Ah Youth
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
March 6, 2011
A founding principle of the science of criminology is that adolescents, especially those somehow “foreign,” represent a “dangerous class.” Now the war on youth has been globalized. All at once underrepresented youth worldwide are one way or another rebelling against their parents. Scary stuff for us (grand)parents who have devoted our lives to making sure our children do the right thing, while the world changes beyond our grasp.
At any time, the fact remains children are the ultimate underclass in every race, class and gender.
The basic remedy I see for the inherent violence of adults trying to mold children is for adults to allow children to participate in socially significant discussion, from dinner tables to schoolrooms. It is doubly tragic when adult performance, as by teachers, rests on children’s scores on super-adult grading of mythically constructed tests of what every child needs to know before s/he can begin to learn on her or his own.
The enduring fact is that anywhere on the planet, youth most suffer “negative growth” in “the economy.” Global connectedness ignites worldwide complaints among young men and women that they expect to be unemployed. Meanwhile, in the US, it is also the case that successful private workers have lost paid employment for life. In tough times, elders are played off against children. On this occasion, I happen to be an elder.
Marx distinguished political emancipation from human emancipation. The one is generational “justice,” punishing our elders for their oppression of us, which the media is calling “revolution.” The other is cultural: Elders can bridge generation gaps by creating avenues in which their children can participate in discussions at the dinner table and at school. The more we share power with children rather than testing and grading and judging them, the better I expect to feel about the future of the world by the time I die. Love and peace--hal
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
humanitarian aid for Libya: a modest proposal
Why not use US military planes on a humanitarian mission to give foreign worker refugees from Libya rides to their homes from Tunisia? l&p hal
beyond debate
BEYOND DEBATE
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
March 1, 2011
“Conflict per se is not harmful. In fact, its absence suggests people who are frightened (to challenge a superior), resentful, or bereft of their rational faculties (as the total agreement among cult members demonstrates. Children know that disagreement exists; to force them to agree in a classroom is to deny reality and it is to deprive them of a real education. It is no coincidence that the word challenge means both to require someone to use her full range of abilities and to call something into question. Genuine learning does not smooth over or soothe. The same is true of effective problem solving: a rigid demand for agreement means that people will effectively be prevented from contributing their wisdom to a group effort.
“What makes disagreement destructive is not the fact of conflict itself but the addition of competition. In a debate (as opposed to a discussion or dialogue), the point is to win rather than to reach the best solution or arrive at a compromise with which everyone is satisfied. Listen in at a board meeting or a dinner party and you can hear the difference between someone participating in an exchange of ideas and someone trying to score points. Both are examples of conflict, but only one involves competition…”
Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition:
Why we lose in our race to win (Houghton Mifflin, 1986, p. 156)
My wife not only gave me the idea of starting to offer a seminar on “feminist justice” in 1987; she gave me No Contest which together with Birgit Brock-Utne’s 1985 book Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective, became my first texts for the seminar. Both books revolutionized my own teaching. As I slowly and sometimes painfully abandoned my lawyer-like propensity to offer propositions for classroom debate, the whole feeling of class changed, most dramatically in the alternative social control systems class of 2-300 I taught every semester I was in Bloomington. Student anger kept giving way to appreciation of being given credit for disagreeing with a professor. I felt interest rather than antagonism, as I was included in a sharing of differences of opinion. I lost my sense of being an outsider in my own classroom.
I just now turned off a local public radio talk show debate on whether to offer federal funding for public broadcasting. The host asked callers to tell “the screener” whether they were for or against the US House vote to take federal funding away. The guest who was in favor of the House resolution dominated the air space: a case of someone bent on scoring points. I thought of Kohn’s polemic against debates, got the book out, and quickly found the particular paragraphs I remembered. Thank you Alfie for these words! They radically changed my style of pedagogy. I aspire to transforming debate into discussion and dialogue as opportunity knocks. Labels like left and right have never made any sense to me, except as excuses to mount political and military battles.
