Angry Adult Adoptees

When I was first thinking about adoption, I read a lot of books about it, because that's what I do. I remember reading one or two by and about transracial adoptees, and coming away from them feeling like I would be damned if I did, and damned if I didn't, no matter what choices I made. One essayist would write that her mother's insistence on her participating in a group for mixed-race adoptive families made her feel like her race was the most important thing about her, that it was the defining feature of who she was, and that she was thus always set apart from her white family. The next would bitterly recount how little her mother did to help her connect with black culture and black people, and how this left her adrift and confused, without a clear racial identity or sense of her place in the world. I was both amused and bemused by this.

Recently, I had a book of interviews with transracial adoptees home from the library. I dipped into it, but didn't read much before returning it. "The interview format just doesn't work for me," I said to myself, and this is true: I don't normally enjoy reading or listening to interviews.

But the other reason I didn't read it deeply is that I have Yehva now, and I did not want to imagine her in some angry adult complaining about how her mother (it's always the mother) got it wrong. The book may not even have had any angry adults complaining about their mothers. It's just that I'd read that kind of thing before, pre-Yehva, and I didn't want to encounter it again now that I could be the mother in question.

I agree with you 100% that this is cowardly of me.

So, the other night I decided to make the best of insomnia by finally spending some time reading what adoptees have to say. If you go to John Raible's blog and look at his blogroll, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I was reading, though I also read some that aren't on that list, and I don't necessarily remember who they were or how I found them, and I couldn't necessarily find them again; they link and inter-link to each other, though, and it's clear there's a community there of activist, sometimes angry adult transracial adoptees (or TRAs).

I have a few observations about my reading.

One is that there seem to be more--I want to stop saying angry because it might seem dismissive and judgmental--maybe politicized is a better word?--OK, politicized international adoptees. Often these are people who were adopted from Vietnam or Korea after wars that America was involved in, and it seems to have been very common for families to simply ignore or deny racial and cultural differences. I found myself hoping that we do better these days, that maybe even the imperfect ways that families wrestle with questions of race and culture will mean that we're doing better by the children we have now. People who were adopted from Vietnam after the war have a common refrain: "I was pulled away from my culture and every person I had ever known, and expected to be grateful for it." I hope we do a better job of not laying that kind of burden on our kids. (I think I'll come back to the gratitude thing later.)

Another is that they make some right-on, valid points. For instance, it it certainly true to my own experience that the primary voices that are heard talking about adoption are adoptive parents. Apparently there are a lot of people like me, who are so fascinated by this whole thing they're going through that they churn out endless blogs and memoirs and confessionals. I would say the second most common speakers on adoption are people who work in the field; birthparents are a very distant third, and adoptees are rarely sought out for commentary when adoption hits the news for some reason. So when John Raible asks us to call media outlets on this--to drop them a note saying, "Hey, why did you not interview a single adoptee in your recent story?"--he has good reason to.

This issue also matters because the perception of parent and child about how the family is doing can be very different. And it matters because adoptive parents are not necessarily very good at listening when adoptees speak; Harriet at Fugitivus later apologized, sort of, for asking adoptive parents to stay out of the comments on one of her posts, but her original request came from experience. She wrote:

I put that disclaimer out there because in the adult adoptee blog sites I’ve frequented, thread derailments seem to be most often started by adoptive parents who are terrified at having their choices, motivations, and privilege questioned.

*su sheepishly raises hand*

But, on the other hand, sometimes people complained about an experience they had in their family, and attributed it to adoption, when it just seemed like bad family shit to me. In a conversation about adoption on MetaFilter, one person described feeling like she did not fit in with her family at all. She didn't look like them, she was the only one who was musical, and so on. This was painful to her, and she attributed it to being adopted; for her, being adopted meant she never fit in with her family. A number of people chimed in to say that they had felt exactly the same way about the family they were born into, but she insisted that her situation was different. Maybe it was, or maybe it was just easy to blame this unfortunate dynamic on adoption.

