The opt out myth
In my post about working families' issues on Monday, I mentioned, but didn't post, my own recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review. That article is now getting enough comment elsewhere (for instance, at both TAPPED and TNR's blog) that I thought it might be useful to publish in its entirety here. Do note that you can find more information (footnotes, additional information, links to the underlying research, resources for research and activism) at the Schuster Institute's website.
On October 26, 2003, The New York Times Magazine jump-started a century-long debate about women who work. On the cover it featured “The Opt Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin’s semipersonal essay, with this banner: "Why don’t more women get to the top? They choose not to." Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full-time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success.
But Belkin’s “revolution”—the idea that well-educated women are fleeing their careers and choosing instead to stay home with their babies—has been touted many times before. As Joan C. Williams notes in her meticulously researched report, “?‘Opt Out’ or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict,” released in October 2006 by the University of California Hastings Center for WorkLife Law, where she is the director, The New York Times alone has highlighted this “trend” repeatedly over the last fifty years: in 1953 ("Case History of an Ex-Working Mother"), 1961 ("Career Women Discover Satisfactions in the Home"), 1980 ("Many Young Women Now Say They’d Pick Family Over Career"), 1998 ("The Stay-At-Home Mother"), and 2005 ("Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood").
And yet during the same years, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Economists agree that the increase in what they dryly call “women’s participation in the waged workforce” has been critical to American prosperity, demonstrably pushing up our gdp. The vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income—especially now, when upwards of 70 percent of American families with children have all adults in the work force, when *51 percent of American women live without a husband, and when many women can expect to live into their eighties and beyond.
The moms-go-home story keeps coming back, in part, because it’s based on some kernels of truth. Women do feel forced to choose between work and family. Women do face a sharp conflict between cultural expectations and economic realities. The workplace is still demonstrably more hostile to mothers than to fathers. Faced with the “choice” of feeling that they’ve failed to be either good mothers or good workers, many women wish they could—or worry that they should—abandon the struggle and stay home with the kids.
The problem is that the moms-go-home storyline presents all those issues as personal rather than public—and does so in misleading ways. The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upper-echelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences and the resulting social policy needs from view.
Here’s why that matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.
So how can this story be killed off, once and for all? Joan Williams attempts to chloroform the moms-go-home storyline with facts. “Opt Out or Pushed Out?” should be on every news, business, and feature editor’s desk. It analyzes 119 representative newspaper articles, published between 1980 and 2006, that use the opt-out storyline to discuss women leaving the workplace. While business sections regularly offer more informed coverage of workplace issues, the “opt out” trend stories get more prominent placement, becoming “the chain reaction story that flashes from the Times to the columnists to the evening news to the cable shows,” says Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor and the author of Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women (April 2007).
There are a number of problems with the moms-go-home storyline. First, such articles focus excessively on a tiny proportion of American women—white, highly educated, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs. Just 8 percent of American working women fit this demographic, writes Williams. The percentage is smaller still if you’re dealing only with white women who graduated from the Ivies and are married to high-earning men, as Belkin’s article does. Furthermore, only 4 percent of women in their mid- to late thirties with children have advanced degrees and are in a privileged income bracket like that of Belkin’s fellow Princeton grads, according to Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That group is far more likely than average women to be married when they give birth (91 percent, as opposed to 73 percent of all women), and thus to have a second income on which to survive. But because journalists and editors increasingly come from and socialize in this class, their anecdotes loom large in our personal rearview mirrors—and in our most influential publications. Such women are chastised for working by Caitlin Flanagan (a woman rich enough to stay home and have a nanny!) in The Atlantic, and for lacking ambition by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect. But such “my-friends-and-me” coverage is an irresponsible approach to major issues being wrestled with by every American family and employer.
The stories are misleading in a second important way. Williams’s report points out that “opt-out stories invariably focus on women in one particular situation: after they have ‘opted out’ but before any of them divorce.” The women in those articles often say their skills can be taken right back onto the job. It’s a sweetly optimistic notion, but studies show that, on average, professional women who come back after time away—or even after working part-time, since U.S. women working part-time earn 21 percent less per hour worked than those who work full-time—take a hefty and sustained pay cut, and a severe cut in responsibility level. Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce, according to the latest census figures. While numbers are lower for marriages in the professional class, divorce remains a real possibility. Williams points to Terry Martin Hekker, one of the ur opt-out mothers, who in 1977 published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled," The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in ‘An Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing .’ In 2006, Hekker wrote—again in the Times, but demoted to the Sunday Style section—about having been divorced and financially abandoned: “He got to take his girlfriend to Cancun, while I got to sell my engagement ring to pay the roofer.”
In other words, interview these opt-out women fifteen years later—or forty years later, when they’re trying to live on skimpy retirement incomes—and you might hear a more jaundiced view of their “choices.”
The opt-out stories have a more subtle, but equally serious, flaw: their premise is entirely ahistorical. Their opening lines often suggest that a generation of women is flouting feminist expectations and heading back home. At the simplest factual level, that’s false. Census numbers show no increase in mothers exiting the work force, and according to Heather Boushey, the maternity leaves women do take have gotten shorter. Furthermore, college-educated women are having their children later, in their thirties—after they’ve established themselves on the job, rather than before. Those maternity leaves thus come in mid-career, rather than pre-career. Calling that “opting out” is misleading. As Alice Kessler-Harris, a labor historian at Columbia University, put it, “I define that as redistributing household labor to adequately take care of one’s family.” She adds that even while at home, most married women keep bringing in family income, as women traditionally have. Today, women with children are selling real estate, answering phone banks, or doing office work at night when the kids are in bed. Early in the twentieth century, they might have done piecework, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. Centuries earlier, they would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers).
Which brings us to an even deeper historical flaw: editors and reporters forget that Belkin’s generation isn’t post-feminism; it’s mid-feminism. Women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. Earlier generations of college-educated women picked either work or family, work after family, or family after work; those who graduated in the 1980s and 1990s—Belkin’s cohort—are the first to expect to do both at the same time. And so these women are shocked to discover that, although 1970s feminists knocked down the barrier to entering the professions in large numbers, the workplace still isn’t fixed. They are standing on today’s feminist frontier: the bias against mothers that remains embedded on the job, in the culture, and at home.
Given that reality, here’s the biggest problem with the moms-go-home storyline: it begins and ends with women saying they are choosing to go home, and ignores the contradictory data sandwiched in between.
Williams establishes that “choice” is emphasized in eighty-eight of the 119 articles she surveyed. But keep reading. Soon you find that staying home wasn’t these women’s first choice, or even their second. Rather, every other door slammed. For instance, Belkin’s prime example of someone who “chose” to stay home, Katherine Brokaw, was a high-flying lawyer until she had a child. Soon after her maternity leave, she exhausted herself working around the clock to prepare for a trial—a trial that, at the last minute, was canceled so the judge could go fishing. After her firm refused even to consider giving her “part-time” hours—forty hours now being considered part-time for high-end lawyers—she “chose” to quit.
More than a third of the articles in Williams’s report cite “workplace inflexibility” as a reason mothers leave their jobs. Nearly half mention how lonely and depressed those women get when they’ve been downgraded to full-time nannies. Never do such articles cite decades of social science research showing that women are happier when occupying several roles; that homemakers’ well-being suffers compared to that of working women; or that young adults who grew up in dual-earner families would choose the same family model for their own kids. Rarely do such articles ask how husband and wife negotiated which one of them would sacrifice a career. Only by ignoring both the women’s own stories and the larger context can the moms-go-home articles keep chirping on about choice and about how such women now have “the best job in the world.”
Underlying all this is a genuinely new trend that the moms-go-home stories never mention: the all-or-nothing workplace. At every income level, Americans work longer hours today than fifty years ago. Mandatory overtime for blue- and pink-collar workers, and eighty-hour expectations for full-time professional workers, deprive everyone of a reasonable family life. Blue-collar and low-wage families increasingly work “tag-team” schedules so that someone’s always home with the kids. In surveys done by the Boston College Sloan Work and Families Research Network and by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, among others, women and men increasingly say that they’d like to have more time with their families, and would give up money and advancement to do it—if doing so didn’t mean sacrificing their careers entirely. Men, however, must face fierce cultural headwinds to choose such a path, while women are pushed in that direction at every turn.
Finally, the opt-out articles never acknowledge the widespread hostility toward working mothers. Researching the book I wrote for Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—and What to Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her highly remunerative specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: Do you feel stupider? Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down. Or consider the experience of Dr. Diane Fingold, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, where she won the 2002 Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the school’s highest teaching award. Her credentials are outstanding, yet when she asked to work three-and-a-half fewer hours a week so that she could manage her family demands—“just a little flexibility for a short period in my life!”—her practice refused. She was enraged. “I thought hard about leaving medicine altogether,” she said. Her husband is a successful venture capitalist whose “annual Christmas bonus is what I make in a year!”