I see that I used “beyond debate” as the title of a blog late last fall. Here I add Alfie Kohn’s words to that peacemaking message. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
March 1, 2011
“Conflict per se is not harmful. In fact, its absence suggests people who are frightened (to challenge a superior), resentful, or bereft of their rational faculties (as the total agreement among cult members demonstrates. Children know that disagreement exists; to force them to agree in a classroom is to deny reality and it is to deprive them of a real education. It is no coincidence that the word challenge means both to require someone to use her full range of abilities and to call something into question. Genuine learning does not smooth over or soothe. The same is true of effective problem solving: a rigid demand for agreement means that people will effectively be prevented from contributing their wisdom to a group effort.
“What makes disagreement destructive is not the fact of conflict itself but the addition of competition. In a debate (as opposed to a discussion or dialogue), the point is to win rather than to reach the best solution or arrive at a compromise with which everyone is satisfied. Listen in at a board meeting or a dinner party and you can hear the difference between someone participating in an exchange of ideas and someone trying to score points. Both are examples of conflict, but only one involves competition…”
Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition:
Why we lose in our race to win (Houghton Mifflin, 1986, p. 156)
My wife not only gave me the idea of starting to offer a seminar on “feminist justice” in 1987; she gave me No Contest which together with Birgit Brock-Utne’s 1985 book Educating for Peace: A Feminist Perspective, became my first texts for the seminar. Both books revolutionized my own teaching. As I slowly and sometimes painfully abandoned my lawyer-like propensity to offer propositions for classroom debate, the whole feeling of class changed, most dramatically in the alternative social control systems class of 2-300 I taught every semester I was in Bloomington. Student anger kept giving way to appreciation of being given credit for disagreeing with a professor. I felt interest rather than antagonism, as I was included in a sharing of differences of opinion. I lost my sense of being an outsider in my own classroom.
I just now turned off a local public radio talk show debate on whether to offer federal funding for public broadcasting. The host asked callers to tell “the screener” whether they were for or against the US House vote to take federal funding away. The guest who was in favor of the House resolution dominated the air space: a case of someone bent on scoring points. I thought of Kohn’s polemic against debates, got the book out, and quickly found the particular paragraphs I remembered. Thank you Alfie for these words! They radically changed my style of pedagogy. I aspire to transforming debate into discussion and dialogue as opportunity knocks. Labels like left and right have never made any sense to me, except as excuses to mount political and military battles.
I see that I used “beyond debate” as the title of a blog late last fall. Here I add Alfie Kohn’s words to that peacemaking message. Love and peace--hal
Monday, February 28, 2011
generation gaps
“SOCIETAL RHYTHMS IN THE CHAOS OF VIOLENCE”
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 28, 2011
“Societal rhythms in the chaos of violence” is chapter 3 in my 1991 book on “the geometry of violence and democracy.” In that paper I gave at a criminology paper in 1989, I foresaw that an east/west divide was giving way to a north/south, religiously based divide.
My analysis was built on the premise that political/cultural/economic change is most at issue in adult child conflicts. What today are being called “revolutions” are essentially clashes between youths and adult elites. In 1989 as now, I see fault lines between generations cracking open worldwide. Indeed, the ways we ravage one another as we ravage our earth mother ultimately manifest themselves in earthquakes and volcanoes. From Christchurch to Tripoli, youth are bent on disrespecting and bringing down their elders. Globally, the tension between ruling class gluttony and impoverishment, condemnation as in criminalization, and finger-pointing at youth (and foreigners) for causing all “our” problems…all this tension has built up worldwide with virtually no release since the fall of the Soviet Union.
No human force can stop political aftershocks from continuing to erupt. Heads of rulers and “protestors” alike will continue to roll. For starters, from Sudan to Cote d’Ivoire to Libya, there is no foreseeing how long entrenched national rule can hang on, on limits to suffering and horror in the interim. And then there is the challenge of how to replace a regime without mimicking its predecessor, as a South African visitor recently reminded me In the case of the end of apartheid and the rise of the ANC in her homeland.
I keep looking for one kind of progress: That it is too simple to reduce any political issue to a debate, especially when it comes to what young people like the colonel who took over power in Libya in 1969 (who even came into power with a “green book” to rival Mao’s “red” one), or in less bloody form for a new generation of US president who came to power in 1993, or Tony Blair in Britain, achieve when youth take over. May debate over whose views ought to prevail be transformed into setting up new forms of governing ourselves, where first and foremost youth are presumed to equal representation and respect in our daily lives—at home, at school, in the workplace.
