Month: October 2013

Stephen Lurie makes the case for one, noting that “every country that bests us in the education rankings either has a constitutional guarantee to education or [has] ensured the right through an independent statute”:

There simply hasn’t been a movement in the US to establish the rights of children in respect to equal, free, and adequate education. … When it comes to the rights of children in education, traditional interpretation has deemed the 10th amendment sufficient to shift responsibility to the states, and the 14th amendment adequate to ensure fairness. The Supreme Court decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), though, ran directly counter to that logic, denying appellant claims that unequal education funding violated a fundamental right and the Equal Protection Clause. Even as America assumes the responsibility for education rests somewhere, it’s clear that the right to that education has clearly fallen through the cracks.

But even if it were possible to pass a constitutional amendment, what would that accomplish?

Besides the important ability to catalyze a national discourse on education and legitimize federal leadership, a constitutional amendment provides a vital opportunity for court challenge. As influential as the decision in Brown v. Board proved to be for de jure discrimination, relying on the 14th Amendment for equal protection has proven inadequate to ensuring de facto educational equality across race, state, and income.

When there is a constitutional guarantee to education, the report and history suggest, direct litigation can produce lasting results. If a true right is established, soft forces and hard law can begin to fundamentally alter the immense flaws of the education system nationwide. This is the exact phenomenon that plays out time and again in other countries – and particularly the ones besting American education.

Ruth Graham urges young people to take home ec:

The words “home economics” likely conjure visions of future homemakers quietly whisking white sauce or stitching rickrack onto an apron. But to a handful of people thinking big about these problems, they evoke something different: a forward-thinking new kind of class that would give a generation of young people – not just women, but everyone – the skills to shop intelligently, cook healthily, manage money, and live well. The historian Helen Zoe Veit has argued that home ec has a key role to play in treating the obesity epidemic. “A beautiful way to start solving this problem would be to get more people cooking,” she said recently. “We have a blueprint of how to do this, and it’s through home economics.”

Erin Gloria Ryan is on board:

FCS [family and consumer sciences] is far from unnecessary sexist wife-prepping fluff; it’s important stuff that all students will actually, you know, use in their adult lives – not as a method of taking care of your hat-wearing husband’s babies, but to take care of themselves and separating themselves from the money and resource-wasting convenience products that rely on a helpless population to survive.

It feels good to take care of yourself! It feels good to save money by making your own food, taking care of your own home, understanding your own basic finances. Mandatory FCS with the sort of curriculum already being taught by dedicated teachers across the country could help alleviate the scourge of kidults currently stocking freezers full of Lean Cuisine and closets full of pants in need of hemming and checkbooks that have never been balanced.

Food writer Tom Philpott presses the issue:

I have witnessed firsthand the vexed state of basic cooking skills among the young. When I helped run the kitchen at Maverick Farms for seven years, I noticed that most of our interns couldn’t chop an onion or turn even just-picked produce into a reasonably good dish in a reasonable amount of time. And these were people motivated enough about food to intern at a small farm in rural North Carolina. If I had their cooking skills, I’d be tempted to resort to takeout often, just to save time.

(Photo of a 1906 “domestic science” class by Alexander W. Galbraith)

Meet Eugen Sandow, who, in the late 19th century, turned bodybuilding into an aesthetic, rather than purely athletic, experience:

Men and women alike clamored for cabinet cards featuring Sandow in the buff, and his physique inspired the first generation of gym bunnies. As Tim Farrell wrote for Neatorama, “Sandow did more than simply shock and titillate audiences with his tiny waist and ripped muscles; he pioneered the notion of working out for the sake of aesthetics.” Sandow recognized the value of sex appeal and used it to establish one of the earliest celebrity sporting franchises from his headquarters in London, which formed the basis of modern gym culture. …

He would cover himself with white powder so that he would look more like marble, and he’d assume a pose. Then they’d close the curtain to this little box, and when they opened it again, he was in another pose. He wore tights, but he took his shirt off, and it was quite unusual in those days for a man to remove his shirt in public. He was using allusions to classical art and statuary as an alibi, an excuse for posing practically nude. But that’s what he did, and he was a huge hit among men and women.

