Midweek linkery

[oursin]

Theme going on here:

Joan Bakewell explains why we need mature women on our screens:
One entire segment of the public - women over 55 - never see their like on serious programming. They may be part of the content - victims of crime, sufferers from disease or lottery winners, but they are never there as the professional equivalent of older men.

Comments

[sartorias]

Ah, good links.

[serrana]

I dunno, it reads to me like Weir is committing the "school is for socialization" fallacy, which...I have long been skeptical about.

And the "I'm not an elitist, the rest of you are elitists and should feel guilty" attitude is one which I have encountered locally, and am...increasingly resistant to.

[cassandre]

The elitist argument worried me too. Surely it's not fear of the plebs that would motivate Guardian readers to send their kids to private school, but rather academic concerns? Weir does touch on those concerns too, but in a rather cursory way.

[serrana]

We're going through a lot of controversy locally about gifted-and-talented vs. elitist vs. racist vs. etc. etc. everything under the sun...and while I don't doubt that there are people involved who are motivated by (1) racism and (2) an exaggerated idea of their children's needs, um...I'm getting a bit tired of being told I'm a snob because I think one should go to school to learn, not to have state-sponsored childcare or exercises in institutionalized socialization (both of which may be valuable, in various ways and to various constituencies, but neither of which I find tremendously compelling at the present time).

So I'll admit that I am, right now, reading through that lens. Mai biases, let me show you them. *GRIN*

[cassandre]

I think one should go to school to learnHear, hear. For all sorts of reasons I'm hoping that the local primary school across the street will work out for my Charlie (he starts next year), but I recoil at the notion that children must attend School X in order to reflect their parents' politics. Surely it's all about the particular child's needs, the particular context, etc, etc? I will do everything in my power to help my kid thrive in state school, but if s/he isn't thriving, I'm going to explore all the other options too - that's my responsibility as a parent

[intertext]

Thank you for the Churchill article! I'm teaching her in two different classes this term :)

Good grief. Alex Kingston too old for ER? Bleah.

[green_knight]

I caught a piece of Radio 4 the other day mentioning that in the Simsons, the ration of female-to-male fleshed out characters was 1:8, and thus worse than the usual ratio of 1:2.

That brought home how little television I watch. I never noticed. Then again, the book I write right now has many more males than females, so maybe I am not the right person to ask. It recently heartened me to come across casting calls on a job website - and while there was *some* stereotyping going on, there was a nice amount of 'bank manager, any ethnicity middle-aged, plumber, any ethnicity' going on.

[rachelmanija]

I think Caryl Churchill is the greatest living playwright whose work I'm familiar with. The Berkeley Rep production of Mad Forest was as much of an eye-opener to me as my entire tenure in UCLA's graduate playwriting program.