A few weeks ago, an adoptive mother told a story on her blog (I am so sorry I don't have links for a lot of this; I didn't bookmark stuff and the content has stayed with me but I can't seem to recreate the path I took to find this stuff) about telling her teenage daughter to stop complaining: "If you were still in China, you'd be working 14 hours a day in a factory."

This gets to that gratitude thing I mentioned above. You can see that Asian adoptees are not making it up, and I hear it sometimes from people, who tell me that Yehva is lucky to have us. Sometimes they just mean we're good parents, and I appreciate that. But sometimes they mean that she is lucky not to be living where she was born (which, for the record, is Chicago). I don't think about it that way, and hope that I would never suggest to Yehva that she is lucky that her birthmother was a drug addict and her teenage birthfather was ignorant of how to protect his parental rights, because that meant she got to be in our family instead.

But I also thought this mom's comment about factories in China wasn't necessarily an adoption problem at all--it seemed like a parenting problem to me. Any woman who would say something so unkind to her daughter would say something unkind to any daughter she had, biological or adopted. In a parallel universe where that woman had a biological child instead of adopting from China, she'd be saying something just as nasty and posting about it on her blog as if it were the most OK thing in the world. Adoption shaped the form that her disrespect for her daughter took, but I have seen too many biological parents treat their children just as badly to assume that adoption caused the disrespect.

That sounds dismissive, and I don't mean it to. Maybe it is and I shouldn't have said it. Maybe that was just me being defensive again. Maybe I'm just reacting out of my hope, as one of those bad-fit kids (I was convinced through most of elementary school that I was a changeling), that parenting can make a difference, that if this woman (and I) had had parents who did a better job of accepting our differences, we wouldn't have felt so out of place.

The truth is, it is hard for me, as an adoptive parent who wants everything to be good for her kid and isn't sure how best to make it good, to listen to adoptees talk about what wasn't good for them. And to hear the challenge in what they say. I took a break from writing to read this post on white LGBT families adopting children of color, and the particular tensions that can arise. I was very interested in what he had to say about the white siblings of adopted children of color, since I have those kids, too, and I was chugging along nodding my head at how on-target he seemed, and then I was suddenly brought to tears by the question: When will your child get a break from being the obviously adopted child?

Raible was talking about the subtle pressure that is always present for transracially adopted kids, and for some reason that question made it real for me. As a lesbian, I experienced that background tension that gets so familiar you forget it's there until you walk into a place where practically everybody is a lesbian and you feel it melt away. When and how can it melt away for Yehva as she gets older, and stops being, in Raible's words about his own childhood, "a cute and cuddly curiosity in [the] neighborhood"?

I did not when Yehva was born, and do not now remotely meet Raible's criteria for white adoptive parents. If I am being honest with myself, this means I probably have some changing to do.

The Collected Works of Sara Zarr

I have now read the entire ouvre of Sara Zarr, whom I wrote about the other week. Since she's only published three books so far, and even as a kid reading YA novels of this length and complexity only took me a little over an hour, this was not burdensome.

Zarr has some themes that come up again and again in her books, for good and ill. Among them:

