Pragmatic Liberalism

Fulfilling Obama's Call to Educational Responsibility

2009-03-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

Obama said the following in his address to Congress last week:

These education policies will open the doors of opportunity for our children. But it is up to us to ensure they walk through them. In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a parent -- for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, read to their child. I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father, when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home. That is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. That's an American issue.

Amen, President Obama!

I wish more people had the gumption to say that. Parents need to take responsibility for their children, and as a nation, we owe it to our children to call on the carpet parents who do not care for their children. We also owe it to those parents to demonstrate ways they can be involved. Let’s start that conversation now. Here are a few ways you can get involved in your child’s educational life.

- Read. Don’t just read to your children (though that’s certainly wonderful). You read, too, whether it’s the newspaper or a magazine or a book. Seeing you modeling how reading matters in “real life” will encourage your child’s learning.

- Volunteer in your child’s classroom. Even if you can’t be in the classroom physically, you can volunteer to organize parents for the holiday fundraiser. You can send in items for the end-of-the-year party. Your children need to see you injecting yourself into their lives from an early age.

- Make it a point to ask each day about school. When I pick my son up, he can’t wait to give me a rundown of the day. That comes from having been asked that every single day after school. Now, not only do I get the story on what craft they did, but he talks about interpersonal relationships. I know who had an argument, who got praise for being really nice, and I’m usually up to date on the weekly line leader as well. And Dad usually gets a version of this story when he gets home.

Knowing these things from a really early age helps make you a partner in your child’s educational life from your child’s perspective. The idea that my mother wouldn’t know what was going on with me at school never entered my mind because from as young as I recall, education was a family affair. Make it that way for your children, too.

- Go through your child’s book bag daily. You will keep up with notes from teachers as well as your child’s progress at school. You’re also modeling responsibility for your children.

- Expose your children to adults in various professions. If your 12-year-old is expressing interest in being a doctor, call local offices to set up a time to meet with a doctor. Many people are happy to talk to children who are thinking of a career in their field. If your child will be the first in your family to attend college, this step is especially important. Your child needs to be able to put a face to the profession’s title.

- Reward good grades. I’m a firm believer in not paying for grades, but that is a family decision you have to make. I do believe in offering other rewards, however. Perhaps you can take your child out for a special dinner or for ice cream if he improves his grades or does really well. Be sure to praise your child for good grades verbally. Children need to know that someone is aware of their accomplishments.

- Make yourself known to your child’s teachers. You should contact your child’s teachers at the beginning of the year to make sure she knows she has your support. Many schools now have email, and you and your child’s teacher can discuss anything related to your child pretty easily. Being in touch with teachers helps your child know you’re taking an extra interest in her education.

- According to Dorothy Rich, an education writer, the best way to help your children’s education is to show the connection between learning and everyday life. Involving your children in household projects or decision-making issues, for example, are excellent ways to apply the concepts from the classroom.

What other ideas do you have for how parents can be more involved with their children’s education?

Real Talk About Periods

2009-02-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Do you know how often I talk about my period?

Typically never. In recent months, I’ve had to because I’ve been taking a medication with amennorhea as a side effect. Before that, though, the last time I remember mentioning it was when I filled out the forms at my OB’s office when I was pregnant with my daughter.

One of the things I’ve never understood about cultural feminism is this need to talk endlessly about menstruation. My Little Red Book is a current book project aimed at focusing on women’s issues with their periods. Thankfully Vagina Monologues didn’t have much text on periods. I read a large number of books in women’s studies classes in college about periods – getting them, stopping them, dealing with them, telling your boyfriend about them.

It really isn’t necessary. Do I think we should hide in shame? Of course not! There’s nothing shameful about periods, but there’s nothing to shout from the rooftops about either.

How can we deal with “period issues”?

I’d like to see comprehensive sex education in general and am frankly appalled at the Obama administration that $94 million remains in the 2009 budget for “abstinence-only” sex education.

I believe that in late elementary/early middle school, students should get to have frank conversations about their bodies. Because of the hormones in our food, girls are hitting puberty earlier with many girls now starting their periods around age 10. Boys have their own concerns with spontaneous (and non-sexual) erections and wet dreams being two of them. Those issues say nothing of other concerns, such as those about body hair, voice changes, and disproportionate growth patterns.

I believe in the curriculum of every school somewhere around fourth grade, teachers should talk about these issues. Embarrassment is a key concern for children of this age, and so some maneuvering of students to separate by sex will be required. Children from certain religious background inevitably will have parents who don’t want them to participate. Allow them to opt out. But deal with these questions.

I’d truly like to see the school nurse address these issues. I know some of my teachers were sadly misinformed about reproductive issues, and a medical professional could better answer these questions. In schools without a nurse, perhaps a local doctor or physician’s assistant could be employed (or even – volunteer!) to come in for the few days a year it takes to have an open discussion.

Dealing with periods in this way would be more productive than I imagine books for adults are. While I have no problem with an author putting together an anthology of stories about periods, I feel the better way to open up and remove the cloak of secrecy around menstruation is to address the issue early.

The Problem With Intellectual Capital

2009-02-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

The problem with intellectual capital is that it’s finite. Each of us has a certain amount of knowledge, time, and ability, and once it’s gone, then we’re done. Knowing that makes it imperative to spend our intellectual capital on the important things – those things we can, and should, work to change.

