The Key Ingredient to Fixing a Failing School
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Chattanooga All-Girls Charter School's Path to Success - The Atlantic - 0 views
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More than 90 percent of its students are black or Latino. Nearly all are low income. The school’s brochure says it was founded “to improve educational opportunities for low-income, underserved girls in Hamilton County.”
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And critics can point to research published in Science magazine that suggests single-sex schools don’t foster better academic outcomes and accuse charters of pulling resources away from neighborhood schools.
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Elaine Swafford was hired as CGLA’s executive director in 2012 and given less than a year to transform the then-failing school, which had launched several years earlier as the state’s first single-gender public charter school and then tanked.
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Math proficiency was in the single digits. Few students had solid prospects for the future.
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. Last year, the school achieved a 93 percent graduation rate and nearly every graduate went on to college.
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Over the last decade, new research has increasingly suggested that strong school leaders are a crucial component of success, and even that turning around failing schools is virtually impossible without a strong leader at the helm.
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On an adjoining wall, hundreds of magnets bearing individual names track each girl’s proficiency in a range of subjects, from below basic to advanced.
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When she took over, half of the school’s teachers turned over after she informed the staff they would need to reapply for their jobs.
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Swafford’s way of thinking is based on the idea that if she can’t deliver the well-rounded education both in and out of the classroom that middle-class kids get, her students will never catch up to their more affluent peers
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Each student at CGLA is assigned an adult mentor and Swafford recently hired a college-access counselor to help students work through the federal financial-aid application and to stay connected with recent graduates
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After she recently discovered that 85 of the school’s 350 students don’t have internet access at home, Swafford set about securing a hotspot for each wifi-less child.
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The school receives some extra funding from the government because it serves such a high number of low-income students, but it’s not nearly enough to pay for all of the programs the school offers, so Swafford has gotten very good at raising money
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Twenty-nine percent of the school’s budget is from fundraising, she told me, which helps fill a $4,500-per-student gap in funding.
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Teachers are expected to believe that every child is capable of success and then help them achieve it by doing whatever it takes, regardless of any obstacles
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The school recently implemented “grit” grading, and, Swafford acknowledged unapologetically, “everybody’s not happy about it.”
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“grit” grading
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shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22
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U.S. History Has Plenty of Good and Bad. Here's How to See Both. - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...ching-good-and-bad-11670111812
psychology research paradox intention history values memo mind cognitive bias
shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22
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I believe that most of us are willing to broaden our understanding of our country’s history to look at both the best and the worst. But we often can’t—not for intellectual reasons but because of unrecognized psychological ones. Understanding those psychological roadblocks is a formidable challenge. But it’s crucial to do so if we want to get past them.
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Let’s begin with the four reasons our minds sometimes make it hard to have a more honest, nuanced view of our history.
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First, our minds tend to play down our wrongdoing from the past.
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Our minds are asymmetric judges, applying harsher moral judgment to present and future transgressions than past ones. It is as if the past becomes blurry. We even tend to blame the victim of a past event more than we blame the victim of a future one.
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Third, our minds struggle with the negative emotions that our country’s complicated past gives rise to.
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Research shows we are drawn to a sentimental form of history—nostalgia—which leads us to feel more loved, more protected, and even more competent in our ability to start and maintain relationships.
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Nostalgia is often tied to the identities that we care most deeply about, such as our family or national identity. And, nostalgia is big business—in fashion, advertising, music and tourism, among other things.
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Second, our minds tend to overplay sweet memories that favor our ancestors from the past.
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When we learn about historical atrocities, particularly ones that expose our limited knowledge, contradict the narratives we believe, or implicate our own ancestors, we might experience shame, guilt, disbelief or anger. In response, we have a natural desire to pull away from the new knowledge and perhaps even refute it, rather than try to better understand it.
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Fourth, our minds want to pick either a beautiful or a brutal narrative.
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Contradictions, though, pocket our history, beginning with forefathers who had an extraordinary vision of equality, and simultaneously enslaved other humans
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Our minds resist the paradoxes that characterize our country’s past. It’s so much less psychologically painful to pick one path than to grapple with both ideas at the same time.
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Tools to useWhile the past is in the past, we can address the psychological challenge, however formidable, in the present. We have tools that will help, and I anticipate (and hope) that our debates will take on more psychological nuance as we shift from arguments over whether to explore our history more fully to how to do it.
