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Posted on 05/31/2002 5:05:20 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Now that the school year is over, it's time to award some miseducational Oscars or Emmys--let's call them Dopeys--to those who have proven their penchant for messing with kids' minds. I hope readers have their own nominees, but here are several that appeal to me.
My Dopey nomination for grammar-school mischief goes to Innisbrook Wraps, which this academic year gave children, as a "reward" for selling school-fundraiser wrapping paper, a colorful "Environmental Q&A Book" titled When Is It Great to Turn Green? Here are some of those Qs and As:
Q. Can trout be burned by a raindrop?
A. Not literally, but fish and other living things do get "burned" by acid rain all the time.
Q. Could I get bitten by a peach?
A. Yes, if it has been sprayed by pesticides...suggest that your parents buy organically grown products.
Q. Could the sun light up the world at night?
A. It sure could. Solar energy is quite powerful...It doesn't pollute the air the way fossil fuels can, and it won't run out anytime soon. So what are we waiting for?
Q. When is it great to turn green?
A. Anytime...Planet Earth needs government agencies, large corporations, and organizations to be green.Yes, when raindrops burn and peaches bite, what are we waiting for? Out with oil and gas, in with solar energy (regardless of cost) and the environmental left.
My high-school Dopey award nominee is Prior Lake High in suburban Minneapolis, if the account of Elinor Burkett, a former Miami Herald reporter and college professor, is anything close to reality. Ms. Burkett went to work at that high school and told Julia Duin of The Washington Times what she found: "a malaise, a low-lying depression all the time. What passes for rebellion is a kind of nagging, unpleasant passive-aggressiveness. There's no life, there's no energy, there's no spark of excitement or interest. But there's a kind of deadening...They've had careful self-esteem training since they were 2. They're told exactly what to feel about everything and they have to be happy all the time."
Ms. Burkett's book, Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School, goes beyond what she calls "shards of half-truths about music and style and adolescent anger" to show how teenagers are bored and teachers blind not only to cheating and copying, but to warfare among the school's factions: "Jocks, Wiggers, Preps, Punks, Burnouts, Rednecks, Sluts and Goths." From the banners that vapidly proclaim "You Are Unique" and "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste," to the emphasis on (unearned) self-esteem, this high school is a mess.
The reaction of Ms. Burkett's colleagues when she said that students didn't know geography is telling: not important because "We don't believe in teaching kids to memorize. That's rote learning. We teach kids to reason." Ms. Burkett's wise response: "We're treating these kids like idiots. They know how to memorize. They memorize the names of their favorite rock stars, they memorize all kinds of things for video games. They memorize with no problem. How do you learn to analyze if you have nothing to analyze--if there is no information?"
I have two nominees for college Dopeys. One goes to Southwestern University, a Texas school that last fall and for the next two falls is proud of having a radical feminist, Bell Hooks, author of Teaching to Transgress, as its guest scowler. (That's not a typo; I've read some of her strident essays.) "She's made a lot of people angry, and that's good," said Shannon Winnubst, chairwoman of Southwestern's women's studies programs. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Ms. Winnubst said she knew the program was successful when a male student told her that Ms. Hooks frightened him.
My other Dopey college nominee is for a lecture course that should be frightening. Yale University's Philosophy 119b: Death. Professor Shelly Kagan's goal is "to get at what is the truth concerning the nature of death--and at what is the truth's significance for our lives." Not a bad idea, except that MR. Kagan tells his 200 students that "you're wrong to believe in a soul" and "I find this country's moral taboo against suicide irrational." Why doesn't Yale at least allow a diversity of opinion--perhaps even a similar course taught by a biblically orthodox Christian? A course on death wouldn't be bad, if students first learned something about life.
WORLD readers are welcome to send in their own nominees for the Dopey awards. Please include press clippings, official announcements, or other documentation.
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Funny, I thought you could only be bitten by a Møøse.
This must be like one of those old weird movies that dealt with nuclear war and, if exposed to radiation .. or, in this case, pesticides .. things were always turning into horrible flesh-eating monsters...
The Peach that Ate Pittsburg"
Oh, and Laz, are you sure that your sister was bitten by a Møøse? Might it not have been a peach dressed up like a Møøse? Or maybe it was just a peach of a Møøse.
