Whose Rights Ring Wronger at School?

Public school? Check.
In the United States of America? Check (well, it’s Tennessee, and the states aren’t very united these days, does that still count?)
Constitution still technically in effect despite a decade of stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with evangelical Catholics? Hmmm. . .

At a football game on the school’s field, cheerleaders at Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School hold up a sign with a Biblical verse on it. After a complaint last week, the school has banned the cheerleaders from using any more signs with religious statements on them, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t even try to calculate how many objective orders of magnitude worse this is, without a peep of protest from the self-appointed School Indoctrination Police (still snarling about what sickening idol worship it was for some little children to sing a non-religious song about the first African-American president during Black History Month.)

Fort Oglethorpe Mayor Ronnie Cobb vehemently disagrees with the ban and said he’ll call on the City Council to support the cheerleaders and their signs.

The signs don’t infringe on anyone’s religious rights and are good for school spirit, he said.

“I’m totally against them doing away with it,” Mr. Cobb said, adding that the cheerleaders’ rights are being abused.

The mayor said football coach John Allen made the signs a tradition around 2003 and it has continued ever since.

“If it’s offensive to anyone, let them go watch another football game,” he said. “Nobody’s forced to come there and nobody’s forced to read the signs.”

Current head football coach Todd Windham said the school system must obey the law, despite everyone’s opinions.

Both are public servants paid with taxpayer dollars, are they not? — both charged with responsibilities to the whole community, not winner-take-all favoritism especially in intramural dispute. Strange that it’s the elected mayor who gets it wrong and wants to choose up sides and fight instead of concentrating on

The Unvirtuous Truth About The Virtue of Harvard

While you’re raging against American institutional gods like Wall Street and the insurance cabal, think about this:

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Think Tank: The "Veritas" About Harvard"

Elite universities have benefited mightily from a number of converging long-term trends, none of their making. The markets made them rich, America made them famous, globalization and the information revolution made their services particularly valuable. The winner-take-all society made them objects of aspiration, nexuses of money, power, and prestige, places where those forces pulse and converge.

They are, without a doubt, extremely valuable institutions that contribute much in the way of science, scholarship and culture. They make the world a better place. But they’ve mistaken their good fortune and great fortunes for virtue, and have lost their way. . .

How does that manifest itself and why should you care, especially if you weren’t trying to send a child to Harvard anyway? Well, let’s see:

“Confessions of a Home-schooler”: Salon

Cock of the snook for this to COD:

. . .Some people seem genuinely disturbed by our decision, on philosophical or political grounds, as if by keeping a couple of 5-year-olds out of kindergarten we have violated the social contract. Specifically, we have rejected the mainstream consensus that since education is a good thing, more of it — more formal, more “academic,” reaching ever deeper into early childhood and filling up more of the day and more of the year — is better for society and better for all children. This is almost an article of faith in contemporary America, but it’s also one that’s debatable at best and remains largely unsupported by research data.

In a related vein, some people suspect we have a hidden ideological or religious agenda we’re not telling them about. We may look like your standard-issue Brooklyn creative-class family — two 40-something parents, two kids, two pet rabbits and a battered Chrysler minivan — but who are we really? Home schooling has become a lot more mainstream and diverse in recent years, but familiar stereotypes endure. . .

In order to avoid one or more of these discomfort zones, we try to answer all well-meaning interlocutors with bland, diplomatic and totally unspecific generalities. Not quite lies, but well short of what you’d call the truth. This is a phenomenon known to almost all home-schoolers, from Mormon separatists to off-the-grid hippie anarchists, and a frequent discussion starter in online home-school groups. . .

JJ Reading Dan Brown’s New Book

. . .and glad it isn’t BANNED!

At the same time, I quite appreciate Killing the Buddha’s much more, ahem, historical and rational writing about the new book.

Dan Brown shares with the Masons a belief in the mythology that gave rise to modern culture, and hopes that his readers will join him in affirming those myths once again.

