Opinions, art, debate
We have gotten to the point where we are seriously discussing whether it is OK to let students graduate without taking a single literature seminar. Because God forbid they don’t take every grammar course available under the Sun and take literature instead.
Bye-bye university, and hello Berlitz!
Dear readers,
my Googling powers are failing me today, so if anybody manages to encounter an English translation of the short story “La beca” (in translation it would probably be titled “Scholarship”) by Miguel de Unamuno, I will be very grateful.
This story is the most powerful depiction of a patriarchal family on 7 short pages of text that I have ever seen. It can be used to let people figure out if they were brought up in a patriarchal family. If they get what the story is about, if it touches a place of pain in them, then yes, they were. If it leaves them confused, then no, they weren’t.
I will test it on my students tomorrow.
My blogroll is awash in posts that suggest children should be praised for their achievements rather than for their way of being. (Here is one of them, but I can easily find about 30 more). Simply put, instead of saying “you are so beautiful!” or “you are very intelligent!”, adults should tell children things like “You tried really hard!” and “You obviously put a lot of work in it!”
To me, the latter form of “praise” sounds like a passive-aggressive form of condescension. If you don’t see what I mean, just imagine yourself, as you are today, hearing both kinds of praise from the most significant people in your life. What would you prefer to hear from your romantic partner, “You look beautiful!” of “I can see how hard you work to look good”?
If you remember that children are just as human as you are and their only difference is that they are a lot more dependent than adults, you can imagine what the “praise for achievement” does to their feelings of self-worth and security in the world. As an adult, you can always just dump the loser who condescends to you with “Good job!” instead of praising you for what you are and who expects you to jump out of your skin to deserve her or his regard. A child has nowhere to go.
I have an opportunity to see the results of both systems of upbringing on a daily basis. N.* and I are products of these competing approaches. As I was growing up, the great-grandparents and grand-parents who raised me kept telling me how beautiful, intelligent, and phenomenal I was. They would sit around me with their mouths gaping open and eyes clouded with tears of delight (seriously, I’m not exaggerating) and repeat, “Oh, isn’t she beautiful? She is the most beautiful little girl in the world. And have you noticed how smart she is? Smart, pshaw! She is so much more than smart! The kid is a genius!”
As a result, I grew up with a feeling – a very basic, crucial, life-forming feeling – that the world is kind and welcoming towards me, that everything will turn out right, all problems can be solved, and everybody likes me**. And isn’t this the most important thing?
N., on the other hand, was always praised only for achievement. Good grades, good behavior, success at athletics. As a little boy, he once grew so desperate to hear a single word of unconditional approval and love that he asked his mother, “Mommy, am I good-looking?” The mother didn’t respond, so N. decided – in a way that cannot be shaken by any evidence to the contrary 30 years since – that he is ugly. I mean, if even your own mother can’t force herself to say you look good, then the only conclusion a child can draw is that he must be really disfigured.
As a result, he grew up with a feeling – a very basic, crucial, life-forming feeling – that the world is treacherous and dangerous, that nothing will ever turn out right, that misfortune can befall him at any turn, and that nobody likes him. Does this sound like a very happy worldview?
I think that people should ask themselves, “Do I want to raise a convenient, easy-to-manage child? Or a happy one?” If you prefer ease of management, then feel free to manipulate with achievement praise, making the kid think s/he has to keep buying love and regard. If your goal is the child’s happiness, then show the kid that s/he is loved just as s/he is. It is important not to sacrifice the long-term goal of bringing up a happy adult to the short-term goal of having the kid complete some insignificant third-grade project that will be forgotten in fifteen minutes.
* As usual, I never publish any stories about N. without his express permission.
** This happy world-view got somewhat messed up when I lived in New Haven but I have now almost completely recovered it.
The course on “Motherhood and Family Relations” was taught by a woman who had been born around the year when the October Revolution took place. She was “married to the revolution”, which left her single and childless.
“As you might realize, motherhood and family relations are not really my sphere of interest,” she explained on the first day of class. “But somebody had to teach this class, and my sense of duty didn’t allow me to reject this assignment.”
She gave us all a look of intense disgust and said, through clenched teeth, “This will be hard work, but I will make good wives and mothers of you yet! Just look at yourselves! All of this make-up, and those nasty skirts. . . No man in his right mind would want to marry you!”
“Good!” a student called Anya said loudly. “Because I’m into girls.”
The professor’s face became purple but she decided to ignore Anya.
“Observe how great I look, compared to you,” the professor told us. “I haven’t applied any make-up once in my life! And I always look modest and decent. A girl’s greatest ornament is her honor! So are you ready to learn how to find a husband?”
“Yes!” students Natasha and Sveta said eagerly. They were from a small village and desperate to find a boyfriend.
“I’m not,” I said.
“Why not?” the professor asked.
“Because I’m already married, and my husband will probably not appreciate me looking for another husband at this point.”
“Well, then you need to learn how to be a mother!” the professor exclaimed. “Children are a horrrrrible burrrrrden!! If you have a baby, you will be chained to that baby for yearrrrrrs!!! It will be like being in prrrrrison!!!”
With every “r”, her voice was getting scarier and her face redder.