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For example, research shows the importance of returning to our values again and again as a way of inoculating us from setbacks
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The daily arguments over curfews or messy rooms or study habits can cause us to shut down (“Do whatever you want”) or double down (“I’m your parent and you’ll do what I say”). Instead, it’s helpful to remind ourselves and our children that a parent has three jobs—to teach them, to protect them and to love them. Just doing that can ground us, and enable us to stay engaged, resilient and calm.
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Similarly, when we confront a historical event, it can help to reflect on questions like, “Which American ideals do you most value?” and, “How do you hope others see your country?
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You can even write out your responses, share them with others, and reread what you have written. Think of it as a values booster shot
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Say, for instance, that you deeply value freedom. Keeping this value in your thoughts can help you notice the ways in which this country has delivered on the promise of freedom in important ways. But it also enables you to consider the disheartening realizations when those freedoms are not upheld.
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esearch by Wendy Smith and others shows that we are capable of embracing paradox, rather than rejecting it. It doesn’t always come naturally. But we simply need to give ourselves permission to allow multiple truths to coexist.
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In a paradox mind-set, we allow both of these things to be true. When both are true, we can challenge our either/or assumptions, and be more creative in finding solutions.
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When you spot the paradox, allow both things to be true and observe if your mind shifts from solving the unsolvable puzzle (reconciling how can both of these things be true) to more deeply processing the knowledge that you may otherwise have pushed away. This is the greater resilience and creativity that comes with a paradox mind-set.
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We simply need to accept that the formidable challenge will require us to be intentional in our approach.
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In doing so, we become what I call “gritty patriots.” Psychologist Angela Duckworth defines grit as “passion and perseverance in pursuit of a meaningful, long-term goal.” Love of country is not something we are entitled to; it is something we work toward, with grit.
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Trump, hillbillies and race - The Washington Post - 0 views
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We all now know that Trump’s rise has been fueled by the alienation and anger of the country’s white working class. That cohort has seen its incomes stagnate, cities crumble and dreams vanish. But Vance gets underneath the data and shows us what these impersonal forces mean to actual people. He describes the abandoned children, the poor work habits, the drug abuse, the violence, the rage. But he does it with sympathy and love.
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For Vance, the problem is ultimately cultural, one of values, attitudes and mores. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he writes, and “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what can we do to make things better.”
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His own life story — coming from low expectations, dysfunctional relationships and persistent poverty to end up a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley executive — demonstrates that grit can conquer all.
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But Vance got some help along the way. He tells us that his public schools were decent enough and, when he got motivated, his teachers helped him succeed. He notes that his trajectory changed when he was admitted to Ohio State University, which he was able to attend because of generous federal loans and grants.
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the turning point in the book and his life takes place when he decides to enlist in the Marine Corps. He describes how the armed forces taught him discipline, hard work, high expectations and good values.
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This is federal bureaucracy engaged in shaping mores and morals, the ultimate example of government as nanny. When so much of what government does is under siege, it is odd that Vance seems to minimize the role that government can play in providing opportunities for others like him.
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The other, larger gap in Vance’s book is race. He speaks about the causes of the anxiety and pain of the white working class, but he describes the causes almost entirely in economic terms.
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there is surely something else at work here — the sense that people who look and sound very different are rising up.
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Vance touches on this sideways, when speaking about the almost pathological suspicion his hillbillies have for Barack Obama. Vance explains that it is because of the president’s accent — “clean, perfect, neutral” — his urban background, his success in the meritocracy, his reliability as a father. “And,” one wants to whisper to Vance, “because he’s black .”
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The white working class has always derived some of its status because there was a minority underclass below it. In his seminal work, “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Edmund Morgan argues that even before the revolution, the introduction of slavery helped dampen class conflict within the white population.
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The rage that is fueling the Trump phenomenon is not just about stagnant wages. It is about a way of life under siege, and it risks producing a “politics of cultural despair.” That phrase was coined by Fritz Stern to describe Germany a century ago.
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The key to avoiding that fate is not a series of public policies — whether tariffs or tax credits — but enlightened politics, meaning leadership that does not prey on people’s fears and phobias.
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What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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success culture ethnicity insecurity superiority impulse control psychology values
shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14
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It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
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These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
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Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
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Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
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Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.
