Two By Two (Part 1): Gender and the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage
In my first three Quaker Fellows responses, I unpacked some of my initial responses and broad experiences of the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage to Peru and Bolivia. While there is certainly much more to talk about (and I reserve the right to come back to the topic in future reflections) I am going to take advantage of recent events in the Quaker Fellows group and spend a few posts transitioning from the Pilgrimage to my more recent experiences in Quaker Fellows at Earlham College, while simultaneously addressing a topic which appeared to hang uncomfortably over both groups like a pre-Halloween ghost: Gender.
In this response, I will (once again) lay out what I perceived during the Pilgrimage, this time going into a bit more detail about the ways in which gender affected our experience. In my next response, I will explain and address my understanding and opinion of the controversy which has been taking place among Quaker Fellows in the past weeks.
I’ll begin by stating the obvious: Gender has been involved in just about everything in just about every place in just about every time in which civilization (and even, you could argue, sexually-reproducing organisms) has yet existed. Much like race and sexual orientation, every single person has one, and at the same time no two people express their identities in precisely the same way. As such, it has tremendous implications on the way we organize ourselves and perceive the world.
Taken a step further, religion (as a way of organizing ourselves and perceiving the world) and gender are almost inextricably intertwined, and that becomes increasingly apparent in Judeo-Christian religious groups whose practices and principles date back to before third-, second-, and even first-wave feminism. Religious groups like the Friends Church and its Bolivian and Peruvian counterparts are certainly no exception.
As I mentioned in my first blog post, one of the hardest challenges I faced during the Pilgrimage was my attempt to understand and reconcile with the gender-associated concepts of the most conservative of the Friends Churches in South America, in particular the Holiness Church. Their literal interpretations of (and, in some cases, beyond literal, as I could not always see how their practices could be directly derived from) Scripture led them to believe that because Eve was created from Adam and had committed original sin, all women existed to serve men. I was shocked to discover that in some churches men and women sat on different sides of the room, and horrified to learn that in at least one women were not even given chairs to sit on.
Gender, however, reached far beyond the practices of one of the church we visited. Indeed, in many ways it set the dynamics, and was a major tension, of the Pilgrimage itself. Not only were the boys and girls separated into separate rooms, but in some cases they were treated differently for it. At one church, the girls were given extra blankets; the boys were not. At one point while we were unloading from a bus, the leaders specifically called for men to carry all of our backpacks and supplies. Gender affected the way we were treated and how we experienced the Pilgrimage from our relationships with one another (both good and bad) to subtle microagressions to outright discrimination.
The fact of the matter is that the Pilgrimage was very romantically-fraught and sexually-tense. I don’t need to go into too many details, but suffice it to say that many gifts were bought and by the end, quite a few tears were shed. Almost every night in the mens’ sleeping quarters, one or two of the South Americans would ask me how to say things like “Do you have a girlfriend?” and repeat to himself, “Do… You… Ave… A… Glow… Friend?” By the end one of them could say “You have beautiful eyes like the ocean.”
Near the end of the Pilgrimage, I made a tally of all of the people who had a romantic or sexual connection with at least one other Pilgrim: 16, or 50%. Afterwards, I learned that that number was actually higher. There’s no value judgment here – I’m simply pointing out the profound impact these kinds of relationships had on the Pilgrimage. In fact, many would argue that this is perfectly normal behavior for a group of 16-to-19-year-olds spending over a month of constant, intimate time together. One of the Quaker Fellows at Earlham who went on the Pilgrimage before mine reported a similar story for hers, though I’m sure the entire dynamic of the Pilgrimage was radically different due to its location in Europe.
All of this is to say that like it or not, gender was inseparably intertwined with (and continues to permeate) the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, our relationships to one another, personal faith, the separations of religious organizations, our identities, and pretty much every aspect of our society in one way or ten (usually ten). As such, it should considered critically important in just about every discussion affecting such controversial issues as religion, identity, and conflict.
This essay is the fourth in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage and the first in a series about gender and Quakerism. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.