By 1989, I had come to recognize that children are the ultimate underclass—who like and at greater extremes than adult women get used and abused and forced to subordinate themselves to adult wisdom. Of course the current global generation quake will work its course in different places. Along the way, this time around, I wish we can pay more attention to the despotism of adults as a group over “their” children. Maybe we could settle down our relations among ourselves and with our mother. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 28, 2011
“Societal rhythms in the chaos of violence” is chapter 3 in my 1991 book on “the geometry of violence and democracy.” In that paper I gave at a criminology paper in 1989, I foresaw that an east/west divide was giving way to a north/south, religiously based divide.
My analysis was built on the premise that political/cultural/economic change is most at issue in adult child conflicts. What today are being called “revolutions” are essentially clashes between youths and adult elites. In 1989 as now, I see fault lines between generations cracking open worldwide. Indeed, the ways we ravage one another as we ravage our earth mother ultimately manifest themselves in earthquakes and volcanoes. From Christchurch to Tripoli, youth are bent on disrespecting and bringing down their elders. Globally, the tension between ruling class gluttony and impoverishment, condemnation as in criminalization, and finger-pointing at youth (and foreigners) for causing all “our” problems…all this tension has built up worldwide with virtually no release since the fall of the Soviet Union.
No human force can stop political aftershocks from continuing to erupt. Heads of rulers and “protestors” alike will continue to roll. For starters, from Sudan to Cote d’Ivoire to Libya, there is no foreseeing how long entrenched national rule can hang on, on limits to suffering and horror in the interim. And then there is the challenge of how to replace a regime without mimicking its predecessor, as a South African visitor recently reminded me In the case of the end of apartheid and the rise of the ANC in her homeland.
I keep looking for one kind of progress: That it is too simple to reduce any political issue to a debate, especially when it comes to what young people like the colonel who took over power in Libya in 1969 (who even came into power with a “green book” to rival Mao’s “red” one), or in less bloody form for a new generation of US president who came to power in 1993, or Tony Blair in Britain, achieve when youth take over. May debate over whose views ought to prevail be transformed into setting up new forms of governing ourselves, where first and foremost youth are presumed to equal representation and respect in our daily lives—at home, at school, in the workplace.
By 1989, I had come to recognize that children are the ultimate underclass—who like and at greater extremes than adult women get used and abused and forced to subordinate themselves to adult wisdom. Of course the current global generation quake will work its course in different places. Along the way, this time around, I wish we can pay more attention to the despotism of adults as a group over “their” children. Maybe we could settle down our relations among ourselves and with our mother. Love and peace--hal
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Gaddafi's dead
GADDAFI’S DEAD
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana,edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 27, 2011
The transliteration of Gaddafi’s name has even been simplified. David Cameron has just asked Mr. Gaddafi to leave office. Meanwhile, in classic military/penal logic, my national government is doing all it can to cooperate with Euro-others to take away Gaddafi’s foreign assets or capacity to travel abroad. Libya’s head has been made a national pariah. He has nowhere to go. He is odds on to die at home. The problem remains: once you’ve lopped off her/his head, what next?
I guess what I most regret at this moment is how focused on the moment, how divorced from the history of “revolutions,” excitement at these “critical moments.” Meanwhile, by US/UN design, Gaddafi has been condemned personally to death. Problem is, the problem of what to do next only then emerges, where the tendency is for those who were well politically and economically connected to “stabilize” oppression that has supposedly been overthrown. Marx radically distinguished political revolution from human emancipation. I think he was right, and I regret the momentary focus on when Gaddafi will die. When revolution is focused on beheading a sovereign, revolution is cheap, especially for those of us who in this case happen not to be Libyan. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana,edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 27, 2011
The transliteration of Gaddafi’s name has even been simplified. David Cameron has just asked Mr. Gaddafi to leave office. Meanwhile, in classic military/penal logic, my national government is doing all it can to cooperate with Euro-others to take away Gaddafi’s foreign assets or capacity to travel abroad. Libya’s head has been made a national pariah. He has nowhere to go. He is odds on to die at home. The problem remains: once you’ve lopped off her/his head, what next?