Had Fingold left, in other words, she would have fit neatly with Belkin’s hyperachievers. But she loves practicing and teaching medicine, and realized she couldn’t reenter at the same level if she walked away entirely. So she moved to another practice that was willing to accommodate her part-time schedule until, in a few years, she can return to full-time. Had she chosen the Belkin course, would she have opted out—or been pushed out?
Experiences like Fingold’s bear out what social scientists are finding: strong bias against mothers, especially white mothers, who work. (Recent research shows bias against African American mothers of any class who don’t work, a subject that deserves an article of its own.) Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor, described in an article in the March 2007 American Journal of Sociology. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously described as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three.
Here’s what feminism hasn’t yet changed: the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and being a worker requires a similar commitment, then the two roles are mutually exclusive. A lawyer might be able to juggle the demands of many complex cases in various stages of research and negotiation, or a grocery manager might be able to juggle dozens of delivery deadlines and worker schedules—but should she have even a fleeting thought about a pediatrics appointment, she’s treated as if her on-the-job reliability will evaporate. No one can escape that cultural idea, reinforced as it is by old sitcoms, movies, jokes—and by the moms-go-home storyline.
Still, if they were pushed out, why would smart, professional women insist that they chose to stay home? Because that’s the most emotionally healthy course: wanting what you’ve got. “That’s really one of the agreed-upon principles of human nature. People want their attitudes and behavior to be in sync,” said Amy Cuddy, an assistant professor in the management and organizations department at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. “People who’ve left promising careers to stay home with their kids aren’t going to say, ‘I was forced out. I really want to be there.’ It gives people a sense of control that they may not actually have.”
So yes, maybe some women “chose” to go home. But they didn’t choose the restrictions and constrictions that made their work lives impossible. They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules. And they didn’t choose the bias or earnings loss that they face if they work part-time or when they go back full time.
By offering a steady diet of common myths and ignoring the relevant facts, newspapers have helped maintain the cultural temperature for what Williams calls “the most family-hostile public policy in the Western world.” On a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, afterschool programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Jody Heymann, who teaches at both the Harvard School of Public Health and McGill University, the U.S. is one of only five without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on nineteenth century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
The moms-go-home story’s personal focus makes as much sense, according to Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”
* After this New York Times article was published, this statistic came under fire, since it includes "women" 15 and up.
I think there is a problem that in American society, a family used to be able to get by on one income and now two incomes barely enable a family to get by, much less have a house, pay for health care, college, and retirement.
Corporations whose productivity has soared have benefited by a weak labor movement.
On the other hand, I really don't care that lawyers require their employees to work 60-80-100 hour weeks and pay employees less that can't do that. (Frankly, I wish they would require 168 hour weeks so they could all drop dead.) What I think is a crock is that our legal system expects people that are in a chokehold in the legal system to pay them $300 an hour or up, or otherwise have no or poor representation. The legal system crisis is not that women that enter it have to choose either being in it or having a kid, the legal system crisis is that unless you are a millionaire you can't expect any real support from a lawyer.
The medical system crisis is that young doctors are expected to work 36 hour shifts as basically slaves and yet patients and young doctors are supposedly better off by that. The medical system crisis is not that a women has to choose between being a doctor or being a mother. Your doctor was incredibly fortunate, she married someone who is very very well paid (overpaid). I feel more for the doctors whose practices won't allow her to take a few weeks off, but apparently she was able to find a practice that suited her needs more. So I am not sure what the use of her example is.
I do agree that in general, industry and employers should be more flexible to the family needs of their employees, women and men. I am just not sure that doctors and lawyers that seem to be incredibly privileged and wield much more power than the rest of us make the best examples for you to be using.
Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
This also seems to be backwards. I think that 1) school schedules should fit the schedules of the kids in terms of when kids can learn best, and then 2) work schedules should be able to fit around school schedules.
In that sense, elementary schools should probably start around 8 am, but high schools should probably start around 10 am.
I am lucky enough to work for a large company that is very family friendly and allows those of us not on an assembly line a great deal of power to flex our schedules for school and other activities.
I would rather hear from you how employers should deal with assembly line workers and the rest of us than with doctors and lawyers.
They didn’t choose the cultural expectation that mothers, not fathers, are responsible for their children’s doctor visits, birthday parties, piano lessons, and summer schedules.
I am not aware of that expectation at all, especially in two income families. I am eager to be the parent that takes my kids to the doctor so that I can talk to the doctor. I suspect many parents that are not the ones that take their kids to a doctor visit have many questions about what happened during the visit.
I arrange the piano lessons, we share the summer schedule, and these days, it seems that most parties often take place at some third party venue that pretty much takes care of most of the details. (But I have picked out and baked the cakes.)
Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment.
I don't see this at all amongst my friends, relatives, or fellow workers at the company I work at, on the other hand, I do see feminists simultaneously demanding sole custody of children while complaining that the patriarchy makes them responsible for both the kids welfare as well as a career.
I know a lot of men that would love to engage in all of these activities but can't.
I think you arguments are stronger when you don't pit men against women but frame these issues as families struggling in our current culture.
March 21, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I see some framing here, too.
We're hearing of women being forced to make a choice because of societal pressure.
But I think there is at least one other way to view this. There are women who make the choice to be stay-at-home mothers not because they're forced by society, but because they really like it. It makes them feel good to spend time with their kids.
Now the problem here isn't that we need to figure out ways to make it so that such women will feel "happier" at work than at home.
The problem is that we have not adjusted the way work is done to accommodate the lifestyles women (and perhaps men) most enjoy.
The problem won't be solved when we can say that women aren't spending time with their kids any longer.
The problem will be solved when we stop expecting that high power careers mean people have to put in 60 hour work weeks.
March 21, 2007 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why can’t twenty-first century school schedules match the twenty-first century workday?
This also seems to be backwards. I think that 1) school schedules should fit the schedules of the kids in terms of when kids can learn best, and then 2) work schedules should be able to fit around school schedules.
In that sense, elementary schools should probably start around 8 am, but high schools should probably start around 10 am.
I agree, as far as time of day. As far as time of year, it would be nice if the school schedule could abandon its agrarian roots and run "year round", with occasional breaks for kids to take family vacations at a time that suits their parents' work schedules (perhaps with a curriculum that is continuous but allows for some self-study), or breaks for the kids to experience non-school experiences like camps. If each institution -- work and school -- accommodated the other in this way, we'd all be happier.
March 21, 2007 11:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would like to point out an additional irony Jerry, in that most lawyers cannot afford their own rates.
March 21, 2007 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that you are refuting myths with myths.
While there might be an "opt-out myth," I think there is also an "opt-in" myth whereby the work that the second spouse adds to the economy is worth less than being part of the "non-waged" labor force.
I recently read in CityPages, [Read The Story Here] about a stay at home mom that created a successful candy business.
If women are being rejected from the labor force in such high numbers, you'd think they'd collectively try different ways to make incomes.
They certainly have huge political clout.
The older I get, the more I think: stop believing you're a victim, keep thinking you're a survivor.
March 21, 2007 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
This all gets back to "the meaning of life". There are those who work because they have to and having children has an immediate effect on their income. Either they have to take time off from work or they have to find (expensive) child care to remain at work.
Then there are those who (like men) find purpose in a career. In places like Japan such reordering of priorities has affected the basic structure of society. Marriage and births are down and having major demographic effects.
Then there are the (small) group of highly educated women who like the career but decide at some point that this is not the ultimate aim of life. They can make this choice because their husbands make enough money so that stopping work is not the same sort of economic hardship as in the first group.
If more people (including men) realized that there is more to life that career advancement, amassing wealth and getting more "stuff" we might have a happier society and one less dependent on mindless consumerism. We also wouldn't be invading other countries in an effort to obtain raw materials needed to continue our present course of wastefulness.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
March 21, 2007 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
How many of us know women in low-paying jobs who quit because the expenses of commuting and child care eat up two-third, or more, of her take-home?
By quitting, these women are saying that they can't afford to work.
March 21, 2007 12:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Graff evidently doesn't give your theory much credit:
So, you just think that their choice is voluntary.
And I am curious whether Graff honestly thinks that earnings loss when a woman goes part-time to take care of family is some kind of cosmic injustice. If she does, would she think the same if she wanted to get a pilot's license?
March 21, 2007 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have to say that as a matter of media criticism, there is little to disagree with here. These opt-out stories are almost always misleading in the way that nearly all stories about social trends or perceived social trends tend to be misleading. It is undeniably true that these stories tend to focus on the professional classes at the expense of seeing the bigger picture about how women in general try to balance work with family obligations.
But isn't one of the reasons these stories focus on educated professional women is that's where feminism's focus has been? Feminists have spent a lot of time worrying about the proportion of women in the executive suite or in other positions of influence and power. It's these professional women who have options and opportunities like no other generation before them (and no, I'm not saying everything is fair and there isn't a glass ceiling etc.). If many of them are saying no thanks, then that's an interesting story, even if it doesn't tell the whole story of working women.