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The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
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Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
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By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
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Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
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MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.
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while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
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The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
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the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success
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The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
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research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
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Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
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it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
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We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.
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That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
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Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
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In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
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Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.
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Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.
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The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age
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Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to
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At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.
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success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies
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Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
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Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
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It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
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But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating
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Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
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Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts
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The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.
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Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
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THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
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The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.
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It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
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research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.
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The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
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But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.
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the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
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Only the Dead documentary: Michael Ware's experiences in Iraq - 0 views
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but after surviving a beheading attempt and witnessing true moments of horror, he began to feel complicit in the violence around him.
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The Australian journalist is the only war correspondent to survive being kidnapped by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and became obsessed with its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He has opened up about his experiences in the film Only The Dead, which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival.
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He now believes it was the first-ever attack by what the world now knows as the Islamic State.
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“It was frightening. I’d surrendered myself to these guerillas, men the Americans were hunting and I had found, not knowing if they were friends or if they were going to kill me. I guess I knew it was insane, but I couldn’t help myself,”
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They also began filming beheadings on camera, a tactic that has become one of the signatures of Islamic State.
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When al-Zarqawi wanted to declare his arrival on the global stage he released a video through Ware. Other insurgents also gave him videos filmed during their actions. This was before the rise of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
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“But it was at this moment, where there’s two of them arguing about how to work my camera, that my insurgent escort finally piped up and stepped in and said that they could not kill me. He said that there will be a turf war between our two groups if you kill this man because he’s our guest, and it was only through gritted teeth that Zarqawi’s men literally pushed me back and I became the only Westerner who ever survives Zarqawi’s organisation.”
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While the Iraqi Prime Minister has made comments this week that Islamic State did not start in Iraq, but in Syria, Ware said this was “absolutely wrong”.“We of the West removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, we presented a new platform for global jihad, right there in the Middle East. And the man who stepped into that breach was the founder of the Islamic State, a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”
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He said that the only way to regain control of Ramadi was for the local population and the Sunni tribes to rise up again as they did in 2006 and 2007 but this was almost certainly not going to happen. “It’s not a battle that can be won,” he said.
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“A soldier once wrote that there’s certain dark chambers of the heart that once opened can never be closed again. And when you’re living that human experience in war, which is stretched to its extreme, you start to find these places within your own self,” Ware told Lateline.
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“In so many ways, the experience of going to war is humbling. It brings you a whole new perspective to life. I will never see the world the same way again, and in so many ways, that’s a privilege. That from now on, every day is a gift, for me and for so many of my friends. And I wouldn’t trade that. But it takes work to get there, as any soldier will tell you. Often, the homecoming is harder than the war itself.”
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Class Prejudice Resurgent - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the nature of racism has changed. There has been a migration away from prejudice based on genetics to prejudice based on class.
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In 18th- and 19th-century Britain, there was a division between “respectable” society and those who lived in slums that were sometimes known as rookeries
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Today we once again have a sharp social divide between people who live in the “respectable” meritocracy and those who live beyond it
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In one world almost everybody you meet has at least been to college, and people have very little contact with features that are sometimes a part of the other world: prison, meth, payday loans, a flowering of nonmarriage family forms. In one world, people assume they can control their destinies
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Widening class distances produce class prejudice, classism. This is a prejudice based on visceral attitudes about competence. People in the “respectable” class have meritocratic virtues: executive function, grit, a capacity for delayed gratification. The view about those in the untouchable world is that they are short on these things.
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this view metastasizes into a vicious, intellectually lazy stereotype. Before long, animalistic imagery is used to describe these human beings.
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classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse at skin color.
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Every civil-rights issue is also an economic and social issue. Classism intertwines with racism.
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ultimately, we don’t need a common conversation; we need a common project. If the nation works together to improve social mobility for the poor of all races, through projects like President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, then social distance will decline, classism will decline and racial prejudice will obliquely decline as well.
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Opinion | I'm for Affirmative Action. Can You Change My Mind? - The New York Times - 0 views
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For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true
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In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”
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over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).
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it does seem plausible: If you think it’s wrong to discriminate against minority applicants, shouldn’t you also think it’s wrong to discriminate against majority (white) applicants? If so, you shouldn’t support affirmative action, since it allows admitting minorities rather than whites precisely because of their race.
