Comments | cellio: [SCA] Pennsic policy games

cellio

[SCA] Pennsic policy games

Jul 07, 2010 09:05

The big new bit of stupidity -- this time not from the SCA board of directors -- is a new Pennsic rule that minors, meaning people under 18, cannot attend classes without being accompanied by an adult. I guess it's just too dangerous for a 16-year-old to learn Italian dance or a 17-year-old to learn how to spin wool, or something. This is totally ( Read more... )

rants, pennsic, children, sca

Comments 25

siderea July 7 2010, 16:54:04 UTC

I'm not saying people need to Stand Up And Do Something Now, because I don't know what we can do.

Strike.

Stop being complicit in the abusive system.

By participating in Pennsic U, one is saying by one's actions that getting to have one's fun is more important that one's principles.

Start canceling classes now with politely formal letters explaining you can no longer in good conscience endorse or support PennU, and you, collectively, have a chance to repeal it by War.

cellio July 7 2010, 23:36:44 UTC

Thank you; this is the clue I needed to get past the feeling of helplessness. (I didn't mean "I don't want to act" but, rather, "I don't know how to act in this case".)

I wish I had signed up to teach this year so that I could withdraw my class from the university and move it to a private venue. But I can encourage others to do so. I wonder what kind of participation level would be needed to have an effect. (I am, alas, not optimistic about SCAdians being willing to act, having lived through a much bigger fiasco with very few people seeming to care. But that is not a reason to not try anyway.)

osewalrus July 7 2010, 19:07:22 UTC

I'm inclined to agree with everything here. I have been toying with a blog post that outlines the problem with this reaction -- compounded by the 'they are our friends/volunteers/good people so they must have a reason which I will now speculate about' or 'since they are friends/volunterers/good people we should not criticize until we know All The Fact which they control and refuse to communicate -- but real life requires I devote energy elsewhere.

I do disagree about children being "small people who do not yet know very much." At least as far as current theory runs, people's brains do change as they get older, and it isn't just getting more information. The essence of the complaint is correct here, however. There is nothing about a 13 year old that requires treating him or her as a potentially dangerous beast tolerated for the sake of others as opposed to actual people capable of learning.

cellio July 7 2010, 23:40:04 UTC

The pets-versus-small-people thing is actually more nuanced in my mind than I said here. I think they're both, at different stages of development. A newborn is a pet that knows how to cry (not talk, yet). A developmentally-typical eight-year-old (or so) is a small person who doesn't know very much (I don't just mean facts but also behavioral norms). Somewhere in between a transition occurs; my gut feeling is "around kindergarten age" but I'm not in the best position to judge. It doesn't seem terribly applicable to this case in particular; pets that can talk are unlikely to be interested in attending classes.

osewalrus July 8 2010, 00:05:14 UTC

It's multiple transitions, but they happen through teenage-hood and early 20s as well.

There are a bunch of huge cognitive leaps that kick in at various stages, although they vary enormously even among adults. Some kick in very young. For example, the idea of "object permanence" does not generally kick in until about age 3 or so. "Object permanence" is the idea that an object as permanence. This is why the "peek-a-boo" game works on babies. Babies don't know that your face is still there when it's covered. It's something they learn not simply through experience, but because at some point they develop mental capacity to actually store, absorb, and remember the specific experience and generalize it out to all experiences ( ... )

galeran July 7 2010, 20:47:54 UTC

Ugh. Is there any information on the rationale behind all of this, or even whether any particular incident is triggering this. Speaking as someone who has taught and taken classes at Pennsic, the A&S area during the day has got to be one of the safest possible parts of the war, and potentially one of the most interesting to the class of teenager that is at the war because they love the Society (as opposed to having been dragged there by their parents). I'd hate to think about a 15 year old not being able to join in a class of interest because the rest of their family had other commitments at that time.

cellio July 7 2010, 23:46:38 UTC

They have been quite unwilling to share any rationale for this.

Yeah, the A&S area is way safer than random private camps in secluded areas, just to pick one example. The idea that a teen can't go to a well-attended class on Viking clothing, but can go hang out at Vlad's until dark, is broken. What behavior are we trying to encourage here? I want event attendees of all ages to feel welcome, not ostracized. The very young require special handling, and all parents need to be held accountable for the behavior of their children (up to evicting them from events if they are persistently negligent), but that's nothing special about the SCA -- the same should apply in any public or communal place. Yet the folks in charge are trying to make rules way more restrictive than those of any place else I can think of. It's probably a CYA thing (fear of liability) without much regard to the effect it has on the people involved ( ... )

galeran July 8 2010, 05:45:53 UTC

It may be tactics and mitigation, but it is also wisdom and practicality.

grouchyoldcoot July 8 2010, 03:24:20 UTC

And pretty soon, everyone is wearing their underwear on the outside. "We need to see your underwear for unspecified reasons, so all outer clothes are to be left home." "What? That's crazy!" "Geez, if our absolutely necessary request is so burdensome for you, how about this..."

cellio July 8 2010, 22:58:08 UTC

I thought the TSA got first crack at policies like that. :-)

zevabe July 8 2010, 19:26:13 UTC

A) I am happy to have friends in the SCA who are smarter than I am.

B) I'll be attending Pennsic for the first time this year (Sun-Fri of War Week). How do people not camping together generally arrange meetings, as I'd be delighted to see you again? I'll be with the Barony of Carolingia, as my friend with whom I am going is Carolingian, and there are some other kosher-keepers camping there.

cellio July 8 2010, 23:07:27 UTC

Cool! I'd enjoy getting together with you, too.

These sorts of things tend to be a little haphazard unless everyone involved is organized in advance. While this may be changing, I think most of us still don't carry cell phones there. :-) There's no central message board, alas, so you look for people in their camps or where you think they might be, and if you don't know what people look like the latter can be challenging. Here are some ways to find me:

- in Polyhymnia, a sub-camp of Debatable Lands, on block N10, which you can find on the map or by going to the Serengeti (that'll mean something to you once you're there) and scanning the landscape for this house. We have a message board in camp in case the person you're looking for isn't home ( ... )