1. She likes to write about parents who are not there even when they're there: an alcoholic mother, a father whose work as a pastor takes him away from his family too much, a single mother whose combination of work as a waitress and nursing school leaves her daughter feeling abandoned, a mother who pretends not to see the problems in her house. This helps set up what seems to be an essential situation for her (so far--it's early days yet, career-wise): a protagonist who feels isolated. I have in my day loved many a tale of family dysfunction, but as a parent I found myself irritated at the extent to which parents are absent. She's a literary writer, so it's more subtle than in much literature, TV, or movies aimed at teens, but she still sets up this dynamic where the parents are unreliable, while teenage friends are steadfast. Half of what goes wrong in these books wouldn't go wrong if these teenagers would just tell their parents something. I suppose that's the equivalent of there being no horror movie if they don't go into the basement, but as a parent I'd like to see parents who can be counted on.
2. She likes to write about aftermaths. In one book, it's several years after a girl was caught by her father having sex with an older boy; in another, a girl who was tormented by classmates in elementary school and has re-invented herself in a new school meets up again with the boy who was her only friend; in the third, the book begins not long after the protagonist's mother has gone into rehab. Sometimes this works--in Once Was Lost, the family dynamic that preceded her mother's commitment is well-drawn through a few flashbacks. Sometimes it doesn't; the plot of Sweethearts, the reunited-friends story, felt painfully contrived. And I still have not even remotely figured out why the protagonist of Story of a Girl was in that car having sex with that 17-year-old boy when she was only 13. I guess because Zarr just wanted to write a book about what happens when a 13-year-old's father catches her having sex.
3. She is willing to let her protagonists be annoying in a way that seems unnecessary to me. For instance, I thought Once Was Lost was her strongest book, and it is the one that deals most directly with faith, and does it well (Zarr is a Christian writer, but not a didactic one so it's not always obvious). But for the sake of plot and drama, I guess, she lets her otherwise-smart protagonist repeatedly wander off alone without telling anyone in the days immediately after a girl from her church youth group has been abducted and is missing. By the second or third time, I just wanted to smack the kid. I suppose it was meant to tell us something about her mental state, but it grated on me.
4. Zarr likes problems that can't be solved, or that can only partly be solved. I wrote before about how, at the end of Story of a Girl, there's been no dramatic resolution--just one tentative conversation between the girl and her father. In Sweethearts, the reunion of the two childhood friends leaves the girl wiser, but her friend is still an emancipated minor who has nowhere to live and is torn between trying to start a new life for himself and wanting to be a presence for good in the lives of his younger siblings. This is one of the things I like about the books: the protagonists wrestle with real problems (if a bit on the dramatic end of the spectrum) and, just like in real life, they can't all be solved, or at least not completely. In this way, in that she invites her readers to think about the mix of happiness and sorrow in life, Zarr is very respectful of the children she's writing for.

Zarr's books raised some interesting questions for me as a parent, about whether I think of these as books I would or would not want my kids to read. On the one hand, I like the moral complexity, and that the kids in these books are dealing with problems and issues that are more substantial than whether the boy they like will ask them to the prom. On the other hand, some of the content seemed a little graphic, both with brief descriptions of sex and with portrayals of violent abuse. And all the sex there is, is bad: the 13-year-old taken advantage of by an older boy, a girl who makes out with (and maybe has sex with; there was one scene in which I honestly could not figure out whether they were supposed to have had intercourse or not) her boyfriend but turns off her mind and goes to another place while it's happening. I'm not sure I want my teenage daughter reading books in which other teenagers have sex, but if she does, I think I might actually like it better if the sex were nice and between people who really cared about each other.

These seem like books worth talking about, probably with teens who are mature enough for the content. But I also found myself wanting to start a reading group for moms, in which we would read YA novels together and our discussion question every month would be, "Would I want my daughter to read this? Why or why not?"

QFT

Harriet at the Fugitivus blog is an angry and profane person whose rants can be hard for me to read sometimes (that her homepage photo is of her flipping off the camera tells you much about her and her attitude). But she says some things about adoption that ring very true to me, and I'm going to quote them here both to share them and to archive them for myself.

From a post called Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up 101:

Everything About Adoption Hurts.

This is not to say that everything about adoption is wrong, but everything about adoption is painful. For our modern, legal concept of adoption to exist, families must be broken. Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case scenario having already come to fruition. From there, you're working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be.

And from Another Thing about Adoption, especially where she quotes an adoptive mom saying something that I have often thought and not put into words nearly so well:

The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there's just no way around it. A TRA [trans-racial adoptive] mother I worked with once put it this way: to become the parent your child deserves, you have to come to realize that in the world you want to raise your child in, and the world you must now work to create, you would never have been their parent.

Book Report: Diane Ravitch Changes Her Mind

A few years ago, I did a big reading project on education issues and education funding. As part of that project, I read a couple of things by Diane Ravitch, who has been writing about education in the US for forty years. Ravitch is a historian of education; her book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform is very good if you like that kind of thing, and I remember The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn as my introduction into the scandal that is textbook selection in the United States.

In The Language Police, and in other places, Ravitch championed school choice and local control. She wanted schools to have autonomy over curriculum and funds, and teachers to have autonomy in the classroom. In other writings, and in her work in the Department of Education, she has been a passionate advocate of vouchers, school choice, and charter schools, as well as of standards. She thought parents would embrace the opportunity to send their children to better schools, that charter schools would be like 1000 little petri dishes where educational theories and practices of all kinds could be tested and the best ones then raised up. She thought testing programs would be founded on clear and robust curriculum standards, that the curriculum would be the driving force, and what harm could then be done by students being tested over their knowledge of that curriculum?

She wasn't just some writer blathering about these things. She influenced policy. She was a Big Name.

Her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education is her mea culpa. "How could I have been so wrong?" she asked herself. This book is her answer.

Much of the content was familiar to me, since I've been following these issues for awhile. I also loved the idea of school choice, of vouchers allowing poor parents to get their kids into schools that could serve them better, of charter schools offering parents a variety of educational options, so that they could choose the school that would best serve their own individual children.

But I was too cynical to let myself hope much. In this, I was wiser than Ravitch, but I am sorry to have been right about it.

Schools of choice? Turns out that in most places, fewer than 1% of parents choose to send their kids to a school that is not their neighborhood school. The reasons vary: people like their neighborhood schools; some parents aren't all that motivated to take an active part in choosing their children's school; many parents find the travel to an out-of-neighborhoood school prohibitive for them or their children (I remember reading a story a couple of years ago about a girl who spent 90 minutes on public transportation at the beginning and end of her school day so that she could attend a choice school. Who would wish that on their child?); it is hard to participate in extracurriculars at a school farther from home.

Ravitch said she thought there'd be a flood of discontented parents eager to move their kids to better schools if they could. Nope. No flood. 1% or fewer of eligible kids.

Charters? Turns out, in most places, they really do skim the best kids from local public schools. Kids who have parents involved enough to enroll them in charters are the same kids who are likely to do well even in a weak school, so selection bias plays a role. Also, it turns out that charters do expel problem children, who are dumped back on the local public school. (Yes, I know charters are public schools, too--but I think this language is parsimonious for my purposes.) Or they make sure they only get the most motivated kids by setting up subtle barriers to entry that nonetheless screen out the kids with less-supportive families, for instance by requiring an in-person meeting between parents and educators prior to enrollment.*

And, in most places, what they do and how they do it doesn't really look all that different from what other schools are doing. This is borne out in my very limited experience; one of my friends had her son in a charter school, for instance, and she felt that the benefits were subtle, like the kids not having to ask permission to use the bathroom.

Ravitch was dismayed and disappointed by No Child Left Behind, which focused on testing, plus rewards and sanctions for better or worse performance, without defining any curriculum standards. She had assumed there'd be curriculum standards; how could there not be? But there weren't. It was high-stakes testing divorced from any grounding in clear objectives about what children should learn.

Math and reading instruction began to edge out other subjects; test-taking strategies became a school subject; corruption and cheating were rife; state standards were watered down (in some states, the bar to be considered adequate on the tests is now as low as getting 17% of the questions right. That's an extreme example, but it's not a typo: 17% is a passing grade. This is why we have many states that claim 80-90% of, say, fourth graders are proficient in math and reading, while only 20-30% get that kind of score on the NAEP ).

All of this was entirely predictable. The problem with high-stakes testing, she quotes one researcher as saying, "is that it corrupts the tests as measures of student performance" (160). Turns out this is such a well-known thing that there's a term for it and has been for over 30 years: Campbell's Law, formulated by a sociologist in 1975, which says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (qtd. on p. 160)

NCLB is apparently the poster child for Campbell's Law.

