TheAgitator.com
Warping Young Minds
Thursday, October 8th, 2009So a short essay I wrote several years ago for Time about the obesity issue is being used in a couple persuasive writing textbooks.
I guess some English classes now have students post their assignments on the web. It’s kinda’ fun to watch college and high school students use my arguments to stake out their own positions.
Related, I received this fun email yesterday:
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this email. You see I have a dilemma. I have a very liberal (ok lets just say socialist, because she is) English teacher. Our book for the class is the They Say/ I Say 2009 edition in which your essay “What You Eat is Your Business” was published. She is now having us write an essay to summarize your work and write a response. The problem is that she is telling me what to write. What I gathered from your essay is that you want the American people to have enough common sense and personal responsibility to eat what is good for them. However, my teacher believes that all you are trying to do is give the power to the insurance companies and make people suffer. She keeps telling me that I have read the article wrong and that I have missed the point. I would like to hear the answer from you if you have the time. It would be greatly appreciated and really help me stand my ground and make my point against my teacher, whose veiws are very different from my own.
I emailed him back. Two points of clarification: I don’t necessarily care if people eat what is good for them. It isn’t really any of my business. I also don’t have much love for the insurance companies, who are probably going to be even more powerful and enmeshed with government once we get a health care bill.
But the part about wanting to make people suffer is spot-on.
I can almost hear that English Teacher: “It’s OK to express your ideas, but they must be the correct ideas.”
I hope that the kid writes his essay the way he wants and lets the world know when she decides to mark him down for saying something she disagrees with.
That was a nice, well-written letter. No major problems with English or critical thinking, there. And that is what the teacher is going to grade the students on, right? Right?
I question whether he could give a working definition of socialism and defend his assessment of his teacher as a socialist. Labels are fine, but if all “socialist” means is someone you disagree with politically, where does it get you?
And how good of a teacher of rhetoric can you be when one of your arguments is that your interlocutor wants to make people suffer?
Is it possible that what she said (which was lost in translation) to make (wrong verb, really) people suffer the consequences of their own actions (which is a central tenet of libertarianism as such)?
Government run schools (and as I understand it, most private schools too, since they model themselves after public schools) have long since abandoned teaching how to think (if indeed they ever did) in favor of teaching what to think. This, of course, is by design.
For my part, I didn’t learn how to think until I was well away from them.
Also, I’m with you 100% on wanting people to suffer.
I’ll give you a definition John:
Any teacher who plays something like this in their classroom and calls it factual:
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
(and yes, your tax money is paying for the kids school to buy it and watch it in many places)
Twenty minutes is too long for the internet (and people with work to do).
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
I thought her intro was reasonable. Then, ZOMG.
Fine, watch it at home …. never said “watch it now and respond!!!”.
By the way, with the abject inability of anyone who disagrees with you being able to recognize sarcasm when they see it, every profile or criticism written of you after this moment will say “Balko once said he wanted to make people suffer.”
You should post your response.
I’m really glad to find out that young minds are being exposed to your work Radley. Reading through the blog search results you link to, it sounds like even the kids who support anti-fat legislation can’t help but agree with your logic.
Anyone who doesn’t want people to suffer needs to get out more…
While I would hate to judge someone on the word of a third party (oh hell, I love doing it, but I’ll admit it is unfair), the teacher is made to sound like the bad cops we hear so much about – radically misinformed as to the nature and limits of their authority.
Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.
Did you end with “MUAHAHAHAH!!!”?. I find that really helps when I’m representing libertarianism to others.
In all fairness, it was hard to tell it was sarcasm, since I’ve heard just that argument from the majority of libertarians I’ve encountered, for whom it is a serious statement of their position and not at all sarcasm.
No shit. I got to the bit about “It’s the government’s job to take care of us”, then my brain exploded.