So I am just as glad Samuel Biagetti’s scholarship isn’t banned either, as I was glad the people freaked out by The Da Vinci Code couldn’t quash it or the people freaked out by Harry Potter couldn’t quash HIM:

I think Rowling’s genius is to see humans as carrying both hope and fear, both good and evil, to see us as magnificent, and animals, and facing new threats of extinction — to realize our ancient songs and stories need to be understood in progressively evolving ways, for anyone to win anything worth living or dying for.

Mortimer Adler’s definition of education was “the freeing discipline of wonder.” Religious education seems like an oxymoron then, unless we change our definition of religion, to match. Make it freeing rather than oppressive, wondrous rather than warlike, open to questions and new discovery and change. That was the thought when I wrote this:

“Maybe human spirituality is evolving [for the next cultural era] as we discover and accept truths not through patriarchal personification and studying “authoritative” writings spelled out for our dutiful performance on demand, but through an “unschooled” direct [and democratic if you will] personal connection to each other, and to the universe as a system?”

It’s not quite Dan Brown’s power of story, but it’s close enough to satisfy me.

“Ideas Are Incombustible”: Banned Books Week 2009

This year, the event features work by Ellen Hopkins, a young adult author who was recently banned from speaking at an Oklahoma middle school when a parent complained about her novels. . .her “Manifesto” for Banned Books Week 2009:

To you zealots and bigots and false
patriots who live in fear of discourse.
You screamers and banners and burners
who would force books
off shelves in your brand name
of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,
innocents ripe for corruption
by perversion or sorcery on the page.
But sticks and stones do break
bones, and ignorance is no armor.
You do not speak for me,
and will not deny my kids magic
in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,
the red, white and blue corroded
by terrorists, socialists, the sexually
confused. But we are a vast quilt
of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered
identities. You cannot speak for those
whose ancestors braved
different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,
the living word eroded by Muhammed
and Darwin and Magdalene.
But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven
and earth designed intelligence.
Surely you dare not speak
for the father, who opens
his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.

Learning to Play, Learning From Play

The whole New York Times Sunday magazine today is about various individual “identity” issues with education, from family background to sexual orientation. (Don’t miss the cover story, Coming Out in Middle School.)

One big piece is the story of our experimenting to figure out how little kids learn to control their own cognitive function, basically how they learn to learn to play, and from play.

It is Not News That Play Works, least of all here at Snook. Which is better news than this was! And Dana is writing about outside play instead of TV for little kids.

For me though, even outside play wasn’t so much physical education as it was the same sort of imaginative role-playing it would have been inside. Fresh air and sunshine was just another staging ground for the same power of story that tv and movies had infused for me with the Rules of the Roles.

And it turns out that’s what this NYT story is all about:

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

. . .a simple but surprising idea: that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days.

If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to

Lego Evolution T-Shirt

You’ve seen this . . .

But why not wear this?

You got your Lego creationists and your Lego evolutionists. Lego creationists are always asking, “If minifigs evolved from 1×1 bricks, then why do 1×1 bricks still exist?” Cause you can’t build the Death Star with a bunch of minifigs. Duh. But you don’t want to hear the Lego version of the big bang theory. Bricks flung to the far reaches of the living room. It’s not a pretty thing, especially if you’re walking around barefoot.

Cyber Student Socialization?

Online High Schools Test Students’ Social Skills
The Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

. . .Most online high schools are relatively young, and there has been little research on cyber students’ academic performance or social adaptation. But education experts say that studies looking at home-schooling suggest that students educated in nontraditional environments perform as well academically as their peers at conventional schools.

“When you look at home-school students compared to public or private school students, we have some reliable evidence to show that students are doing about the same but not better [in home school],” said Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Researchers affiliated with home-schooling cite their own studies showing that home schoolers outperform their conventionally educated counterparts on standardized tests.

Some online schools let students tackle the curriculum on their own schedule; others create a virtual classroom of students and teachers using video feeds, online chat and PowerPoint presentations. Online schools appeal to gifted students who want to work at their own pace, students who dropped out of traditional high schools or who are taught at home by their families, students who travel with globe-trotting parents and teens with competitive outside pursuits like ballet, tennis or gymnastics. . .

