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

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

Used (and New) Car Buying 102

If you are buying a used car, you should first read my June 4, 2012 posting, Used-Car Buying 101. The information here applies to buying either a new or used car—specifically the negotiation part--and has been said elsewhere.

First, do not allow a car salesman to begin the dialog by asking, "How much are you prepared to pay per month?" If you answer that, you will not get a good deal, and you very likely will end up paying more than the figure you named.

Second, have an idea of what your credit score is. Then go to a credit union and see what interest rate you'd be able to get from them. Go into the car dealer armed with that offer of a finance rate and see whether the dealer is able to beat it. He has his sources of financing, and a car buyer with an excellent credit score is in a good position to bargain for the finance rate.

But that is the last step. First you and the dealer (or salesman) must agree on the price. Remember that they do this all the time, and in fact for a living, and they have a bag of tricks up their sleeve. Be armed with figures for what you should be paying for the car, and be prepared to spend several hours with back-and-forth offers and counter-offers. The salesman will keep disappearing after you name a figure, telling you he has to get approval from his sales manager. This may be more tactic than fact. But stick to your guns as to what you think you should pay, and be prepared to walk out if they're not willing to bargain. Anyone who lives in an urban area with multiple dealers for that make can threaten to go elsewhere. Also—did you know you can even do some of your car shopping by phone? You can call around and ask for quotes—though some dealers will refuse to name any numbers over the phone.

You can also solicit price offers on a car via the Internet. I think the site in question is carbuyer.com.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

What Is College For?

A few days ago I was again watching the PBS TV program called "Moyers & Company," which is an interview program. That episode's guest was a man called Junot Diaz, who is an author and teaches Creative Writing at MIT. Aside from much of interest in the man's background or personal story, my attention was caught by a (perhaps somewhat incidental) observation he made about a change he has observed in college students over the course of the 20 years he has been teaching.

He said that students today all seem like MBA students; that they are working for a piece of paper like one that would gain them admission to a medieval guild.

In other words (and as he himself said), parents who send their kids to school today are not doing it to build character or maturity or wisdom, or for the sake of any such changes between their temples that might be looked for. Rather, they are there just to be able to get a better job. I, let it be said immediately, am a firm believer in "liberal education." (Does one even hear that term anymore?) That is, I am of the school (no pun) that believes that what education is about is things like learning how to think logically and critically, gaining an appreciation of thousands of years of human cultural advances, and so forth. That is, gaining what once were called "humane values."

If I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Diaz myself, I would have had to chime in with the fact (or opinion) that it's not just a phenomenon of the last 20 years. When I first taught in a collegiate institution, I found the same thing—and that was 45 years ago!

So I would agree that there definitely has been a change in our society's view of college and in its expectations of college. But I have some ideas as to the cause.

First: In the 1960s and into the 70s, in the era of the "counter-culture," student protests against the Vietnam War, and so forth, students were (among other things) fighting for "relevance" in their education. That evidently meant no more "dead poets"; no more history. We want to learn about today's world, we have no interest in (or respect for) the past—including both history and writers of past ages.

Then again, there has been a big change in who goes to college. It's not just the children of well-to-do families, who might be sent to college to acquire a bit of culture before going into the family business or becoming doctors or lawyers. More students—including very many of the young people I was teaching—were the first in their families to go to college. The parents of these young people were sending their kids to college so that they would earn more money. A BA equals dollars: it's that simple.

You put the two factors together, and what you've got is, students from working-class or lower-middle-class families go to some school beyond high school and they want to become system engineers (whatever that is) or network managers—to get a good job in IT or some such field where no one cares about your pedigree. So—don't teach me history. Don't teach me literature. Just the courses directly relevant to my future career. Anything else is a waste of time.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

Some Reflections on the Christmas Story

Since it's Christmas Day, this might be an occasion to think about some of the stories that surround Christmas and that are usually viewed as facts about Jesus' birth but which either are probably untrue or are almost certainly untrue.

First, Jesus was not born in the  year 1 A.D. There was an error in the calendar at one point. Most scholars now think it probably was in 4 B.C.

Second, there is absolutely no reason to believe Jesus was born on December 25. There is no record of the date Jesus was born; and it is believed that the celebration of the birth of Jesus at some point was attracted to the time of the Roman celebration of Saturnalia or perhaps to one or more pagan feasts that centered around the winter solstice.

Third, scholars now think Jesus was probably not born in Bethlehem, as the gospel stories say, but in Nazareth.

Fourth, the story of the Magi or "wise men." I believe only one of the gospels mentions this (sorry, I haven't got a N.T. at my elbow with which to confirm this), where it simply says "three kings of the East." There is no mention of their names being Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar—that is a so-called medieval accretion—nor that one of them was black.


Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

The Newtown, Connecticut, School Shooting--After We've Had a Week to Gain Perspective

It's now been over a week since the occurrence of the terrible, tragic shooting of first-grade pupils and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut; and the nation and the world has had, not a chance to recover but a chance to contemplate, discuss, and try to analyze this shocking event.

As was well shown in a special program on PBS (the American public TV broadcasting network), there are two components or ingredients to an event like this.

1. Mental illness on the part of the perpetrator.
2. The availability of guns.

The current state of our science is such that we can't confidently identify individuals who are going to do something like that. There are factors which might be considered risk factors, but the group possessing such risk factors is large, and it's only a statistical matter and would not clearly focus attention on specific individuals.

However, much thought needs to be given to the second factor, the availability of guns. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, 88.8 guns per 100 population. And, as a Harvard study showed, more guns mean more homicides.

The gun lobby—mainly the National Rifle Association and a few other, smaller gun owners' or gun rights groups—wants to tell us that what we need is more guns. But that is contradicted by the experience of our own country, first; and by that of Australia.

The United States had a federal ban on so-called assault weapons for ten years, which expired in 2004. Mass shootings using assault weapons have increased since the ban expired. Also and at the same time—due to the influence, power, and legislative success of the gun lobby--gun laws have been loosened in many states.

Second, since Australia enacted tough gun-control laws, their experience of mass shootings such as we have been having has been nearly nonexistent.

A third factor needs to be added to the two I enumerated above:

3. The gun culture in the US.

There are countries with a high—though not as high as America's—rate of gun ownership. One such is Switzerland. But you simply do not hear of mass shootings in Switzerland.

Or take England. England has maybe 50 homicides a year. The US has roughly 12,000.* On a single summer weekend in Chicago, there might be 20 or more homicides committed with guns.

In the US, guns are glamorized and may be, for young urban gang members, a symbol of manhood. Guns are identified with heroically depicted characters in western movies.

Video games have also been blamed for our gun violence. At first blush it makes sense: many video games feature killing people (albeit not real people) by shooting them, and I understand that some video games even show assault weapons being used, weapons with visible brand names.

However, England gets the same video games. And they surely get American movies, including all those American westerns. Yet somehow those factors have not caused the English to be enamored with guns the way Americans are. We need to figure out what accounts for the difference. It would be too easy to simply say, "Well, the English--or the Swiss--are just more peaceable and civilized people." But as I write that, I'm almost tempted to say, Well, maybe that is simply the case. It just does not occur to them to go around shooting one another.


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*Update, January 8, 2013. Last night ABC TV news said the figure is 30,000 gun homicides a year. Today they said that there have been 57,000 gun homicides in two years; and that 85% of the world's deaths of children from guns occur in the US.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein