The phrase I use all the time is, “the kids are alright,” from the Who. It’s amazing to me, you know, I’m 54 years old, and it’s amazing to me watching my peers turn into these cartoons. They say, s*** like, “well you know, when we were kids we weren’t this rude, and we wouldn’t say this stuff. I would have never done this.” And it’s absolute f***ing bulls***, and we certainly have records going back thousands of years that adults always hate the younger generation. Adults always find a reason to hate people that are 20-years-old, and I don’t know why it is. Clearly and provably every generation gets better. Every generation gets healthier, smarter, more sophisticated, and that’s always been true. Twenty-year-olds are just better than us. Old people just can’t seem to get it through their heads that things are getting better and that’s wonderful. Not only do young people not have polio, not only are young people less racist, less homophobic, and less violent – not only is all that true, but they also have some really really cool art, and some of that art we don’t understand. The problem is a question of time.
You know, when I was 15, 16, 17-years-old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games. The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong. The cliché of the nerdy kid who doesn’t go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it’s also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It’s beautiful. That kind of obsession is going to lead to a sophisticated 30-year-old who has a background in that artform. It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably s***ty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.
Penn Jillette, “Penn Jillette Is Tired Of The Video Game Bulls***”, Game Informer, 2009-11-20
June 24, 2012
QotD: The kids really are alright
June 21, 2012
June 7, 2012
Yet another scare “study” about teens and video gaming
Martin Robbins in the Guardian on another “study” linking teenagers who play video games to negative results:
Not that the ‘research’ cited says anything about violent video games to begin with. BAAM conducted a survey of 204 parents of children aged nine to eighteen, asking about their use of computer games: anything from Tetris to GTA IV via SimCity. This produced the following results:
“Forty-six per cent said their sons or daughters had become ‘less co-operative’ since they started playing video games. Forty-four per cent said they were more ‘rude or intolerant towards others’, 40 per cent said they were more impatient, 36 per cent reported an increase in ‘aggressive behaviour’, 29 per cent cited more mood swings and 26 per cent said their offspring had become more reclusive.”
26% of parents thought their teen offspring had become more reclusive in the years since they started playing video games. No doubt pedantic nay-sayers will whine on about the other SEVENTY-BLOODY-FOUR PER CENT of kids who either didn’t become more reclusive or became less reclusive, or ask how ‘reclusive’ is even defined or measured in the first place; but if that incredible correlation doesn’t persuade you, well then by golly-gosh I don’t know what will.
Even the most ‘persuasive’ of those figures stands at just 46%. That, astonishingly, is the proportion of parents who think their teenaged children are becoming less cooperative with time. This is put down to video games, rather than something silly, like… oh I don’t know, maybe the fact that they’re teenagers?! 46% is a shocking figure only in the sense that I’m shocked it’s only 46%. Perhaps video games actually make kids more cooperative? We have no way of knowing, because there doesn’t seem to have been any effort made to survey kids who don’t play video games as a control group.
June 4, 2012
The “sex traffic” meme is this decade’s version of the “Satanic panic” of the late 1980s
An interesting post at The Honest Courtesan on the strong similarities between the media freak-out about Satanic ritualists kidnapping children back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the current media meme about sex trafficking rings:
How well do you remember the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s? Do you remember when you first heard about it, and what your reactions were? Do you remember how widespread and exaggerated the claims were, and how seriously everyone took them? The reactions from believers when skeptics pointed out the tremendous absurdities? The decline and fall of the hysteria? I sure do, and if you do as well you’ve probably noticed the strong resemblance of “trafficking” hysteria to its older sibling. Both revolve around gigantic international conspiracies which supposedly abduct children into a netherworld of sexual abuse; both are conflated with adult sex work, especially prostitution and porn; both make fantastic claims of vast numbers which are not remotely substantiated by anything like actual figures from “law enforcement” agencies or any other investigative body; both rely on circular logic, claiming the lack of evidence as “proof” of the size of the conspiracy and the lengths to which its participants will go to “hide” their nefarious doings; both encourage paranoia and foment distrust of strangers, especially male strangers; etc, etc, etc.