What a lot of horseshit. I don’t ever grade my students on what their ideas are — I grade them the quality of their argument, the depth of their analysis, mechanical and stylistic stuff. In other words, what they’re supposed to be graded on. I don’t have enough of a hard-on for the word ‘professor’ in front of my name to think it suddenly makes me right about everything. More importantly, I don’t think my students are incapable of independent thought. The person he describes is the worst sort of teacher; dealing with them is one of the few things I hate about my job.
I’ll have to get a desk copy of that there text, though. I’ve been meaning to revamp my comp syllabi.
Unfortunately Gonzo, I think you are the exception, not the rule. My high school and college experiences had very few encounters with teachers like you describe.
Neither did mine, but I found none, no matter how much we disagreed, who ever graded me down for that disagreement. Some of them appreciated even appreciated the arguments. Hell, that’s mostly how I choose my friends today. I don’t agree with them on much :-)
“personal responsibility is a trap”???
Man, and I love the example of how we should know this argument is intolerable because of big tobacco–because it’s inconceivable we should think people can be personally responsible about smoking, too!
I don’t know how to reply to a comment like the rest of you apparently do, so I’m just going to copy/paste
“http://www.storyofstuff.com/
I thought her intro was reasonable. Then, ZOMG.”
Heh, I loved the bit around 13:00 where she starts talking about planned obsolescence. It’s totally just the shape of the processor that changes, just that one little chip in the corner. Yup, that’s the only reason you can’t slap a new core I7 processor in your old 286 computer, those bastards at Intel changed the shape! It has nothing to do with pinouts, changing interfaces, new memory technologies, or chipsets. Nope, nope.
Just cut & paste between blockquote tags.
If that worked, thanks.
“It’s their job!”
That is when the discord of her thinking made me hit the X in the top right corner. If anything it should be “our” job, but that belies her intellectually dishonesty. Especially after she gives the standard “by the people”, she just left out “the right people”.
At first I was happy to come in here and just do a couple of updings. I don’t usually contribute to what I consider an “AMEN! choir” but after I closed the window it hit me how cool this must be for Radley. Congrats to have contributed positively to the shaping of the mush between the ears of our youth. You must feel very proud, especially doing it in your role as a writer.
Wow. She spent ten years to come up with that?
Good for you John, because I, on the other hand, had a bunch of teachers who graded down just because I disgreed with their opinion …. pretty much ruined my chance at a 4.0 in college but I decided earlier in my life that facts and principles were more important than sucking up to a teacher. I wish I had more teachers like Gonzo.
I clicked on the link to the student essays. And it hurt:
“Radley Balko, the writer of the first article, argues that obesity, and the conduction of an unhealthy lifestyle is a private matter.”
“I like the fact that Radley Balko talked about that the government is starting to intervene with this issue.”
“According to Radley Balko, government should have no business interfering what you eat.”
The question has to be asked: Is our children learning?
@James D
Hey, thanks man. Truth be told, I had a long, long line of shitbag teachers, as well. I never really ran into anyone worth a damn until very late in my academic career. I like to think I’m balancing out some sort of karmic situation, but who the hell knows.
Meat of it is, I hang around libertarian websites not because I agree with everything that gets floated (I do not), but because the free exchange of ideas is encouraged. And not in some bullshit way, either. I encourage my students to write about any goddamn thing they want outside of ‘Hitler was a nice guy’ — and honestly, I’d probably take that as well, if just to be a sophist.
Well, I write too much. Way to get anthologized, Balko. I look forward to using it in class.
I think we need the essay for relevance. It’s hard to say wtf either of them are talking about without having read it.
[...] finally, not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 reasons our education system is going downhill. If this is the quality of those given, by the [...]
Don’t feel bad.
I just survived a college economics 101 class taught by an admitted Keynesian.
It was simple really, just answer almost all the questions exactly wrong and get an A.
Radley.
There is a problem with getting meanings across, sometimes one makes or writes a statement with the intention of conveying some explicit meanings but the person who reads the statement see in it implied meanings which the writer in no way intended and with which he may vehemently disagree. These implied meanings arise in the mind of the reader because of prejudices and assumptions that the reader has and which he assumes the writer shares.