In the previous two essays, I reflected upon the internal and external conflicts within Quakerism which I perceived during my experience on the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. Ever the cynicist, I leapt at the chance to scrutinize every flaw and discrepancy I could find in the way people think, act, and communicate. In order to paint a more complete picture, however, I think I should force myself to talk about some of the ways in which the Pilgrimage was a success.
First, the basics: None of us died. Though almost all of the Northern Hemisphere Quakers got pretty sick at one point or another, we were very well-cared-for by our trusty leader and medical professional, Wendy. Circumstances forced us to spend more money than anticipated on food, lodgings, and transportation, but (with one notable exception I’ll explain in a moment) we never had to pay out-of-pocket for the necessities. We made friends, we had fun, and us Northerners learned a lot about what it means to be a Quaker in South America. We managed to make our way through Peru and Bolivia, accomplishing just about everything we could have hoped – not an easy task.
One of the most important challenges (and the most valuable rewards) of spending a lot of time and money to spend a month and a half in developing countries in another hemisphere is coming face-to-face, eye-to-eye, with a radically different perspective from one you’ve ever known, and learning from the experience without external conflict. The Pilgrimage wasn’t the dramatic transcension of cultural, theological, and geographic barriers I (admittedly, a bit naïvely) hoped it might be. But the fact that we, as teenagers, could expose some of our most deeply-rooted beliefs and traditions, understand the differences between them, and remain steadfast friends is an admirable accomplishment rarely achieved in any historical narrative I’ve ever read.
One of the moments on the Pilgrimage I felt most deeply enriched my understanding of the Latin American Quakers and their Latin American Quakerism was that aforementioned crisis in which we had to pool our personal funds. It was the day we embarked from La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, on a day-long bus journey to Cochabamba. Towards the end of the Pilgrimage, I could tell the leaders were running low on group funds and I hoped we wouldn’t need to spend another extra night in a hostel. As usual, we had to get up early to hop on the buses, and as usual, we were late. In the scramble from the shuttles which led us from the heart of the city to the outskirts, where we met the double-decker bus on which we would spend the rest of the day, we accidentally left all of the food and the cooking supplies behind. Everything, from the lunch specially-prepared by our hosts in La Paz to our travel-sized yogurts and water heater, was lost. We hadn’t even eaten breakfast.
By the time we stopped at the closest thing to a roadside convenience store I could imagine existing in Bolivia, our stomachs were howling. The exhaustion of a long and winding journey had begun to settle into our muscles and the bags under our eyes, and we were very much annoyed. Seemingly most frustrated were our leaders, who realized that the Pilgrimage did not have enough Bolivianos to cover two more meals for a group of two dozen teenagers. We had to pool our pocket change (a dilemma compounded by the fact that the Americans and Europeans had much more money to spend on alpaca-wool sweaters and Inca Kola than the South American Friends) and buy as many crackers, trail mix, and yogurt bottles as we could.
In the end, food filled our bellies, though it was accompanied by more than a few butterflies borne from the accumulating lump of travel weariness and culture shock which had been burying itself farther and farther down our throats. The leaders blamed the Pilgrims’ lack of concern, the Pilgrims blamed the leaders’ lack of responsibility, and the only relief to be found was in a few bites of plain saltines and peach-flavored yogurt.
I thought the issue had been resolved and thoroughly discarded into the water under the bridge, but during that evening’s Epilogue (a kind of closing reflection at the end of the day) one of the Bolivian Pilgrims burst into tears. She thanked Jesús for what she saw as a lesson granted by divine fortune. We had been selfish, thinking only of our own belongings when we got on the bus, she said. God punished us for our selfishness, but as a result we learned to care about the group as a whole, and became closer to one another by working together through this unexpected hardship.
This interpretation was particularly remarkable to me, first and foremost, because I hadn’t really bothered to interpret it at all. While I don’t think it was a lesson from God and I certainly wouldn’t give thanks to Jesús for making us forget our food, I realized that her spiritual framework led her to seek meaning even in the moments of her life which at first seem insignificant or troublesome. As an evangelical Christian, she knew that a divine intelligence rules her life, and as a result she was well-practiced in the art of learning from the past. As it turns out, this is one of my weakest skills.