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So the question becomes, what purpose justifies preferring minority applicants? What problem do we need affirmative action to solve?
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The straightforward answer is the underrepresentation of minorities in elite colleges and universities, where the percentage of minorities is far below their percentage of the population. So, for example, blacks make up 15 percent of the college-age population but only 6 percent of those enrolled at the top 100 private and public schools. There’s little hope of improvement without further action, since the figures have scarcely changed since 1980
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The underrepresentation does not seem due to admissions committees’ prejudices, conscious or unconscious, that blind them to the objective credentials of minority applicants. Those rejected have lower test scores and less impressive academic and extracurricular achievements.
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Some argue that these standard criteria are themselves unfair and that other factors, such as strength of character, are at least as important. Writing at The Washington Post, the Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and the venture capitalist Ted Dintersmith suggest that it may be “more about grit than GPAs.” But judgment about moral and emotional qualities can be highly subjective, and there’s no reason to think that over all, minority students are superior in these qualities.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggests an answer in her response to Chief Justice Roberts’s famous comment: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.
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The last step, then, in the defense of affirmation action in college admissions is an appeal to the moral demand to compensate for the damage done to by minorities by a long history of racial discrimination. Sotomayor elaborates: “Race matters in part because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process. … Race also matters because of persistent racial inequality in society — inequality that cannot be ignored and that has produced stark socioeconomic disparities …. Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”
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he connection would have to lie, as Sotomayor suggests, in the present-day residues, the stubborn structural effects of centuries of mistreatment, gradually diminishing but still an undeserved burden.
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The burden shows up in both economic and social terms. The wealth (total value of home, savings, investments, etc.) of middle-class white families is about four times that of middle-class black families. This gives white families a decided edge in their ability to survive financial setbacks and resources to provide a better education for their children
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Similarly, due to restrictive real estate practices, wealthier blacks still often live in poorer neighborhoods than comparable whites do, reducing educational and cultural opportunities
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There are also psychological effects: Black children live in a world where their very appearance presents them as “others,” often objects of either uneasy suspicion or patronizing sympathy.
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So it’s hard to deny that blacks as a whole face a distinctive set of disadvantages that are primarily due to the still effective legacy of slavery.
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But why think affirmative action will be an appropriate remedy?
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Chief Justice Roberts and others suggest that simply knowing that they are at an elite school in large part because of their race will increase minority students’ alienation and self-doubt. To this, one common response is that athletes and legacy admissions don’t seem bothered by such concerns. But they at least can see their admission as due to their own or their families’ distinctive achievements.
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why shouldn’t black students be proud to see themselves as very talented people who are a vanguard in one small effort to undo the evils of their history? And shouldn’t they expect that their children and grandchildren will move further and further toward a world where that history will eventually become truly past?
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Britain needs a day of reckoning. Brexit will provide it | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | Th... - 0 views
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Brexit has revealed an unaddressed xenophobia – and the immigration system that stoked it – on the right and the left
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It has laid bare our political class, squirming pathetically and uselessly under the micro-scrutiny of Brexit. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, Brexit rolled over the log and we saw what crawled ou
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The referendum aftermath has exposed an exceptionalism verging on delusion. It is no coincidence that Churchill’s legacy has become a matter of public debate. It is an argument that reflects Britain’s inner turmoil on whether it is uniquely apart from the rest of the world, or cannot thrive on its own. It is a soul-searching, long-overdue questioning of the conventional account of Britain’s history. Is the country especially endowed with that historical grit and determination that helped to vanquish its enemies in two world wars and run an empire; or is it a country that ran that empire by means of brutality, and only won those wars as part of an alliance
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Can we go it alone? Did we ever? Are we, as the heavily memed That Mitchell and Webb Look quote goes, the baddies?
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it is, ironically, Britain’s global profile that has diminished its ability to focus on internal nation-building. “The British state is a machine for running and exploring the world,” he said. “It doesn’t work very well when it comes to the business of the modern nation.”
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inally exposed is the unbridgeable gap, both economic and cultural, between centre and peripheries, between the winners and the losers. There is a double nihilism about Brexit. There are many who feel like they have nothing to lose from a no-deal scenario, while also savouring the prospect of trouble ahead. This is what happens when a country is fed a diet of crisis as glamorous film reel. You cannot fight this appetite for martyrdom with technical arguments about processing times at Dover: these perverse fantasies can only be vanquished by an actual crisis
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From the beginning, Brexit created its own momentum. Once the question was asked – in or out? – all the grievances, justified or not, could be projected on it, with “in” being widely seen as a vote for the status quo. Within this frame, nothing else matters – not economic predictions, not warnings about medicines running out, nor threats of the need to stockpile foods. The remain campaign could not have done anything differently: it lost the moment the question was asked.
