Thursday, February 28, 2013

Women's Rights

Our public TV broadcasting system, PBS, has been showing a program titled Makers, about women's progress in the past 50 years.

The following countries have had women prime ministers:
  • Sri Lanka
  • India
  • Pakistan
  • Israel
  • Germany
  • United Kingdom
  • Australia
  • Ireland
  • Bangladesh
  • Thailand

Also, the Philippines and Iceland have had female presidents. South Korea recently installed a female president.

These lists are not exhaustive; they represent only what I can easily recall, so there very likely are more.

The United States, on the other hand, has never had a female president or vice president. There have been three female Secretaries of State in the last 20-some years; and women have held other Cabinet positions.

The United States Supreme Court briefly had three women sitting on it (out of nine members), but that was exceptional.

The United States Senate currently has one-fifth female members. The percentages of women in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, taken with the lack of female presidents or even vice presidents, show that the United States, which views itself as an advanced country, may yet have a ways to go regarding equality for women.

And in much of the world the situation is dismal. The news recently has focused on a girl in Afghanistan named Malala, who was shot in the head by the Taliban because she wanted education for herself and others of her gender. In Saudi Arabia women presently are fighting for the right to drive a car.

And in many countries women are still regarded as chattel. The idea that the man is the boss in a married couple still widely prevails and means that a woman might not be able to decide for herself when or if to bear children. Even in the West, some marriage ceremonies still include the woman vowing to obey her husband. If a married man forces himself on his wife sexually, that often—maybe usually--is not criminal.

Update. I have added to the list of women prime ministers several times, as I have learned of more such.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

Friday, February 1, 2013

Thoughts on Education in America. Pt. 2. Elementary School

Should students be allowed to exit from college and scarcely know how to read and write? It's pretty clear that people much younger than me and my peers can't spell, and that has to be because they were not taught. Remedial (it's now euphemistically called "developmental") reading is being taught in colleges, at least two-year colleges. I know because I myself have taught it.

We're not only talking questions of the role of post-secondary education. One time, as part of my job (educational publishing), I visited an elementary school in a somewhat affluent suburban community. In one room I saw a student lying on the floor while a classmate was tracing his outline. In another room there was almost an appearance of anarchy: multiple small groups of students were working at their own pace (and maybe at their own projects) while the teacher visited them in rotation. When I was in elementary school, we sat still and listened to the teacher.

I had already had a good idea that teaching had changed. Because I worked in educational publishing—one of my first jobs—I knew that, in the hands of the "educationists" (those with Ed.D. or Doctor of Education degrees), the philosophy was that you can't teach anything if you can't make it into a game. Teaching has to be sugar-coated as fun. To not do so is to "turn the kids off." No idea whatsoever that some things have to be learned by rote memorization.

So kids today don't learn to spell. They can't do mental math and a cashier in a store would be helpless without his or her register to calculate the customer's change for her.

At least this was where education in America was several decades ago. I frankly don't know if it's  much different now but I am pretty sure that kids are still not learning how to spell.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

Thoughts on Education in America. Pt. 1. College

Well, maybe I need to refute myself. This is apropos of my January 5, 2013 posting, "What Is College For?"

I read or heard recently that employers are complaining that college-educated young people don't have the skills they are working for.

So possibly my rosy vision of the liberal education is out-of-date, the product of an earlier era—maybe in fact about 100 years ago—when a college education was the province of the rich and the college grad did not have to have a lot of concern about finding a job after graduation. Or if he was going to work, his career might be medicine or the law—two fields for which your undergraduate education would not matter much and could be almost anything.

In those days of a hundred years ago, every educated person learned Latin and Greek—two things not much studied nowadays; and, unless you read old books that might include quotations in Latin an Greek which you were assumed to be able to understand, we pretty much get along without them.

So okay, maybe I have to concede that a college education has to, to some extent and in some degree, be geared to the exigencies of finding employment after graduation.

Even if I have to admit all this, I have to wonder, where to draw the line between "relevance" to something "useful" and clearly imparting job skills, and what I might call well-roundedness? I still have to lament what is not being learned these days. Young people nowadays don't learn, and don't care about, history—which means we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

They don't want to learn about literature or art. So they have little idea of the enormous, millennia-long march of civilization. I'm probably near to admitting that that might not be "useful," but I can't help believing that it is valuable.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Richard Stein