Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard privacy

The Propriety of Cultural “Appropriation”

prom dress, cultural appropriation, racism, political correctness, Keziah Daum

Young Keziah Daum committed a terrible crime. She wore a traditional Chinese dress and displayed it online. 

No wonder she was chastised by hordes of frothing guardians of cultural purity.

Many Chinese themselves say they find the criticism baffling. Perhaps they are burdened by common sense. They are probably not sociologically sophisticated enough to mind when an American orders Chinese takeout, either.

“Puritanism is the haunting fear,” H.L. Mencken once explained, “that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” 

“Cultural appropriation” is the currently favored bludgeon wielded by today’s “puritans” to ruin enjoyment. According to this misbegotten notion, it is somehow wrong-​souled to enjoy somebody else’s culture.

The very idea is hard to pin down. It is unduly fuzzy. How? Well, borders between countries or groups are pretty arbitrary as cultural boundaries. To try to be consistent, enemies of culture-​grabbing would have to berate any partaking of culture not strictly one’s own. 

Alas, the amount of culture a person can produce single-​handedly is paltry. 

Nor can anybody create any unit of culture without being influenced by — “appropriating” — the creations of others. Cultural creators have shamelessly “appropriated” each other’s stuff for millennia, a process that accelerated with improvements in travel and communication.

Should all seven billion of us live our lives in separate cubicles?

Enemies of “cultural appropriation” subscribe to every kind of silliness when they attack watching foreign films or wearing socks, dresses or Halloween costumes that evoke the culture of another country, state, town, or block. 

No matter from whom they stole the idea of “cultural appropriation,” they should give it back.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture moral hazard Regulating Protest

The Shallow State

deep state, shallow state, free speech, censorship, first amendment, law. university

Amidst all the talk of The Deep State, we are in danger of losing track of a parallel problem: the Shallow State — which, despite lack of depth, is very wide.

I am referring to government employees who increasingly abandon any pretense of impartiality. And the public institutions that protect them. 

Consider the case of the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign and its 39-​year-​old lecturer Tariq Khan, who is a member of an Antifa-​affiliated group called the Black Rose Anarchist Federation. Mr. Khan had been angrily shouting and chanting at a campus anti-​Trump rally when he was mildly challenged by a non-​nut student journalist. Khan went on a rampage, screamed at and pushed the young journalist, and deliberately broke the smartphone of a fellow journalist who had been recording the fracas.

Khan was charged with destruction of property. But the story doesn’t stop there.

“I was told that if I wanted the ‘situation to improve,’” wrote a third journalist, “that I should stop writing about Khan.” 

The university placed a restraining order on the three, to squelch news and dissent.

So the trio sued on First Amendment grounds.

Here we have a teacher willing to abridge free speech the old-​fashioned way, by playing the bully. And a public institution ready and willing to defend him, to take his petty criminality and raise it to a conspiratorial, Big Brother level.

Not only does this rob Americans of rights, taxpayers are being forced to fund what they might justifiably regard as the destruction of the republican form of governance.

Root out the infamous Deep State? 

Sure.

But limit and make transparent the Shallow State, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access education and schooling folly ideological culture media and media people Popular responsibility

Fiddling with the Franchise

voting age, democracy, elections, adult, maturity

In 2013, Tacoma Park, Maryland, became the first place in the U.S. to allow 16-​year-​olds to vote in local elections.* Now, Washington, D.C., Councilman Charles Allen, “inspired by the high-​schoolers who are campaigning for gun control and filled D.C. streets last month in a massive protest that mesmerized the country,” reports the Washington Post, wants to follow suit.

“It’s pretty hard for anyone to watch the events of the last couple of months,” claims Councilman Allen, “and not understand the pure power and maturity of incredibly young voices.”

Well, they do use adult words.

One has to wonder: would the “maturity” of these young adults equally amaze this politician, were they advocating opinions** with which he disagreed?

But wait a second … wasn’t one of the demands of the “March for Our Lives” to raise, not lower, the age when a person would be deemed mature enough to legally purchase a scary-​looking rifle?

Lowering the voting age seems odd, at best, with society lurching in the other direction — raising the age of adulthood for everything else. Decades ago, the legal age to purchase alcohol was 18 in some places; today it is 21 everywhere. In Virginia, one may still drive at 16, as I could back in the day … but now there are limits on other young people riding in the car unless the driver is 18.

More ominously, facilitation by many public schools of the recent student walkouts and marches present the strongest argument against lowering the voting age: So long as government schools act in a partisan manner, indoctrination and intimidation would be rampant. 

Who wants a captive audience of would-​be voters most? 