[. . .]
Once one is able to examine the hysteria from an historical and sociological perspective, it becomes rather fascinating (though none the less frightening for those of us whose profession is being targeted by the witch hunters). For example, one can see how events that would have been interpreted one way 15 years ago are now seen through the lens of “human trafficking”; this recent trial in which members of a Somali gang were convicted for forcing young female members into prostitution would have been reported as a “gang-related violence” story in the late ‘90s, but is now labeled a “sex trafficking case”. In the ‘80s, every city in America imagined itself overrun with Satanic cultists; now it’s “human traffickers”, and there’s a creepy competition for the title of “leading hub for sex trafficking”, generally on the basis of how many interstate highways pass through or near the city (since none of them have any actual statistics to support their claims). In the past year I’ve heard New York, Dallas, Miami, Portland, Atlanta and Sacramento vying for this dubious distinction, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma is as well.
H/T to Jesse Walker for the link.
May 31, 2012
May 27, 2012
The anatomy of the standard “kids these days” moral freak-out story
Nick Gillespie explains what the next media meme intended to alarm parents will look like (because they all do):
Don’t you dare think just because no one is actually doing something that it’s not about to become the next big thing: “Although there’s only been a few cases, county public health toxicology expert Cyrus Rangan says it could signal a dangerous trend.”
The hand-sanitizer story is a classic of the particularly powerful news narrative that might be called “The Kids These Days” story. The recipe is as simple as it is intoxicating: Take kids, a wholesome product or activity (cleanser, say, or a sleepover), throw in drugs, booze, or sex (preferably all three), some form of vaguely scary technology (teh Interwebz, cell phones), and shake vigorously (like Mentos in a 2 liter bottle of Pepsi, or maybe Pop Rocks with a Coca-Cola chaser), and let it rip!
While we await the next fake news trend about teens and sex and drugs — and the coming federal ban on so-called bath salts and fake marijuana — here are five classic freakouts to contemplate.
May 19, 2012
The politics of the school lunch
Baylen Linnekin examines the school lunch issue, and finds yet another example of experts and government officials trying to override parental input and childrens’ own wishes “for the children”, of course:
School food is always a hot topic, and is perhaps more so now than it’s ever been. From a publicity standpoint, school food has taken off as an issue largely due to the efforts of [British chef and food nuisance Jamie] Oliver and First Lady Michelle Obama. But viewed from the standpoint of edibility, cost, and healthiness, food served by public schools via the USDA’s National School Lunch Program was already an issue because that program and its food have a decades-long track record of sucking. And in spite of the best efforts of Oliver and Mrs. Obama, along with new rules set to take effect in the coming months, I’m not optimistic that the quality of school food is likely to change anytime soon. Why?
If you’re one of those who thought all this talk about the National School Lunch Program had translated into better food, think again. Contrary to any visions you may have of expensive reforms leading to school kitchens serving as virtual clearinghouses for fresh fruits and vegetables, that just isn’t the case. Expensive reforms? You bet. They crop up every few years. But schools are still serving kids nachos. And sometimes — as happened last week at a public school in Ohio — those nachos are full of ants.
Issues like ants in food are hardly rare. And other systemic problems persist.
I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).
As a 12-year-old army cadet, my first experience of army cooking was a huge shock: it was actually good! I didn’t know that cafeteria-style cooking didn’t have to be bland, boring, or nauseating. Schools couldn’t seem to manage the trick, but the army could.
School lunches also neuter the ability of families to make dietary choices their children. Consider the pink slime controversy earlier this year. Whether you were up in arms over chemically treated meat or thought it was completely fine to eat, the truth is if you’re a public school parent whose child eats a school lunch you still have little say over whether or not your child eats pink slime — or genetically-modified foods, sugars, starches, and a whole host of other foods about which decent parents (and experts) disagree.
