Month: September 2007

Had a big event at school today, a jog-a-thon with kids, from K-5th grade, running laps to raise money for school activities (little things like an art teacher, instrumental music, and gym equipment, stuff that was paid for by taxes dollars when I was a lad). And as could be expected, some of the younger kids got over-hydrated and had the kind of accidents that 5 year-old bladders can have. But rather than run around trying to find them clean clothes and talking openly about a kid wetting their pants, I came up with the phrase “Code Yellow” which they don’t understand but changed the adults’ mood from serious/exasperated to laughter.

Feel free to use it in your own conversation. It’s almost as useful as referring to a Rule One Violation (when you see a kid crying on the baseball diamond: as everyone knows, there’s no crying in baseball).

did you know that the most common use of “blackwater” is as a descriptive term for waste water, especially if contaminated with fecal matter, urine, food waste, or other nastiness?

One Laptop Per Child (New Version), Reviewed by 12-Year-Old:

For a regular laptop, this would be the paragraph about its problems, its deficiencies. But the thing is, there aren’t any problems with this computer! Congratulations, OLPC. You’ve done it. Or will you come out with yet better laptops? Is that even possible? We’ll have to see…

Maybe these should be standard issue instead of i/MacBooks? I like the idea of an OS-agnostic approach where there’s no mental lock-in/switching costs/

• using Safari 3 means you may need to “fix” your user agent
  ebay, for example, refuses to recognize Safari 3, think it’s Safari 1. [grumble]. this hint will fix it. Shouldn’t be necessary, of course.
  (tags: safari technology design security)

Breaking the Army:

It is simply a measure of our times that when the top officer in the Army goes before Congress so that he can publicly warn about the state of readiness of his branch that it’s not the top news story of the day.

Now playing: Essence from the album “Gold Afternoon Fix” by The Church

Go, NBC! You’re SMURT!:

It’s amazing how 100% of the companies that make their living distributing other people’s content are run by absolute morons. Like, they fulfill no meaningful purpose in society — these are the guys from the Hitchhiker’s Guide that got sent in the first ship. I mean, you literally could put an African Grey parrot in charge of NBC and it’d make better decisions. (For one, there’d be a lot more shows about pirates, which would be awesome.) I defy anyone to think of a good decision that a record or TV or movie company has made recently. Let’s sue teenagers! Let’s make it impossible to enjoy our content over the web! Let’s fund the seventeenth sequel to a crappy movie that barely made money! Let’s have a fall season full of the same shit we’ve made a hundred times! Let’s fire our writers and go entirely with reality shows that aren’t real! Let’s give outrageous amounts of money to washed-up artists and ignore the new talent that’s actually selling records now! Let’s cancel shows that are at all interesting and have a smart audience, because only stupid people watch TV now! Let’s sue sue sue instead of create create create!

• Why are we so scared of debate? — “A scary man not from here came to give a speech this week, inducing such trembling it nearly brought our democracy to its knees.”
  Boycotting appearances by people you oppose does more to empower them than oppose them. No remembers who didn’t show up. What’s the good of free speech if you don’t use it?
  (tags: values politics speech)
• Slate Magazine – Still Waiting for That $100 Laptop?
  good points, all. My skepticism about computers in the classroom is not so much anti-progress as anti-waste. Poor decisions about how to use resources are why some of these countries and people are poor.
  (tags: economics markets values technology education olpc)

This list appears at the end of the interview mentioned below. I guess it’s safe to say from the title — Psychology Today: Trashing Teens — that there’s a POV expressed here. But look at these draconian prohibitions: are the folks at PsychToday they want a return to the halcyon days of child labor, unrestricted drinking and driving, and child prostitution? And some of these items — “Tracking devices routinely installed in cell phones and cars of teens” — are dubious. I confess I don’t know how many people are doing this, but routinely can’t be accurate. Some phones have GPS (for 911/emergency purposes, if for no other reason). For non-emergency use, you can buy a special phone and accompanying service. Just leave it at a friend’s house or, in these days of hacking the iPhone, plug in a set of waypoints that tell a better story.