I guess what I most regret at this moment is how focused on the moment, how divorced from the history of “revolutions,” excitement at these “critical moments.” Meanwhile, by US/UN design, Gaddafi has been condemned personally to death. Problem is, the problem of what to do next only then emerges, where the tendency is for those who were well politically and economically connected to “stabilize” oppression that has supposedly been overthrown. Marx radically distinguished political revolution from human emancipation. I think he was right, and I regret the momentary focus on when Gaddafi will die. When revolution is focused on beheading a sovereign, revolution is cheap, especially for those of us who in this case happen not to be Libyan. Love and peace--hal
Apologies for the US in Libya
APOLOGIES FOR THE US IN LIBYA
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 27, 2011
Shame on my national government for its complicity in last night’s unanimous UN Security Council resolution to punish the Libyan leader and his associates and employees.
The US Senate has steadfastly refused to ratify the Rome Statute of 1998 that created the International Criminal Court. What are the US thinking? Here we are sending the chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Pakistan in a Presidential effort to free a CIA agent who gunned down two Pakistanis.
It has long been puzzling to me that we can become politically aroused over a single death or arrest of one of the US. US UN representative Susan Rice’s press statement in the wake of the Security Council vote on “sanctions” against Libyans felt gross to me. How can the US vote to urge the ICC to prosecute foreign nationals, when a single US life is held so precious? I guess the US are just plain arrogant. I resent the danger this arrogance poses to US people in this age of global tumult. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
February 27, 2011
Shame on my national government for its complicity in last night’s unanimous UN Security Council resolution to punish the Libyan leader and his associates and employees.
The US Senate has steadfastly refused to ratify the Rome Statute of 1998 that created the International Criminal Court. What are the US thinking? Here we are sending the chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Pakistan in a Presidential effort to free a CIA agent who gunned down two Pakistanis.
It has long been puzzling to me that we can become politically aroused over a single death or arrest of one of the US. US UN representative Susan Rice’s press statement in the wake of the Security Council vote on “sanctions” against Libyans felt gross to me. How can the US vote to urge the ICC to prosecute foreign nationals, when a single US life is held so precious? I guess the US are just plain arrogant. I resent the danger this arrogance poses to US people in this age of global tumult. Love and peace--hal
Friday, February 25, 2011
a tilt in global tumult
A TILT IN GLOBAL TUMULT
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.edu
February 24, 2011
It is a mantra in introductory statistics that association doesn’t imply causation. In criminology and social science generally, a methodological response has been to partially correlate data so as to isolate, for example, a statistically significant association between the part of “criminality” that has nothing to do with class, race, gender and age, and getting busted, as in reporting trends in juvenile as authoritative trends in juvenile crime itself. This represents one social science method, one methodological choice, to inform our personal social choices by the central tendency of demographic data we disaggregate.
As Gregory Bateson put it in his Mind and Nature, tautology is the only rational proof of anything. Two plus two equals four because that is how I define 2 and 4 in my language of choice. Hence, social data can never prove anything, except by arbitrary definition. As US sociologist W.I. Thomas put it after WWI, “things that are defined as real are real in their consequences.” Call students’ standardized test scores proof of teachers’ educational competence, and marginal students will be pushed to drop out or expelled, and in social science, students who best regurgitate the mantra what US founding fathers created a nation that is closest to god the best government that humans have ever created, odds are on the children of relative wealth who hang on to private schooling where their well fed children damn well do their homework and pass their tests, to carry on the perhaps untaxed legacy of wealth.
I take the methodological stance that parsimony trumps specific claims to human knowledge. When a whole bunch of stuff is happening in different places, I infer SOCIAL significance to my data. Let’s start with the coincidence that youth unemployment leads protest worldwide. When the president of Egypt is driven out of office, strikes break out particularly of public workers who take payoffs at work in order to feed their families. At least soldiers there are conscripts rather than scabs hired in privatized security. They refuse orders to kill. In all cases, “national security” forces are chronically underpaid, and set off to control a civil populace in which youth unemployment is growing, and in which pressure mounts to kick out older generations in power to open opportunity to younger unemployed people.
