CSotD: Sunday Funnies and not so much
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In today's Nonsequitur, Wiley sends us on a trip down other people's memory lanes and highlights the difficulty of being a grandfather, or even a parent, in the current age.
For centuries, it was easy to tell stories, and you could go ahead and share the memory without having to explain why something that couldn't happen today was not only possible but somewhat inevitable back then.
Farmer or farrier or hausfrau, the overall setting of your life was like that of your parents and their parents and on down the line.
And then Cyrus McCormick and Thomas Edison and Guglielmo Marconi and the rest of that gang came along and things just began to cascade.
Last night, I went over to Elder Son's for dinner and a movie, and, as we all stood around the kitchen while the meal was being prepared, he began to tell a story about a first date gone horribly, hilariously wrong, which involved being stranded with a dead battery and an increasingly unamused date at a very late hour at a very remote location.
Part of the story involved calling a friend from a pay phone on your last quarter, knowing that, if he didn't agree to get out of bed and drive an hour to give you a jump, you might not be out of friends but you'd be out of quarters.
It was more complex than that, but each step in the increasingly disastrous disaster would have — not just "could have" — been prevented with a cell phone.
After dinner, we watched "It," with Clara Bow, and the grandkids — sixth grade, 10th grade and 20 — got a lesson not only in the narrative structure of silent films, but also in how retailing worked in the days of the shopgirl, funhouse rides no sane insurance company would allow today, and, chillingly, the socially accepted-and-assumed attitude towards unwed mothers in 1927.
And, during the credits, I added the trivia that Antonio Moreno's stratospheric career as a leading man floundered with the advent of talkies because of his thick accent.
Fortunately, they're a pretty curious bunch, but it sure does extend the storytelling when you have to keep interrupting to explain what once was obvious.
And, in a world where things go out of date so quickly, curiosity is the best thing you can give your child.
Mr. Fitz has dealt with Jeremy Yoyo in the past, a student whose parents keep jerking him out of one school and putting him into another, but he's more direct in the current arc in using Jeremy to comment — yes, with a misspelled word — on school choice, in this age of Betsy DeVos and rightwing culture war.
I remember a brother and sister who popped up in my boys' school for a single year. The sister had a severe learning disability of some sort, so the parents went school-shopping to find a place where she didn't.
Meanwhile, the son had learned that, if he acted a little off-the-wall, faculty would assume he was in the same boat and cut him a break.
No humor intended in that. Just given as an example of "school choice."
This chilling piece on homeschooling and indoctrination has been making the rounds, but my experience with homeschooling, magnet schools and charters has been a little less one-sided.
Magnets seem cool, and I wish we would approach technical and vocational training the same way: Simply shift the full curriculum so that they are congruent with a student's interest, but still are basically solid on their own merits. Every other industrialized nation in the world does this; we refuse, except in magnets.
And charter schools could do good work if they were more like magnets and offered differentiated learning rather than simply a way to get hell-raising parents out of the system so that underfunded public schools can continue to function as warehouses.
Or if they were not set up as a way to circumvent the church/state wall and stay on the public teat.
(BTW, in New York, religious schools can get textbook funding except for religious books or, for instance, science books with a religious context. They can also get special ed services for students who need that. Everything else must be paid for by whoever felt that prayers before class is a priority. I like that.)
My experience with homeschooling basically breaks down into two categories, aside from people who try it for a semester before they realize how incredibly demanding it is.
One type raises kids who are very curious, plus, because they deal one-on-one or in small groups with adults, tend to be quite articulate and socially poised beyond their years. Touring a group of homeschoolers through the paper felt more like a break in the day than part of my job.
But I've also dealt with homeschooler groups who peer out of their bunkers and teach their kids how to line their hats with tinfoil. Their groups rarely asked for tours because they already knew the newspaper was part of the media conspiracy and, when they did, the kids tended to be pretty unengaged.
Whatever the actual proportion of those homeschooler categories, "school choice" is, too often, geared to encourage the same withdrawal from society that we saw after desegregation sparked a sudden interest in private education, though at least those people were honest enough not to ask for public funding.
Betsy DeVos and I would disagree on all of this, though she'd do it with that smile that is considered utterly charming among rich people but would be a slappable-smirk anywhere else.
Further history: Anita Bryant mixed orange juice with hogwash, but nobody ever put her up for a cabinet post.
I suppose "honesty" and "the social contract" are also things we'll have to explain to our grandchildren.
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