Emily Yoffe issues a call for women to take their own steps toward avoiding sexual assault, arguing that “the rise of female binge drinking has made [college] campuses a prey-rich environment”:

Experts I spoke to who wanted young women to get this information said they were aware of how loaded it has become to give warnings to women about their behavior. “I’m always feeling defensive that my main advice is: ‘Protect yourself. Don’t make yourself vulnerable to the point of losing your cognitive faculties,’ ” says Anne Coughlin, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has written on rape and teaches feminist jurisprudence. She adds that by not telling them the truth—that they are responsible for keeping their wits about them—she worries that we are “infantilizing women.” …

The biological reality is that women do not metabolize alcohol the same way as men, and that means drink for drink women will get drunker faster. … If female college students start moderating their drinking as a way of looking out for their own self-interest—and looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle—I hope their restraint trickles down to the men.

Katie McDonough accuses Yoffe of writing “rape apologia”:

These arguments are offensive and damaging to victims, but they are also familiar to the point of being banal. It’s the reason why responding to them can be a challenge, because it is hard to find new ways to say the same things. Like that female sexuality or female vulnerability do not cause rape. That rape is a crime, but that being drunk is not. These things have been written before, and they will most certainly be written again.

Yoffe has plenty of good data to support her argument that binge drinking on college campuses isn’t healthy. The over-consumption of alcohol can literally kill people. What it can’t do, however, is make a woman responsible for a crime committed against her.

Emily Matchar comes to Yoffe’s defense:

The fact that Yoffe didn’t discuss men in her story is troubling. It frames rape as a women’s issue rather than an everybody issue, which I assume was not her intent. But this doesn’t make her points about women and drinking any less true. Educating women on the factors that make them vulnerable to assault is not victim-blaming. It is simply practical advice backed up by data. We tell travelers to be aware of their surroundings in unfamiliar cities to reduce the risk of mugging. We teach new drivers defensive strategies to avoid being hit by drunks and speeders. This should not be any different.

Some critics said Yoffe was merely rehashing tired, hysterical old warnings about alcohol and rape, which “all” women have already heard. Yet many available sources of information on sexual assault prevention skirt the issue of drunkenness without directly addressing it. They urge alertness and awareness: Trust your gut, walk purposefully, keep your keys handy, scan your surroundings when alone at night, note the locations of emergency phones. But these are all things that drunkenness make impossible. Why not address that directly?

Recent Dish on rape here, here, here, and here.

Jim White watches Alex Gibney’s new documentary on the fall of Lance Armstrong, The Armstrong Lie, which began production before the revelations of the cyclist’s doping. “Armstrong invited Gibney into his life on the assumption that the film-maker would seal his place in history,” he observes. “Gibney has done that”:

At the heart of the complex, sophisticated lie the rider constructed around his systematic cheating was his own ability to fib to camera. Time and again during that 2009 Tour he looks into Gibney’s lens and tells him he has never, will never, and could never embrace performance-enhancing assistance. And boy, is he good at it. Never in this history of dope control has there been a drug cheat who has voluntarily admitted their guilt before they were exposed. Until found out, Marion Jones, Michelle de Bruin, Dwain Chambers, all of them insisted their achievements owed entirely to their brilliance and hard work.

But nobody was as proficient at the fib as Armstrong. Nobody lied as often and as skilfully as he did. In Gibney’s film we see him in those 2009 press conferences taking on his detractors such as journalist David Walsh with a plausibility that, with the benefit of hindsight, beggars belief. We witness his bullying delight in humiliating those who knew the truth. We see him at his contemptible worst, hiding behind his cancer to denigrate those who dared challenge his version of himself.

Relatedly, Ashley Fetters focuses on the new book Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever:

Armstrong’s true story—or, at least, Wheelmen’s account of it—contains enough juicy intrigue that it’s worth pondering: In some alternate universe where Lance Armstrong was a fictional character created in a writers’ room (rather than a real person who’s disappointed millions of people), would he be looked upon with contempt or with fascination? With a few clever storytelling touches—a few glimpses of Lance’s unstable childhood in Texas here, some added emphasis on just wanting to win it for the cancer survivors there, some strategically placed flickers of truly agonized soul-searching—it’s not hard to imagine that his story might even elicit some degree of conflicted compassion.

Previous Dish on Armstrong’s public demise here, here and here.

In only his second known interview since ending Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, the reclusive Bill Watterson discusses the role of the comic strip in an increasingly digital culture:

Where do you think the comic strip fits in today’s culture?

Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with.

So should we be on the look-out for a Pixar-produced Calvin and Hobbes movie?

The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.

Go Comics recently made the Calvin and Hobbes archive available online.  This summer, Dish readers reminisced about the comic here, here, and here. More here.