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maybe, in the end, we will finally believe that immigration is necessary for an economy and an NHS to function, that the inequality between the south-east and the rest of Britain is unsustainable, that our political class is over-pedigreed and under-principled. We might even believe that other crises, such as climate change, are real, too.
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Maybe, in the end, the country outside Europe will find its stride by confronting its issues rather than blaming them on others, and forging its own way. But there is only one way to find out. What a shame Brexit is that path
The Navy's USS Gabrielle Giffords and the Future of Work - The Atlantic - 0 views
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skills lifelong learning specialization inclusion expertise grit conscientiousness multitasking knowledge Research agility navy
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10,000 UK coronavirus deaths: don't forget that this was preventable | Nesrine Malik | ... - 0 views
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uk pandemic response accountability government responsibility
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The UK is now surpassing the apocalyptic tolls we fixated on just two weeks ago. The same tragedies are unfolding across our country
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But the sense of distress with which the Italian scenario was reported and received in the UK is strangely absent. Missing too is the urgent need to understand why this is happening.
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Not only did the UK have the experience of Italy play out before the virus hit its own shores, illustrating clearly the measures that needed to be taken, it had explicit warnings from Italians spelling out the pitfalls to be avoided.
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Every report showing the scale of the crisis should be framed in the language of accountability and anchored in the premise of preventability.
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With all the benefits of hindsight, the government dragged its feet, wasted precious time and infused the issue with a sense of British exceptionalism: drastic measures need not be taken because in the UK things will somehow be different.
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Johnson’s illness was folded into a larger, editorialised narrative about his martyrdom and indefatigability, turning his sickness and recovery into a virtue of character
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Questions over his responsibility for the national carnage – his complacent messaging over shaking hands with the afflicted, his delay in shutting down the country, his “herd immunity” policy, the ongoing lack of testing, of equipment and of ventilators – were not asked.
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The terminology of war did much of the work. The virus was framed in the context of an enemy to be fought in the trenches, rather than a series of public health policy failures
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The Queen’s message, a call for noble resolve, further generalised the crisis into an act of God that we must weather by mobilising the powers of the British national character. It’s now a matter of grit, of reaching into our reserves to see us through until we meet again.
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Despite the extent of the crisis, many doctors and nurses fear speaking on the record
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I have received WhatsApp messages from NHS staff too afraid even to email them in case the paper trail leads to disciplinary action – detailing horrors of an NHS stretched thin, of ill-protected staff doing 36-hour shifts. They will be clapped every week, as the government claims to champion the NHS, yet gagged if they dare raise concerns
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. It’s hard, as we lock down, to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when the loss of life is happening today – more so when the government has stealthily removed itself from the picture and shifted the responsibility entirely on to the public, responding to any concerns by robotically repeating the mantra: “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”
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Relocate the pain and recall that this need not have happened. Ten thousand people, in UK hospitals alone, have now died.
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Once Upon a Time on Mars - The New York Times - 0 views
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Three and a half billion years ago, waves splashed and streams surged across this dusty expanse on Mars now known as Jezero Crater. On a nascent Earth, chemistry was coagulating toward the exalted state we call life.
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Astronomers, philosophers and science fiction writers have long wondered whether nature ran the same experiment there as on Earth. Was Mars another test tube for Darwinian evolution?
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So humans have sent their progeny across time and 300 million miles of space in search of long-lost relatives, ancient roots of a family tree that might be traced in the Red Planet’s soil.
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The Perseverance rover and its little sibling, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed in a cloud of grit on Feb. 18, bristling with antennas and cameras.
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The rover will scrutinize the debris chemically and geologically, and take photographs, so that scientists on Earth can search for any signs of ancient fossilization or other patterns that living organisms might have produced.
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Perseverance and Ingenuity operate on very long leashes: 12 minutes of light-travel time — and signal delay — across the ether from Pasadena, where their creators and tenders wait to see what they have accomplished lately.
