How for-profit colleges recruit

“Dig deep. Get to their pain. Get to what’s bothering them, so that that way you can convince them that a college degree is going to solve all their problems.” This is a quote from a former for-profit college recruiter describing how she was instructed to recruit students, taken from the PBS "Frontline" special "College, Inc." (temporary posted online, today (5/7/2010), at http://video.pbs.org/video/1485280975/ ) For me, the quote highlights the importance of self-empathy; if people targeted for such recruiting have the capacity for self-empathy they already will have "dug deep" themselves, tuned into their own needs themselves, and considered for themselves what is and is not likely to meet those needs, or "solve their problems," instead of having it figured out for them by a marketer. When people don't self-empathize - tune into their own basic needs - they become ready targets for marketers' manipulations.

Diane Ravitch's new book

Diane Ravitch has written a new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She believes in teaching content, not just focusing on the style of teaching and encouraging student freedom (this has caused her to be labeled illiberal or conservative by education academics in the past), and she used to think that testing and charter schools were a good way to achieve these goals. Therefore, she supported the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Now she’s against NCLB and related, recent developments because charter schools are proven to be unsuccessful, insufficiently accountable or unaccountable, and likely to be taken over by corporate interests; and testing has generated fraud – state-specific standards for tests and state-administered tests have generated evidence of students’ test scores rising under NCLB, but national tests have not shown evidence of improvement under NCLB. Rather, national tests have shown that greater improvement in student achievement was happening before NCLB was put in place. Also, there has been an unconstructive focus, in Ravitch’s view, on demonizing teacher unions and finding “who to punish” (which schools to shut down, how many schools to shut down, which teachers and administrators to fire, etc.); and there has been insufficient emphasis on areas other than the "basic skills" of reading and math. We need to focus attention also on science, the arts, and the humanities including literature. Ravitch also observes with disapproval that hugely wealthy foundations like the Gates (Microsoft) and Waltons' (Wal-Mart) foundations are highly influential in directing education policy; these foundations support charter schools, the privatization of education, and the current emphasis on skills testing.

I believe that a solution must include greater respect for, and influence of, the leadership of teachers and the teaching profession in decision-making; and higher-quality and well-paid teaching in currently underfunded school districts. The corporate sphere and corporation-spawned foundations have too much influence in education. Needed change cannot happen unless educators increasingly regard themselves, and conduct themselves, as grown-up human beings and competent professionals, departing from habits of embracing ultimately disempowering roles of helpless-infantile-victims-who-must-be-rescued-by-someone-else. Emotional investment in childish, fairy-tale rescue narratives in which educators consciously or subconsciously fancy themselves as princesses-waiting-for-the-rescuing-hero, and the self-disempowerment and self-infantilization that are involved in such an emotional orientation, are bad for education. Nobody else is going to swoop in and solve all our problems (especially not people from the corporate sphere). We educators, ourselves, are the ones we have been waiting for.

Joseph Stiglitz

I’m interested in the ideas of Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of the new book, Freefall. He criticizes the US for not regulating investment practices enough, not investing enough in medium and small business, not investing in big businesses (the ones that failed) in a way that secured a sufficient return for the government (European nations did better with this), and not rearranging work in tough economic times in ways that would hurt people less (Germany and France, much more than the US, did things like shifting people from full-time to part-time work but not taking away their jobs). He thinks the World Bank and the IMF lately are operating in ways that are less destructive of small countries than formerly (formerly they lent to countries in need in ways that set too-stringent conditions and brought about recessions and depressions in small countries; lately they are not doing this and are sometimes doing constructive things). He says the US dollar should not remain the economic standard for the world (with our recent bailouts and stimulus-es we are becoming a less reliable-looking currency backer, I believe), and that some international monetary standard likely should replace it. He says we should have done a bigger initial stimulus and we would have stimulated more job creation if we had, and he thinks we’re likely to have another recession like the 2008 one within the next 10 years because we didn’t handle the last one well enough. He says banking and investing need to be separated institutionally, and regulations should be such that no company ever becomes “too big to fail” (especially not investment companies, I think; some insurance for banks is needed). He says we need to stop having a situation where there is “underwater” investment (like a mortgaged house where an individual owes more on the house than the house is worth), and that a kind of bankruptcy/forgiveness of debt should be legally provided as an “out.” He points out that there has been irresponsible management of capital by a range of people at the top of the $income pyramid to cause more capital from the $bottom to make its way to the top (e.g., predatory lenders who lend at exorbitant rates in sneaky ways; credit card companies who engage in similar practices; etc.).

As it appears to me, what is economically rational is also empathic and moves away from a silly, compulsive, inhumane, and exclusive emphasis on competition and winning over econmic activity that is humane, interestingly diversifying, sustainably empowering, nonviolent, secure, and valuably productive.