Instead of simply feeling discomfort or (at times) a creeping contempt for her church’s views on morality, the afterlife, and same-sex marriage, I discovered not only a quality of her faith I find admirable but one I have actually found lacking in my own cynical “we’re-just-atoms-and-chemical-reactions-hopelessly-bound-in-the-shackles-of-Plato’s-cave” life philosophy. This is one of the strongest moments of interfaith communication on my Quaker Youth Pilgrimage, and I think it serves as a good example of the kind of enrichment which was hopefully experienced at least as much by the rest of the Pilgrims.
Indeed, I learned so much about the world, about Quakers, and about myself, all while having the adventure of a lifetime. It may have been hard, but as long as you keep holding yourself in the Light, difficult challenges often turn out to be the most enjoyable journeys of all.
This essay is the third in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.
Douglas Steere’s Mutual Irradiation: A View of Quaker Ecumenism, which was assigned to me as reading for this semester’s “Friends and Interfaith Relations” Friends Colloquium, offers a model of interfaith exchange which I think would have been useful to reflect upon during my time in Peru and Bolivia on the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage.
Steere postulated that there are four main methods a powerful religious group could choose to manage an encounter with another religion. First, it could try to smother or destroy the other religion; Second, it could attempt to fuse entirely with the other religion; Third, it could tolerate the other religion but keep them segregated and wholly uninfluenced by the other; And fourth, it might conduct this so-called “mutual irradiation,” in which neither religion attempts to combat or merge with the other but instead expose themselves to each other in the hopes of sharing their experiences and building a common foundation.
The idea is that through open dialogue and mutual exposure without the pressure of sectarianism can lead to a deeper mutual understanding of culture and the cosmos. Mutual irradiation allows for change but doesn’t force transition or compromise for the sake of unanimity. This form of interaction breaks down dogmatism and its ensuing conflicts because it highlights the fact that no one can know for certain if they are truly right, and that everyone has something to teach and to learn.
In my opinion, Unprogrammed Quakers and Programmed Quakers interact using the third framework, one of isolated, rigid tolerance. Both groups acknowledge the existence of the other, and seem mostly content to let the other share in the name “The Religious Society of Friends,” but are otherwise disinterested in any sort of large-scale interaction.
This is particularly true of North American Friends and their counterparts in other parts of the world, like South America and Kenya. While the barriers of distance and language certainly make any sort of widespread dialogue difficult to organize and carry out, I have found that many Friends are only barely aware of the beliefs and practices of Quakers in other walks of life.
This is not to say that all Quakers do not care about increasing mutual exposure; in fact, this year’s Pilgrimage went to the Andes for (more or less) that precise purpose. However, even in my month and a half of total immersion in the life of South American Quakers, I found that truly open and equal exchange was a bit difficult to come by.
My Spanish-speaking skills were developed enough to pick up moments when one of our leaders would cut out an edgy idea or an unconventional word when translating for a non-bilingual Pilgrim. While we used a consensus model of business meeting and had a few Meetings for Worship, the Unprogrammed tradition of Quakerism could not have made up even a fifth of the time we spent in South America (despite the fact that half of the Pilgrims were Unprogrammed, and that we were allegedly giving the South American Pilgrims a chance to experience a style of faith which they would not otherwise be able to participate in).
While the Pilgrimage was far from a failure, and Quakers in general are certainly not close-minded, I think that the idea of “mutual irradiation” has not fully sunk into our collective psyche. As eager as we are to interact with Zen Buddhists and Muslims and many branches of Christianity, we seem to be hesitant to toe across the Unprogrammed/Programmed dichotomy. Sometimes, we’re so busy theorizing about grand concepts of equality and open-mindedness that we forget to reflect on the tensions a bit closer to home.
This essay is the second in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.
