I’ve been thinking today about all the young and old minds that are heading back into our classrooms today. I don’t know about you, but droves of Americans heading back to school always makes me feel good inside, despite the twilight of summer and all of that. Just in time, Brainstorm has a post questioning the conventional wisdom of reading tests. Some scholars now posit that prior knowledge (or “domain knowledge”) of a reading topic will increase a student’s reading comprehension significantly. This casts doubt on whether a given passage can assess a student’s reading skills just as well as any other comparable passage on a different subject. The claim makes for an interesting debate. I am most inspired, however, by the final graph of this post, which imagines curricula blending reading comprehension and the learning of subjects into a single lesson:
If reading is not an abstract, transferable skill, if reading comprehension relies upon sufficiently broad knowledge of important cultural, political, scientific, historical, and artistic materials, then we run squarely into delicate Culture War questions of curriculum. The inevitable question arises, “Who’s to say which traditions and histories and literature and philosophies should be required in the classroom?”
I’ll take Hirsch/Pondiscio’s advice: “Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. . . . Let’s say a state’s fourth-grade science standards include the circulatory system, atoms and molecules, electricity, and Earth’s geologic layers and weather; and social-studies standards include world geography, Europe in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other domains. The state’s reading tests should include not just fiction and poetry but nonfiction readings on those topics and others culled from those specific curriculum standards.”
I realize this isn’t exactly revolutionary — that this sometimes happens on its own anyway — but I’m still struck by the vision behind it: that reading should encompass all areas of interest; that students who “like to read” shouldn’t just study stories and poetry; and that reading forms the basis of most learning and that we need more of it, not less.
At moments like this I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have job where I get to read so often, not to mention one that gives me the time to still be a student in the off hours. Most days, of course, that is easier said than done. The struggle against mindless entertainment is harder now than it has ever been: In every brain in this country there rages a battle for finite time and attention, and the worthier pursuits do not always win. But to know that we’re at a watershed in the intellectual tradition, that fewer and fewer stand to carry the mantle into the future, surely makes each little triumph all the sweeter.
Somewhat related to this: while looking into the work of Tony Judt, the acclaimed historian who died a couple of weeks ago, I came across an interview with Charlie Rose wherein Judt discusses his book “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” and asserts that students today have lost their citizenship in the country of time. By this he means that although history in the classroom used to be rather boring it nonetheless prepared students to comprehend the important issues and events they would encounter in their lives — it gave them reference points from which to draw larger ideas about the world (and in this sense history encompasses not just politics but the whole array of endeavors and developments that have come before us). To go back to the terms of the reading study, history used to give us domain knowledge.
Despite Judt’s assessment, though, I take hope in another thing that the Brainstorm post mentioned: with regard to future comprehension, the gap between no knowledge on a topic and some is greater than the gap between some and much. Understanding, therefore, can grown from a meager basis, which means that a little effort every day remains a powerful thing.
Filed under: world affairs
Despite the hemming and hawing over this war, it’s pretty clear that we are not leaving anytime soon. We’ve only just drawn down in Iraq, and all President Obama hoped to do there was leave. As World Affairs’s own Ann Marlowe has pointed out, the administration’s number one talking point on this matter is pretty simple: we need more time. The Pentagon, too, is proceeding with plans for a major military commitment: Walter Pincus reported earlier this week that the Defense Department is asking Congress to fund three $100 million expansion projects on air bases that won’t be completed until late 2011 (and no, they’re not for Afghan use).
I don’t say this to foreground a critique of the war itself, but these facts were nonetheless swirling through my mind when I read Ann Jones’s column in this week’s Nation. You should really read the whole thing yourself, but it’s basically a counterpunch to everyone — from politicians and policymakers to the fanciful editors at Time magazine — who see this war as a kind of hero’s journey to save the women of Afghanistan. After debunking the more mythic version of the “Aisha” story (which lead the Aug. 9 cover of said weekly), Jones lays into the meat of her argument, worth quoting in full. Pay special attention to the ends of the 3rd and 6th graphs:
The Taliban do terrible things. Yet the problem with demonizing them is that it diverts attention away from other, equally unpleasant and threatening facts. Let’s not make the common mistake of thinking that the devil we see is the only one.