From my own personal experience working in the professional world, I would say that life as a modern professional is almost totally incompatible with a focus on family. Any position of any significant responsibility is simply too demanding of your time and energy to allow much of the kind of flexibility that reformers want. I am a management consultant who is able to work a fair amount at home and on those days I can participate in getting the kids out to school in the morning and in dinner and after-dinner routines. But my schedule is highly unpredictable, I travel a decent amount and I have a lot of phone calls that go into the late hours of the evening. It would be impossible to do my job if my wife (or someone else) were not primarily responsible for the kids. I think women who opt out take a look at that lifestyle and say no thanks. My colleagues who are women generally do not have children.
March 21, 2007 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think I understand why people don't want to hear about the troubles of a doctor whose husband earns at least a $1/4 million dollar Christmas bonus. However, doctors are very influential.
The American College of Emergency Physicians, for example, helped force Winchester to modify and rebrand the Black Talon bullet in 1993. The Black Talon killed people faster by expanding into a six-pointed star formation on impact. The spinning bullet's sharp edges caused it to careen haphazardly about a person's interior, ripping way more flesh than a traditional round. Naturally, the gun lobby thought it was every American's right to own some. But a surgeon's description of the damage Black Talons cause, coupled with the ACEP's concern that the bullet was hazardous to the trauma team, helped put the fear of lawsuit into Winchester.
Of course, doctors also suffer from the fear of lawsuit, inspired mainly by their grossly-inflated insurance premiums. Thus, doctors find common ground with the gun industry by supporting tort reform. So I guess I'd like to see more articles on how the insurance industry is not the doctor's friend. Doctors are powerful allies when they're on the right side of things.
March 21, 2007 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is this not the essence of Conservatism? Conservatives always abuse the logic of micro situations to preserve the macro status quo.
March 21, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
On the other hand, I really don't care that lawyers require their employees to work 60-80-100 hour weeks and pay employees less that can't do that. (Frankly, I wish they would require 168 hour weeks so they could all drop dead.) What I think is a crock is that our legal system expects people that are in a chokehold in the legal system to pay them $300 an hour or up, or otherwise have no or poor representation. The legal system crisis is not that women that enter it have to choose either being in it or having a kid, the legal system crisis is that unless you are a millionaire you can't expect any real support from a lawyer.
Sir: My wife makes between 30 to 40 bucks an hour (no benefits) representing children who are wards of the state in a depressed inner-city. She cares deeply about her work, routinely buys the kids small things like notebooks, shoes, even tampons. Her law degree is from University of Michigan, and she could certainly work for more if she chose to.
Additionally, she's a great mother to our son, and we're expecting another child soon. I couldn't be more lucky than I am to be married to this woman.
You just wished her dead.
March 21, 2007 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
No... he told a joke.
Our political debates are in big trouble if we can't tell a few jokes around here.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
March 21, 2007 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree totally. We are in the pre-retirement phase now and our life is little different from what you describe. After working in an investment banking environment where the professional women almost all did not have children (if they were married), I moved to a lower-cost of living state where I work from time to time on a consulting basis and manage all aspects of the home life while my husband travels within the region for a software company.
We chose this lifestyle option after dealing with many "sandwich generation" issues in the 1990's. Something had to give if we wanted to maintain our own health and "have a life."
I often note that the media gives too much emphasis to young families (not that they don't have lots going on!), while totally ignoring the career and lifestyle issues that arise in response to the demands of middle age.
March 21, 2007 6:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
What I think is a crock is that our legal system expects people that are in a chokehold in the legal system to pay them $300 an hour or up, or otherwise have no or poor representation.
Near as I can tell, you need to be a millionaire to have any ability to have decent representation from a lawyer who is busy trying to bill 60-80-100 hours a week. If you need a lawyer but can't pay $300 per hour pretty much indefinitely, then you can expect to be afraid of phone calls with your representation because they will cost $50 a piece. And you can expect them to come to court knowing some of the details and pretty much just making shit up about the rest.
You tell me, and it is good to hear, about the other side. If you are very poor, and probably a minor, you can find a lawyer that will be working for free and probably getting a low wage. Certainly not $300 per hour.
The lawyers know the system is shit. They have the power to change the system, and they will not. They will just complain about how crappy the system is while they continue to charge $300 per hour and feel they are somehow entitled to it since they perceive a free market where the rest of us perceive a person in crisis that has no ability to say no and walk away.
Sorry, yeah, lawyers can die.
I am sorry if I had to be the one to tell you there is no Santa Claus.
March 21, 2007 7:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
E.J.,
You and I may not like the choices facing these professional women, but at least they have a choice.
There are many people, men and women, who have no such choice. They work. They work as many jobs as they can. They can barely pay the rent.
Then there are people, men and women, but mostly men, who have had their choices completely removed, removed by women.
After two kids and many years, and her own reasons (but not for DV or infidelity) my wife filed for divorce. I sought and was given joint custody at which point she filed for permission to move away out of state and was given it.
She moved away with the kids and with no job on her part I paid her bills, the kids bills, and my bills.
For a year, while I sought work in the new state, I commuted 1600 miles every other week. A year later, I accepted the first full time position that had been offered to me at about half pay.
Because of the move with the kids, I lost my 45% share of their time. And I lost the joint custody of the kids.
I moved to a state in which I had no friends and no family, from a state in which I had both.
Just because I was being paid half didn't mean my child support was cut by half. It took another year before that case made it to court. During that time, though it was obvious to everyone that I would be given a custody reduction, my ex had my wages garnished at the existing rate. For that year, I was paying the equivalent of about 70% of my paycheck every month. I ran up massive credit card debt so that I wouldn't have to move out of my 2 BR apartment. In the meantime I watched my ex buy two houses.
I work in a position I am not terribly fond of, in an industry I am not particularly fond of, for about 50% of what I had earned before.
And here is the kicker. At the custody support evaluation hearing, my ex was asked if my new job in this new state was okay with her. Because if it wasn't okay with her, she could still demand and obtain the old custody agreement, and presumably I would either have to find a job in the new state that paid twice my pay, or find a job somewhere that would.
And at all times, if I want to find a job that I would be happier with, or if I want to reduce my hours so that I could gain another degree while still paying my kids far far above any sort of poverty level support levels, ALL OF THIS, is subject to my ex's approval.
Now, I agree, the choices given to those professional women are not the best choices in the world. But there are many of us that no longer live in a world where we are allowed any choices.
You and I both complain about a world that expects 60 hours from an individual. And I will be nasty and go further. I complain about a world in which feminists claim that a rebuttable presumption of joint custody of kids is not in the childs best interest and in which feminists leverage as much power as they have, and they have quite a bit, to deny fathers access to their kids, deny fathers the ability to change jobs, force fathers to move if they want to see their kids, and all the time, deny that there is any sort of bias in the courts.
When I bring this up, when I try to discuss this, I am typically dismissed with a cry to everyone else that "he's a misogynist, a right wing troll, an FRA".
But my story is fairly common, and there are many men AND women that can testify as to its accuracy and tell of their very similar stories.
I don't know where I am going with this. Sorry for rambling.
I would like to see society do much better for the individuals in society, and not just for the corporations and the privileged.
I would also like to see my kids 40-60% of the time, and be an effective and real parent to them, and not live in a 2BR dumpy apartment, and work in a more fulfilling job.
I have no ability to either opt-out or opt-in.
March 21, 2007 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
See his response below. I don't think he is joking. And, honestly, all the "let's kill all the lawyers" remarks start to get irritating after a while.
March 21, 2007 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh god, poor you Thaco. You don't like lawyer jokes. All lawyers are wonderful people and true benefits to society. They right society's ills and cause none themselves.
Before NOLO went corporate, they were the best source of lawyer jokes.
From that I conclude you should love your wife, you are blessed, and you should buy a sense of humor.
Lighten up, Francis.
March 21, 2007 8:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
So, you are arguing that yes, my wife who receives about 25 to 40 bucks an hour for representing wards of the state, should indeed die. Because she hasn't taken the time to completely overhaul our centuries-old legal system. Between changing poopy diapers, presumably, is when you expect for her to take her part in that.
Incidentally, it isn't just my wife: thousands of lawyers out there do similar work. Most have little or no power to affect the system--in fact, there really is no "system," as you put it. It's an economy, with buyers, sellers, and (as you allude to in your original post) all kinds of arbitrage. Economies work as eco-systems, not simple systems. They are not easily and predictably changed.
You undermine your arguments--the parts without the mass-slaughter fantasies--about the high cost of lawyers by implying that the cheap ones are somehow poor in quality. You say, "and you can expect them to come to court knowing some of the details and pretty much just making s*** up about the rest." If this is indeed the truth, it seems that you may as well represent yourself. Or that the low-cost options would be just as good.