There's more; Ravitch has a lot to say about the failures of the market-style approaches she had championed, and about her concerns that so much education funding is now coming from the foundations of people like Bill Gates and the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame), who are trying to impose the business models that have made them so successful. She is concerned that the Gates foundation in particular has given so much money to almost literally every institute and publication that studies and monitors education and shapes policy that there is no one left who is enough of an outsider to offer a critique. And she does a very good critique of the current New New Idea, the idea that excellent teaching is the solution and that we can create a corps of excellent teachers by studying what excellent teachers do and then filling the schools with people who do that, too. (I like the part where she says that the problem with this plan becomes obvious if you take a moment to ask yourself why baseball teams don't just fill themselves up with .300 batters who are also great basemen and fielders.)

So, it's bad. What's Ravitch's solution?

Hell if I know. I do know she's a big fan of content and curriculum standards; she's a board member of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which advocates nationwide grade-based content standards. But beyond that, I don't know. The book concludes with a whole bunch of high-falutin' language, a veritable cascade of Glittering Generalities:

As a nation, we need a strong and vibrant public education system. As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our schools once again the pride of the nation. Our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society. Our public schools have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans, giving them the tools to fashion their own life and to improve the commonweal. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.

At the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival. We must turn our attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning and reviving the conditions that make learning possible.

I don't know about you, but I can't read that without picturing a waving flag and hearing some stirring martial music. But I still don't know what the heck Ravitch thinks the answer is. "Strong...vibrant...do no harm...pride of the nation...improve...infuse...revive." Got it! No problem! My friend Joann works in the field of school improvement; I'll send her those two paragraphs and she will thank me for making her job 100% easier.

*A little side note: Two years ago, I edited the annual report for the Michigan Legislature on the status of charter schools in Michigan. About a thousand pages of, "17% of students here versus 13% there on practically every measure possible. One of the things that rose up from that data that has stayed with me was that in Michigan, charter school students do about as well academically as their public school counterparts. The exception is African-American students in urban districts, who do somewhat better that AA kids in the public schools. I found it interesting.

Four Quick Book Notes

The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce.

I have found books about population and demographics very interesting in the past, so I grabbed this one at the library. I thought I might be hitting the point of diminishing returns on the topic; I already know a lot about the declining birthrates we're seeing all over the world, and suspected I might end up skimming this because it was all too familiar. What Pearce does that made this worthwhile for me, though, is devote chapters to exploring the cultural forces that drive lower birthrates in various parts of the world. For instance, I was interested in his discussion of industrial ghost towns in the former East Germany. For reasons I can't quite remember, young women are more likely than young men in these areas to leave for cities in the west, seeking education and professional employment. So Germany has a demographic skew, with 120 or more women for every man [edit: I of course mean for every hundred men. Oops.] in some cities, and the opposite in these depressed former industrial areas. The men left behind are lost in an epidemic of alcoholism, and educated single professional women have low chances of finding a man they consider worth marrying. This leaves a surprisingly large proportion of Germans child-free.

Pearce did a great discussion of forces in India and Singapore, as well. One kind of throw-away line caught my attention because we hear so much about the high academic achievement of children in Singapore, who often attend school for 8-10 hours a day, and have tutoring and enrichment classes on top of that. Pearce mentions a woman who, in an interview, suggested that one reason she and her friends had chosen not to have kids was that, having lived through that experience, they didn't think childhood was worth it. They didn't want to have kids only to push them along that same path, but they didn't think it was realistic to think they could opt out.

This is a book that reminded me, through both historical and present-day examples, that human hunger is rarely caused by actual food production shortages, but is almost always caused by political decisions made by people in power. I have ancestors (supposedly) who came to the US during the Irish potato famine, and I was fascinated and appalled to learn that many poor people in Ireland were forcibly relocated, forced onto crowded ships on which many (do I remember half? That might be too high) would die on the passage, and the rest would simply be dumped on a wharf in the New World with no money or resources. I knew people migrated because of hunger; I had not known they were ejected from their homes en masse and forced out under such circumstances.

