Education Divested

September 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here in New Jersey, as in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the governor has been attacking educators and cutting education budgets, and educators have been doing their best to fight back. 

In France too, professors are trying to win public support against the “depouillement” of education.  The word literally means stripping or skinning, leaving something bare, and it carries the same connotations as the English “fleecing.”  So the profs have posed, depouillé, for a calendar. 

The writing on the blackboard carries a message appropriate both to the academic area and to the protest.  The double meaning gets lost in a literal translation.  “Let’s do economics, not budget-cutting.”

The decreasing function in math is more obvious.

As you might expect, the conservative reaction laments that by doing something that might win public opinion to their side, the profs “dévalorisaient la profession.”  Of course, if you really want to “devalue” something, you  reduce the money you allocate to it, which is what the government is doing. 


View and download all twelve months here, all safe for work.  The calendar begins with Septembre 2011, so you’d better hurry.

HT:  Maîtresse

Chic Cliques (or is it Chick Clicks?)

September 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sara Wakefield mentioned on Facebook that Kindergarten Moms’ night was “remarkably like high school where I did okay with all groups but fit in with none.”  (I took note because at the time,  I was just about to leave for my own high school reunion.)

The social structure of high school, it seems, is all about cliques – freaks and geeks,* jocks and emos, preps, goths, cool kids, et. al.  But there’s a paradox here.  Whenever I ask students about cliques in high school, they all say pretty much what Sara said.  (I mean, that's what they say once they figure out that when I say “clique” – rhymes with “antique” or “unique” – I really mean “click.”)  I ask them to jot down a list of the cliques at their school.  Some make longer lists, some shorter, but nobody sits there with a blank sheet of paper. Then, when I ask them which they were in, it turns out that nobody was a member of any clique.  Instead, like Sara, they affiliated loosely with many of the groups, or they had friends in several different cliques.

But wait a minute. You can’t have a group without members.  So if nobody is a member of any clique, then cliques don’t exist.  How can everyone see all these cliques when nobody in the school belongs to a clique?

The paradox stems from two different definitions or ways of thinking about cliques – as an actual group, and as a label.  When we think about other people, we think of the clique as both – group and label.  But when we think about ourselves, we think of the clique primarily as a label.  And while we are very willing to apply a label to other people, we resist labeling ourselves. 

Attribution theory has a similar take on “personality.”  If we are given a list of personality traits – from Affable to Zany –  and asked to say whether they apply to some person we know, we have no trouble going through the list and checking Yes or No for each trait. But when asked if those traits apply to us, we balk and go for the column marked “depends on the situation.”  As one of the attribution pioneers (Walter Mischel?) put it, apparently a personality is something that other people have. 

The same self/other difference shapes our ideas about cliques – that they are something that other people belong to – and for the same reason: the clique label, like the personality trait, is too limiting.  To say that I am “introverted” implies that this is how I am.  Always.  But “always” doesn’t feel right.  For one thing, I know that sometimes I can act in a very outgoing way. And for another, if I assign myself that label, then I can never act effusively and still be true to who I “really” am.

Similarly, to label myself as “one of the cool kids,” flattering though that may seem, limits me to that characteristic – coolness – when in fact I know there are times when I feel very uncool.  And besides, I sometimes hang around with kids who are not in the cool group.  (I’m using “I” in the hypothetical, generic sense. In reality, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the cool kids.)

The distinction probably even applies to official groups like the football team.  If you’re not a member, you might think of them as “the jocks” with all the connotations that the word carries. But I suspect that your local linebacker is more reluctant to apply that label to himself. There’s no doubt that he’s on the team. But he probably doesn’t think of himself as a jock.   

So while cliques have a certain reality embodied in real people, they are also cognitive categories that we construct and use to simplify and make sense of the social life of school.  Perhaps it’s equally useful to think of cliques not so much as actual groups of people but as ways of being that real people slide into and out of. And if any of what I’m saying here is accurate, how might it apply outside the high school microcosm – for example, to the concept of social class?

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* At about this same time when Sara and I were thinking about high school, Mrs. Castelli’s  students – actual high school students –  were thinking and blogging about “Freaks and Geeks.”

danah boyd on Bullying asTrue Drama

September 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Long ago, David Matza contrasted two styles of studying deviance –  “corrective” and “appreciative.”  The corrective approach is moralistic.  It applies a prior set of values and shows how the subject under review fails to measure up.   It asks, “Why do these people do these bad things, and how can we get them to stop?”  The appreciative approach asks, “How does the world look from the subject’s point of view?”

