Or is Twitter the beast?

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, the number sign is a hash tag used to label “tweets” (mini-posts) similar to Technorati or WordPress tags in blogs.  As you can see from this chart from Twist, the topic du jour for Sunday was motrinmoms.

In fact, at 8:50 Saturday evening, there wasn’t a single mention.  But only fourteen minutes later, the true power of social networking began to show with 339 mentions of motrinmoms.

All over a Motrin ad.  By the time I saw the first message, the site was already getting overloaded and the advertisement wouldn’t play until the entire site finally went down and Motrin issued an apology.  The ads are no longer available, but A Dad First kindly provided a transcript in case you are wondering what all the fuss is about.  Update: Of course it would be on YouTube.

I’m still wondering what all the fuss is about, but for a different reason.

To start with, we have a rather large company which certainly put a lot of money and research into this ad campaign.  It most certainly was not a spontaneous lightning bolt of inspiration which struck some corporate exec on Friday night and got launched before anyone really thought about it.

They did think about it.  And I’m sure they had focus groups respond.  You know those people with clipboards who stop you in the mall to ask you a couple of questions?  I could almost guarantee they were out in force accosting young mothers at the mall and getting their feedback.  And when I saw the graphic ads and read the transcript of the video ad, I could see what they were going for: a tongue-in-cheek sort of humor that a mom could identify with immediately.  The trouble with humor, however, is that it is easy to miss the mark.  And when you miss the mark, people tend to feel like they are being mocked rather than understood.

Enter the Twitterers.  These are not random young mothers walking through the mall with their children wandering here and there while they were being asked some questions about Ibuprofen.  Instead, they are socially engaged, techically savvy, ideologically motivated mothers who have made a place for themselves on the internet discussing their parenting styles.  Women who have dedicated themselves to attachment parenting, homeschooling or both.  Women who do not take even subtle references to children as burdens lightly.

So they reacted.  Or as some claim, overreacted.

I didn’t suggest that a Twitter protest would save the world – just that outrage is manufactured and misdirected –matthewktabor of education for the aughts, a pretty good education blog, I might add.

And this is the part that intrigues me.  Did they overreact?  Have homeschoolers overreacted to the “homeschoolers are demented” comment made by some comedian on The View?

As I watched this topic trend upward until Motrin responded, my first thought was not “the power of Twitter.”  In fact, my first thought was how much money Motrin saved by the near instant feedback to their advertising campaign.  They did not have to wait until next quarter to wonder why their sales seemed to be declining and to perhaps mistakenly blame the economy.  Instant feedback, a quick and hearty response and all is forgiven with a bit of added brand recognition in the minds of consumers.

But I guess it is all in how you view Twitter and the conversations you find there.  As more and more people commented on the advertising, I did not see protesters marching in front of Motrin’s corporate headquarters.  I saw friends and acquaintances who were talking about what they had for lunch.  And then ask if I’d seen the Motrin ad.

The thing is, I wouldn’t think twice about the vast majority of the comments I have read regarding either Motrin or the demented homeschooler line if they were dropped in casual conversation.  And that is what Twitter is.  Informal, casual conversation that happens to be available for all the world to read.

homeschool motrinmoms motrin

There has been quite a bit of buzz recently about Nebraska’s safe haven laws, intended to give a safe place for distraught mothers to drop off their unwanted infants.  These laws are gaining in popularity as people are increasingly horrified at the occasional stories of infants left to die in dumpsters or other unseemly places, but we here in Nebraska were unique in not identifying an age-limit.

So a lot of children were dropped off who didn’t fit the “newborn” status that lawmakers had intended.  Like the nine children aged one to seventeen dropped off by a man who lost his wife a year previously.  Or even the eighteen year old who turned himself in to a hospital.  We’ve even had some come from other states to absolve themselves of their parenting duties, prompting children and family services director for Health and Human Services, Todd Landry,  to quip,

“This is not what we intended when we said we wanted to increase Nebraska tourism.” Omaha World Herald

So the governor called a special session of the legislature to try to hammer down an age-limit.  Senator Ernie Chambers apparently attempted a one-man filibuster, something he is rather notorious for around here.  And yes, that would be the Senator Chambers who sued God, a lawsuit he is apparently considering pursuing even though it was thrown out of court.

