from readers, and the comments section includes some wonderful suggestions. The whole exchange makes me jealous of young Wes, and the education he is receiving. It is so obviously superior to my own academic experience in ninth through twelfth grade.

I say that as someone who attended a well-regarded Catholic high school that offered numerous AP classes, better than average teachers and a reputation among elite colleges for turning out exceptionally well prepared students. Even so, I cannot help but assess its curriculum with a Paul Simon line: "When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." Despite hard work that resulted in a 4.0+ GPA, I spent four years studying Spanish without becoming anything near fluent, passed an AP Physics class knowing embarrassingly little about the subject, and endured a biology class that basically amounted to memorizing terms long enough to pass successive unit exams (and no longer), conceptual understanding be damned. The only classes that afforded real learning were senior year English, modern art, geometry, and an ethics course, classes I remain grateful for having taken — they've afforded more intellectual fulfillment in subsequent years than anything in my upbringing save the fact that my parents read to me endlessly as a little kid.

What strikes me, all these years later, about my lousy but better-than-average high school education is how useful it proved in preparing me for college and the job market. Absent exceptional teachers, an academically competitive high school basically teaches the young how to game the system lots of people call the American meritocracy. It is difficult to describe this skill set precisely, though it certainly includes things like earning good grades in classes you know little if anything about, learning to game standardized tests and exams, employing writerly tricks to obscure the fact that you know nothing of substance about the topic of your five page paper, and understanding which teachers aren't desirous of substance insomuch as they want an ability to fake it on pages where the margins and font are diligently set to their specifications.

Oh to have those youthful years back. As an adult, I understand the preciousness of time, and I sorely regret having wasted any of it simulating rather than gaining knowledge. The experience does inform a suspicion that if we stopped making the overlap between academic skills and life skills a self-fulfilling prophecy, they might overlap less than we imagine. Were that the case, perhaps high schools would rejigger their curriculum to more closely resemble what Alan is attempting: knowledge as something more than a metric to be measured by standardized tests, a means of admission to a selective college or a prerequisite for strategic advancement in the American job market.

by Patrick Appel

Via Goldblog, Totten declares almost-victory:

The country is far from paradise, as the rest of Totten's report makes clear. I share Andrew's fears.

(Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty.)

by Conor Clarke

Just one more point about Sarah Palin's op-ed in this morning's Washington Post: Derek Thompson and others have pointed out to me that the piece does not contain the words pollution, emissions, carbon, or global warming. As Derek says, this is a bit like an op-ed on health care that doesn't contain the words spending, costs, coverage, or medicine, or a high-school paper on Catcher in the Rye that doesn't contain the words, um, Catcher in the Rye.

I find this absence sickening. Deciding how to deal with climate change is an uncertain and complicated process. It requires weighing costs in the present against benefits a hundred years in the future. It requires weighing costs in the U.S. against benefits in places like India and Bangladesh. It requires weighing concrete GDP against the moral emphemera of the world's floral and animal diversity. And it requires sacrificing today to ward off uncertain and unquantifiable future risks. This tremendous empirical uncertainty demands reflection and humility.

And then you have Sarah Palin show up, blathering about how we're "destroying America's economy" while we're "literally" sitting on mountains of oil and drill baby drill and blah blah blah. Sickening.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

by Patrick Appel

Water shortages.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

For several reasons, a mass movement of the sort Hoffer described is unlikely in present circumstances. First, the present economic downturn is more a hiccup in prosperity than an incubator for a mass movement. Unemployment is nothing like it was during the Great Depression. We are experiencing nothing like the hyperinflation in post-World War I Germany, nor the squalor and oppression in czarist Russia. In addition, calling the Reagan Revolution a mass movement of Hofferian grandeur is a bit of a stretch. The movements inspired by Ron Paul, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, as well as the so-called Tea Party movement, gained momentum from the Internet, but the Internet also limited their scope.

Yes, like-minded people, even lunatics, are able to find their co-religionists more easily now than ever before. At the same time, the internet causes fissures to appear in any mass movement at a very early stage. Enforcement of ideological conformity is more difficult online than when people have to gather together on the street or in a smoke-filled room.

What is more likely is that we will continue to see a rise in intense mini-movements which make a lot of noise but gain very little traction. These mini-movements can become dangerous and may result in an uptick of violent incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing. However, the risk–or the possibility–of a mass movement developing that transforms American society is getting lower as information becomes more broadly available.

The present circumstances are more likely to breed anarchy than they are to breed a mass movement.

by Conor Clarke

Yesterday's New York Times op-ed page published a bunch of possible confirmation questions for Sonia Sotomayor. Here's one from blogger and law professor Ann Althouse:

Andrew Gelman responds by observing that Catholicism has been historically underrepresented on the Court: "We've had 12 Catholics, 7 Jews, 1 unaffiliated, and 89 Protestants" in the Court's history. (The single unaffiliated justice — in case you're wondering, as I was — is David Davis, who was also Lincoln's campaign manager.) But while Gelman's data is interesting, and while I love interesting data, I also think it somewhat misses the point of Althouse's question. As I understand it, her point isn't "let's get rid of the damn Catholics." The point of the question is: "Why do we treat racial diversity as different — and potentially more desirable — than other kinds of diversity?" So, why do we?

A good angle into the question might be to think about two different ways you could justify an affirmative action program. One argument would be that affirmative action is needed to correct a lack of opportunity: You might say (indeed, I would say) that certain groups face historic disadvantages that are worth correcting. A second and distinct justification would be that diversity creates social benefits. The usual argument is that diverse classrooms have better discussions, and a diverse officer corps runs a better military, and a diverse business force helps navigate that cliche of an "increasingly globalized world."

But my feeling is that race-based affirmative action works much better under the first justification (creating equal opportunities) than it does under the second (increasing social utility). Why do we think racial diversity — as opposed to diversity of opinion, religion, sex, sexuality, age, language or class — is uniquely disposed to make an institution more effective? I also think arguments based on equal opportunity are more effective when you're talking about college admissions than when you're talking about a seat on the Supreme Court. That SCOTUS seat is an outcome, not an opportunity.

And so I sympathize with Althouse's question: Why treat racial diversity as more important than other forms of diversity at a place like the Supreme Court? (I don't think appealing to a large group of voters is a good enough argument!)