[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Arthur]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arthur [mailto:ajsiegel at optonline.net]
> Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2005 10:40 AM
> To: 'Laura Creighton'; 'Arthur'
> 
> Well  - let me be the reactionary, again.

Only because this subject is *so* significant to me, and I understand that I
am subverting that seriousness by being the tongue-in-cheek "reactionary",
let me restate and add some personal frame of reference.

The elder sister I refer to, the one perhaps in the "history books", has not
simply been among the women of her generation who have broken new ground for
women in education and in the professions, she has applied her education and
devoted a good deal of her professional life to the cause of women,
particularly in giving women the ammunition they need to defend themselves
as members of the workforce, in various ways, and on various fronts. 

And while I am not on board with every word of every law, and I recognize
that this ammunition, like all ammunition, can be misdirected - I am
certainly generally supportive of what she and her colleagues have
accomplished.

So again, I didn't want it be too easy to dismiss as the tongue-in-cheek
reactionary.

But....

First do no harm.    

Everything we can look to with any objective eye should tell us that it is
the boys who are suffering most under the current atmosphere of our schools.
And I see that absolutely clearly from my personal frame of reference. My
feminist sisters see it absolutely clearly with their own children. 

And it is largely because the engineers have seen fit to denigrate the
things boys gravitate toward, and the ways that they gravitate towards doing
it.  And that has been done largely in the interests of achieving fairness
for girls - of the shallowest kind. By in fact making strengths of the exact
weaknesses of women's culture that Laura articulates so well. Hardening
those problems, rather than confronting and solving them.  All done with the
best of intentions, by human beings of various and sundry genders who have
no right to expect otherwise - no right to expect that your ape of more than
average intelligence would have be equipped to get this effort right.   


We are achieving shallow fairness at the expense of a deeper pervasive
unfairness. 

Yes, and feminization. But feminization in the sense of what feminists are
not supposed to want it to mean.

Moratorium, at least until we get our heads on straight.

Art 






> 
> With some reference back to David's point about "social engineering" and
> its
> deleterious effect on education.
> 
> There is a long history of literature on the subject of the inevitable
> destructiveness of just these kinds of engineering efforts - mostly an
> outgrowth of the intellectual minority mustering some effort to confront
> the
> intellectual majority's pussyfooting on subjects like Marxism.
> 
> Educators have done enough harm to boys already by trying to solve these
> problems (in an atmosphere of duress), and more abstract, but real, harm
> to
> girls as well.
> 
> More efforts will bring us more of the same.
> 
> As a good reactionary, I actually wish we could - for the good of all -
> roll
> things back a bit.
> 
> But will settle for a moratorium.
> 
> A good, long moratorium.
> 
> Art
> 
> 
> 
> 
>