Among historians, there’s an interesting theory yet to make its way to the masses. This theory is that the image of the South as devoid of intellectualism is an erroneous one. In fact, the people of the South – its brightest (white) minds – expended tremendous energy to come up with arguments to justify slavery. During Reconstruction, this energy went to upholding a new racial status quo – segregation. The defense of Jim Crow became the predominant activity of many a well-educated Southerner.

Black Southerners were trapped in a different problem. Their educations were limited through the system of racism. Black Southerners created music and art and writing, but those contributions were ignored – or credited to white folk.

With the fall of Jim Crow, the South’s intellectual and creative potential broke free of these constraints, and the four decades since have seen a rise of Southern culture, adopted by people in other regions. Southerners themselves have come to represent a large portion of the people who win Oscars and Heisman Trophies and other indicators of success.

Mainstream liberals today are stuck in the same kind of intellectual quagmire as those Southerners were for more than a century. We often waste our potential on issues that don’t matter. Some issues are interesting to note in passing but really aren’t worth more than cursory acknowledgment.

I’ve give you an example. Feministing, a leading cultural-liberal feminist blog, had a post a few weeks ago about a campaign in Germany to combat bulimia. The campaign involved placing pink magnets that looked like vomit splatter on the lids of toilet seats. Now, what do you think was the most important part of that campaign? At Feministing, it was the color. How dare this organization whose mission it is to encourage girls’ self-esteem use pink! Pink! Don’t they know that’s a girly color?

No, folks I’m not kidding, though concern over the shape of the magnet and its exact placement closely followed the color as an issue of primary importance.

Intellectual capital that day? Wasted.

What other options were there? Well, let’s see. We could have talked about (from a US perspective here; I’m not familiar enough with the German system) the classification of bulimia as a mental illness. That leads us to advocating for mental illness to be on par with physical illness as far as insurance coverage. Or we could talk about the dearth of courses dealing with severe body image dysfunction in therapy programs. Or we could discuss the piss-poor state of treatment for mental illness in this country in general. We could plan an educational campaign about body image or eating disorders. Any of those, even if they were only coffee shop talk, would serve us better than debating the color of the damned magnet.

I’d like to encourage liberals really to think about what they’re doing. We often share the same goals. With the magnet, everyone’s goal is to stop eating disorders by helping the girls (and boys, men, and women) who have them. A productive discussion would address how to do that and would focus on real solutions. That’s where liberalism could be more pragmatic.

Why I'm a Pragmatic Liberal

2009-02-27T11:14:00.001-08:00

The reason liberals piss me off hit me last night like that proverbial ton of bricks. I should qualify my sentiments with two statements, however. First I am a liberal, so I’m not liberal-bashing. The purpose of Pragmatic Liberalism is more of a worldwide comment to the members of my political family. Second, I’ve realized for a while now things that upset me about liberalism; the impetus to speak out and the ability to articulate my anger just became compelling.

The story starts with a cheese sandwich. A story came out yesterday that in New Mexico, children whose parents don’t pay for their lunch receive a cheese sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a carton of milk as a replacement lunch.

In step liberal bloggers.

“How dare these schools shame these children!”
“Schools should provide everything children need.”
“This is just unacceptable. The schools are judging parents who don’t pay for their children’s lunches.”

As I kept coming back to commentary throughout the day, I found myself growing angrier. Despite many, many legitimate comments asking what alternative the school systems should employ, these people who were so “shocked” never responded. Do you know why not?

There is no easy response.

Here are the important points from the story for me.

- This system doesn’t apply to children who qualify for federal free or reduced lunch programs.
- The federal income requirements for the program are as follows for a family of 4: $27,000 a year maximum for free lunch and $39,000 for reduced lunch.
- The Albuquerque school district had $143,000 in unpaid school lunch bills. Since the implementation of this program, parents have paid $93,000 of those bills.
- The school district has no obligation to provide students who do not pay for lunch with anything to eat. The “cheese sandwich lunch” is in lieu of children going hungry.

Okay, so what upsets me so much about the mainstream liberal bloggers?

These bloggers don’t want to solve the problem. They want to hand-wring about what they find wrong with the world. I haven’t seen one person offer a viable alternative. Nor have I seen any suggestion of a blogger-type drive. No one’s trying to get people to pay out the other $48,000 owed to help kids in Albuquerque eat lunch. Instead these folks are simply whining about the woes of a system that doesn’t fit into their ideal world.

In my fantasy life, I imagine a world in which everyone has everything he or she needs. Children are loved, fed, and clothed. They are educated in a system that can take into account their individual needs. We help people have productive adult lives.

I live in a different reality, however. Instead of the educational system I would like to see, I see a system funded (inadequately in many cases) by a combination of federal funds and property taxes. I see school districts with little wiggle room in their budgets after paying for personnel and transportation costs. I see school systems too overburdened to provide for children everything they need for a happy, well-adjusted childhood. Hell, this extends beyond lunches and jackets to academics for me. Students who are exceptional in either direction have a very hard time getting appropriate services. Why?

THERE’S NO MONEY!

School districts don’t have an endless supply of money, and the people who make funding decisions have to determine how to use the limited resources they have. And that’s where we come back to the cheese sandwich. The folks in New Mexico’s school systems couldn’t continue to afford everything, and they opted to cut out free rides for the children of parents who by and large just aren’t paying for their lunch.

That brings us to Pragmatic Liberalism. My goal here is to search out real answers to the problems plaguing our society. You won’t find endless worry about the ills of Super Bowl commercials or repeated commentary on the likes of Westboro Baptist Church. Are those things problems? Yes, they are. They just aren’t the biggest problems. And they aren’t always solvable problems.