Not sure how Santa Claus comes into this, to be honest, unless you are just trying to dismiss me as an idiot. I suggest that you might want to channel the rage at some more appropriate target. After all, I'm not a lawyer, just married to one whom I'd prefer to continue living.
March 21, 2007 9:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
believe me, as a non-lawyer it's depressing to think that it costs millions to try a case... and it just seems so damn expensive and the courts really don't "take on" important issues. I think drug users are the big jail population, hooray!
March 21, 2007 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
You say, "and you can expect them to come to court knowing some of the details and pretty much just making s*** up about the rest." If this is indeed the truth, it seems that you may as well represent yourself. Or that the low-cost options would be just as good.
Yeah, no shit, except we all know what the word is for the person that defends themselves. But jeez thaco, a) you take everything personally, b) you want to tell me I have no right to think or say that lawyers can go fuck off, c) you portray me as engaging in mass slaughter fantasies, and d) you really show that you have no idea what goes on in a court room when you can only afford to pay for about ten to thirty hours of a lawyers time.
And then you fall back on the old "it's a free market" bullshit. Next time you need a lawyer Thaco, you come back and tell me that just as in a free market, you were able to walk away without purchasing any product.
Not sure how Santa Claus comes into this, to be honest, unless you are just trying to dismiss me as an idiot. I suggest that you might want to channel the rage at some more appropriate target. After all, I'm not a lawyer, just married to one whom I'd prefer to continue living.
And somehow I am raging at you, when in fact, you were the one that stepped in all offended at my statement that lawyers can all just die and made it all about yourself and how noble you are because your wife is a good lawyer.
Blow me.
And lawyers can all just die as far as I am concerned, including your wife. Sorry if that gets your thought police panties in a wad.
March 21, 2007 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I suppose I get excited over the "unschool me" movement because, when I was a substitute teacher in the schools, I nearly got sick watching kids write current event articles by going to foxnews.com, etc...
another class used footage from the "Today Show" in order to engage kids. I think they were dying of bordom.
at the university, the "math ed" program I went to didn't even use the term "peer reviewed journal" once.
and, in a fairly "rich district," I was told that not a single "math major" recently applied to teach math.
March 21, 2007 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
More fundamentally here, I sense that the main problem is that the USA-- along with Australia, Britain and even Canada-- is justifiably infamous for being one of the most family-unfriendly countries in the developed world. This is bad news for both working women and men and especially for professional couples.
In Continental European countries, especially France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Sweden and other countries that place a high premium on family-friendly policies and workplaces, new mothers (and fathers as well) in all kinds of professional jobs are allowed many months, in some cases up to a year, of funded leave to take care of their new children.
Now, if you're a new parent, you immediately realize how sensible the Continental European system is-- new kids take a lot of time to raise and even to provide basic care for, especially if you have to make trips to the clinic or hospital for respiratory or stomach infections. An old friend of mine, a professional architect who learned German and emigrated from Australia to Wuppertal, in Germany, remarked how pleasantly surprised she was when she had her two kids, and despite working for a high-powered firm, she was able to stay home for long stretches at a time and care for them after they were born, take them to the clinic herself, get help for early child care from the local community, and so on, without penalty. She never had such respect in Australia (or in the US). It wasn't just the policies, it was the culture in Wuppertal which refused to penalize her for becoming a mother.
If you're a professional couple in the USA or Australia, you and your children get royally screwed by the system here-- which allows you, often, no more than a couple weeks of *unpaid* family leave for your kids, and where you suffer a heavy penalty if, heaven forbid, your child becomes sick or just needs you to stay home on a given day, or show up a bit late. In the US, Australia and UK especially, there is an extremely strong incentive for professionals to not have children-- the penalties for doing what any new parent has to do are quite severe.
Whereas in Continental Europe, you're not only protected but rewarded when you have your kids.
Add this to other very family-unfriendly (or outright hostile) policies in the US, and you see just how behind the curve we are. There's the Alternative Minimum Tax, which utterly slams you if you make the "mistake" of having kids, especially if you're a professional couple.
Even worse, there's the fact that in the United States, there's almost no financial support for your kids' education. The public schools around most big metro areas are terrible, so you have to find a good private school to provide a good education to your kids. This is unbelievably expensive, and it's even worse when college tuition (let alone grad/professional school) comes along-- you're looking at a $1 million bill, at least, for your kids' education.
In Continental Europe, esp. in Germany or France for example, the public schools are top-notch, and the universities and grad/professional schools are almost free-of-charge for tuition for those with the ability to attend them.
The result of this isn't tough to predict-- smart professionals in the USA, Australia, Britain and Canada are emigrating. Among my old friends in my college graduating class, many graduates with honors and with advanced degrees, have gotten their hands on language-learning materials to learn French, German, Dutch or Italian for example, and permanently emigrated to countries like Belgium, Germany, France or neighboring countries. No rocket science here-- professional couples will go to the places where their decisions are respected, and they won't be penalized for merely having kids and caring for them.
March 22, 2007 2:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: There's the Alternative Minimum Tax, which utterly slams you if you make the "mistake" of having kids, especially if you're a professional couple.
Despite all the whining about this, you still have to have a fairly income to be affected by this.
Re: The public schools around most big metro areas are terrible, so you have to find a good private school to provide a good education to your kids.
Nonsense. Yes, there are bad public schools, but most aren't, especialy if you live in some upper middle class suburb. As I've said before, this is mostly rightwing propaganda against public education.
Re: The result of this isn't tough to predict-- smart professionals in the USA, Australia, Britain and Canada are emigrating.
Also, nonsense. And if they do they will scamper home when they discover that their taxes are far higher than they are in the US, while the job opportunities are few and far between.
March 22, 2007 3:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
And lawyers can all just die as far as I am concerned, including your wife.
Ah, well, you win then.
Blow me.
Touché!
March 22, 2007 6:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
This post is overly long in arguing the case, but yes - when your right your right on all counts.
Women aren't really 'choosing' domesticity.
The 'choice' is framed around this idea of 'lifestyle.'
March 22, 2007 7:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
I liked this post a lot. As Brad says, it's very good media analysis, which is the point. I appreciate those who want to broaden the issue to the class struggle generally. However, that battle can still continue, and we're still having our lives altered by demeaning prejudices and media assumptions. Besides, we're not going to get back a system in which, as in that fortunate decade, one parent working will suffice.
I also appreciate those who want to insist that we pay attention to women and families aside from the wealthy who worry about losing super duper careers. But do reread her post. It's exactly about the media bias toward (sexist) anecdotes about their upper-class friends. It's not about knocking "Nickle and Dimed."
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
March 22, 2007 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
What I think is that there should be better options for everyone, that these are major public policy questions that should not be reduced to "women just want to raise babies" or "'feminists' think all women should work." Public policy changes need to be made to accommodate the fact that we have an all-hands-on-deck economy, in which almost every adult must work. We have, as Ruth Rosen put it earlier, a care crisis. There need to be better options for taking time to care for those who need it--children, sick spouses, sick parents, ourselves.
March 22, 2007 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, as Ruth Rosen put it earlier, 'feminists' haven't focused primarily on getting women into equal positions in the high-end workforce. Rather, that's been the pop-media version of certain strains of liberal feminism. (Linda Hirshman comes to mind as today's intellectual version of the Bad Feminist, and she's not highly thought of among feminists.) (The gap at the high-end is of concern, but it's not the only or primary feminist issue.) The feminists that I know have been focused on changing the workplace to accommodate the realities of family life, and are trying to alter the either/or model, the concept that *either* you work *or* you parent. All workers (not just high-end doctors and lawyers--who are people too, let's remember--but also construction workers, WaL-Mart sales clerks, cubicle dwellers, and all the rest of us) ought to be able to do both things. It's just insane that a low-wage worker can be fired just because s/he has to leave work to pick up a sick child, as Joan Williams has so thoroughly documented. There are indeed some creative ways to make it possible to accommodate both work and family demands, and I'm hearing about those in my further reporting, but that's too much information to put in a short response here!
March 22, 2007 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ok fair enough. But I would argue that framing the complexities of modern working life as an either/or propostion is wildly overstating the case. The vast majority of people manage the balance, although not without challenges. The either/or model generally only applies at the high end. That's where women need to make hard choices as to whether they want to put in the long hours and frequent travel that are required to succeed.
This is not to say that access to child care can't be improved or people shouldn't be protected from being fired for taking care of an urgent family matter. It's just that as in so many areas, those seeking change damage their cause by overstating their case. It's just not the case that people are forced to choose whether to work or care for their family. Or rather, that's not the issue for the vast majority of people. The issue is making work/family balance easier.
March 22, 2007 8:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
As I've said before, this is mostly rightwing propaganda against public education.
Here in Minnesota, the percentage of kids who want to go into math and science has fallen down to 7%, I think it was 11% last year.