The whole situation is upsetting, but I think we may be asking the wrong questions from all sides of the debate.  Many are looking at these parents and wondering “What kind of parent…”  But I wonder why the shock and judgment is saved for those who abandon teenagers.  And as much as it pains me to think what it must be like for those children to be dropped off at an area hospital, I cannot help but wonder what life was like at home with parents who were, for whatever reason, in a situation they no longer felt they could handle.

And what might have happened if they were forced to continue without some sort of support.

Julie of Shanan Trail makes an interesting point in Why Homeschool’s comment box:

When I read the stories of these teenagers (most of whom were dropped off because of behavioral problems — I know at least one has fetal alcohol syndrome) my heart breaks. I think it is terrible for a parent to walk out on their struggling kids. But, the tale is no less sad or tragic when it happens to an infant. Because here is the truth… that infant is going to become an adult adoptee. No one should have their story be that their mother dropped them of anonymously at a hospital somewhere and walked away. And, for the mother… abandonment is a permanent solution to a problem that may well have other solutions. She may be able to parent the child herself and just need help in finding resources. She may feel she needs to place the child for adoption. When a mother places a child for adoption, she is supposed to receive counseling and support. She may opt to create an adoption plan that allows her to have continued contact with a child. For sure the adoptee will have access to more information about his or her past.

I am not sure what I think about safe haven laws in general, but I do think that we are looking at the wrong thing when we begin to focus on the age-limit.  Regardless of the age, we are talking about families in crisis that are in need of intensive support.  And safe haven laws may not work to save the babies they are directed at, anyway.

Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln cited studies in states with safe haven laws showing that, after passage of the law, as many infants have been left to die as have been left in safe havens.  Omaha World Herald

Murder cannot be prevented by simply providing “another way out.”  There have always been choices other than murder.  I doubt it can be solved by throwing more money at it, or by lessening the stigma associated with teen pregnancy as Senator Chambers desires.

I wish I had a neat little packaged answer, but I fear in this area we are going to be governed by a principle laid out pretty clearly by Senator Arnie Stuthman,

“I felt I was sacrificing, but I thought if we could save just one baby, it would be worth it,” he said. “I think people felt they did not want to see another youngster dropped off in a Dumpster.”  Ibid.

If we could save just one baby…

In exchange we leave families in crisis situations to walk away from their children without any of the underlying problems addressed.  Families which might have been preserved if our state focused on helping families identify community resources set up to provide support, counseling, respite or whatever other needs these families have.  And families which will continue to struggle because you may be able to physically walk away from your child, but the emotional and spiritual toll of such an act cannot so simply be dropped off at your local hospital.

Of the 35 children dropped off since the law was passed, not one was an infant.  But I think perhaps we prefer to simply change the law and pretend that those other families were anomalies rather than a warning of some serious social problems affecting families today.

Hat Tip: NCCPR

Nebraska safe haven law safe haven child abuse

An interesting story popped up in my Google alert for homeschool, although it has nothing to do with homeschooling.  Still, it is an interesting look at the difficulties experienced by some immigrant communities and raises a lot of questions for me regarding the whole assimilation process, how immigrant families are instructed in American values and what the idea of American culture and values even means.

Over 100,000 evangelical Christians from the former Soviet Union live in the Portland area and the older generation is increasingly clashing with the younger.  In the Soviet Union, they were fined, jailed and put in mental asylums so the community learned to exist by isolating itself.  This has also been an interesting part of the ongoing homeschooling story in Germany as one of the stories to really gain a great deal of international attention involves the so-called “Paderborner Baptists,” an ethnically German group which had relocated back to Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union.  They rejected the values they saw in the schools, isolated themselves and began to homeschool.  They also resisted the state’s pressure on them, and some speculated that the resulting standoff had less to do with religion and homeschooling than it did with a community that had continued to exist by resisting Soviet oppression.