Consider the creeping Talibanization of Afghan life under the Karzai government. Restrictions on women’s freedom of movement, access to work and rights within the family have steadily tightened as the result of a confluence of factors, including the neglect of legal and judicial reform and the obligations of international human rights conventions; legislation typified by the infamous Shia Personal Status Law (SPSL), gazetted in 2009 by President Karzai himself despite women’s protests and international furor; intimidation; and violence. Women legislators told the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) last year that they have come to fear the fundamentalist warlords who control the Parliament. One said, “Most of the time women don’t dare even say a word about sensitive Islamic issues, because they are afraid of being labeled as blasphemous.” (Blasphemy is a capital offense.) Women journalists also told UNAMA that they “refrain from criticizing warlords and other power brokers, or covering topics that are deemed contentious such as women’s rights.” A series of assassinations of prominent women, beginning in 2005, have driven many women from work and public life. Women working in women’s organizations in Kabul regularly receive threatening letters and, recently, high-tech videos on their mobile phones showing women being raped.
The Taliban claim responsibility for some, but not all, of the assassinations and threats, while most members of the Karzai government maintain a complicit silence. These developments have sent into reverse what little progress women in the cities had made since 2001, while most women in the countryside have seen no progress at all, and untold thousands have been harmed and displaced by warfare. All this has taken place on Karzai’s watch and much of it with his connivance. Our government complains that the Karzai administration is corrupt, but the greater problem — never mentioned — is that it is fundamentalist. The cabinet, courts and Parliament are all largely controlled by men who differ from the Taliban chiefly in their choice of turbans.
If our government were truly concerned about the lives of women in Afghanistan, it would have invited women to the table to take part in decision-making about the future of their country, beginning with the Bonn conference in 2001. Instead, they have been consistently left out.
Our long history of woeful policies has put us and Afghan women in a double bind. If we leave, the Taliban may seize power or allow themselves to be bought in exchange for a substantial share of the government, to the detriment of women. But if we stay, the Taliban may simply continue to creep into power, or they may allow themselves to be bought (or “reconciled”) in exchange for bribes and a substantial share of the government, all to the detriment of women, while we go on fighting to preserve that same government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assurance that “reconciled” Taliban will agree to observe women’s rights under the Constitution is either cynical or naïve in the extreme. And the U.S. pretense that somehow women’s rights will be preserved if only we stay long enough to shore up the Karzai regime and the ragtag Afghan National Army is at best a delusion. Yet the specter of the demon Taliban somehow makes it seem plausible.
Before feminists and the antiwar left come to blows, we might do well to consider that every Afghan woman or girl who still goes to work or school does so with the support of a progressive husband or father. Several husbands of prominent working women have been killed for not keeping their wives at home, and many are threatened. What’s taking place in Afghanistan is commonly depicted, as it is on the Time cover, as a battle of the forces of freedom, democracy and women’s rights (that is, the United States and the Karzai government) against the demon Taliban. But the real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, many of them young, and a phalanx of regressive forces. For the United States, the problem is this: the regressive forces militating against women’s rights and a democratic future for Afghanistan are headed by the demon Taliban, to be sure, but they also include the fundamentalist (and fundamentally misogynist) Karzai government, and us.
In case you have just skipped the quote in the hope that I’ll be summarizing it (it happens), I want to highlight the last few lines again:
The real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, many of them young, and a phalanx of regressive forces. For the United States, the problem is this: the regressive forces militating against women’s rights and a democratic future for Afghanistan are headed by the demon Taliban, to be sure, but they also include the fundamentalist (and fundamentally misogynist) Karzai government, and us.
It was no surprise to hear that these guys are corrupt, but I had never thought so clearly about how foolish it is to think that just because American forces are trying to stabilize the country we must also, automatically, be working with some progressive local leaders. Perhaps it wasn’t even that — Karzai, after all, has been a known liability for years — but rather the assumption that just because Westerners are patrolling the streets instead of Talibs that life is steadily getting better for the people there. Unless the U.S. wants to fight this war forever, some nasty deals are going to be made — and progressive Afghans, it seems, are going to fall onto the wrong side of history no matter what the final terms are (which of course raises questions of our role abroad which I should probably strive to address at some future point).
If the Obama administration wants to keep public support for this war going — and I think, for now, it should; counterinsurgencies like this don’t work over night — it can’t let the mission creep from a security measure back into the Bush-era narrative of a humanitarian crusade. But as the Time magazine cover shows, perhaps it already has.
Filed under: world affairs
Today was another rough day in the violent Somali capital. Gunmen from the local Islamist group al-Shabab attacked a hotel in Mogadishu this morning, killing 33 people, including 6 MPs. The story of this region floats on and off the radar of most Americans, but after the attempted Christmas Day bombing over Detroit last year, I don’t think any instability this close to Yemen should go unwatched. If you don’t know much about this issue, you should check out the latest from World Affairs — an article by piracy expert Martin N. Murphy that backgrounds the regional problems and proposes that if the U.S. wants to get serious about helping Somalia, it has to get serious about stopping the pirates who thrive in the Horn of Africa.