Recently, an older teacher told me that "math majors" don't apply for "teaching jobs" any more.
The graduation rate over the years has fallen 10%....
It could be today's schools or even the consumer culture.
However, I think "both spouses" working has contributed mightly to the problem since my "stay at home mom" stepped in many times when the school failed to act. Based on what I remember, the school wanted to push me down into easier classes and my mother had them push me up into more difficult classes and added in a little tutoring.
March 22, 2007 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you may have touched on the real problem with education. It isn't the schools at all (OK, in low income areas, whether rural or urban, the schools really do suck; in most middle and upper class areas though the schools are OK, even excellent). No, the problem is the students-- and ultimately the parents. I too had a non-working mother. While she wasn't much involved with my school directly, she was very much involved with my education. As in fact was my father. Both my parents were avid readers who kept abreast of current events and were curious about all sorts of things. They enjoyed learning themselves. How many families today have time to set such an example, or have plenty of books readily to hand rather than relying on the internet for everything?
March 22, 2007 9:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
One of my earliest memories of my mother is seeing her at her desk, head bent, the light from the desk lamp making her hair shine. And I knew I needed to be quiet, because she was studying. I'm not sure what she was studying for, but I knew it was important.
My parents always made clear that education was important. My dad knew my class schedule in junior high and high school; every day, he asked about each class in order.
In other words, I disagree with the implicit equation of stay-at-home-parent and education-is-important. No one said it, particularly not JPF, but I don't buy the argument. :)
I agree that there's only so much schools can do. Too often, though, it seems that saying anything like that is translated into "so why do we fund schools, anyway?" or "it's a lost cause (shrug)." So I'm wary of rhetoric that places the blame on families. I think that schools & home are intertwined and that figuring out who/what deserves the most blame is pointless. After all, making changes to both family and school culture can help.
March 22, 2007 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
So I'm wary of rhetoric that places the blame on families...
The studies I tend to believe link socioeconomic background and success.
figuring out who/what deserves the most blame is pointless.
I suppose that I don't think it's pointless because what if the money spent on the school was simply given to the family instead? In Minnesota, I think they spend over $10,000 per child per year. That way, the stay at home spouse would receive a stipend to fund staying at home and "homeschooling."
As the internet matures more, the only thing schools have to provide, IMO, are the labs....
When I was in scouting, I loved going through the "merit badge" books on my own and found school overly prescriptive.
And, based on this learning model, professionals in the community could meet with kids and help them understand the real world.
March 22, 2007 11:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
well, I've stopped taking the newspapers seriously, but that's another discussion.
March 22, 2007 11:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
You and Graff are both right.
It's an issue of specialization, biological and social, resulting in normative choices and normative pressures. Not just for women but for men as well.
Nature biases women towards childcare and men towards the workplace (especially traditional labors) in a number of marginal but significant ways. Women: nine months of bonding, some amount of time incapacitated from most types of work, breast feeding. Men: less childcare biologically, more musculature/size, and perhaps testosterone for workplace competitiveness.
Those biological biases are amplified in the workplace by social and practical factors such as fraternity and a tendency towards homogeneity. There are also the issues of long term investment for mngt trainees, the greater commitment required, etc.
The result is significant gender specialization, biological and social, resulting in normative choices and normative pressures. Specialization increases difficulty (or reduces efficiency) for women seeking to be power executives or men seeking to be child care givers, though it may make things easier (or more efficient) for those within norms.
It can be argued there should be no gender specializations, on the other hand some would argue they're human nature and somewhat unavoidable. I see valid points on both sides.
Gender specializations which are irrational should be minimized. In many careers the biological differences are trivial, and maternity can be worked around to some extent. Single payer healthcare for example could legislate greater maternity care, and disperse economic costs away from mothers and business to avoid punitive effects.
On the other hand, until men get pregnant and breast feed, women who have children will lose a significant chunk of time/energy out of prime career blazing years. There’s no legislative solution for the missed experience, bonding, etc that occurs in the office during the maternity period, especially when so many innovation/professional companies evolve rapidly.
So, I’d like to see workplace gender disparity decrease, though I doubt it will go away completely for biological reasons. Also, greater cultural and financial recognition should be given to child care givers, both men and women, through increases in child tax credits for example and also recognition of the huge contribution made.
March 23, 2007 5:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
for example and also recognition of the huge contribution made...
Also, greater cultural and financial recognition should be given to child care givers..
But one could argue that the world is overpopulated, and Al Gore alluded to this in his movie, "Inconvienient Truth." Population growth and C02 emission have both been exponential.
March 23, 2007 6:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're really muddying the waters there. Was that meant to be a troll or joke? Must be.
Obviously population growth issues are separate from giving respect and aid to parents and care givers. Harming parents/children would be considered unwise policy for population control or reducing global warming, don't you think?
Regardless, in cultures like Western Europe where more respect/aid is given to parents, including maternity leave, excellent pre/post natal care, etc. population rates are stable, infant mortality is lower, and later development metrics like academic test scores are up.
March 23, 2007 7:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
"By quitting, these women are saying that they can't afford to work."
Yes, that happens, and it shouldn't, but that's not always the case.
Plenty of women quit work because they can, because it's more socially acceptable than for men to do so, especially if they have children. Their spouses will support them, and they'd rather not deal with the stress of the work would. If men had the opportunity to do so without the social penalty, many more would I'm sure.
Anecdotally, I know that's true for many well educated and capable women who made competitive wages.
March 23, 2007 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re; Regardless, in cultures like Western Europe where more respect/aid is given to parents, including maternity leave, excellent pre/post natal care, etc. population rates are stable
Population rates in Europe are most certainly not stable-- they are declining. One problem here may be that Europe's policies are friendly toward people who already have children, but tend to impede younger people from gaining enough traction in life where they can afford to start families.
March 23, 2007 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Most European populations are basically flat, with small declines in some, which still leaves Europe with much higher population densities than the USA.
Instead of "stable" implying static, I should have said "sustainable" i.e. they don't have a growth problem and if overpopulation was an issue, they're solving it. Anyways, I suspect you know what I meant and it answered your question all the same.
That's simply not true. Do you have any evidence of that?
While average is income is higher in the US than some European countries, due to extreme wealth on the high end, many European countries have a higher median quality of life, and choose to have less children as a result. There are plenty of quality of life enhancements that discourage large families, such as vacations and travel for example, which they enjoy far more of.
March 23, 2007 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was trying to figure out what you meant by your reply to my comment upthread, in which you referred to the "unschool me movement".
I am trying to be more open minded about alternatives to public schools such as charter schools, virtual charter schools and homeschooling. I have an admitted bias against all of them because I come from a family of teachers, and professors of education, and married a teacher, who is the daughter of a teacher. And my father was instrumental in getting his faculty colleagues in his college of education (and the rest of his university) represented by the AAUP.
And so I have been conscious for years about the diminishing status of teachers -- their stagnating wages; their increasingly dangerous working environment; the way their daily activities are more and more legally and politically circumscribed (laws about what they can and cannot teach, policies about *how* they can teach). Many districts now have adopted reading curricula which are phonics-based and "scripted". This may be a good thing, and supported by the research which shows that there is a "right way" to teach reading effectively, but the cumulative result of all this is a teaching corps which has less and less respect as a group of professionals.
So what is the relationship with charter schools? That, in part, they are an institution designed to free the schools from the "constraints" of having to pay teachers the sorts of salaries they have achieved through collective bargaining, and the "constraints" imposed on the schools by the teachers unions. And as for homeschooling, at least part of the intellectual foundation of the movement is that parents are as good as teachers at teaching; that teachers' experience and training counts for nothing.
And both of these alternatives -- homeschooling and charter schools -- have been embraced by the right-wing to, in my opinion, weaken the institution of the public school.
As I said, I'm a little biased about this but in recent talks with friends who have sent their kids to charter schools or homeschooled them, I am beginning to come around. In most of these cases, the kids involved have special needs (one was severely autistic), and the public schools, because of their size, just weren't working for them. But I'm still skeptical of the idea that somehow "professionals in the real world" are imbued with magical abilities not just to work in the real world but to teach about it.
March 23, 2007 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's a book review on "unschooling" on amazon.com for the book "Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves
Being a former public school teacher who wanted to unschool my own child, I found great difficulty letting things happen at their own time, in their own way. Alison McKee's book helped me breathe again and appreciate my child's pace and interests in a way no other homeschooling book was able to do.
When I did my "student teaching," my supervising teacher didn't initially like my notion that home schooling was OK but, by the end, I think he warmed up to my interpretation that we're all free and, like women and blacks, kids-- as much as possible, should be able to choose their educational paths. In my opinion, kids shouldn't be shielded until they have to make their most expensive and important decision ever: "what college, and what should I study?"