“Women today want to make child-rearing easier on themselves,” the professor continued. “But that is wrong! If you want to be a mother, prepare to be enslaved! There will be no diapers for you because they are evil! You should use cotton nappies and wash them by hand. Three times a day! And then iron them. On both sides!”
“On both sides?” one student asked in a terrified little voice.
“Yes! And remember that you have to boil the nappies for at least an hour! Or there will be bacteria. Bacteria everywhere! Children are nasty, dirty creatures who always make a mess.”
She kept silent for a while and added quietly, “Especially boys. Those are VERY NASTY.”
As you can probably imagine, I never went back. My colleagues, however, took motherhood classes with this professor for two semesters. At the end of the course, they had to write a 15-page essay on the evil nature of diapers and pacifiers.
It is curious how often ideological foes end up promoting the same beliefs and supporting the same practices. Spain’s fascist dictator Franco hated the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union responded with an equally powerful dislike. However, there are many striking similarities in the way the two regimes functioned. Franco’s dictatorship is notorious for forcing all women to undergo humiliating classes where women were taught how to be good wives and mothers. (As you can imagine, it never occurred to anybody to offer any suggestions to men on how to be good husbands and fathers.)
Franco died the year before I was born, but I still had to take such classes. That was in 1995-1998, in the post-Soviet Ukraine. The USSR had collapsed a few years earlier, but nobody had had either the resources or the time to change the Soviet curricula in schools and universities. I majored in English and German, which meant that I had to undergo 4 years of military training.
“We are preparing you to serve as military translators in case a nuclear war begins,” the former KGB colonel who was the head of the Military Training Department explained to us.
“Excuse me,” I asked, “who will we fight against in this war?”
“The US, of course,” said the colonel.
“Can I fight on the Americans’ side, then?” I asked.
The poor elderly KGB officer blanched. Youth is cruel, and today I would have never hurt the guy’s feelings this way. He was obviously unprepared to deal with a bunch of loud-mouthed, painted, rude and cynical female students who were so unlike the earnest, shy Communist young women of his younger days.
Every Thursday for four years was dedicated exclusively to military training. Male and female students were separated for these classes. Our male colleagues were supposed to learn to march, shoot, run and jump, but there never was an instructor available to teach them, so they simply had a free day on Thursdays.
Female students, however, had to take courses on:
1. Basic human anatomy;
2. First aid;
3. Nursing;
4. And the infamous course on “Motherhood and Family Relations.”
[To be continued. . .]
Of course, nobody can match the kind of Peruvian food I have been served in Montreal, but this was quite good, too.
Calabaza soup, seafood chupe, and mango ice-cream. The ice-cream was a fail, to be honest, because they decided to cover it with quinoa, and the texture was all wrong.
Did my photo for the previous post not load,
or something?
We haven’t even arrived at the theater yet but the laughs have already started.
Before our visit to the theater, I felt an intense craving for a hamburger, so we went to a hamburger place to scare people with our theater getup.
I hate Citizens United, but here is a post where a Liberal makes a very interesting case in defense of it. Tell me what you think if the issue interests you.
Generational Theft: what is it and does it exist? I see everything that is based on the word “generational” or the idea of a conflict between generations to be suspect but many people seem to find the concept appealing. What interests me in the whole thing is why the Boomers embrace this idea so passionately.
Obama’s pre-K plan: “Also expanding Nurse Family Partnerships, a program that has also earned top marks in randomized trials, and which provides regular home visits from nurses to families from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday, intended to promote good health and parenting practices.” What I’m getting from the language is that this doesn’t exist or isn’t ubiquitous yet. Is that true? Does anybody know?
“Of course one worker families with children have a hard time managing for different reasons. But the lack of affordable childcare, school hours/days which don’t match work times, ratcheted up expectations about 24/7 helicopter parenting…” Ratcheted up by whom? Have we gotten to the point where helicoptering parents only helicopter because they are some evil entity’s victim and not because they enjoy victimizing their children? Jeez. . .
So you can get sued for saying that a press is nothing but a vanity press? Seriously?
I read these posts from a person who claims to be a sex educator because there is no comedy show that can provide more laughs per second. The blogger must be faking this because it is not possible that an adult person with at least a primary school education could be so egregiously ignorant about. . . well, everything.
One of the American cultural traditions that I find extremely creepy: “Last night was the town Daddy-Daughter dance, so I took The Girl. We both dressed up — I even bought her a wrist corsage, the first time I’ve bought one of those since the Reagan administration — and we went to a local country club for the annual event.” Just the idea of a father referring to his daughter as “The Girl” is already very disturbing. And before anybody starts to yak, I defy you to prove that you have seen a better relationship between a father and an adult daughter than the one I have with my father. So these vaguely incestuous creep-fests are in no way necessary for healthy relationships.
Hugo Schwyzer writes yet another post promoting the lifestyle of people who force themselves to remain faithful and use others as props to make this fake and painful loyalty possible. If my husband wrote this kind of desperate post, I’d just stop torturing the poor guy and move the hell out. But I vaguely remember Schwyzer writing about the wife’s numerous relatives that he supports, so here is the answer to the mystery of why some women are perfectly fine with letting their husbands torture themselves with forced chastity.
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