Another good example of how school lunches usurp family decision-making took place in Chicago last year, where a seventh grader named Fernando Dominguez helped lead a revolt against his school’s six-year-old policy that banned students from taking their own lunch to school. According to the Chicago Tribune, the principal argued that the policy was put in place “to protect students from their own unhealthful food choices.”
[. . .]
These anecdotes help illustrate the point that food served in public school cafeterias has — along with prison food — long been one of the best arguments against the singular notion that big, mean corporations are responsible for all of the food problems we face in America. After all, public-school lunches are government creations. They’re subsidized by government, provided by government, served by government, and paid for by government. And they’re often gross, unhealthy, and wasteful.
But supporters of the National School Lunch Program, not surprisingly, argue that what’s needed are reforms, improvements, rejiggering, and — of course — more money.
May 17, 2012
This month’s prize-winner for bureaucratic over-reaction goes to…
… Indiana’s Dr. Patrick Spray, superintendent of Mill Creek Schools for his breathtaking performance of over-reactor in an educational role:
So here’s the story: Five high school seniors in Indiana went into their school after hours, when it was officially off-limits, and decorated it with 10,000 Post-It notes. They used the notes to create a big, cheery “2012″ on the gym floor, for instance. They made bright patterns on the doors, and another big “2012″ on some windows. And for this, they were suspended for two days (during finals) and the janitor who supervised them got fired.
What kills me most, though, is how the superintendent described the event: “It was just Post-It notes: no damage, thank goodness, occurred. Nobody was injured, thank goodness. It’s the unintended stuff that sometimes causes issues…”
The five kids who were suspended got vocal support from their classmates, so another over-reaction was called for … and delivered:
Here’s an update on today’s story about the five seniors suspended from Indiana’s Cascade High School for decorating it, at night, with Post-It Notes. Now a whopping 67 students have been suspended, because they were protesting the suspension of the Cascade Five.
As you can hear in the TV report — presented by the stations “Crime Beat” reporter (making you wonder what exactly constitutes crime in Indiana) — the kids who did the “prank” got permission from a school board member and the head custodian. And even if they didn’t, I agree with one of the commenters on my original post: While it’s being labeled a “‘prank” it could just as easily have been labeled a beautification effort, or a morale booster.
May 10, 2012
April 15, 2012
Virginia county considering creating first virtual public high school
In many ways, it’s a tribute to the resilience and determination of the educational establishment that it’s taken this long for a school district to even consider offering completely online classes:
Fairfax County schools could become the first in the Washington region to create a virtual public high school that would allow students to take all their classes from a computer at home.
No sports teams. No pep rallies. No lockers, no hall passes. Instead, assignments delivered on-screen and after-school clubs that meet online.
It’s a reimagination of the American high school experience. And it’s a nod to the power of the school choice movement, which has given rise to the widespread expectation that parents should have a menu of options to customize their children’s education.
Of course, it might not just be simple willingness to allow more choice on the part of the school district … there might be other pressures being applied:
Dozens of younger students have left Fairfax schools for the public Virginia Virtual Academy, the first statewide full-time virtual program. Open to any Virginia student in kindergarten through eighth grade, it is run by a Herndon firm — K12 Inc., the nation’s largest operator of public virtual schools — and enrolls nearly 500 students.
April 9, 2012
“Teacher tenure is one of those ideas” [that] “do real damage to the public education system”
If I told you that an article in support of ending tenure for public school teachers appeared in The New Republic, would you believe it? I wouldn’t have done, until today:
Like the abortion measures, this bill was also pushed by Republicans — but here’s the strange part: It was actually a halfway decent idea. The subject of the bill was an important one: tenure for public school teachers. And, while the proposal wasn’t perfect, it was at least an attempt to rectify what is perhaps the least sane element of our country’s approach to education.
The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is simple: After a certain number of years, teachers qualify — “virtually automatically” in most states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality — for a form of job protection that makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers.
[. . .]