After I finished "student teaching," I studied some advanced probability and then took two advanced math courses at the University of Minnesota. The professor of the first class got mad at me for wanting additional paper during the test because
"I might cheat" and, in the second course, I scored several standard deviations above the mean when I studied the material on my own and average otherwise. These experiences discouraged me from liking the paterialistic structure of universities and encouraged me to believe in my own work.
I think that we'll always need teachers to write great books, write informative journal articles, provide inspirtion, create wonderful video lectures, etc...
thus, based on my own experience with student teaching, and my own learning, I think its mandatory for each student to:
1: actively deciper knowledge rather than trying to memorize facts;
2: actively think about the meaning of what's being studied and what personal meaning it has;
3: actively prioritize interests and have the power to study something more and other things less;
4: reflect on what the reward was for studying something;
5: actively seek out others with similar interests for discussion and "jam sessions;"
6: actively think about what the best ways to learn are and try to optimize the learning environment;
7: etc...
As a student teacher, I felt compelled to think for my students and anticipate everything for them in order to create a safe environment. However, in my eyes, this created an intellectual and emotional codependence that my students would have to transcend before they would get their own confidence.
The current monolithic school environments could be changed from providers of a comprehensive service to a provider of micro services.
For example, in order to support "self study" of chemistry, they could perhaps provide a laboratory for experiments and students would just go to a webpage and sign up when they were ready.
This might sound unorganized, but when I was at the University of Minnesota, I realized that I learned some things faster than others and that's why the professor went too slow, when I understood, or too fast, when I didn't.
My idea is that teachers/professors should only be there when a student is having a hard time making a breakthrough otherwise, I think it's important to learn from mistakes... and "try, try again."
March 23, 2007 3:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: That's simply not true. Do you have any evidence of that?
Yes. In many countries in Europe unemployment rates are horrendous for the young. The European system (by which I should probably specify the Continental system, more so than the Anglo-Irish or Scandinavian systems) tends to favor middle aged and older workers over youth.
Re: Instead of "stable" implying static, I should have said "sustainable"
Europe's population sustains itself only because of immigration. The native-born population is NOT sustaining itself. Meanwhile in the US, the native-born population is more-or-less at replacement (i.e., "sustainable"). Our population increase in due almost wholly to immigration.
Now I am not trying to Euro-bash, but I also refuse to romanticize Europe as some sort of Shangri-La. Europe has its problems-- very serious ones. These problems are different from those we have in the US (and yes, our problems are very serious too). Neither the US nor Europe has squared the circle or solved how to live in a 21st century paradise-- though both (plus Canada, Australia, Japan and a few other places) have certainly come closer than many other parts of the world.
March 23, 2007 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're cherry picking and distorting.
If anything the health care system and family friendly policies encourage child rearing.
Europeans have slightly more trouble getting into the workplace because workers tend to have more job security, better benefits, and seniority. Of course this bothers workers in their early 20's (what doesn't?) but later they enjoy the benefits more.
Another American myth is that innovation is stifled in Europe. The opposite is true. Europeans work less but more efficiently yielding more per capita per hour worked. Even the WSJ concedes that fact.
Historically, many of the great "American" inventors and innovators were in fact European immigrants who came here for the capitalization. That however has little to no benefit for the average American, though it's great for the very wealthy.
Now, in the age of global capital, and when huge corporations rely on large pools of talent as well as good governmental policy, Europeans and others are choosing to capitalize in countries with the most skilled populations, best quality of life, and governments who encourage and focus innovation. So, they're staying in Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. on the innovation side, and outsourcing the unskilled or low skilled labor to India, china, etc. But more of their economy is capable of transitioning to high tech than ours, in large part due to a better educated populace, and the farm subsidies and protections for "traditional" professions are more efficient because they're yielding genuinely appreciated goods such as artisan foods, organics, etc, which their educated populace is happy to support.
They have the best cellular and broadband networks and some of the best wireless technologies in companies like Sony/Erricson, Nokia, DoCoMo etc. They have booming biotech and pharmaceutical companies. A French company is responsible for the virtualization technology which is a major innovation in the new Boeing jet. Some of the largest media/ip companies are in Asia and Europe. They make the best cars and consumer devices.
On childhood developmental issues, they routinely outscore Americans across the board from the sciences to the humanities, have less violence, etc.
Any way you look at it, Europeans, Japnese, and Koreans have a very high quality of life and their median is higher than ours in many regards, from the groceries they eat, to the vacations they take, to the walks they make, to the health care, to better work environments, etc.
The Irish boom is a one time gain, mostly due to how depressed their economy has been historically and the large number of educated x-pats they could harvest once the economy recovered. It isn't sustainable, and is already slowing to eventually settle at a European norm.
They are close to doing so, and the small difference is made up by immigration, which is absolutely fine. Even a small population reduction would be fine, and maybe even good. Obviously it's impossible to continually maintain logarithmic population growth. The same goes for Japan. They still have higher population densities than the US, which creates efficiencies that offset the aging population. For example the typical European or Japanese consume far less energy for the same quality of life due to higher density living, good public transit, local boutique shopping and less driving, etc. which also has health benefits and they are far less obese.
Anyways, you're changing the subject because the initial point was (supposedly not a troll) that European style family friendly social policies could be argued against for global warming reasons. Obviously that was a specious assertion, and now you're trying to argue they lead to dangerous population reduction.
It just seems to me you're looking for a reason to be against family friendly social policies, and kind of a troll.
I don't emotionally refuse or insist on seeing anything. I'm just looking at the facts.
They're not perfect, nobody is, but they're doing a lot we could learn from to make US society much healthier, happier, the median wealthier, and more efficient. We have problems too, in many way much bigger problems. Such as China holding our debt, negative savings, financing consumerism with the housing bubble, the decimation of US manufacturing, wealth disparity, high stress and a it's toll on the culture and children, and counter productive management or lack of management of technology standardization for growth infrastructure in energy, wireless, etc.
March 24, 2007 12:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: If anything the health care system and family friendly policies encourage child rearing.
I am an empiricist by nature: does the real world support a theory? If not, dump the theory, not the reality! And real world data does NOT support your claims in this particular matter.
Re: Of course this bothers workers in their early 20's (what doesn't?) but later they enjoy the benefits more.
Later may be too late. I think it quite crucial to integrate young people into the economy as fully as possible. Otherwise you end up with a large, disaffected and alienated class of people. ALienated young men are an especially serious problem (see: rioting by both immigrants and native-born Euroepans). Europe (meaning the Franco-Germanic axis, not Britain/Ireland or Scandinavia) has simply gone too far in its "job security" policies. Hence its econo-sclerosis. That doesn't mean that I think the US is perfect: we haven't gone far enough (hence the general subject of this thread which I mostly agree with) and above all the US has not gone far enough in providing health and disability support for everyone, retraining and income support for terminated workers, etc. I think my previous post makes it clear that I am not supporting the US way of doing things either. I rather think there's a happy medium somewhere between the two extremes. The Scandinavians may have come close to achieving it ("flexicurity"), but closer to home, if I had my choice, I would choose Canada as the best place to live and work in today's world.
Re: Of course this bothers workers in their early 20's (what doesn't?) but later they enjoy the benefits more.
On school testing issues, I am quite the skeptical. Are they using the same exact tests (differing only by language translation) to compile these results? If not, the results are classic "apples and oranges".
Re: It just seems to me you're looking for a reason to be against family friendly social policies, and kind of a troll.
Did I say I am against these things?
As my above comment makes clear, I am in favor such policies in proper moderation and proportion-- meaning much more than what we have in this country, but less than the ecobnomy-damaging extremes that France and Germany have gone to. Again, Sweden would be a good model for Europe, Canada for the US.
March 24, 2007 6:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's a book review on "unschooling" on amazon.com for the book "Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves
Being a former public school teacher who wanted to unschool my own child, I found great difficulty letting things happen at their own time, in their own way. Alison McKee's book helped me breathe again and appreciate my child's pace and interests in a way no other homeschooling book was able to do.
Thanks, I will read it.
When I did my "student teaching," my supervising teacher didn't initially like my notion that home schooling was OK but, by the end, I think he warmed up to my interpretation that we're all free and, like women and blacks, kids-- as much as possible, should be able to choose their educational paths. In my opinion, kids shouldn't be shielded until they have to make their most expensive and important decision ever: "what college, and what should I study?"
I don't think kids should be *shielded* either -- simply being forcibly tossed from an environment where learning is led to one where learning is self-directed isn't going to have a high probability of success. But first of all, education should take into account that children of different ages learn in different ways, and that even within age cohorts, children learn in different ways. Absolutely, elementary-aged kids don't need to begin making irrevocable choices about what they're going to do when they grow up -- it is a time to fantasize about that, and try on different adult identities, and perhaps discover their passion. If you want to call this "shielding" then I think it's a good thing, at that age.
