Intellectual Capital

One thing that we all agree on quite strongly here at CultureKitchen is that most of what we read and hear from the various mainstream news media sources is bogus to some extent -- incomplete, inaccurate, in many cases biased.

How can we tell when we're being told the truth and when we're being misled or lied to? How do we know who we can count on to tell us the truth and who we can safely assume is blowing smoke at us? How can we tell the difference between good journalism and bad?

It's difficult to separate the news wheat from the spin chaff, because every time we look at a new article or listen to a new story we have to keep asking ourselves the same questions time after time:

Is this a good story?
Is it informative?
Is it fair?
Is it well-sourced?
Does it show the "big picture"?
Can we trust the publisher of this story?

That's a time-consuming set of mental hoops to jump to every time we see a headline or hear a lead-in to another piece of news. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "yes", then we don't want to miss out on exploring and learning from the story in question. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "no", then we don't want to waste our time or bandwidth wading through it at all.

I've enjoyed a half-century of thrilling school sports -- personally I bleed orange and blue -- but I'm prepared to argue that it is immoral and degenerate (if not downright sick and twisted) to school little kids as if they were competitive commodities in big-money academic sports franchises.

September 11, 2006
NEWSWEEK Cover Story
The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon
Among affluent families, the pressure to succeed at younger and younger ages is an inevitable byproduct of an increasingly competitive world. . .Parents are acutely aware of the pressure on their kids, but they're also creating it. . .
"There comes a time when prudent people begin to wonder just how high we can raise our expectations for our littlest schoolkids," says Walter Gilliam, a child-development expert at Yale University. Early education, he says, is not just about teaching letters but about turning curious kids into lifelong learners. It's critical that all kids know how to read, but that is only one aspect of a child's education.
. . . childhood takes time.

Giving little kids TIME to love reading and learning sounds great, doesn't it? But see how once again we twist general good into specific harm. As usual, we do it simply by misapplying force instead of respecting the individual. We love both nature and humans -- why such little love for the nature of little humans?

What a week for trying to walk, talk, learn and think at the same time!

First, our 10-year-old son is listening to NPR in the car when he's riveted by news of an important fossil discovery linking fish and land creatures, a so-called tetrapod, lifeforms that left the water to walk on land.

He isn't interested in the news or politics, although he just
discovered Stephen Colbert and gets some of the comedy. He likes the
split screen where the contradictory wisecracks are on the right as
Stephen pontificates on the left. It reminds him of the wisecracking
moose commentary on the Brother Bear DVD.

But yesterday in the car, he suddenly wanted us to turn it up, so
he could hear all about the new fossil link. That was the first really
interesting "news" worth hearing, he proclaimed, but there wasn't enough
to the story. (He actually said this, exactly that way, pronouncing
judgment like a seasoned media critic.)
Intense investigation ensues when we can get online, after which my little boy, who has never been made to think about anything, hugs me with a goofy grin and says, "Hello, my fellow tetrapod!"

If progressive American scholar Noah Webster were here, says Adam Cohen in the Times, he would be clamoring for two things: real public education (not mere school) and real public leadership (not mere politics).

He was "never more eloquent than in his screeds against excessive partisanship."

"The party which, while in a minority, will lick the dust to gain the ascendancy," [Webster] warned, "becomes, in power, insolvent, vindictive and tyrannical."

Public education is supposed to be the universal solution, not the universal problem. Maybe the problem isn't so much our schools but our own ignorance -- we can't or won't interrelate language, learning, liberty, and leadership as Webster did so well, 200 years ago. It seems we dutifully completed our own schooling yet cannot understand the meanings most important to our own lives, liberties and pursuits, never mind anyone else's. And in our ignorance and impotence, schooled yet ill-equipped as self-governing citizens of our free union, we yell more than we think, point fingers, shove, stampede and then start shooting.

Police Chief Nannette H. Hegerty of Milwaukee calls it "the rage thing."

Blogging with Lorraine about truth and lies, and whether we have the wisdom to know the difference, I commented that moms understand how children construct meaning that is both truth and lie, or to be more accurate, meaning for which the labels "truth" or "lie" have little or no meaning!

. . .just ask a child who ate the last cookie, or why his dog suddenly has a bald patch and where are the scissors?! The answers will depend (most passionately!) on what the child believes you may believe, and what he or she WANTS to believe, and not much on evidence, objectivity or looming jurisprudence.

Then this morning, I came across a book review of "Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life" in which Susan L. Engel apparently pleads with us to be at least as interested in the ways that children think, their thought processing if you will, as we are in their outcomes or achievements.

(And JJ pleads with citizens everywhere to reject the lie that society's Job One is to label the natural thinking processes of children as some unnatural problem or other, the better to impose years of professional intervention in the name of national security and all that is holy.)

Staff attorney Scott
Somerville of The Homeschool Legal Defense Association is asking when or whether any of the rest of us (read: not conservative Christians) will do something meaningful
for ourselves politically, as homeschoolers, other than just take pot
shots at his conservative HSLDA. http://hslda.org/
Basically, grab a spoon and join us to help change us or get out of the kitchen and go eat what's put in front of you, he was saying - I answered by referring him to what's cooking here in Liza's Culture Kitchen, as follows:

DEAR MAKEOVER MAVENS:
I saw the last half of "Extreme Home Makeover" last night, the Bartlett
family I think, with their own kids plus four adopted teens living
out in some flat, dusty, empty place, a family united by horses and
rodeo-riding. http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/303.html

The show pros had knocked down their whole house to build
the perfect custom dream home from the ground up, all-new for this
mold-breaking, blended, good-hearted bunch of folks.

Something like 600 community volunteers with hundreds of thousands of
dollars in business donations, all workin' haaarrrd! - so I was
pleasantly teary and enjoying the complete and dramatic change of it