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The rocks that return starting in 2031 will be scrutinized for years, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, for what they might say about the hidden history of our lost twin and, perhaps, the earliest days of life in the Solar System.
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It could be the destiny of this generation to carry out the next great reconnaissance, to discover if we have or ever had any neighbors on these worlds. In Jezero Crater, the dream lives on. We may not ever live on Mars, but our machines already do.
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shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20
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Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views
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perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20
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picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
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The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
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Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
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over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
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Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
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I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
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Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
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On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
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Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
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Opinion | What Does It Mean to Love Your Country? - The New York Times - 0 views
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In her essay, “Don’t Give Up on America,” Marilynne Robinson describes the “deep if sometimes difficult affinity” she has for her country. At the end of a long, contentious election season, it’s not surprising that Ms. Robinson has become disillusioned with that love affair. “Resentment displaces hope and purpose the way carbon monoxide displaces air,” she writes.
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I love most what this country has been at different times in its brief history: a defeater of tyrants, a promulgator of liberty, a beacon of opportunity and hope,” wrote Michael B. Trosino, a reader in Michigan.
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My faith is restored when I see that, despite everything, people generally do hold leaders accountable, as they will in the coming election.
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I’m the daughter of a career military man. My patriotism is unwavering. I stand for the national anthem. I wear red, white and blue for every national holiday. I respect every branch of the military and those who have served. Most importantly, I hold my country in my heart and thank God every single day that I’m an American.
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I’m a survivor of domestic violence and pervasive sexism that has periodically and unjustly crushed my American dreams for over five decades. Yet I still yearn for my freedom and am linked to others who have been unjustly judged, abused and oppressed. The promise of freedom and equality in our founding and our people’s struggles needs a rebirth that stretches deeper and farther than ever before. I love this land, its beauty, its bounty and all the wild creatures I have seen when visiting wild spaces. We need to embrace the protection of life and liberty for the planet, our fellow creatures and all of humanity. — Kara Steffensen, Eugene, Ore.
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To me, love of country is to be gladly anchored to values and customs that are shared by fellow citizens. It is to yearn to try shrimp and grits in South Carolina, seeing a game at Fenway, taking in some jazz in Chicago and watching waves crash against a West Coast shore.
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Joe Klein Explains How the History of Four Centuries Ago Still Shapes American Culture ... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ican-culture-and-politics.html
Culture history american ethnic immigrants UK Scots-Irish Puritan Quaker Cavalier politics
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 21
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“Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America, which was published in 1989 and explained these phenomena with a clarity that seems even more stunning today. The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.
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The Appalachian hill country and much of the Deep South were settled by a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.
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The spirit of the Scots-Irish borderlanders could also be seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol; their ancestors staged the Whiskey Rebellion against the U.S. Constitution.
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In New England, it was quite the opposite. “Order was an obsession” for the Puritan founders. Everything was regulated.
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Cotton Mather defined an “honorable” person as one who was “studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” These habits have lingered, too.
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“Albion’s Seed” makes the brazen case that the tangled roots of America’s restless and contentious spirit can be found in the interplay of the distinctive societies and value systems brought by the British emigrations — the Puritans from East Anglia to New England; the Cavaliers (and their indentured servants) from Sussex and Wessex to Virginia; the Quakers from north-central England to the Delaware River valley; and the Scots-Irish from the borderlands to the Southern hill country.
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The values of the Virginia Cavaliers caused the unusual brutality of the American system of Black enslavement.)
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Fischer writes of the Scots-Irish: The people of the Southern hill country region “were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of ‘foreigners.’ … In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.”
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But how does one prove such an assertion? The only way is through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Over nearly a thousand pages, Fischer describes 22 different patterns of behavior or “folkways” for each of the four cultures — from dress and cooking, to marriage and child-rearing, to governance and criminal justice
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These culminate in four distinctive definitions of liberty. Freedom, he writes, “has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with each other.”
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Here is the nub of the book: The Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker and Scots-Irish notions of liberty were radically different, but each provided an essential strain of the American idea
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The Puritans practiced an “ordered freedom” with the state parceling out liberties: Fishing licenses allowed the freedom to fish
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Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic — Andrew Jackson was the paragon — and their religion was evangelical,
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“Natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement,
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The Scots-Irish were the opposite: Their sense of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the backcountry so that you could do what you wanted
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Honor was valor, a physical trait (among the Puritans and Quakers, honor was spiritual).