Sometimes, it seems as if the only thing all Quakers have in common is the fact that they call themselves Quakers. I experienced this when I traveled to Peru and Bolivia for a month and a half in the summer of 2014 as part of the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. The adventure was the first time I (and the Pilgrimage) had ever been to South America, and never before had I been in close contact with any Evangelical Friend.
Despite the fact that they outnumber us, the Friends of South America, along with their beliefs and practices, are frequently ignored by Unprogrammed Friends in North America. Most of the things I read and heard about Quakers spoke of silence as if it were a universal tenet of Quakerism, so it took me by surprise to learn that very few Friends in Latin America ever engage in waiting worship. I have told curious questioners that all Quakers recognize a plurality of religious doctrines, not ruling out any spiritual language or practice as totally wrong. Unwittingly, I had told them a lie. It is a strongly-held belief in all of the Quaker Churches in South America that Jesus is coming again, and that those who do not repent and worship the Lord in the manner decreed by the Bible will suffer in hell everlasting.
I was stunned to discover that even equality, one of the most fundamental Quaker Testimonies, is not a belief firmly held by every Quaker. During the Pilgrimage, we visited Friends Churches in which only men could sit in the pews (and yes, every church had pews) on the right-hand side of the building, while women were made to sit on the floor on the left. I overheard one of the Pilgrims (who belonged to the same highly-conservative Yearly Meeting) say that LGBTQ individuals would not be welcome in their church because they are “contra de lo que está escrito” (“against what is written”).
I was definitely overwhelmed with culture shock from the very first hours-long service in Tacna, Peru. At times, I struggled with my conscience to recognize the Peruvians and Bolivians as Quaker when their experience with the Inner Light seemed so different, their practices so alien, from my own. No wonder they are never mentioned up north, I thought at one point. They simply aren’t Quakers.
However, over time I realized that this conclusion was neither productive nor respectful. I could not dictate what other people were or were not; I could only expand my own view and open my definition of the word “Quaker.” Just like it is not my place to tell someone their gender identity, I have no right to exclude individuals from a certain religious identity. Only once I made this realization could I begin to focus not on our differences, but on our similarities, in the seemingly-dim hope of reconciliation.
While the Evangelical Friends of Bolivia and Peru may not know the Quaker Testimonies as the “SPICES” I have been taught, they have a similar set of principles and values taken from the New Testament. While their most conservative churches may believe that, following Adam and Eve, women were created to serve men, they all believe in nonviolence and respectful communication in the resolution of conflicts. We share their belief that fancy symbols and complex ceremonies are not necessary to contact, and live in harmony with, the Holy Spirit of the present. For better or for worse, we both call ourselves Quakers. Even if they didn’t, we would still have so much to learn from one another, as we share in the experience of humanity.
This essay is the first in a series about the 2014 Quaker Youth Pilgrimage. It is a component of the Quaker Fellows program at Earlham College.
Introduction to "Civic Hacking at Andover: A Manifesto" (Second Draft)
In this paper I will summarize my personal experience and opinion of the past several years of Phillips Academy’s community and administration, with an emphasis on the nature of school-wide conflicts, discourse, and decision-making. I won’t be writing a step-by-step program guaranteeing success, nor a scientific study; I’m simply using the experience and education I have accumulated at Andover to observe the dynamics in its community and present an insider’s opinion. I aim to make this paper as accessible and reader-friendly as possible, and to acknowledge the lack of absolute Truth that any one paper can have about these topics without compromising my reasoning or sources of information. That said, my target of absolute thoroughness may come at the expense of brevity: while each section of this paper is best understood if read completely and in the proper order, I won’t be upset if you skip the history of Phillips Academy to read about my opinion on social networks, or vice versa. You can click on the titles of each section in the Table of Contents to jump to that section.