So what is the case for K–12 teacher tenure? The truth is, there isn’t a good one. One argument typically offered by tenure defenders is that teaching is a notoriously difficult profession in which to measure success. But this is true for lots of jobs — yet, in all other professions, efforts are still made, however imperfect, to evaluate whether an employee is succeeding and to remove those who are not. Why should teaching be different? In fact, given that teaching is arguably the most important job in our society, it would be difficult to name a profession, save maybe the military, for which these sorts of heightened job protections would be less logical. If a job is truly important to the nation’s future, then you want to make sure that the most able, talented people are doing it — and doing their best work at all times.
That goal is simply incompatible with tenure. Indeed, tenure is so illogical that it’s impossible to see why it shouldn’t be abolished. And that is exactly what the Virginia bill sought to do. Predictably, however, Democrats — who remain far too beholden to teachers’ unions — scuttled the measure. As a result, tenure lives on in Virginia for now.
April 2, 2012
New from The Guild: “I’m the One That’s Cool”
Music by Jed Whedon, lyrics by Jed Whedon and Felicia Day.
The August riots: another study that finds exactly what it expects to find
Neil Davenport on the most recent report on the causes of the August riots in Britain:
Once again, an independent panel, this time set up by the government, rolls out a rehearsed number of ‘social factors’ to explain away the disturbing events: unemployment and lack of opportunities for young people; ‘forgotten families’; police harassment and a widespread ‘culture of materialism’. The panel, which visited 21 communities and interviewed thousands of people affected by the riots, says its wide-ranging recommendations ‘must be enacted together’ if the risk of further riots is to be reduced. In a conclusion that bizarrely echoes Tony Blair’s time in office, panel chair Darra Singh says that everyone must have a ‘stake in society’. It makes you wonder why ‘stakeholder society’ policies didn’t actually work in the first place.
[. . .]
None of the enquiries have examined the broad cultural changes that have taken place in British society which, more often than not, are institutionalised in English schools and other state agencies. In fact, this is the ‘social context’ that ought to preoccupy researchers, not the handwrung staples of poverty and unemployment. To approach the riots in this way is not to rehearse ‘teachers aren’t strict enough’ platitudes. It is to examine the kind of destructive values that have been passed down from the top of society: namely, the fostering of assertive victimhood whereby nobody is expected to be accountable for their own actions. It really is somebody else’s fault.
What every schoolchild learns from an early age is that both emotional hurts and tick-box disadvantages — from minor medical problems to class/ethnic background — constitute a person’s default status. It is only by placing demands on state providers that these ‘hurts’ are temporarily assuaged. This is what is meant by a culture of entitlement — victim status has to be recognised and then rewarded by state providers. The higher the perceived victim status, the greater the expectation that somebody else must make provisions or allowances (or even an educational maintenance allowance). In this sense, looting from JD Sports becomes justified, even acceptable, because of the expectations that somebody must pay for a looter’s inflated sense of grievance.
Indeed, many of August’s looters rolled out a lexicon of ‘hurts’ in order to justify their destructive, anti-social behaviour. According to this cultural script, social solidarities are entirely alien because young people have been socialised to dwell on their self-esteem above all else. Far from other people or a wider community being a source of support, they are more often seen as a target for all sorts of imaginary grievances. Local shopkeepers and random individuals attacked during the August riots were, in some way, being held responsible for young people’s poverty and lack of employment prospects. As one of the blasé looters put it, ‘we wanted to show the rich that we can do what we want’. If young people have grown up with the belief that they are automatically held back by social disadvantages, often promoted by state agencies themselves, then a local community itself can become a target for retribution.
[. . .]
Once again, another report on last August’s riots is an exercise in advocacy research, whereby the research neatly matches already rehearsed conclusions. The government panel’s recommendations, failing to recognise the profound significance of the riots, follow the line of wishful thinking and delusion pursued by radical commentators. Furthermore, the panel’s instinctive elitism simply echoes the radical left’s own distrust of ordinary people. Institutionalising the claim that most people are naturally incapable and useless is what destroyed informal communities in the first place. As the nannying, hectoring tone of the latest report into the riots shows, what could be more morally debilitating and soul-destroying?
