Politics of Parenting; Book review: Underground Education
A big story in the US political blogosphere right now is Barbara Whitehead's article Bridging the Parent Gap. Speaking under the aegis of the Democratic Party's Leadership Council, she identifies "married parents" as a demographic group the Donkeys should try to appeal to, and she recommends some platform-changes to attract them.
I am a married parent. The proposed changes will not attract me. I do not blame "the culture" for my inability to get my kids to behave. Their disdain for workbooks and school essays is normal childhood short-sightedness; trying to blame it on "wardrobe malfunctions" at sporting events is just a cop-out. My kids engage in sassy back-talk, not because they play violent computer games like Grand Theft Auto, but because they are *my* offspring. I gave them my genes and my day-to-day behavior to copy and this is what they came up with. There is no one to blame but myself.
I do not find it difficult to "resist the onslaught of corporate Goliaths investing huge amounts of time and money thinking up ways to appeal directly to children right over parents' heads". I just say No. Try rolling that word over your tongue: No. It's far more effective than having the FCC to ban advertisements for sugary cereals or to micromanage how much embedded advertising shall be permitted at NeoPets.
The FCC receives many complaints about "indecent" broadcasts. 99.8% of all their complaints come from a single source: The "Parents Television Council". These trolls pour over every disgusting episode of every sleazy TV show, looking for things to hate and writing them up as complaints to the government. Seems like a fun job, in an ultra-geeky obsessed-trollish sort of way.
[Insert segue here] Yet another book I received as a Winter Holidays gift was An Underground Education, by Richard Zacks. It contains a lot of "forgotten history" I did not know, plus a few tidbits I've seen before (such as Edison's attempt to make "Westinghouse" a verb meaning "to kill by electrocution"). In general it seems this book is a truth-teller. A good many of the illustrations would horrify the Parents Television Council types. I thought of all the fun they were having with their VCRs, analyzing tapes of TV shows, and decided to try my paw at analyzing Zacks' choice of illustrations. Here is a table I came up with. The table seems rather "busy"; is there a clearer way to present this information? Also, I thought it important to use Unicode font-symbols instead of image-graphics, so the table would scale properly when you change your font-size, but Unicode is somewhat lacking in appropriate symbols for lechery and debauchery! I scanned the book multiple times because I kept changing my mind about the set of features I wanted to catalog
Creating that table took days of spare time, days during which kid #1 would look over my shoulder and ask what I was doing, why was I doing it, why did I have a file called underground-pictures-analysis.html, why did I stop working on it whenever she looked over my shoulder, etc.? One of the Amazon reviewers says "I cannot even begin to imagine giving this book to my father..." Well I'm a father and I received this book! And I left it lying around the house where (for all I know) one or more kids has flipped through it-but I'm not going to present it to them as a book they should read (unlike, say, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, which I have recommended).
So now I have this table. Now I can confidently spout statistics like "16% of all the pictures in that book involve nudity" and "8% involve dismemberment". Now what do I do with it?
I am a married parent. The proposed changes will not attract me. I do not blame "the culture" for my inability to get my kids to behave. Their disdain for workbooks and school essays is normal childhood short-sightedness; trying to blame it on "wardrobe malfunctions" at sporting events is just a cop-out. My kids engage in sassy back-talk, not because they play violent computer games like Grand Theft Auto, but because they are *my* offspring. I gave them my genes and my day-to-day behavior to copy and this is what they came up with. There is no one to blame but myself.
I do not find it difficult to "resist the onslaught of corporate Goliaths investing huge amounts of time and money thinking up ways to appeal directly to children right over parents' heads". I just say No. Try rolling that word over your tongue: No. It's far more effective than having the FCC to ban advertisements for sugary cereals or to micromanage how much embedded advertising shall be permitted at NeoPets.
The FCC receives many complaints about "indecent" broadcasts. 99.8% of all their complaints come from a single source: The "Parents Television Council". These trolls pour over every disgusting episode of every sleazy TV show, looking for things to hate and writing them up as complaints to the government. Seems like a fun job, in an ultra-geeky obsessed-trollish sort of way.
[Insert segue here] Yet another book I received as a Winter Holidays gift was An Underground Education, by Richard Zacks. It contains a lot of "forgotten history" I did not know, plus a few tidbits I've seen before (such as Edison's attempt to make "Westinghouse" a verb meaning "to kill by electrocution"). In general it seems this book is a truth-teller. A good many of the illustrations would horrify the Parents Television Council types. I thought of all the fun they were having with their VCRs, analyzing tapes of TV shows, and decided to try my paw at analyzing Zacks' choice of illustrations. Here is a table I came up with. The table seems rather "busy"; is there a clearer way to present this information? Also, I thought it important to use Unicode font-symbols instead of image-graphics, so the table would scale properly when you change your font-size, but Unicode is somewhat lacking in appropriate symbols for lechery and debauchery! I scanned the book multiple times because I kept changing my mind about the set of features I wanted to catalog
Creating that table took days of spare time, days during which kid #1 would look over my shoulder and ask what I was doing, why was I doing it, why did I have a file called underground-pictures-analysis.html, why did I stop working on it whenever she looked over my shoulder, etc.? One of the Amazon reviewers says "I cannot even begin to imagine giving this book to my father..." Well I'm a father and I received this book! And I left it lying around the house where (for all I know) one or more kids has flipped through it-but I'm not going to present it to them as a book they should read (unlike, say, The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, which I have recommended).
So now I have this table. Now I can confidently spout statistics like "16% of all the pictures in that book involve nudity" and "8% involve dismemberment". Now what do I do with it?