Good public high school teachers and curriculum directors take this into account, by building more and more individualized, project and self-research based assignments into the curriculum as students approach the 12th grade, and by providing counseling services to help kids choose, for example, paths to large universities, small liberal arts colleges, art schools, trade schools, the military, or simply stopping out.
After I finished "student teaching," I studied some advanced probability and then took two advanced math courses at the University of Minnesota. The professor of the first class got mad at me for wanting additional paper during the test because "I might cheat" and, in the second course, I scored several standard deviations above the mean when I studied the material on my own and average otherwise. These experiences discouraged me from liking the paterialistic structure of universities and encouraged me to believe in my own work.
It's important to realize that only in grades K-12 (in the US) do teachers go through training on "how to educate". Most university professors have no idea about educational theory beyond what they've taught themselves. Instead, they are subject matter experts. They don't know how to teach -- or rather, they model their teaching on their own experiences as learners -- but that's generally OK because by that time, if students have been successful in K-12, the students themselves have learned how to learn. I know this doesn't always happen, but I'm just cautioning against conflating problems in the K-12 levels with issues at the university level.
I think that we'll always need teachers to write great books, write informative journal articles, provide inspirtion, create wonderful video lectures, etc... thus, based on my own experience with student teaching, and my own learning, I think its mandatory for each student to:
1: actively deciper knowledge rather than trying to memorize facts;
2: actively think about the meaning of what's being studied and what personal meaning it has;
3: actively prioritize interests and have the power to study something more and other things less;
4: reflect on what the reward was for studying something;
5: actively seek out others with similar interests for discussion and "jam sessions;"
6: actively think about what the best ways to learn are and try to optimize the learning environment;
7: etc...
Agree with all these points. But all of these things are being done in good public schools too, not just in the homeschool environment.
As a student teacher, I felt compelled to think for my students and anticipate everything for them in order to create a safe environment. However, in my eyes, this created an intellectual and emotional codependence that my students would have to transcend before they would get their own confidence.
The current monolithic school environments could be changed from providers of a comprehensive service to a provider of micro services. For example, in order to support "self study" of chemistry, they could perhaps provide a laboratory for experiments and students would just go to a webpage and sign up when they were ready.
I think this gets to the heart of the matter, and that is that the public schools are charged by law with educating *everybody* who falls in the ages of roughly 5 to 18 years. That's a lot of people, it requires a lot of schools and a lot of teachers. What you describe is the ideal learning environment, but many kids just never will be able to learn that way. If we can teach them the basic things they need to make their way in the world-- how to read, how to calculate, how to understand a math problem and transform it into a mental model that they can solve, at some level how the US government works, at some level how the physical world works (geologically, biologically) -- then already we will have succeeded spectacularly. If we can also teach them how to think, and to have an appreciation for art, music, literature and dance, and, in my opinion, that it's important to be kind to one another, then so much the better.
But just as Jesus said "The poor will always be with us", so it is also the case that "the uneducated will always be with us". The very fact that the public schools are so big and have to try to do so many things for so many different kinds of learners at so many different levels, is both their strength and their weakness. They cannot offer the complete range of individualized instruction to every child, and so it's a good thing that our society is beginning to develop, or rediscover, other models such as homeschooling and beginning to provide more support to homeschoolers.
That's not to say that the typical good public school teacher is not aware of these issues -- he or she most definitely is, but is not able to, does not have the resources and time to, provide service at this level of individuation to all kids. Because even if we wanted to afford it -- and in our current climate of dubiousness about taxation, we don't -- in fact, we can't. We could afford much more than we currently give, in my opinion, but it still wouldn't be enough, and in a way it's not worth it to try to make the public schools work for every single last kid -- if they can work for 99% of the kids, that's about as well as I think they can do.
This might sound unorganized, but when I was at the University of Minnesota, I realized that I learned some things faster than others and that's why the professor went too slow, when I understood, or too fast, when I didn't.
My idea is that teachers/professors should only be there when a student is having a hard time making a breakthrough otherwise, I think it's important to learn from mistakes... and "try, try again."
No disagreement here, other than to reiterate that "being there when a student is having a hard time making a breakthrough" means something different for a kindergartener than for a university student, and something different for a kid who is bright and psychobiologically healthy than for a kid who is of average intelligence and with ADHD or dyslexia or autism.
March 24, 2007 6:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
by building more and more individualized, project and self-research based assignments into the curriculum as students approach the 12th grade...
the problem is, whenever this situation occured in my classes, the teachers did sloppy assessments because they simply just didn't have the time to work iteratively and/or get into the details.
At the University of Minnesota, several of the professors seemed to only give "completion grades" since anything else would take too much time. When I student taught, many k/12 teachers did the same thing.
Agree with all these points. But all of these things are being done in good public schools
In all the public schools I observed, everything was "top down." The rubrics typically steer students toward monolithic outcomes.
What you describe is the ideal learning environment, but many kids just never will be able to learn that way...
The problem is, if they don't strive towards that ideal, I believe that they won't reach their full potential. It was only after I made "my list" that my engineering career took off again, because I started to make and assess my own goals and critically grade myself.
In a classroom environment, I feel that students are let down because teachers typically create and assess the goals that their students should be making.
If we can teach them the basic things they need to make their way in the world-- how to read, how to calculate, how to understand a math problem and transform it into a mental model that they can solve, at some level how the US government works, at some level how the physical world works (geologically, biologically) -- then already we will have succeeded spectacularly.
If we can also teach them how to think,...
This is where we disagree! Humans are born with the capability to think; thus, the ability to think doesn't need to be taught.
More specifically, after I started to read every day, I realized that I wasn't learning much "in school" and came to believe that it is through literacy, not through the education system, that the mind blossoms.
That's why I like the term "unschooling" because it frees the mind from learning "task recipes."
Once I started to choose my own books, set goals and started "studying things," I began feeling creative and no longer a "tape recorder" that remembered what "my teacher" told me.
Agree with all these points. But all of these things are being done in good public schools...
Recent statistics suggest that, as our kids get older, they stop learning and, in fact, America places 20th, internationally, in math.
Do these numbers suggest that our public schools" are good?
Furthermore, an MIT graduate informed me that MIT students start their math studies with differential equations; I don't know a single high school that gets their students to that level or even sets the expectations that high.
That's not to say that the typical good public school teacher is not aware of these issues -- he or she most definitely is, but is not able to, does not have the resources and time to, provide service at this level of individuation to all kids.
And, because of this, if I had a kid, I'd unschool them because their teachers, due to the limitations you mention, wouldn't be that useful.
if they can work for 99% of the kids, that's about as well as I think they can do.
In Minnesota, the graduation rate fell from 90% to 80% so the schools are failing to reach 20% of the student population!
Of those who graduate, only 7% of them stated that they wanted to study math or science last year.
March 24, 2007 8:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well I don't think we really disagree, except maybe on two or three points.
You say we are born with the ability to think, and I agree with that, though I'm not sure we are born with an ability to form a cogent and rational multi-step argument such as we find on this forum. I think that's an ability that has to be cultivated. I am a product of the US public schools of the 60's and 70's, and I honor them because I think they are mostly responsible for my ability to hold this conversation with you. Maybe things have changed since then. And maybe the public schools have never been able to reach and teach every last kid. But in the first instance, one of the things that's changed since then is the funding base, and another is the right-wing attack on the schools as a "liberal" institution. I just don't agree with your conceptualization of the public schools as a place where thinking kids enter and mindless zombies exit.
In the second instance, thank god for homeschooling and other alternatives -- and I even have no problem with these alternatives as a choice for anyone else who wants them too. But not as part of a deliberate right-wing strategy to defund the public schools.
The second area of disagreement is whether the public schools are good or bad, as an aggregate. I never said the public schools in aggregate were good, although I believe they are. Obviously there are better and worse public schools. Is an 80% graduation rate good or bad? It isn't acceptable, but it's better than 60%, or 50% or 30% or 10%. If 100% of US kids were homeschooled, would we have a 100% graduation rate? I doubt it. Of the 19 countries which place higher than the US in math, in how many of them is homeschooling more prevalent than here? Or is it the level of state support that accounts for the difference? Or is it something, or things, else?
The final area of disagreement I think is in whether we should fix the problems in the public schools or abandon them. I don't think we have a choice here. There is no other system which is already in place that can step in to educate the millions of kids that need to learn.
March 24, 2007 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
A non-answer. Not a bad one, but a non-answer.
March 24, 2007 12:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just don't agree with your conceptualization of the public schools as a place where thinking kids enter and mindless zombies exit.
I'm only telling you what the statistics say. Only 7% of Minnesota's children want to go into math and science. Nationally, the literacy rate continues to drop.
If I remember correctly, you noted that one of your parents was a teacher and, based on the literature, socioeconomic background is one of the largest indicators of future success. Thus, some would claim that your family passed on its literacy to you.
But not as part of a deliberate right-wing strategy to defund the public schools.