That was the point of my post about sociologists in Las Vegas.  But if you want a better example, read the op-ed (here) on bullying in today’s Times by danah boyd* and Alice Marwick.  While most writing and research on bullying falls squarely in the corrective camp, boyd and Marwick actually talk with teenagers and listen to them.  A lot.  Mostly online.

 Given the public interest in cyberbullying, we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain. . . .
While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as “drama.” . . . .

At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them.

You should really read the whole article.   

boyd has been writing about social media and “drama” for at least five years.   Now that she’s in the newspaper of record, maybe her ideas and observations will get the attention they deserve.

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*The Times insists on initial caps, the first time I’ve ever seen her name printed that way.

False Equivalence

September 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

Do Democrats and Republicans have a similar lack of respect for science?  Alex Berezow seems to think so.  The title of his op-ed in USA Today  is “GOP might be anti-science, but so are Democrats.”

I hope that others will point out the false equivalence.  For evidence of  Democrats’ anti-science, Berezow cites mostly fringe groups like PETA, which objects to scientific research on animals, and fringe issues like vaccination.  According to Berezow, many people who oppose vaccination are Democrats.  True perhaps, but these positions are held by only a small minority of Democratic voters.  And neither of these positions has been espoused by any of the party leaders.* 

Compare that to Republican anti-science.  Most of the leading GOP presidential hopefuls, now and in the previous election, have voiced their skepticism on evolution and global warming.  Only Huntsman and Romney have hinted that they agree with the near–unanimous opinions of scientists in these fields. 

Maybe the candidates take these anti-science positions because the people whose votes they want – the GOP faithful – also reject the scientific consensus.

Here are the results of a recent Gallup poll   that asked which position  “Comes closest to your views.”

• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10 000 years or so
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process

Half of all Republicans think that humans have been around for only 10,000 years.

The Republican base is also much more dubious about global warming than are Democrats.

The graph goes only to 2008, and beliefs about global warming since then Americans’ have become somewhat more skeptical about the issue, but I am certain that Republicans are still well above Democrats on the chart.

As for the anti-vaccine crowd, Berezow sees them as mostly Prius-driving, organic-vegan liberals.    Maybe so.  I have a scientist friend whose son runs an organic food co-op, and she is furious at his decision not to have his kids (her grandchildren) vaccinated.  (FWIW, she drives a Prius.)  But is there more systematic evidence of this liberal/anti-vaccine connection?  Here’s Berezow’s proof.

a public health official once noted that rates of vaccine non-compliance tend to be higher in places where Whole Foods is popular — and 89% of Whole Foods stores are located in counties that favored Barack Obama in 2008. . . . . With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Areas with Whole Foods have both more vaccine skeptics and more Obama voters.  The thread of the logic is a bit thin (how big a difference is “tends to be higher”?), and it runs the risk of the ecological fallacy.  But it sounded right to me – my friend’s son lives in Vermont – and 75% (three states out of four) is pretty impressive evidence.

But there are 46 other states plus DC, and I wondered if they too followed the pattern.   So I looked up the CDC data on the  percentages of vaccination refusal for non-medical reasons in each state (here).  I also got data on how Democratic the state was – the margin of victory or loss for Obama in 2008.** 

Sure enough, the top three – Washington, Vermont, and Oregon – are all on the Obama side of the line, though it’s worth noting that in Washington, vaccine exemption was as common in the conservative eastern part of the state (near Idaho, which also has a high exemption rate and was strongly for McCain) as it was in the more liberal western counties.   And of the states with 3% or more taking non-medical exemptions from vaccination, eight were for Obama, four for McCain. But overall, the correlation (r = 0.12) is not overwhelming.   And even in the most anti-vaccine, pro-Whole Foods states like Washington and Vermont, nearly 95% of parent s had their kindergartners vaccinated.  That’s hardly convincing evidence that Democrats are anti-science.   Compare that with the 50% of Republicans (and 75% of their presidential hopefuls) who think evolution is a hoax or at best “just a theory.”

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*Berezow notes that seven Democratic senators (and one Republican) wrote a letter to the FDA “threatening to halt approval of a genetically modified salmon.”  But he implies that their position had more to do with money than anti-science.  They were from the salmony Northwest, while the company seeking approval is in Massachusetts.

** The CDC had no data for Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wyoming.