1800s
1836 Massachusetts passes first law requiring minimal schooling for people under 15 working in factories
1848 Pennsylvania sets 12 as minimum work age for some jobs
1852 Massachusetts passes first universal compulsory education law in U.S., requires three months of schooling for all young people ages 8-14
1880s Some states pass laws restricting various behaviors by young people: smoking, singing on the streets, prostitution, “incorrigible” behavior
1881 American Federation of Labor calls on states to ban people under 14 from working
1898 World’s first juvenile court established in Illinois—constitutional rights of minors effectively taken away

1900s
1903 Illinois requires school attendance and restricts youth labor
1918 All states have compulsory education laws in place
1933 First federal law restricting drinking by young people
1936 & 1938 First successful federal laws restricting labor by young people, establishing 16 and 18 as minimum ages for work; still in effect
1940 Most states have laws in place restricting driving by people under 16
1968 Supreme Court upholds states’ right to prohibit sale of obscene materials to minors
1968 Movie rating system established to restrict young people from certain films
1970s Supreme Court upholds laws restricting young women’s right to abortion
1970s Dramatic increase in involuntary electroshock therapy (ECT) of teens
1980s Many cities and states pass laws restricting teens’ access to arcades and other places of amusement; Supreme Court upholds such laws in 1989
1980s Courts uphold states’ right to prohibit sale of lottery tickets to minors
1980 to 1998 Rate of involuntary commitment of minors to mental institutions increases 300-400 percent
1984 First national law effectively raising drinking age to 21
1988 Supreme Court denies freedom of press to school newspapers
1989 Missouri court upholds schools’ right to prohibit dancing
1989 Court rules school in Florida can ban salacious works by Chaucer and Aristophanes
1990s Curfew laws for young people sweep cities and states
1990s Dramatic increase in use of security systems in schools
1992 Federal law prohibits sale of tobacco products to minors
1997 New federal law makes easier involuntary commitment of teens

2000s
2000+ New laws restricting minors’ rights to get tattoos, piercings, and to enter tanning salons spread through U.S.
2000+ Tougher driving laws sweeping through states: full driving rights obtained gradually over a period of years
2000+ Dramatic increase in zero-tolerance laws in schools, resulting in suspensions or dismissals for throwing spitballs, making gun gestures with hand, etc.
2000+ New procedures and laws making it easier to prosecute minors as adults

Currently spreading nationwide:
New rules prohibiting cell phones in schools or use of cell phones by minors while driving
Libraries and schools block access to Internet material by minors
New dress code rules in schools
New rules restricting wearing of potentially offensive clothing or accessories in schools
New laws prohibiting teens from attending parties where alcohol is served (even if they’re not drinking)
New laws restricting teens’ access to shopping malls
Tracking devices routinely installed in cell phones and cars of teens
New availability of home drug tests for teens
New laws prohibiting minors from driving with any alcohol in bloodstream (zero-tolerance)
Proposals for longer school days, longer school year, and addition of grades 13 and 14 to school curriculum under discussion

I must be old. I don’t think all teens need all these “freedoms” as presented here: some exposure to a diverse community makes you aware of the variety of parenting styles and relative maturity of the other kids and their parents. What one kid can handle might get another one in serious trouble.

Some of these items are undeniably bad but I don’t equate the loss of a school newspaper’s first amendment rights with a ban on cell phone use in the classroom.

Really weak stuff, this.

Ahmadinejad vs. Khrushchev:

In the post Cold War-era, it’s easy to forget the context, but the USSR was the most dangerous rival the United States had ever seen. And we welcomed Khrushchev with open arms, anxious to show him and the world our greatness.

To be sure, the comparison is inexact. Russia was a global counter-weight; Iran is a regional player. Khrushchev was an official guest of the U.S.; Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University and the U.N.

