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