It may be that the teacher mentioned in the post above is making assumptions that Radley Balko must believe certain things because all reasonable people believe these things and that these things combined with the statements in Radley’s essay imply certain other meanings. Alternately it may be that the teacher is prejudiced and assumes that Radley Balko being a libertarian must hold certain irrational beliefs and that those beliefs in conjunction with the essay imply certain other meanings. Another possibility is that it is the student is misunderstanding the teacher in the same way.
The fact is that one cannot get some meanings across to some people whose assumptions and prejudices make understanding these meanings impossible. Some times implied meanings are intended and this is the basis of the political tactic of using “dog whistling” to target the prejudices of certain audiences, but sometimes one has no intention to signal any meaning beyond what is explicit, and one must add additional sentences explicitly to deny unwanted and unmeant but likely perceived implied meanings.
Consider the following two statements:-
1/ The establishment of the state of Israel has resulted in a great injustice to the Palestinian former residents of the area now occupied by Israel;
2/ The Jewish people know that after 1800 years of massacres and theft that it is unsafe to live among Christians as at any moment their Christian neighbors may turn on them, murder them and divide up their property therefore the Jewish people need a nation of their own;
I would warrant that 99% of readers would assume that the above two statements are logically incompatible, that it is impossible that one person could assert both of them. In fact there is no such contradiction, the appearance of such is entirely the result of commonly held prejudices. Most people take their ideas in packaged sets and most people who agree with statement 1 would be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel and would find it very hard to agree with statement 2. Likewise most people who agree with statement 2 would be pro-Israeli and would find it difficult to accept the truth of statement 1. An unbiased person should be able to see that both statements are true and that their is no contradiction, the appearance of contradiction arising entirely out of unstated and untrue assumptions.
I went to Catholic HS and had a class called morality where a teacher told us how to think about moral issues and then we had to spit back her opinion to her in weekly papers. She blatantly told us that if we didn’t write in support of her opinion we would not receive a passing grade.
I can remember three topics; School of the Americas, Abortion, and Food Production where she made us watch a video with baby chicks being crushed by a hammer or something. Yeah, she didn’t win me over to her side of thinking.
@ Carlyle Moulton: If you think that both of those premises are fine examples of logic that an unbiased observer would see as true, you are in error. They do not even support your argument (they are clearly not inconsistent, for one thing).
First time I read that TIME article. Also, I haven’t had any coffee yet this morning.
Did those people who took the “con” position really mean to say that foods high in fat and sugar were unhealthy, that people are biologically hardwired to eat fat and sugar as a survival mechanism, and that “government should be doing everything it can to create conditions that lead to healthy eating,” i.e., keeping people from eating fat and sugar?
So…the Government IS trying to kill me!
@#34 | Carlyle Moulton
Your comment is really smart analysis. I hope to throw this in my own face sometime when making a strong argument about something that “just feels wrong”. Unfortunately, you may be accused of the poisonous sin moral relativism. ;-D
18 gonzo said:
“I’ll have to get a desk copy of that there text, though. I’ve been meaning to revamp my comp syllabi.”
I had some fun teachers in my life. In college, i found you could tell if you were going to rub with a teacher on the first day of class, based on how detailed both the printed syllabus was and the amount of ruler-slapping that went into what pages were read at what time and grading scales. The farther away you get from contact information and office hours, the closer you get to the jungles of 1906. Even chemistry class made a big deal about not so much knowing the answer (like 1.8x+32) but rather figuring out how to take a celsius scale and a fahrenheit scale and taking that lesson of figuring out how to divide 180/100 and finding new places to apply that approach to problem solving. Although i enjoyed a comp 102 class with a teacher that would write a statement on the board and get the class to discuss it while he’d just sit back and give a little shove back to center when the conversation got out of hand. “The phone’s ring is through your nose” and “the sound of clapping with one hand”-type stuff. Then he’d make us go home and try to write something about the unwritable. Science and sentence structure are just vehicles to learn what you should be learning. Wish they had the internet when i was a kid (the degrees between source and recipient are so few now, and its so easy to make it public and share ideas/thoughts/concepts).