Here in the US, however, we do not have that kind of pressure.  Certainly there is a form of pressure put on immigrant families and their children, but it is of a different kind.  More subtle, not forceful, but still felt.  Some members of the community have responeded by withdrawing into their community, refusing to learn English and by maintaing their “old ways” as best they can.  But in the process, some fear they are losing their children.

The story focuses on Mariya and her family who immigrated here 6 years ago.  She feels helpless as she watches her children stray from her values and reject their heritage.

In Ukraine, she says, she never had trouble with her children.  Now they refuse to go to church or eat the Ukranian food she prepares.  They tell Mariya they will call the police if she disciplines them.  “I have no more hope that anything will change for the better,” she says.  “In this society, you basically have to do what your kids say.”  OregonLive.com

A pastor gives some additional insight:

“Parents think that if their kids get involved in American things, it’s desertion,” Faith Community Church Pastor Robert Rathburn says.  “It’s like corruption of their Russian or Ukranian culture and religion.”  Ibid.

Throughout the article, “American culture” is seen as pulling these children away from their parents, drawing them into our way of life and away from their parents.  Even the title, “Slavic parents lose control of their Americanizing kids” implies as much.  The sad thing is, however, the behaviors raising concern are not part of “American culture.”  The article leads off with an example.

Mariya calls her children’s schools almost daily, or comes to school crying.  Her three teenage sons smoke and drink, even in front of Mariya and her husband.  They go out at night, don’t return home until morning and sometimes disappear for days.  Her oldest dropped out of high school last year; another son did the same a few months ago.  Her preteen daughter ran away from home.  Ibid.

Drinking, drugs and running away certainly exist among American youth, but most of us who have been born and raised here would be horrified to see this kind of behavior in our children, and would also arrive at meetings with the school in tears.  It is shocking, and the parents feel completely powerless.

Later on in the story, we see a glimpse of the real problem.  The parents do not discipline their kids.  Back home, they spanked.  With a belt.  Here, parents fear losing their children if they use this sort of discipline and they seem at a loss for any other way to raise their children.

It is a difficult situation for all involved.  Perhaps when social workers receive reports arising out of these situations, some consideration needs to be taken for the culture they are coming from.  What we see as abusive, many of these families see as normal child rearing.  Education and assistance is needed more than splitting up families.

It makes me wonder exactly what they have been told.  Here in Lincoln, Catholic Social Servies helps to introduce refugees to American culture, teaching them a little of what to expect and specifically outlining parenting practices common in some of their native cultures which can lead to CPS involvement here in America.

In the immigrant population I worked with for a short time, I saw a lot of the same kinds of problems expressed in this article.  I don’t know specifically what they were told when they arrived, nor how they parented in teh refugee camp in the Middle East where they lived before coming here, but I was shocked at how much control children had over their parents and how parents were reluctant to even say “no,” let alone offer consequences for misbehavior.  And they also blamed American culture for seducing their children from their way of life.

But is American culture really to blame?  Somewhere along the line, someone did their job informing these immigrants that certain discipline techniques will bring the state into your home and possibly lead to your children being removed.  But it seems that something that is perhaps lacking is someone to teach them that there are other ways of setting and maintaining boundaries.  That even in America, we don’t allow our children to control us.  And that when our children make bad decisions involving underage drinking, drug use, gang behavior and even theft, we too are devastated.

Instead, they live in fear of their own children calling CPS or the police, and end up covering up the crimies of their children out of fear of the stigma from friends in their community and what will happen if the police get involved.

Ukraine corporal punishment parenting culture

This has nothing to do with homeschooling, but nausea and apathy have pretty much killed my motivation to tackle the task I set before myself this evening…and that is only in part due to pregnancy.  Thanks to COD for this little article which displays both the worst and best of the human spirit:  The girl in the window.

The girl in the window is six year old Danielle, who just appeared there for a fleeting moment one day, years after a family moved in.  No one even knew a little girl lived there.  When officers finally arrived to investigate, what they found left them vomiting and in tears.