Really Unfortunate Headline

Our local longtime newspaper food critic died yesterday. Of course it was news to the readership. And obviously his colleagues in printing the story would use the man’s name — but did the news he was dead absolutely have to be headlined: Restaurant Critic Stiff??

School Is To Food: Obama-rama Energy for Positive Change

Snook started blogging the “school is to food” analogy at its inception three years ago this week. (Happy birthday, Baby Snook!)

JJ loves analogies if you haven’t noticed yet.

This one especially. Neither food politics nor school politics can be thought of as “free market” power of story — not if we want the kids to grow up healthy, that is:

It simply makes it impossible to avoid the question of what it means to live in a democracy when such basic aspects of our lives are affected by the actions of others in a manner so completely outside our reckoning. These are people we haven’t elected, and institutions which our elected representatives have not only failed to control but have actively aided in their folly.

It may be one of the most positive outcomes of this crisis that it compels us to ask fundamental questions about our political system, questions we may normally be too complacent or polite to ask. . .

Some of our earliest “school is to food” thinking is linked below and on Snook’s blogroll you can find some dedicated food food-for-thought we like. Today I found a new winner for that roll, thanks to Lynn and Sam talking here, about dog-whistle politics, of all seemingly unconnected things.

Obama Food-orama!

And btw, while we are connecting ideas you can’t get much more inspiringly healthy and smart and “pro-life” than anything about Michelle Obama.

In the beginning there was “school is to food” Snooking:

Science Fiction — and Anti-science Fiction?

Check out the Google graphic today, did you know this was H.G. Wells’ birthday?

And former Miss California, tall, blonde and ridiculously, redundantly, bionically enhanced-for-effect Carrie Prejean, remember her, the defender of “opposite marriage” for “her country” all the while doing what beauty queens as a breed do, exploiting sex and outlandish storytelling for big bucks in a personal power grab under the hot media lights (not in church) — she is spinning a made-for-tv sy-fy whopper on cable news via some conservative political convention called a Family Values event over the weekend:
“God chose me for that moment!” she thrills . . .

Anti-science fiction? Or ACTUAL history of how the human race was enslaved once again by dark dominionist forces from another planet or at least a foreign fifth column that uses our own values against us. . .

What if Invasion of the Body Snatchers IS a true story — not written by HG Wells, but then history has many authors.

I wish this all WERE science fiction, and not power of story reality in 21st century America. But Miss Prejean’s true lies make Mr. Wells’ fictional truths sound eerily prescient, even in his most fevered imaginations. Take this title to describe the real weekend of Thinking Parent discussion some of us home education parents just had, and this chapter one quote as a forward-looking draft of its history:

H. G. Wells, English author, futurist, essayist, historian, socialist, and teacher wrote “The War of the Worlds” (1898)

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

New Secret Video: Pimp and Prostitute Real This Time

UPDATE Sept 24: Unintended Consequences of Congress Acting to De-fund ACORN:

[C]ontractors that “might be caught in the ACORN net. . .

Did you know that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman had 20 fraud cases between them? And that your Congress didn’t care?
[Blackwater, Halliburton and] taxpayer-funded contractor DynCorp — its employees actually, LITERALLY, did service a prostitution ring . . .Girls between the ages of 12 and 15 were involved. . . . six years later, employees of the very same contractor went to Iraq and DID IT AGAIN! And this time somebody got killed.

. . .DynCorp is still “supporting U.S. interests worldwide.”

The only reason the American people have earned a potential tool in guarding against contractor fraud is because Congress created it BY ACCIDENT.

. . .This is a moment the media should seize.

**********

Journalism may not be the oldest profession but it once was more honorable than this. If you think ACORN employees were shamelessly manipulating our democracy, check out a young woman who wasn’t just playing a role but actually degrading herself and her employers for hire and got caught on secret video . . .she hasn’t been fired though, just “disciplined” whatever that means in the world of public prostitution. [shudder]