#36 | John Jenkins |
Er, that the two statements are compatible (but likely to be treated as incompatible by people who hold one or the other) was kind of the point. Y’know?
I was fortunate enough to go to college after having seen enough of what goes on in the world to have formed my own views and opinions. I had several teachers who were able to help me adjust my views and opinions and several who only served to reinforce them. I decided early in to play the game and wrote several papers from a view that I personally disagreed with. The thing that bothered me most was how some teachers felt it was their duty to not only teach the class, but to indoctrinate their students in the Liberal point of view. My personal favorite was the teaching assistant who was finishing a Masters degree in Romance Languages. I still see him almost every morning,………………… he serves me my morning coffee at the drive through coffee stand I stop at on my way to work.
All right…you know, I’ve had my share of teachers who marked me down for writing something they disagreed with, and it sucks….but could the student here be missing the point? Part of effective rhetoric, and learning to look at things with an open mind, is arguing for something you’re against. Or vice versa. I’ve had to do that in English classes, in most of my law classes, and especially in legal writing classes.
That’s part of how you develop as a writer. If we only wrote on viewpoints that we agreed with, you’d become, I don’t know, Fox News.
My point is that I’ve had several assignments where I was assigned to write something in favor of something I didn’t believe in. And it taught me to examine a subject critically, and examine the opposing arguments so that I could argue more effectively against that position later down the road. We can’t, and shouldn’t, remain in our little safety bubble.
@JOR: My point is they are not even facially incompatible, so they can’t possibly serve the thesis.
Anyone who already holds either of those beliefs as true is making an error (neither is true: most such categorical statements are not true, and one of them has designs on being a syllogism without premises (because, therefore…)
Also, does anyone need a six paragraph monograph on cognitive bias?
If you wanted to create the comparison he was looking for, it would probably go something like this.
1. The Palestinians are justified in their killing of Israeli civilians.
2. The Israelis are justified in their killing of Palestinian militants.
I sincerely doubt you could find a person who holds both of those beliefs, but the beliefs are not inherently contradictory and a person could hold both.
Also, this is bullshit:
It’s stated in the conjunctive, so if either is false, the quoted matter is false (and I think both statements are false as written).
What Mr. Moulton has done is cleverly dress up the argument that whoever disagrees with him is prejudiced and biased as a lecture on the travails of cognitive bias.
@John Jenkins.
I was trying to make a point to further illuminate Radley Balko’s argument in his post at the beginning of this thread.
I chose two statements relevant to the Israeli Palestine conflict because I believe that on this conflict most people choose one side or the other and that making this choice inevitably causes them to see an incompatibility between the statements which is in fact is not there but is the result of unstated assumptions adopted in choosing sides. If you see no inconsistency between the statements then you agree with me, obviously you have not chosen one side or the other to the extent that it invokes the implicit assumptions that I wanted to use as illustration. You are close to being my hypothetical unbiased observer and the example does not work for you.
I believe both these statements are true or that at least reasonable arguments can be made in favour of both of them. The fact that a person may disagree with one or both statements is not the point. The point is that persons capable of seeing 1 as true would be likely to see 2 as false and vice versa. It is not about what you believe but about what you believe other people would believe. Think of people that you know, do you know any whom you think would agree with statement 1? If so do you think that they would also agree with statement 2?
I would suggest to the student that she seriously look for elements of your argument with which she disagrees or which she feels you inadequately clarify. In essence, she’ll be agreeing with you, but good critical thinking does involve questioning the reverend from the choir. It may not be a formula for a good grade from a willfully ignorant ideologue, but the teacher may not be as closed-minded as we’ve all assumed.