Update: Apparently there was a dust-up in Yemen as well today (which also, oddly, resulted in exactly 33 deaths). World Affairs Daily gets the hat-tip on this one.
Update: Now reporting 30 killed in Mogadishu, including 4 MPs.
Courtland Milloy is a Metro columnist for the Post. Every time I read one of his columns, I’m glad I have. Yesterday was no exception:
The Macon Telegraph in Georgia calls it “the iniquitous N-word.”
At the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., it’s “the dreaded N-word.”
Laura Schlessinger gave up her radio talk show last week after using on air what the Chicago Tribune called “the ‘n’ word 11 times in five minutes.”
And just what kind of word is this N-word — N technically being a letter that’s often used in statistics to mean the norm, in chemistry as short for nitro and in physics for nano?
Oh, snap, you mean the N-word — the euphemism for that taboo sound, the racial curse: in eye, double g and . . . er, excuse me; I almost cast a spell. You can’t spell it, either. . . .
I realized yesterday that although the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy has been going on for a while now, I had not actually read anything about it (can’t imagine I’m alone on that) and thus took a few minutes to read the front-page story in the New York Times that profiles Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed community center, and backgrounds his father, who was also a forceful leader in New York’s Muslim community. I recommend everyone do the same. The piece is almost blatantly defensive of Abdul Rauf at times but nonetheless should quell any doubts about this man’s qualifications as a peaceful man respectful of this country and the many religions practiced here. He’s actually gotten a lot of flack from Muslims for this, as the article points out.
This whole issue seems to boil down to a twelve-angry-men kind of scenario: there’s a core of bigotry surrounded by a cushion of discomfort and conformity and it’s going to take a few good men to see that fairness prevails. It’s really baffling that this has become as big of an issue as it has. I mean, does anyone have any idea how much shit goes on in Manhattan? Who would ever set out to shelter the Trade Center memorial from the rest of the city? First, you could never do it. Second, you can’t choose where this kind of thing happens and New York — with all of its chaos and complexity — was the city that was attacked, so let’s just accept that too (to wit). Oh and third, despite what a staggering number of Republicans apparently believe, there’s legally nothing the government could do to stop Abdul Rauf from incorporating a mosque into the fifteen-story facility he’s planning to create.
I also can’t help but think about the counterpoint to people who say a mosque near Ground Zero would disgrace the 9/11 memorial. The terrorists behind the attacks undoubtedly saw all Americans as equally culpable for everything terrible the West had ever done in the Middle East. Yet we reject that premise, and have decided to erect memorials to the dead in our centers of power, at the Pentagon and in lower Manhattan; we believe that even though some bad and — well, let’s just say inconsiderate — decisions have indeed been made by leaders in the government, military, and the world of business, an act such as 9/11 remains wholly unjust. Why then, can we not extend the same nuanced perspective to American Muslims? Wouldn’t that be a better way to react? A terrorist attack is of course very different from the kind of cultural offensive launched against this project, but both are rooted in the kind of ignorance we’ve been asked again and again to resist these last nine years. It just doesn’t make sense to lower ourselves, especially over something this benign.
PS: In the course of reading up on this story, I also came across a thoughtful and somewhat more conservative take on the issue, from Sam Harris at the Daily Beast. He argues that Islam, despite its equality under the law, is nonetheless unique today in the challenges it poses to followers and non-followers alike — and that we need to acknowledge the difference without simply turning a blind eye in the name of tolerance. I agree with that. But I’d also say Abdul Rauf has proven that he takes this approach as well, so why not bolster his leadership rather than lump him in with “jihadists”?
Filed under: society
Slate has a round table discussion on the “What’s up with twentysomethings?” think piece in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a good way to get a taste for the article without having to subject yourself to it. Maybe I’m too isolated, but these kinds of reports never register with me. I just don’t approach humanity in a demographic way. I realize researchers kind of have to do it, but anyone with a touch of liberal education knows, deep down, that this sort of thing runs aground when it moves out of the realm of hard science. Individuals seek to know themselves and others as individuals. That doesn’t mean you can’t track social mores, but it’s kind of futile to translate them into predictors of personal behavior and “life choices.” This article basically takes the kind of discussion parents might have with their own children — which is normal — and amplifies it to the point of obscurity. It’s interesting but it doesn’t really correspond with reality.