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The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory — and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. “I am an aristocrat,” John Randolph of Roanoke said. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”
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Freedom was defined by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.
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Over time, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk. Neither wanted to be “ruled” by a strong central government. Look at the Covid maps: The regional alliance remains to this day.
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The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was “reciprocal freedom,” based on the golden rule.
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American cuisine mirrored the cultures — the Puritans baked (as in beans and pies), the Cavaliers roasted (as in barbecue), the Quakers boiled (as in cream cheese) and the Scots-Irish fried and mashed (as in pancakes and grits)
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The Scots-Irish spoke a dialect that predated current British English, and that, because of their notion of freedom, included “an actual antipathy to fixed schemes of grammar and orthography and punctuation.”
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Culture is a sticky thing. “To change a culture in any fundamental way,” Fischer writes, “one must transform many things at once.”
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Child-rearing was wildly different in the four colonial systems, for example. And, in turn, that affected education, which affected criminal justice and traditions of governance.
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shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23
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I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...674759
trigger resilience social media psychology mental health culture history
shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23
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Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”
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he issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.
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He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.
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Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.
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My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.
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as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?
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Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.
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Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”
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The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.
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So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it
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Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled
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this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others.
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Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.
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“We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”
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Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed
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But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”
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In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,”
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Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline
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soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.
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what would be a more productive way to approach adversity
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physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”
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“But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”
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he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.
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“the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems
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From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human.
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patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”
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Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely
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Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.
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to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work.
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“If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?”
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“Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external
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Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.
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we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.
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In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.
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Why Israelis Are So Happy - WSJ - 0 views
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You might have seen reports that America has fallen out of the top 20 countries on the 2024 World Happiness Index. They probably didn’t mention that Israel finished fifth, behind Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.
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Don’t confuse “happiness” with “comfort” or “self-indulgence.” Israelis began 2023 polarized politically—only to be united by Hamas’s invasion. Amid unspeakable suffering, Israelis have found comfort in one another and a higher calling
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That dance between the individual and the collective begins long before birth. It spawns Israelis’ high levels of “trust, benevolence, and social connections,” which, as the 2023 happiness report emphasized, nurture “well-being,” even “in times of crisis.”
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Israelis pursue happiness through family and community, by feeling rooted and having a sense of purpose. My son Yoni got married in Jerusalem midwar, while serving in the military reserves. He notes that “Israelis grow up with many outside influences, many adult role models, not just their parents. It starts with our large weddings, when you’re blessed to ‘build a faithful home in Israel.’ ”
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Alexis de Tocqueville called families the backbone of healthy democracies. Family inculcates loyalty, commitment and self-sacrifice. Belonging to communities—extended families—teaches citizens to care about and cooperate with others.
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Despite disagreeing passionately, Israelis live in an intimate society that runs on trust and generates hope. Israelis feel they’re never alone, and that their relatives and friends will never abandon them.
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Living in what Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, called Altneuland, old-new land, Israelis don’t count in days and decades but in millennia and eternity. They feel part of a bigger story, Jews’ historical saga reaching back 3,500 years.
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The pain punctuating this story helps transcend passing traumas. Even as most Israelis experienced Hamas’s Oct. 7 killing spree as a Jewish event, powered by centuries of Jew-hatred, Israelis recall many redemptive moments too. Israelis’ favorite holidays, including Hanukkah, Passover, and Independence Day, re-enact this reassuring oppression-to-liberation arc.
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Compare anti-Israel progressive students with their Israeli soldier peers. Many protesters are the avatars of America’s lost generation. Their pinched ideology deems the U.S. systemically racist and is intent on sorting everyone by “gender identity” and skin color. Rather than optimistically expand America’s economy for all, they pessimistically compete for reparations and indulgences—their “restorative justice” is often more vengeful than just.
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These illiberal liberals trash traditional families, religion and America’s noble story of a flawed nation becoming “a more perfect union.” These campus commissars are among the unhappy Americans the surgeon general sees in the depths of loneliness and despair.
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Israelis didn’t seek this war—but when attacked, they unleashed a patriotism, idealism, self-sacrifice and grit that today’s regressive progressives scorn. Israelis’ resilience, duty and love of life explain how this often polarized and besieged society remains such a happy place