Letters to the Editor
LeCastor
Published Letters: 1916 Editor's Choice: 86
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Don't worry. I think...
[Read the article: New Jersey Supreme Court: State must allow same-sex unions]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't really think this will matter. It's the 4th state after all, and it's NJ, not Georgia. Everyone already knew NJ is a hotbed of sin -- closeted governor, Atlantic Titty, black people in charge of cities (Newark). If the southern baptists needed a reason to hate NJ, they already had plenty.
What does concern me is that this may have been a republican political move after all. As one poster pointed out, the 3 in the minority were for outright marriage. So the majority is more conservative, perhaps even slightly republican (like Bloomberg or Pataki are republicans, not like Hastert). So, if they wanted to give republicans ammo for the election, they would decide (since they are the majority) to release the decision before the election. Perhaps they felt that their hands were tied as to the law (meaning, unless they were going to be completely political, they had to rule for something like civil unions because that's what the NJ constitution requires), but they could use the decision's release date to incite political change in the country.
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Why separate on gender?
[Read the article: Turning back the clock on single-sex education]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Gender is just one way to separate people. (We already separate them by age, but that's a different matter). What are the purported reasons to separate people on gender?
1) Behavioral -- boys and girls will behave better if we separate them.
2) "different learning styles"
Well, as to the first reason, wouldn't it be more reasonable and rational to separate kids by how wel they behave? Put the well-behaved with other well-behaved children, and the not so well behaved with the like. Gender is a crude approximation for who is well-behaved. Now, of course there's the possibility of stigma, and that the not-so-well-behave will never learn how to behave if they are surrounded with similar children. But that is not the reason we want to separate by gender. Because, if we were really thinking about helping the not-well-behaved, we wouldn't separate at all. Plus, think about how heteronormative this idea is. Gay kids and teenagers won't be helped in their behavior with the sex they are attracted to, because they're attracted to the same sex.
As to the second reason, "different learning styles," this seems disingenuous to me. First of all, when we separate kids by age, age is jsut an approximation of their matuirty and capacity to learn. No one would argue that every 10 year old has the same matrity and mental sophistication to learn a particular subject. Secondly, again, gender is a crude approximation. Invariably, you will stick women who learn "like men" and men who learn "like women" into environments where they don't belong. Currently, we don't suggest separating classes by whether kids are auditory or visual learners, why should we separate by gender?
Gender is a crude approximation as a solution to these problems. If we want to change the current system, we would be better served by actually testing individual children for behavioral problems and different learning styles and separating them on that basis. Also, i think there is some nostalgia in single-gender classes. The same people who pine for the mythical land of the 1950's "Leave it to Beaver" are the ones who think that "back when we had single sex education, things were better, and all these social problems didn't exist" without any solid data.
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Laurel
[Read the article: Turning back the clock on single-sex education]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I completely agree with you.
What i mentioned about the 1950's nostalgia -- i know that single sex education wasn't the norm back then. But the thing is, most of the things these "nostalgists" profess existed in the 1950's didn't exist back then. They look back at the 1950's and claim it was some sort of "anti-delluvian paradise," with no gays, no premarital sex, teen pregnancy, stds, drugs, anything at all, and that all families were dad (works) & mom (stays at home) combos with a dog and a picket fence. It's this collective fantasy that never existed in reality, and doesn't appeal as "paradise" to a great many americans (including myself).
In fact, you may be right that the nostalgists for single-sex education are looking back even further than the 1950's, somewhere into Victorian england and the realm of Eton (which i know still exists) and finishing schools for girls. But for all the reasons you and others have pointed out, (1) these schools are not all that to begin with, and (2) they certainly cannot be recreated in the cheapo public school environment.
Or maybe this is all just a grand illusion. Middle-class parents know that rich kids go to private single-gender schools, and want their kids to get the same level of education, but the middle class parents simply don't understand that the great education in private schools is created by things other than the single-gender aspect.
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Bush doesn't use powerpoint
[Read the article: Bush: In search of "a matrix that says things are getting better"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]why, he doesn't email, and only recently decided to use "the Google" to look up some maps.
The last few times i've seen him on TV, he seems to vacillate between aggressive and pathetic.