“I’ve been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad,” Holste said later. “There’s just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting.”

And then there was the little girl.  The one who had appeared for a fleeting moment in a window months previously.  Lying in a bed in a soiled diaper, amongst a stack of dirty diapers and surrounded by filth and human excrement.  At seven, she had been so severely neglected that she was completely unresponsive to stiumuli, including eye contact, touch and even pain.  No one knows whether she will ever be able to live on her own although physically, nothing is wrong with her.

In the end, she is adopted by a loving family who by all accounts is doing all they can for her even though she is far from what they were seeking when they set their hearts on adoption.  Her eyes just captivated them and the rest didn’t seem to matter so much.  She is even beginning to show improvment, responds to people, understands simple commands, is potty trained and seems to enjoy interaction…all things which no one knew for sure she would ever be capable of.

I should have just stopped reading the story at the end.  It was about as happy of an ending as you could get for a story like this.  But of course a comment caught my attention, and I think someone’s moral compass is in serious need of readjustment.  Dormiel writes:

Wait they are saying that the mother had a low IQ and was neglectful so they give her to a family who worship sky fairies? I don’t know what’s worse frankly.

Let me see.  Leave the child to rot in her own feces, or give her to a Christian family who wants to care for her.  Which do you think is worse?

I’d be inclined to pass it off as yet another asinine Internet comment, but I’ve heard others who seem to have difficulty drawing a distinction as well.

So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.  Edge.org

And Nicholas Humphrey is not some random anonymous commenter on a newspaper article.  He was speaking before Amnesty International.

Cocking a Snook asks an interesting question that I started to answer in her comment box: What can Homeschooling Learn from Our Present Political Stories? It started with some musing about how Ron Paul seemed to unite extremists on both the left and right behind him over on Spunky’s post NEA endorses Obama. I was never particularly surprised by Ron Paul’s apparent unifying ability at the extremes of both ends of the spectrum, but I’ll get back to that after sharing JJRoss’ quote from “The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,” by Matt Taibibi:

The Ron Paul candidacy was an extreme example of outsider politics on the left and right merging…retreats from the mainstream that traveled in opposite directions but were parallel in substance….Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side…

I have not read the book and am only reacting to what was shared. I disagree with the assessment, but I think the surprise that people from seemingly opposite sides of the political spectrum were able to so passionately come behind the same candidate demonstrates something deeply wrong with American politics.

The trouble is, we have all fallen into this “unshakable belief in the inhumanity of [our] enemies on the other side.” Conservatives have cast the liberal as public enemy number one. In fact, they aren’t even really liberals any more. They are God-hating secularists trying to push their homosexual agenda. Conservatives, on the other hand…well, we are “seduced by homophobia and a lust for war.” * Or, as Thomas Frank says in What’s the Matter With Kansas (as if voting Republican were some sort of mental illness), we lack the ability to make “certain mental connections about the world.”

Libertarians have long had a difficult time identifying themselves on the Left-Right spectrum of American politics. Because their political views are not so typically defined by the freedom to/freedom from debate that drives so much of the philosophizing against conservatives and liberals. They embrace both, and the libertarian party has long been split by those who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. For an essentially libertarian candidate to have united these groups is unsurprising. To have attracted a few people who probably have libertarian leanings whether they realized it or not is unsurprising. Realizing that American political views do not really work along a Left-Right spectrum goes along way in quelling the surprise.

To realize that conservatives and liberals have similar goals shouldn’t leave people standing in the grocery store shocked that a single candidate was able to unite despite seemingly polar opposite political beliefs. We all want liberty. Certainly we define it a little differently. Certainly we see differing roles for government. But conservatives do not want to leave children and the elderly starving in the streets and the rest of the nation without health care any more than liberals want to make us all dependent on the welfare state in order to increase their…I don’t know what exactly. I haven’t quite figured it out because I stopped reading that kind of “reporting.”