His stuff on current-day patterns of migration, and the forces driving it, are very interesting, too. He says Europe's birth rates are so low that Europe finds itself in the ridiculous position of turning away and deporting immigrants it would have to go looking for if they weren't coming on their own. A good read.

A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, by Patricia Cline Cohen.

I love this kind of history, that points out ways that what we take for granted--like our assumption that a well-educated person will know mathematics--are actually historically-bound. Turns out it wasn't until well into the 19th Century that anyone thought math should be part of a well-rounded liberal education; it had always been seen as something only merchants and traders needed to know, and they only provisionally. Math was treated as a brute-force process of memorization of rules; people weren't even expected to understand, say, multiplication as a concept. Books called "Ready Reckoners" were published for the use of clerks; they were nothing but tables of calculations, so that a clerk selling X yards of cloth at Y price could look it up in a table, rather than be expected to perform the math.

To be sure, this was partly driven by the incredibly complex non-decimal money system, and by a system of measures that seems insane to the modern reader: a gallon of, say, milk had a different number of ounces than a gallon of beer, while a barrel of wine might have 4 more gallons in it than a barrel of maple syrup. There were three or four differing "ounces" used to measure different commodities. The spread of the idea that people should be able to perform math was partly made possible by Thomas Jefferson's drive to standardize measures and convert America to a decimal money system: at that point, ordinary people could figure this stuff out.

When math first became part of a standard education plan, it began as a single course taken during a student's final year of college. As it moved into earlier stages of education, the idea persisted for a long time that boys under 12 were simply not capable of grasping mathematics. We expect so much of elementary-aged children these days that I find it interesting to learn about how different expectations were not really that long ago.

Finally, I love stories of people resisting inevitable change. In the middle ages, as Arabic numbers first came to Europe, they were strongly resisted. Roman numerals had always been good enough, and even though the only thing you could do with them was count and record quantities, who needed to do more? Arabic numerals were seen as dangerous because they lent themselves to fraud: a 0 could easily be changed to a 6, for instance, or 412 to 1412. They evoked so much anxiety that in the late 13th century, the city of Florence actually outlawed their use. Like Canute commanding the tides.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.

I love spiritual memoirs. Sadly, despite its title, this isn't one. Janzen isn't a very good writer or a very deep thinker, and this book wanders around and skims the surface of what could have been some very interesting and meaty stuff. On the other hand, she can be wickedly funny. I'd be trying to read passages out loud to David and laughing too hard to finish them. A light read, kind of disappointing in some ways (I was thinking so often, "Wow, I'd like to hear more about that," and not getting it.), not too bad for passing an evening. Very glad I got it from the library; I wouldn't have wanted to pay good money for it.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.

I am an old fan of John Taylor Gatto for his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which has always seemed to me like a valid critique of school systems, and a good reminder that while we think we are teaching children content, our actions and words and expectations and use of time are also teaching them things we may not be aware of and wouldn't like if we were.

Gatto was a teacher in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he resigned in the year he won New York State's Teacher of the Year award, becoming a vocal critic of public schooling. I would like to give him an award, too: crappiest book I've read this year.

First, the book is not coherent. Oh, on the sentence level, it's fine. But I often could not figure out what he thought the connection between two ideas was. He'd talk about X for three paragraphs, and Y for the next three paragraphs, and I'd be mystified about why he put X and Y next to each other, what larger point he thought they made, why a juxtaposition seemed useful. The book is organized into chapters, but their content seems almost random.

But worse, Gatto's argument is founded on two bases, both of which are very weak. The first is anecdote. He loves a good story about a bad teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board. I think such stories can be useful, especially when they come from "good" schools--Gatto himself taught in a school in a very affluent neighborhood, and his students were the children of well-off, highly-educated parents. When he tells a toe-curling story and you know it comes from a school that might be held up as a model rather than a school everybody knows is broken, that does have impact.

But, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." There were 95,726 public schools in the US in the 2003-4 school year and 76.6 million children enrolled in 2006. With that many schools to draw on, it would be astonishing if I couldn't fill a book or six with crap anecdotes. Anecdotes are evocative; they are compelling; they are illustrative; they raise questions. They are not strong enough to support an entire argument about policy.

Fortunately, Gatto does not have only anecdotes in his toolbox. He has one other thing: The Genetic Fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the rejection of an institution or idea because of perceived problems with its origins, and critics of American public schooling have a lot of temptation for falling into this, because the genesis of our system is ugly, ugly, ugly.

You can find philanthropists, education experts, founders of the movement for public education, and even the occasional US president saying in so many words that public education's purpose is to fit the mass of people to accept a life of repetitive manual labor for the benefit of the few who will be allowed a true liberal education; to remove children from the home for so many hours and days that family ties will be weakened, replaced with loyalty to external authority; even to deliberately suppress children's innate genius, because, as one person Gatto quotes says (a president of Harvard, IIRC), we have more statesmen, entrepreneurs, and potential leaders of industry than we need already.

The first time you learn this stuff, it's pretty shocking. And I think it can be worth examining whether, given public education's ugly birth, there are legacies in our system that should be examined, that perhaps continue to work against the kinds of goals we have today, for student achievement and the fulfillment of potential.

But somebody needs to tell Gatto that repeating that one thing Woodrow Wilson said in 1909 in four different places in your book does not actually constitute a critique of public education as it is practiced today. None of his sources were written later than 1920, I don't think--the only time he dips a toe into more modern ideas, it's to compare something to "one of the first laws Hitler passed." Early 20th century eugenicists plus Hitler: a toxic combination, indeed, but not one that any rational person could think had a lot to do with 21st century schools.

[Edit: on re-reading it, I find The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher a bit overwrought as well. The six lessons are worth paying attention to; the rest of the essay, not so much.]

TV Needs More People Like Hurley

David and I have just started watching Lost, from the beginning, on DVD from the library. I like it fine. But what I like best about it is Hurley, the fat guy. Why?

Because Hurley is a smart guy. He is not portrayed as a glutton--in fact, when another character assumes he has been hoarding food and comes to him to ask for some, Hurley takes him down a peg with a kind of tired dignity that shows he's dealt with this kind of bs before and he's just not gonna get worked up about it anymore. When there's work to be done (digging somebody out of a collapsed cave, hauling heavy shit around) Hurley gets in there and does it.

He's portrayed as a decent guy who treats others well. He's the one who figures out that the stranded people need something more to bring them together than the endless round of survival and try-to-get-rescued activities.

The show treats Hurley respectfully even when others don't--when another character calls him "Lardo," it's just his selected insult for Hurley; he has a different one for anybody else who crosses his path.

Hurley is a fat guy who never once says anything denigrating about himself; when he tells Charlie he's taken in a notch on his belt, it's a statement of fact, not a "one good thing about being stranded on an island and not being able to get Ben & Jerry's, ha ha" joke of the kind we hear all too often from women with, say, a stomach bug.

I've heard Hurley called the show's comic relief. And he is. But unlike most fat characters on TV, he's not the comic relief because the show is making fun of him, or he is making fun of himself. He's the comic relief because he has a sense of humor.

This shouldn't be revolutionary. There are plenty of fat people in the world who are healthy and hard-working; who like themselves despite all the messages they get telling them they shouldn't; who have brains and compassion and decent relationships. But they don't show up on TV or in the movies. On TV, they show up on The Biggest Loser, or on NCIS as a woman whose flirtation with a main character can't be anything but a joke, or on name-your-medical-drama as patients who are psychotic or eating themselves to death.

I am happy to add Lost to my very short list of movies and TV shows with positive portrayals of fat people (even if the show otherwise makes no effort to show the diversity of body size and shapes that 40 people randomly put together on a plane would exhibit). We're maybe nine episodes in, and so far Hurley and the show's treatment of him is the highlight for me. It is so refreshing to see a member of my tribe being treated like a human being on TV.