Aren’t the same forces at work in US states where the American Legislative Exchange Council has drafted legislation magically appearing now in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to repeal public employees’ rights to binding arbitration in contract disputes? In this case the right to strike is a smokescreen. And as in the Southern Mediterranean area, public workers are pitted off against marginal private workers—all the more forceful because those who hold public/private wealth and power want public/private and foreign/native impoverished people to pick each other off.
A global explosion in accumulation of familial/government/private wealth has crashed. On the bright side, young people, many with degrees and credentials who have no jobs or risk losing livelihoods, including children of the elite, are asserting themselves. When I hear stories as about how Egyptians are flooding supplies and personal support into Eastern Libya, when I hear such heart and courage both in Libya and in Madison and Columbus to resist nonviolently, with such discipline, I am heartened. Of course lopping off political heads does not indicate how to transform entrenched political/economic/familial structures. Different places will suffer and respond in their own ways, but as Greek public workers protest, as Wisconsin and Ohio public workers protest, as Egyptian public workers protest, as governors use private youth discontent to identify foreign influences like drugs and alcohol among youth or youth indiscipline as primary threats to stability, I see connection. I infer that the political tumult now surrounding is has common cause, with varying manifestations. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.edu
February 24, 2011
It is a mantra in introductory statistics that association doesn’t imply causation. In criminology and social science generally, a methodological response has been to partially correlate data so as to isolate, for example, a statistically significant association between the part of “criminality” that has nothing to do with class, race, gender and age, and getting busted, as in reporting trends in juvenile as authoritative trends in juvenile crime itself. This represents one social science method, one methodological choice, to inform our personal social choices by the central tendency of demographic data we disaggregate.
As Gregory Bateson put it in his Mind and Nature, tautology is the only rational proof of anything. Two plus two equals four because that is how I define 2 and 4 in my language of choice. Hence, social data can never prove anything, except by arbitrary definition. As US sociologist W.I. Thomas put it after WWI, “things that are defined as real are real in their consequences.” Call students’ standardized test scores proof of teachers’ educational competence, and marginal students will be pushed to drop out or expelled, and in social science, students who best regurgitate the mantra what US founding fathers created a nation that is closest to god the best government that humans have ever created, odds are on the children of relative wealth who hang on to private schooling where their well fed children damn well do their homework and pass their tests, to carry on the perhaps untaxed legacy of wealth.
I take the methodological stance that parsimony trumps specific claims to human knowledge. When a whole bunch of stuff is happening in different places, I infer SOCIAL significance to my data. Let’s start with the coincidence that youth unemployment leads protest worldwide. When the president of Egypt is driven out of office, strikes break out particularly of public workers who take payoffs at work in order to feed their families. At least soldiers there are conscripts rather than scabs hired in privatized security. They refuse orders to kill. In all cases, “national security” forces are chronically underpaid, and set off to control a civil populace in which youth unemployment is growing, and in which pressure mounts to kick out older generations in power to open opportunity to younger unemployed people.
Aren’t the same forces at work in US states where the American Legislative Exchange Council has drafted legislation magically appearing now in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to repeal public employees’ rights to binding arbitration in contract disputes? In this case the right to strike is a smokescreen. And as in the Southern Mediterranean area, public workers are pitted off against marginal private workers—all the more forceful because those who hold public/private wealth and power want public/private and foreign/native impoverished people to pick each other off.
A global explosion in accumulation of familial/government/private wealth has crashed. On the bright side, young people, many with degrees and credentials who have no jobs or risk losing livelihoods, including children of the elite, are asserting themselves. When I hear stories as about how Egyptians are flooding supplies and personal support into Eastern Libya, when I hear such heart and courage both in Libya and in Madison and Columbus to resist nonviolently, with such discipline, I am heartened. Of course lopping off political heads does not indicate how to transform entrenched political/economic/familial structures. Different places will suffer and respond in their own ways, but as Greek public workers protest, as Wisconsin and Ohio public workers protest, as Egyptian public workers protest, as governors use private youth discontent to identify foreign influences like drugs and alcohol among youth or youth indiscipline as primary threats to stability, I see connection. I infer that the political tumult now surrounding is has common cause, with varying manifestations. Love and peace--hal
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