Unscrupulous ideologues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Greenbelt and Hyattsville, Maryland, as well as Berkeley, California, have since joined Tacoma Park in allowing 16- and 17-​year-​olds to vote in local elections.

** Term limits, say. Or school vouchers. Or the rights of gestating humans.

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crime and punishment education and schooling ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Bias and Blindness

GAO, racism, race, boys, Roseanne, schools, education, bias

Neither stretching the truth nor ignoring it helps beat back implicit or explicit racism.  Yesterday, my Townhall​.com column took the Washington Post to task for misstating the results of a recent GAO report.

The GAO noted wide discrepancies between the percentage of students facing disciplinary actions who are black, male and disabled and the relative percentages of these groups in the overall student population. Yet, the report also specifically stated: “Our analyses of these data, taken alone, do not establish whether unlawful discrimination has occurred.”

Nonetheless, the Post headline told readers: “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites, federal report finds.” The article claimed that “a government analysis of data … said implicit racial bias was the likely cause of these continuing disparities.”

The same discrepancies regarding boys of all races? And students with disabilities? Even the crickets had no comment.

In the Post’s Outlook section, yesterday, readers were treated to further edification on race — this time via C. Nicole Mason with the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest. “I feel alienated and slightly betrayed by the reboot” of the sitcom Roseanne,” she writes.

The title of her piece proclaims why: “‘Roseanne’ was about a white family, but it was for all working people. Not anymore.”

The “not anymore” refers to Roseanne’s support of (and Mason’s derangement syndrome over) President Trump. Interestingly, a more legitimate “not anymore” angle was completely missed — or ignored. The Connors now have a black granddaughter. The new show isn’t “about a white family,” but a racially mixed family. 

When racism is finally extinguished from this planet, someone remember to tell the race-hustlers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom moral hazard privacy responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Ecstatic with Independence

free range, freedom, Utah, children, walk, outside, law, hysteria

Utah’s legislature unanimously passed it; the governor signed it — the nation’s first measure protecting what’s become known as “free-​range parenting.” 

It was once known simply as “parenting.”

Certain activities are now exempt from a state law criminalizing child neglect. Children may legally “walk, run or bike to and from school, travel to commercial or recreational facilities, play outside and remain at home unattended” — thereby allowing “a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities …”

Back in the day, we apparently played outside in a sort of statutory limbo.

Do we really need a law saying kids can walk on a public street? 

Sadly, yes: government agencies across the country are grossly violating the most basic rights of parents to rear independent children.

Regular readers may recall my 2015 defenses* of the Meitiv parents against the absurd charge of “unsubstantiated neglect” leveled against them by Montgomery County (Maryland) Child Protective Services. Ultimately, Maryland authorities acknowledged that permitting one’s kids (in the Meitivs’ case, a 10- and a 6‑year-​old) to walk on a public sidewalk (from a local park) wasn’t prima facie evidence of a crime. 

The current free-​range parenting movement was launched in 2008 when Lenore Skenazy publicly admitted — to mass shock and condemnation — to allowing her 9‑year-​old son to take a trip alone on New York City’s subway.

“My son got home,” she wrote in the New York Sun, “ecstatic with independence.”

Notice how rare it is to find anyone ecstatic with dependence.

Lesson? An old one: Happiness must be pursued with freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* My writings on the Meitivs’ battle to keep their kids:

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Good Guy With Gun

Blaine Gaskill, school shooting, gun, gun control, Maryland, defense, 2nd Amendment

Short version of the story: a good guy with a gun at a Maryland high school stopped a bad guy with a gun. In less than a minute. How? Because the good guy had a gun and was inside the school with the gun.

The bad guy was able to shoot a 16-​year-​old female student, apparently someone with whom he had a previous relationship, as well as a 14-​year-​old male before an officer on site responded. This officer, Blaine Gaskill, was on the spot in less than a minute. Gaskill and the assailant fired simultaneously. The assailant fell dead. What exactly happened is still unclear; there has been some media speculation that the bad guy may have shot himself. 

But the 17-​year-​old shooter is dead. The female victim, though still alive, is unfortunately in critical condition. The male victim is in stable condition.

The good guy was armed — with a gun. And he was on site. If you’re learning about the incident here first, it’s because the story isn’t being plastered all over the place 24 – 7 as it would have been had the shooter been able to wreak much more havoc because nobody could quickly counter him.

So, is it okay to let responsible, well-​trained administrators, teachers and others in schools be armed? 

Well, ask the question a different way. If you happened to be inside the school at the time, would it be okay to survive when some maniac with a gun starts shooting at you and others inside that school? 

Let’s defend our loved ones.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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