Flax on privileged feminists' (non)responses to Dorothy Dinnerstein

Jane Flax has praised Dorothy "Dinnerstein's steely insistence on...women's collusion in sustaining oppressive gender arrangements." Flax further comments: "I think this insistence partially accounts for [Dinnerstein's] disappearance within feminist canons. The tug toward the pleasures of victimization and the political innocence and solidarity it offers (especially for white, heterosexual, Western, well-off feminists) remains hard to resist" (Jane Flax, "Reentering the Labyrinth: Revisiting Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 27, no. 4, p. 1038)).

I love this quotation and find it helpful, and not just because I love Dorothy Dinnerstein's book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual arrangements and human malaise. The rejection of personal responsibility and accountability by privileged grown-ups in favor of some false, childlike "innocence" and criticism-immune "victimhood" is something I've been hurt by when I've experienced it among people taking feminist and quasi-feminist perspectives (including some of my fellow gay men). It's hard to think of anything more likely to prevent honest, constructive, empathic communication than this kind of false self-infantilization.

thinking and emotion/desire

Today with my students I presented what I hope was a helpful Venn diagram - overlapping circles, one labeled "thinking" and the other labelled "emotion/desire." I told them to select for their final papers topics that fell in the area of overlap - things they feel interested in and are prepared to think through.

having my attitude adjusted

Today my students adjusted my attitude towards lawsuits, questioning whether high school students subjected to verbal, anti-gay harassment really should have been given large financial rewards as a result of lawsuits. (For a list of some of these lawsuits, see http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights_hiv-aids/cost-harassment-fact-sheet-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender-high-school-stu ) Upon learning about such lawsuits one student commented something like, “When I was in high school, I should have had my friends call me names and then made a lot of money.” Couldn’t such legal precedent scare administrators away from substantively addressing things like the need for more understanding, context-specific, and deeply sustainable communication about conflicts in educational settings? Couldn’t fear of being sued make administrators unproductively repressive? Might scared administrators just suspend and expel students deemed “offenders” instead of empathically trying to look into the causes of their actions and communicating empathically with teachers and students about what is actually going on in a given situation? Is this happening in schools now? Evidence I'm aware of suggests that it is. While I want anti-gay-bashing case law in place, I do not want for most educational administrators' decisions in response to conflict to be motivated by fear of being sued. Interest in understanding, healing, and creating positive learning environments would ideally be the first motivations.

needs based communication

I've been working with students on concepts from Marshall Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication, and especially his emphasis on basing communication on basic needs. Students sometimes respond really well to it, noticing how satisfying it can be to name a basic need that is met or unmet in a given, emotionally provokative situation. Needs list link: http://www.cnvc.org/node/179

REINSTATEMENT OF DELETED POSTS

Sunday, February 14, 2010
company
"Company is indispensable for the thinker." - Immanuel Kant

I appreciate having been able to participate in the Mid-Atlantic States Philosophy of Education Society meeting yesterday in Manhattan. Stimulating presentations on democratic citizenship and needed "porousness" of individual identities in relation to other people were among the many highlights of the day. A question on my mind is - how can we cultivate democratic citizenship without becoming too separate from each other while also avoiding the destructive narcissistic assimilation of everyone to mainstream mental and emotional attitudes and experiences?


Friday, February 12, 2010
Peggy McIntosh quotation
As someone who has wondered why I've often felt attracted to people from cultures other than my own, I appreciate this quotation -

“The multicultural world as I have come to see it is interior as well as exterior ... multicultural worlds are in even me…a Caucasian woman with a rather sheltered background...what I think about this is that early cultural conditioning trained each of us as children to shut off awareness of many kinds of groups, voices, abilities, and inclinations, including our own inclination to be with many kinds of children; and then continents that we might have known, within us, were closed off or subordinated within us and the domains of personality that remain can and do fill the conceptual space like colonizing powers. But a potential for pluralized understanding remains in us, and I think that the move toward reflective consciousness [comes] in part from almost silent continents within ourselves, so greater diversity of curriculum reflects not just the exterior multicultural world, but also, for me, the interior self which in early childhood was aware of, and attuned to, many varieties of experience.”