Schools have always been part of politics. Today's New York Times, for example, talks about a Conneticuit school district which canceled a student written anti-war play because "it wasn't balanced."
I tend to think that I'm on the left because I believe that the internet, and other adminstrative changes, could enhance the diversity of our schools.
myspace, for example, is allowing kids to form bigger social networks than ever before!
Thus, because study after study concludes that peer influence is stronger than adult influence, the public education system, of the 21st century, could start helping these social networks prosper and give them the right resources to support learning and growth.
Essentially, the bi-partisan idea is that "pulic education" needs to transform itself. However, because of economic interests, like home values and jobs, and issues like sentimentality, it's hard to make these transformations.
I'm not against "public schools" per say because both the home schoolers and the parochial school students, where I grew up, went to the public high schools because of their math, arts and science programs.
What I am thinking though, more specifically, is that fitness facilities like Bally's or the YMCA might be a great place for a teens to go and take "gym classes," and local musicians would surely love to teach music in small groups.
Thus, I'm only hoping that that the current "public education system" becomes more flexible instead of enforcing an entire set of choices on its students.
So, if kids can handle it, let them drive.
Of the 19 countries which place higher than the US in math, how many of them is homeschooling more prevalent than here
A Mong immigrant told me the other day that the main difference he sees, with the US system, is that children are forced to go to school. I didn't ask him what that means.
My belief is that TV is killing literacy... I just don't see how serveral hours of TV a night helps anybody.
March 24, 2007 1:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's no conflict with the facts about thier superior childcare and family friendly policies, and slightly lower birth rates. You're just not controlling properly and misreading the data.
You're conflating quality with quantity.
You really should read some books on the subject
The reason for marginally lower birth rates? Very simple. Choice. Their culture prefers lavishing more attention, emotional and financial, on fewer children. Our culture is trending the same way, we're just a little behind. Our birth rates, not counting recent immigrants from large family cultures, will be the same as theirs shortly.
European and Japanese family-friendly polices take much better care of children and families in everything from state paid pre-post natal care, maternity leave, more vacation time, etc. In Japan work hours tend to be on the long side, but most families do fine on a single income so mothers typically stay home. In Europe there are single and dual earner families, but work hours are shorter and maternity policies are excellent.
It's been shown again and again that as child mortality rates drop, and as people move away from rural/agrarian lifestyles, they have less children. The higher up the professional/pay scale you go, the more active people are, the less children people choose to have.
Europeans, Japanese, and coastal/urban Americans don't have the "big family" culture like in the Midwest and Southern USA, which are closer to rural, agrarian, or poor roots. In those cultures a big family is necessary for labor and due to mortality rates. It's become tradition, but even the US is trending to smaller families as we move further from agrarian cultural values. Immigrants from the 3rd world and Latin America are the major growth populations in the USA.
March 25, 2007 2:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's unreasonable. America doesn't have a single test, we have many, and yet we manage to differentiate reasonably well.
Japan and most Western Europe routinely outscore Americans academically, on everything from humanities to hard sciences, which test highly objectively. That has been well known for decades.
Our top 95+ percentile schools are of course equivalent to theirs, limited by student's intellect, not institutions.
But system-wide, median and average scores in the US are some of the lowest in the developed world. Sad but true. The truth is we import a lot of our talent, as I was saying earlier. They tend to come for out top universities, and have historically stayed for capitalization opportunities. But that's changing, rapidly, for superior opportunities back home, as I was saying before.
I'm not trying be all doom and gloom or claim they're in paradise, but we do need to learn a lot from them. We have a lot of old, cold war, anti-socialist, superpower bias and hubris in America that's preventing us from learning from others or taking a dispassionate look at the merits of various systems. If we don't wise up, we will hit bottom and learn the hard way, chanting "we're #1!" all the way down.
March 25, 2007 3:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's mixed up on a number of levels. You're (again) conflating issues to suit the argument you want to make rather than what the facts indicate.
1) you're crying wolf. They have problems relative to where? The USA? By comparison their riots, crime rates and mortality, etc are a fraction of ours. In the case of France, they have African immigrants from colonialism struggling to integrate more recently than American blacks from slavery, mid 20th century compared with mid 19th century. In the Netherlands, Muslims feel free to organize and voice complaints, where as in the USA they fear, rightly, they'd be put down quickly. In fact Arabic American Muslims since 9/11 are reaching out to Black American Muslims for the first time, and beginning to organize, for exactly that reason. So the kind of issues they're facing in Europe now may be ours soon, and we'll be lucky to do as well based on our history of violent reprisals further radicalizing movements. If you compare riots and strife fairly, controlling for historical circumstances, Europeans are doing relatively great with a minimum of violence and blowback.
2) you're wrongly presuming the problem is with European family friendly-culture. Japan and Korea have largely homogeneous populations, and very European family-friendly social policies, and no "alienated youth" protests. they do have: high job security, fewer careers, more seniority, stay at home moms, early childbirth. High quality of life, the lowest child mortality rates, lowest incidence of child/adult diseases, highest longevity. Very high levels of education from public schools, high college rates, and academic scores that routinely trounce American scores. Also their tech/innovation economies are doing awesome. So there goes your "alienated youth due to social policies" theory.
The real causes of "alienated youth" are twofold:
1) immigrant vs. native race/cultural conflict is the overwhelmingly dominant cause of European riots.
2) In the case of France's youth movement protesting the seniority system, it's the "angsty twenty something’s" as I already mentioned, and the fact that France is experiencing a second “dotcom” type (irrational) exuberance. So, young people there, just like here in the late 90’s, all think they’re going to be overnight millionaires in tech, and so the seniority system doesn’t look so good compared with that fantasy. But, those same kids will be happy for the system in five years, when they’re still not multi-millionaires, and happy to have good pay, maternity leave, and a decent work schedule rather than an 80/hr week. Again, plenty of other countries in Europe and Asia have the same system, and their economies are great, high tech, innovative, etc. and they're good with it.
March 25, 2007 3:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmm, you say:
The reason for marginally lower birth rates? Very simple. Choice. Their culture prefers lavishing more attention, emotional and financial, on fewer children.
and others have given completely different reasons.
- our kids don't die like they used to. my grandmother's mother had a lot of children and several of them died before becoming a teenager because of the poorer health care back then. in today's world, most parents expect their children to outlive them;
- most of us no longer live on farms and don't need an army of labor to keep the farm going;
- old age care has been socialized so we don't necessarily need to have a big ratio of young people to each elderly person. my grandmother, who is 90, can live by herself since everything she needs is around the corner and easy to get.
- if socioeconomic factors play a big role in successful child rearing, then the parents have to keep expanding their knowledge of the world and pass it on... so gaining knowledge is as important as gaining children.
etc...
March 25, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Our top 95+ percentile schools are of course equivalent to theirs, limited by student's intellect, not institutions...
Huh? k/12 teachers are known to come from the bottom third of their classes and that's why we have efforts to attract more cream.
Recently, a teacher in an affluent school district told me: "math majors don't apply here any more..."
after house hunting on a google based map, I really felt that schools can be improved through multimedia because house hunting in the classfieds was so difficult in comparison. the google map version not only shows me houses in a price range, but I also get to see the lakes, major streets, schools, etc... without needing a real estate agent to brief me.
I tend to think that k/12 teachers would be replaced with computers if we had the nerve. The technology is to the point where students could get 24/7 assistance on their studies and they could conference call too.
I was reading the book: "Deflation: What Happens When Prices Fall" and it talked about the trouble of deflating the cost of service sector work and computers are to the point where the quality of education can go up and the cost can go down.
To me, educational institutions are the limiting factor and, just like the space shuttle which is flown by a computer, not astronauts, I think it's time to let education transform itself.
Based on my experiences with the Internet, in particular, it's much more diverse than the typical university's monoculture.
March 25, 2007 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
These are countries whose birth rates are well below replacement levels and are having to import lots of third world labor to cover their pensioners. Why in the world would we want to follow that example?
The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir
March 25, 2007 9:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
...? Whatever.
March 27, 2007 12:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
I tend to think that k/12 teachers would be replaced with computers if we had the nerve. --mcs
Way back when I was in public school, I read a futuristic story in which this was the case. Each student had a machine -- the Teacher -- in his or her house. The story featured a brother and sister, each with a Teacher. The lessons moved at the individual pace, so if the child mastered the concept, the computer would move on.
I don't recall how the story ended -- or its author or title, honestly. I do remember being intrigued by that "moving at your own pace" concept. As an only child, I found accommodations to a group of children quite frustrating. But I am amazed at how much my teachers did to challenge me and to give me individual attention, even in a classroom setting. An outstanding education, if I say so myself, not just in math and grammar and whatnot, but also in getting along with others. After all, I spend much more of my time as an adult interacting with other people that I do diagramming sentences.
March 27, 2007 8:10 AM | Reply | Permalink