What has this all to do with homeschooling? Too much, I’m afraid. Julie of Shanan Trail left a comment on my post Homeschoolers Threaten Our Cultural Comfort which rings true to the way we often go about advocating our positions.

Well, I think perhaps some of the defensiveness people feel against homeschoolers is legitimate…I started reading homeschool blogs shortly afterward, there are quite alot of entries that more than imply that the only acceptable educational choice is homeschooling.

And if you need an illustration, here is a nice one from the forum over at OneNewsNow (emphasis and misspelling in original).

My children my choice right? Never will I sacrifice my children upon that alter of mid control and manipulation. I propose bringing against any parent that willing allows thier child to attend a public school up on charges of neglect and abuse. I am raising men and women, not self-centered gender confused diversified evolved sin toleraters.

Is that what we really believe? Charges of neglect and abuse against any parents who let their children attend a public school? No wonder people get a little defensive at the mention of homeschooling. I realize that this is in direct response to the educational anarchy comment by the California Teachers Association, and a few people in the forum were a little insulted by it. But what does this sort of language serve to accomplish?

What certified teacher would read that and be persuaded? What parent of a public schooled child would read that and wonder if homeschooling might be for them? The point of this kind of speech is not to promote understanding, find common ground or really engage the opposition at all. Its sole purpose is to draw a clear distinction between parties and rally supporters behind the “flag.” It is a call to war, not to reason.

All too often, homeschoolers engage the public with the same “unshakable belief in the inhumanity of [our] enemies on the other side” that conservatives and liberals adopted long ago. We engage each other in that fashion, promoting a divide between religious and secular homeschoolers that does not necessarily have to exist. So we are surprised when friendships develop across the divide? As if our views on the origin of life were the dominant theme in our lives?

I am not surprised when I find myself reading secular blogs and agreeing with a lot of what they say. I am not surprised when I find more points of agreement than disagreement with the secular homeschoolers who occasionally participate in the discussion here. We are “polar opposites” to a greater degree than a Republican and a Democrat meeting in a grocery store. But we are parents. With a goal of raising our children in the best way we know how.

What can we learn from the “present political stories?”

Perhaps that we do our own cause a disservice when we march on the public with the same sort of passion that we march on the capitol. That nothing is gained by boxing those we disagree with into a dehumanizing label even as we react to the stereotypes placed on us. That those who appear to be from opposing “camps” very often have similar goals, just a different means of getting there. That homeschooling would get on a little better if we could more effectively engage fellow parents rather than shallow, materialistic people more interested in their careers than their children. Fellow educators rather than purveyors of mind-control and manipulation. Children rather than mindless automatons raised by the state.

* Recorded in Superior, Nebraska by Denis Boyles, p. 14

Update: Dawn at Day by Day Discoveries adds some thoughts.  Blogger doesn’t do automatic trackbacks, and her post is well-worth reading so I’m adding it to the post.

homeschooling homeschool education Ron+Paul conservative liberal libertarian politics

Thanks to not having a television, the first I heard of the mall shooting in Omaha yesterday was through an email from another blogger I opened this morning.

Dana, you’re ok down in there in Nebraska I hope?

It was an odd subject line and not how his emails usually begin. Nine dead in a shopping mall starts making you think about the people you know who live in or near Omaha, however. I chat with Angela now and again. It was nice to get an email from her this morning. Kaltholier lives there, too. Joe blogs from Omaha…and the second amendment is his main topic. I was glad to see he had posted.

I read somewhere once that referring to other bloggers by first name only is supposed to come across as “cliquish” and that I should avoid it. However, I didn’t care all that much about their blogs this morning nor what they wrote about. I could guess that much. I only cared that they had written something. That they hadn’t been shopping. To make sure these people I have never met in person were ok. Yesterday evening, thousands of people called friends and relatives for the same reason. “Just checking.” Apparently more than Alltell could handle.

And now to figure out what to make of it all.