One of the contributors to the round table — who happens to be the daughter of the Times reporter who wrote the original piece — throws in an anecdote that I assume was meant as a joke but actually reveals a lot. In the process of asking her friends when they thought they would “change” into adults, one replied, “when someone kills my parents and I have to avenge their death, like Batman.” The jest of comparing our lives to those of superheroes distracts from the deeper truth that we do, indeed, yearn for narratives in our own lives. We seek adventures (in the literary sense) that punctuate our chronology. The problem is that in our current mythology those events have become generational — the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Sixties. The dominant expectation — not of individuals, necessarily, but society — is for some cataclysm that will reshape everyone simultaneously. (All “Gen X” saw was the end of the Cold War — a muted accomplishment that only early generations could really appreciate — so millions of souls were deemed unknowable to history and themselves.)
When Graydon Carter declared after 9/11, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony,” he wasn’t wrong, just late. Irony had become the norm because as a group Americans could not resist the story of “we are individuals forged by tragic events beyond our control — we’ve read ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ lived through JFK and the Vietnam War, and concluded that success, fundamentally, comes not from accomplishment but failure — the cutting short of the individual, the ‘death of innocence.’” You had to be ruined, basically, before you were really an adult. If 9/11 showed anything like what Mr. Carter hoped it did, however, it was that group narratives cannot always sustain themselves: as important and tragic as the event was for most Americans (and as much as people wanted to make it the new “defining moment”), it directly reshaped only a minority of individual lives.
This is where I’ll concede one point from the article, which discusses psychology professor Jefferey Jensen Arnett’s work to establish “early adulthood” as a period of development as distinct as adolescence:
During the period he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their idealistic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.
The narrative, in other words, is that there is no narrative — at least for the group. (It’s hardly news that people mature at different rates, although the folks who worked on this article seem to think it is.) I’ll also concede that maybe the anxiety comes from having nothing to push back against. Irony’s end comes not from some horrific event, but the lack of one — as this country slowly accepts its decline, we’re left wondering what to do with ourselves, hence the possibilities.
I realize that it might sound like I’m contradicting what I started out to say — that I’m griping about baby boomers unloading their baggage on the twentysomethings — but my point is that the whole premise of “generations” is superficial at best. It’s all just collective fiction. That’s not to say that group narratives are always bad; they are sometimes an important force in our lives. But generations are never protagonists — they do not read books or fight wars or fall in love. People do. And we cannot presume to know how any event affects those people until they tell us themselves. Researchers can collect all the data they please, but when it comes to making stories out of it journalists are just spinning yarn.
By the way, I’d be remiss if I didn’t let all of you know the real way you know when you’re an adult. It’s not very complicated: If you’re fundamentally the same person drunk — or otherwise altered by chemicals, or even by strong emotions — as you are when you’re unaltered, then you know you’ve fully matured (and have very little else to worry about).
Filed under: world affairs
This week we opened up an article by Claire Berlinski about her not-so-impressive impressions of Turkey. Arts & Letters picked it up on Wednesday and the comments have been coming in ever since. It’s a good read, whether you agree with it or not. You can read it here and tell us what you think. The issue also features Ian Bremmer on China (here), Matthew Kaminski on South Africa (here), Fredrik Logevall and Kennth Osgood on Munich and the myth of appeasement (here), and more . . .
My friend Michelle sent this to me: a request from the writer Antonya Nelson for her friends to reveal the “most famous book you haven’t read” and the “worst book you adore.” It makes for some pretty good reading itself, and I kind of wish someone with a higher profile had done it — I’d love to see the variety of responses if, say, Paper Cuts or Bookslut put this to its readers. But this is fun, too.
Seeing the names of all those big books like “Ulysses” and “Moby-Dick” reminded me of something I’d read earlier today — some brief remarks from Esquire’s Benjamin Alsup touching on the decline of great novels and the triumph of Jonathan Franzen’s new book:
It’s not that Franzen’s prose makes other writers seem untalented; it’s that he makes them seem so lazy, so irrelevant, so lacking in the kind of chutzpah we once expected from our best authors. “Freedom” doesn’t name check “War and Peace” for nothing. It’s making a claim for shelf space among the kind of books that the big dogs used to write. The kind they called important. The kind they called greats.
I have concluded that we should all mandate some big-book reading for ourselves on a regular basis, perhaps with some government-subsidized programs that let us read on work time. I think our nation would benefit greatly. I’m only sort of kidding.
(By the way, I do not read Esquire nearly as much as this blog makes it look like I do at the moment. But it does churn out a good piece now and then, even though it is essentially Maxim with a better, and mostly lost, history. And better covers.)