- Dr. Peggy McIntosh speaking at a 1995 multicultural education conference


Sunday, August 9, 2009
Mental Stress in the Military; empathy for US soldiers?
CSPAN recently showed an interesting and sparsely attended, 7/29/09 meeting of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on the topic, "Mental Stress in the Military." Some highlights: In response to questions from Representative Carol Shea-Porter (Democrat, New Hampshire), General Peter Chiarelli acknowledged that the military does not have enough mental health counselors and has a backlog of requests for mental health care from soldiers, and that the military’s response to soldiers' mental health care requests is slow. Representative Mike Coffman (Republican, Colorado) asked whether new recruits are being screened to see whether they have the necessary mental toughness to be in the military in the first place. He received an affirmative reply. Representative Patrick Kennedy (Democrat, Rhode Island) asked whether needed mental health care is provided not only to soldiers, but also to their families. He also asked the question: why not see mental health care as strengthening, rather than as stigmatizing? Supporting this, he pointed out that the elite Green Berets receive high-quality mental health care, and he used them as a mental health care example that the rest of the military should follow.
Posted by Greg at 8:22 PM 0 comments


Thursday, August 6, 2009
Obama on the economy
I appreciated and was moved by President Obama's recent speech in Indiana about the economy and the government's role in it -

http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse?blend=1&ob=4#play/uploads/1/_gXUiTEHO_M

He emphasized the ideas that well-constructed supports for innovation must be combined with stimulation to innovation, particularly in the areas of greener industries. To me this makes the most sense - the focus on creating a demanding, competitive environment without providing necessary supports (whether in the world of business or in the world of education) in the U.S. never was any good to begin with, and (I hope) is now played out.
Posted by Greg at 6:44 PM 0 comments


Tuesday, August 4, 2009
"Gay self-hate"
I was moved by this YouTube video, in which a popular, out gay YouTube presenter responds graciously to an apology from a closeted gay person who had sent him harsh messages in the past -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMmM4Z1YEuE&feature=popular
Posted by Greg at 1:34 PM 0 comments


Thursday, July 30, 2009
Is old-style competition on the way out?
I've been interested in conversations where someone expects to see competition as most beneficial but instead ends up seeing collaboration as most beneficial. For example, in an interview with Charlie Rose (link - ), Sam Altman describes how, when negotiating with signaling carriers to get his "Loopt" technology working (a technology that helps you locate friends geographically via a GPS type device), he found that the carriers at first wanted exclusive contracts but then agreed not to require that, since collaboration with others was shown by Altman to be most likely to lead to better profits. I've heard of similar moves away from the "competition-only" mentality towards the "working together in a network" mentality in other contexts (coalition building, another computer-companies-collaboration). I wonder what kind of potential there is for the competition-for-competition's-sake mentality to become obsolete.
Posted by Greg at 6:50 PM 0 comments


Friday, April 17, 2009
Fannie Lou Hamer education quote
"More is caught than taught." (People learn by example.)
Posted by Greg at 10:58 PM 0 comments
I love Gloria Steinem
I have been watching on YouTube a 2007, Tulsa Community College speech by Gloria Steinem, with whom I am currently in love. (To see it click on "Gloria Steinem" Parts 1-6 at this link: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MyTCCwork&view=videos .) Passages below in quotation marks are her actual words; other passages are paraphrases of her words. More of my words are under the line.

Being a housewife is the worst job in the US. All you get is room and board; you get no salary; you have to work extensive hours; and although the work of raising young humans is very interesting, the job description as a whole is terrible.

“It’s sweet reason to say I want to control my own body.”

“The old system of socializing baby humans being totally in the hands of women – as long as that goes on, 2 things will happen – one is, women will have two jobs, and men will have only one, and the other is that children will grow up deeply believing that only women will be loving and nurturing because that’s what they’ve seen, and that men either can’t or don’t have to do this, and so we will have replicated the deepest, deepest injustice, the injustice in the family, which normalizes all other injustice.”

“Men are just as loving and nurturing and as capable of raising children as women are. It’s a libel on men to say they are not.”

Steinem reflecting on the area where she has seen the least social progress in her lifetime:
“The one issue, I think, on which we’ve made the least progress is raising children – understanding two things (1) that men are just as capable of being loving and nurturing and are just as responsible for children; women cannot possibly and should not possibly do it by ourselves; it will only replicate the roles that are the problem in the first place; and (2) we have let the society at large behave as if it has no children.”

“The only form of arms control is how we raise our kids. We will be killing each other with something if we continue to normalize domination and violence.”

“We need to create a democratic family if we are ever going to have a democratic society.” Racial injustice and class injustice imitate gender injustice.

“A lot of [young] women are sitting around thinking ‘how can I combine career and family?’ instead of getting mad as hell and saying ‘If men are not asking that question as much as I am, it’s never going to work.’”

"Every parent, male or female, has a right to have job patterns that make it possible to raise little kids and still have a job."