I cannot help but think back to the Virginia Tech shootings. I was in the hospital, giving birth to my fourth child. I was also inundated with images, commentary, repetitive reporting. Different people saying the same things, but with the same questions left unanswered. Virginia is a long ways from Lincoln, Nebraska. But the shootings felt close. Television makes the world seem smaller.

The Westroads Mall is only 70 miles away. I’ve been there, although not often. I know people who live near the mall, yet somehow this event is more distant. Because it wasn’t replayed in my living room. The first image I saw was a photograph on the front page of the newspaper I purchased this evening. While pumping gas, I found out a man didn’t realize he had been shot, that there is no making sense of a tragedy like this, that the shooter was “a good kid” with a troubled past. That President Bush was in the state and some graphic novel was available online. And that snow was in the forecast.

Headlines deliver a certain amount of information for my own thoughts to wrestle with. They do not carry with them the same emotional charge as even the photo I am looking at here in the paper of a Von Maur employee holding her little girl. They do not pull you into the story like television does, making you feel almost as if you were a part of it. The newspaper lets the news stay distant.

Perhaps that is why there is such an urgency to some of the discussion about policy in the wake of these tragedies. Do we need more gun control? A better police force? More security in all of our public places? Statistics say that violent crime is decreasing in America, yet we seem to feel more threatened than ever. More frightened. More willing to trade in liberty for a sense of security.

We appeal to a higher power, and that power is the state.

[tags]Westroads, Omaha, shooting, Hawkins[/tags]

I am not sure what is being cheapened here:  women or our rights.

I have seen the advertisements for BITTEN, Sarah Jessica Parker’s new line of fashion, hanging in the mall and they bother me more every time I see them.  Visiting BITTEN’s website, I find this increasingly offensive line of fashion has its own manifesto:

It is every woman’s inalienable right to have a pulled-together stylish, confident wardrobe with money left over to spend.

Get BITTEN

Are women that shallow?  Or have our rights become that meaningless? Pamela Kirkland of The Campus Word thinks it even cheapens fashion.

And what exactly is Burlington Coat Factory thinking with its Christmas commercial?

Lady to small child:   Do you believe in Santa?

Small child:  I believe in cashmere.

Are we to be impressed by the materialism of this small child?  If so, then a belief in Santa perhaps would not be so contradictory to her belief in cashmere.  The vague reference to Fran Lebowitz’ words, however, can hardly be missed:

I do not believe in God.  I believe in cashmere.

Advertising by its nature is meant to be shallow, to strike at our emotions rather than our reason, to entice us to spend and let tomorrow worry about itself.  But if it does so successfully by attacking the very foundations of our free society, I do worry that perhaps we have become a frivolous generation.

[tags]Bitten, Sarah Jessica Parker, fashion, culture[/tags]

A lesson which backfired (or did it?), an offended student, another coalition and another protest against Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In a lesson to prepare students to read Huckleberry Finn, a teacher writes a number of emotionally charged words on the chalkboard. “Nigger” is among them, which offends a student.

So he asked his teacher to shorten it to the “N-word.”

He said his request was met with questions from his teacher.

“She asked me: ‘Does it offend you? It hurts, doesn’t it?’ ” he said. “To me, it was cruel the way it was presented. It didn’t help the lesson at all. It showed improper judgment.” Dallas News

This particular word appears 212 times in the book, and is one of many reasons this book has been ranked the fifth most frequently challenged book of 1990-2000 by the American Library Association. Helping to maintain this status for this decade, “The Coalition to stop the N-Word,” made up of the National Black United Front, the New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, the Black Coalition to Maximize Education, and the NAACP, has protested on behalf of the family and are calling for the book to be pulled from the curriculum.

The word is highly offensive. Which is the point of the lesson. I was not there the day the lesson was given, but from the brief excerpt of the exchange between the teacher and student shared here, I see nothing that should require her to take “sensitivity training.” Chances are, should she attend them, she will sit through the same lesson. I went through Teach For America to begin teaching and our “sensitivity training” regarding gender and sexuality issues ran exactly like that. Offensive terms were written on the board. We were asked which ones bothered us the most. Then we discussed the power of language at evoking emotional reactions and how words can hurt.