But the historical analogy holds up anyway. Khrushchev had threatened to erase the United States off the map — and had the power to make it happen. Ahmadinejad denies the reality of butchery and slaughter, but Khrushchev actually orchestrated a few. He appeared quite mad when he went to the U.N., took off his shoe, and pounded it on the podium. He was the nation’s most dangerous foe in the midst of a generational war, and yet, upon his arrival, we showed no fear. Americans had confidence that our way was the right way, and we would not flinch.

In contrast, Ahmadinejad showed up at Columbia for a well-deserved admonishment — he was literally laughed at for his absurdities — and conservatives can barely contain their anxiety. Their collective freak-out suggests insecurities and weakness, as if Ahmadinejad’s mere presence should strike fear into all of us. “Panic! Americans will see how ridiculous Ahmadinejad’s ideas really are! Run for your lives!”

Please. I wasn’t born when Eisenhower welcomed Khrushchev, but I’m old enough to remember that we used to be bigger than we are today.

It really is striking how anxious about all this the thought-leaders and pundit seem to be. Exposing wackos for what they are is the best way to defuse their power. That’s what free speech and a free press are all about: if you attempt to silence or marginalize these people it gives them a grievance and legitimizes their position to their followers. Better to invite them into the light and let their ideas be scrutinized for what they are.

[Update: I read the article/interview. If it’s any indication of the tone and content of the book, it’s more a screed about the author’s issues with his own upbringing and unhappiness with whatever restrictions he lived under than a cogent discussion of where young people are today. So much projection, I thought I was at the movies . . . . ]

Jason Kottke links to The Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein, an excerpt from which is available online. I’m reluctant to make an argument against so slim an example but if it spells out his thesis accurately, I think he’s missing a lot.

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing — 30 is the new 20 — and most Americans now believe a person isn’t an adult until age 26.

In some cases, children have children of their own when they reach puberty. Current societal attitudes are pretty firmly against it, as it happens. Yes, we are mammals, like whales, apes, and giraffes, but that doesn’t mean we obey the same biological signals: society, something that’s alleged to be a good idea, proscribes some of those behaviors.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

Much of this argument of anticipated and in my opinion refuted by The Disappearance of Childhood. Noted curmudgeon Neil Postman makes the case that childhood is a recent phenomenon, that children as a protected class came along after the Renaissance. I think his argument that reading and the availability of books became a useful delimiter of childhood from adulthood, though it often reflected class background as well before the advent of compulsory education. Epstein mentions compulsory education but the reference, linked as it is to child-labor laws, seems dismissive, even negative, as if children are unworthy of education or protection from exploitation.

I don’t find the idea of educating the next generation with the accumulated knowledge of the past, even as it includes material the current generation didn’t know, as “artificially extending childhood.” I see as creating a more useful and productive adulthood.

His theory that childhood now exists until one’s late 20s is just silly and has little to do with society’s mandates or even culture. If a parent wants to enable their kid’s delayed entry into Epstein’s factories, that’s up to them.

Postman’s argument is that children are not allowed to be children, with adult entertainment and messages bombarding them as soon as they watch TV, read, or see movies. Daytime TV, what too many households have on, is a cesspit of adult programming, from the talk shows to the soaps, that kids can learn a lot from, none of it good. At the risk of sounding like “hey, you damn kids, get off my lawn” take a look at the clothes and general deportment of kids from elementary grades on up. There’s a constant pressure to aspire up, to do the things that the older kids are doing. You know what a tween[1] is, right?

The issue is not that childhood is extended: it’s that the age at which kids are treated/marketed and sold to as adults is become extended downward, as younger kids are targeted as consumers.

As for isolating teens from adults, most of what I understand tells me that when we don’t do that — when we mix people who are by definition immature with people on the other side of a legal definition — there are issues.

I’d have to read the book or at least the article to try to understand what he’s driving at, but it seems as if he wants a return to a world that Dickens, Upton Sinclair, and Jacob Riis documented and that, as a result, was outlawed.

Continue reading “Someone needs to read some Dickens and study Jacob Riis.”