"There should be no course about political science or government that doesn't start with how we raise our children. That's the single biggest determinant of the kind of government we have."
_______________________________________________________________
The one thing I disagree with in Steinem's thinking is when she talks about women as if they traditionally have no power, and men as if they traditionally have all the power. To say that women traditionally don’t have power is to imply that women’s power over children doesn’t exist and implicitly to erase children’s experience, which for most children is the experience of having women have power over them. Believing the statement, “women have no power” means believing the statement, “to have power over children is to have no power;” such believing alienates adults from children (to whom it is profoundly disrespectful); it alienates childhood experience from adult consideration (since adults who believe it are telling a fundamental lie about childhood experience); and it alienates adults from the possibility of appropriately considering the enduring significance of their own childhood experiences (since they're lying to themselves on a fundamental level by embracing the belief that the women who raised them had no power over them). I don’t see how we can decrease violence and increase social justice in the world without considering the significance of both (1) children's experiences and (2) the enduring influence of childhood experience in adult lives. Again and again the work of psychologists and counselors shows us that breaking cycles of violence requires coming to terms with the great significance of behavior patterns that emerge from how we respond to childhood experience - which for most of us is experience of women having power over us - and changing those patterns. It seems to me that the assertion, "women have no power," is an act of child abuse and an act of violence - an act that cuts us off from understanding, and changing how we relate to, childhood experience. What is needed is for both the nature of male control and the nature of female control to change. All kinds of power (childrearing power; power of public political, intellectual, and business leadership...) need to be shared equally between men and women, instead of childrearing power being given mainly to women and inaccurately called "no power" (or maybe "bad power"), and public leadership power being given mainly to men and inaccurately called "all power" (or maybe "good power"). All power needs to be called "power" in order for people to have meaningful and worthwhile power.

Nonetheless, I still love Gloria Steinem.
Posted by Greg at 9:53 PM 0 comments


Thursday, April 16, 2009
Socialization of boys and men
I'm concerned about how people often fail to hold anyone accountable for the emotionally punishing and unstable-violence-engendering way in which boys and men are socialized NOT to respond responsibly to human physical and emotional experience and vulnerability (both their own experience & vulnerability and that of others). The attitude often seems to be that, despite what psychology has been proving during the past century, there is no need to consider (much less critically examine with any rigor or depth) the influence of males' childhood experience on their adult lives. (Childrearing is erroneously regarded as insignificant; as Gloria Steinem points out, we as a society fail to give childcare providers (including parents) the full respect and FULL PROFESSIONAL $FINANCIAL$ COMPENSATION that they should receive for the socially essential work they do; and this contributes to a sense that early childhood experience is insignificant and it doesn’t need to be looked at or changed.)

Since we still operate on the deluded, technocrat-militaristic belief that, in order for us to be secure, we must have a lot of young men who can be relied on readily and thoughtlessly to kill and maim other people and to be killed and maimed themselves, boys are generally socialized to believe that, among the many emotions they experience, only two are acceptable: childish happiness (the way a child feels when given a sweet treat or a shiny medal) and anger. Then, as adolescents, boys are told (regardless of what their actual interests, feelings, and intentions may be) that they only thing they care about is sexually dominating women (something soldiers do), and that they are likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence. BOTH WOMEN AND MEN PERPETRATE, SENTIMENTALIZE, AND ROMANTICIZE THIS FALSE AND DESTRUCTIVE IMAGE OF BOYS. This is irresponsible and violence-engendering childrearing – bad both for boys and for everybody who has to deal with them when they grow up.

I appreciate, and will use in a class I teach, William Pollack's work on boys' psychology, which gives some useful critical perspective on this situation. (I do not appreciate, and would never use, other so-called "pro-boy" books such as Christina Hoff Summers’ “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men,” which is more or less a call to return to the way boys were raised in the early 20th Century – a useful idea if you’re aiming for World War III and total nuclear holocaust.) I am also showing the following clip of Gloria Steinem analyzing people's sexist attitudes towards Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, in which she points out that, in order to overcome our socially irresponsible habits of gender role enforcement (against both women and men) we need to develop new, more explicitly conscious and critical ways of responding to early childhood experience - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rozZqScUiyEE

I also will be presenting the students with the following:

“Dorothy Dinnerstein, philosophical anthropologist and critic of gender convention, proposes that in order to end sexism we need to “break the female monopoly on early childcare.” In contrast to our reading [the chapter on sexism in “Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice,” ed. Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Ball, and Pat Griffin, (Routledge, 2007)], Dinnerstein focuses on changing both male control and female control in society, instead of only focusing on changing male control. (See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1976).)
Following up on Dinnerstein’s critique, consider the following question:
What changes might happen in individual human psychology, education, and society as a whole if (1) women and men equally shared the traditionally “feminine” work of early childcare, and (2) women and men also equally shared the traditionally “masculine” work of public political, intellectual, and business leadership?”
Posted by Greg at 3:41 PM 1 comments