Banning books which handle difficult themes such as slavery and racism will do nothing to lessen racism in America. These are issues which need to be confronted. Students need to be challenged to think, not have the curriculum sanitized to avoid offense. This book is not racist because an offensive term is used (over and over). Nat Hentoff of the Jewish World Review had the opportunity to talk to some African-American students who had recently read the book and their insight into the issue of the N-word is interesting.

Do you think we’re so dumb,” one of the Brooklyn eighth-graders said to me, “that we don’t know the difference between a racist book and an anti-racist book? Sure, the book is full of the word ‘Nigger.’ That’s how those bigots talked back then. –Jewish World Review

Is that a lesson that can be learned through censorship?

“The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi” — Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times in 1982 — “are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is ‘Nigger Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.”

The book would not be the same and could not make the point as clearly if it were not for the offensive language. But that is something students need to be prepared for. And I think the teacher in this case was doing just that.

[tags]education, Huckleberry Finn[/tags]

I don’t do this very often. Actually, I am not sure that I have ever done it. But Peggy Noonan’s words need no commentary.

You don’t want to judge Christ by Christians, someone once said. He is perfect, they are not.

In a similar way you don’t want to judge capitalism by capitalists, or the legitimacy of democracy by the Democrats, or the vitality of our republic by the Republicans. You have to take the thing pure and in itself, while allowing for the flaws and waywardness of its practitioners.

I say this because here in America we have reached a funny pass. People are doing and saying odd things as if they don’t know the meaning of the thing they say they stand for. In particular I mean we used to be proud of whom we allowed to speak, and now are leaning toward defining ourselves by whom we don’t speak to and will not allow to speak. This is not progress.

Conservatives on campus are shouted down. A crusader against illegal immigration is rushed off the stage at Columbia University. Great newspapers give ad breaks to groups with which they feel an ideological affinity, but turn away ads from those they do not, such as antiabortion groups. And they call this a business.

So much silencing. It seems so weak, so out of keeping with who we are. We love the tradition of free speech in America, but you don’t want to judge its health by what we’ve done with it lately or to it. Opinion Journal

Do consider reading the rest.

Hat Tip: The Education Wonks

English literary tradition has produces a number of great works with which we should all be familiar. Schools are doing a good thing when their required reading list includes such works as Of Mice and Men, Moby Dick, Lord of the Flies, and, as much as I despised reading it, maybe even Jane Eyre.

But like any good student, you want to get out of as much work as possible. So, in combining the old and the new, you buy a set of Cliffs Notes and pop popcorn with a movie rental to see if you can glean enough of the story line to pass the test. Noticing the spike in literary movie sales at exam crunch time, MGM marketing director Chris Franchino and his colleagues at Fox Home Entertainment decided to make things even easier by repackaging a few classic movie titles together with the popular study guides.

“Maybe this isn’t a bad idea,” Franchino says of the strategy involved in the new series. “The students are already doing it and maybe we can actually try to make it more educational.” jam!

Thus the Cliffs Notes Ultimate Study Guide was born. And available at my grocery store.

But wait! Why stop at high school and college kids trying to cut a few corners in their reading list? There is also a new Follow Along series aimed at young children to help improve reading skills. Busy parents no longer have to sit down and read to their children to promote literacy in early childhood. Now, it is as simple as turning on the captioning button.

As a word is spoken, it lights up in the oversized captions. American educator Helen Hoffner, who has spent two decades researching the potential of captioning before consulting on these DVDs, tells Sun Media that the series has a simple, elegant benefit.

“I see it building language skills. It is something very easy and inexpensive for parents because it is as easy as turning on the captioning button. Children, when they’re two or two years old, have to get the idea that these squiggly symbols that are letters really represent words.” Ibid.

We have talked about what happens to the brain during television viewing before. But even very young children are already being immersed in media, and most parents think it is good for children. With reviews like this, who is going to question that? So now we will attempt to learn to read with captioning and learn about our literary tradition with MGM. I guess it fits.

education, media