Der Elite Møøsenspåånkengruppen OberKømmååndø
And having said that, the pilots union will probably "discover" that in order to wear a firearm in the cockpit, they merely had to become federal agents.
Let me see, next up here on the agenda ... Oh yeah(!), "Only Government Should Own Property."
I hope it did not.
The point, I make, is pointless.
As it does or does not pertain to the point above.
To wit: You know there's too much money in the system when government agents and agencies have time to protect their budgets, and what would really help the country is a MASSIVE tax cut all around, sales, income, capital gains, property --- kind of like turning off the electricity to the understanding-impaired.
Healthy møøses only bite sisters. Møøses subjected to global warming, acid rain and pesticides will bite anyone.
Answer - "Common sense is forbidden, it just has to make you feel good".
One of my møøses would only eat virgin sisters .. and, since I don't have any virgin sisters (or sisters at all for that matter), you can imagine how difficult it was to keep this one healthy ... not to mention having to send Igor out in the night to abduct virgin sisters (and then having to spend my time after his return checking to ensure that they WERE virgins). Between that and the townspeople with pitchforks and torches banging on my drawbridge, I didn't get much sleep during feeding times.
But most of my møøses weren't so picky and would simply bite any sister that they could run down.
Every now and then though, during the cold and flu season, one of my møøses would get sick and then it would be Katie-bar-the-door (that is, if you could get Katie close enough to actually do so) and it would bite everything in sight.
Ah, well, the trials and tribulations of raising møøses for fun and profit. Maybe I'll look into chickens or alpacas ... do you know if wombats bite?
DO NOT attempt to raise wombats, unless you're prepared to move first. If brought within 1,000 yards of møøse scent (which persists for decades), they fly into an UNCONTROLLABLE RAGE.
Well, I guess that would explain the temperament of my Australian wife.
(And if you tell her I said that, I'm going to sick my most amorous møøse on you.)
Shelly Kagan Henry R. Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics PhD 1982, Princeton. Contact Information
Office: 204 CT Hall Phone: 432-1663 Email: shelly.kagan@yale.edu
Areas of Interest
Ethics, social and political philosophy. As my publications reveal, my main research interests lie in moral philosophy, in particular normative ethics. Indeed, my second book is a systematic survey of the field of normative ethics, considered analytically (rather than historically, as is more typical of textbooks in ethics). More particularly still, much of my work centers on the debate between consequentialist and deontological moral theories. My first book dealt with two common objections to consequentialism, that it is too demanding, and that it fails to recognize that certain types of acts are morally forbidden--even when performing those acts would bring about the best possible results. I argue that neither objection can be sustained. The book thus constitutes a kind of back door defense of consequentialism. Since then, much of my work has been devoted to trying to arrive at an adequate theory of the good (to incorporate into that consequentialist framework), with publications on (among other things) the nature of well-being, the concept of intrinsic value, and problems involving ranking worlds with infinite amounts of utility. For the last several years I have been working on the nature of moral desert. I think that desert is a far more complex topic than has been previously appreciated, but that we can make progress in better understanding the alternative possible views that are available here by representing these views in graphs. Hence the title of my main work in progress, The Geometry of Desert.
Selected Publications
Books: The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1989) Normative Ethics (Westview, 1998)
Articles: "The Additive Fallacy", Ethics 99, #1 (October, 1988): 5-31. "The Structure of Normative Ethics", Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992): 223-242. "Me and My Life", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994): 309-324. "Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory" (with Peter Vallentyne), The Journal of Philosophy 94, #1 (January, 1997): 5-26. "Equality and Desert", in What Do We Deserve?, edited by Owen McLeod and Louis Pojman (Oxford: 1998): 298-314. "Rethinking Intrinsic Value", The Journal of Ethics 2, #4 (1998): 277-297. "Evaluative Focal Points", in Morality, Rules, and Consequences, edited by Brad Hooker, Elinor Mason, and Dale Miller (Edinburgh: 2000): 134-155. "Thinking About Cases", Social Philosophy and Policy 18, #2 (2001): 44-63 "Kantianism for Consequentialists," forthcoming, Kant's Groundwork, ed. Allen Wood (Yale University Press).
Works in Progress
Book: The Geometry of Desert Articles: Indeterminate Desert "Comparative Desert"
Classes Taught Recently Introduction: Ethics Death Normative Ethics Moral Epistemology --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Department of Philosophy Faculty Bio
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