I will incorporate the results of surveys, polls, scholarly papers, and other scientific and academic materials into my paper, but I will rely most extensively on my own personal experience and education as well as the perspectives and ideas I’ve gained through observation and direct participation of discourse at Phillips Academy. I will incorporate what I’ve learned in classes from Developmental Psychology to Justice and Globalization, from Journalism to Media Studies, not to mention Hacking: A Practicum (for which this paper constitutes my final project).
This paper will also forgo traditional stylings of writing, research, and notation, to better utilize the technological tools in which it is contained. While my citations have been generated using EasyBib’s Chicago Manual of Style setting, it is not fashioned using all of that book’s guidelines (I’m “hacking” it, if you will). I’m writing in a way which I think is best suited for an online interactive format. I have tried to additionally source as much of my knowledge as possible in the body of the text, using blue and underlined hyperlinks to deliver readers directly to any sources or relevant bits of information, which (paired with footnotes and a bibliography) will hopefully be more than enough to satisfy most readers.
This is not meant to be an official or conclusive finding based on methodological research. By all means it is a work in progress, and in some senses it should always be that way: I am only one person recounting my individual experiences. There is a great deal that I do not know, and these issues are far too nuanced and systemic to ever completely understand or “solve.” Hopefully this paper will serve as a valuable insight and argument about the topics of community, discrimination, and education, from the perspective of one teenager who is living right in the middle of it all.
This Introduction briefly covers the nature and history of this paper, Mr. Palfrey’s Hacking Class, and Phillips Academy, and includes an explanation of why I think the themes and issues explored in this paper are important enough to discuss.
I welcome any additional insight, new perspectives, or disagreement over any of these topics. None of them are static; rather, they are constantly evolving in ways that are unpredictable and highly complex. Hopefully this paper will also continue to morph and expand, just as the conversations about its subject matter always should. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them as a public comment on the Google Doc by highlighting the relevant portion of text. If you’re not able to leave a comment (or if you’re holding this in your hands as real paper) then feel free to send them to me personally [email protected].
This introduction is part of the second draft of the paper available as a Google Doc as the final project for the Spring Term of Hacking at Phillips Academy.
It is clear that gender is one of the earliest and deepest divides in American culture; gender norms affect who we are as soon as we are wrapped in a blue or pink blanket on the day we’re born. These cultural expectations, which tell us that boys should be invincible, aggressive, and solitary while women ought to be naive, emotional, and vulnerable, force narrow identities onto us which no one can actually fulfill. As a result, women become psychologically unstable and dependent on the approval of others, while men become distant and emotionally illiterate. Growing up in public elementary and middle schools, I have seen firsthand several of these societal repressions and I can now understand how they can be attributed to many of the difficult social experiences of my childhood.
Traditional gender norms allocate all-or-nothing attributes or roles to men and women. Girls should have more emotion than they can handle; boys should have none. Males should take up total responsibility; girls should seek none. Women should only care about others, while men should only rely on themselves. Dominance? Only for the guys. Vulnerability? Only for the ladies. These norms create a gender dichotomy where men and women are exact opposites of each other, which builds a cultural framework in which men and women can only be complete if they find their “other half.” Instead of causing a perfect and happy nuclear family, however, these archetypes make both men and women incomplete, unhappy, and completely unable to understand or communicate with one another. In, short, everybody loses.
As a teenage boy growing up in a middle-class American community, these cultural limitations have heavily influenced my development and my identity. I have a tendency to reject conformity (both of my parents were anti-war protesters in the 70s, and when I was a small child they frequently encouraged and rewarded me for acting independently rather than living up to societal expectations) and though I have, in certain ways, remained true to my interests even if they were not deemed “masculine,” it has come at the cost of isolation and insecurity. In the world of adolescence, teenagers are psychologically inclined to offer our respect and attention to the social cues of other teenagers more exclusively than they will to any other age group at any other stage in their lives (Dobbs, “Beautiful Brains,” 2011). My failure to live up to the ideal of “manhood” became a central part of my identity because, in the sphere of middle school students, gender-based social standing was the only measurement that mattered.
In many ways, an adolescent male measures his worth based on a number of contests and unspoken tests which determines his masculinity and, as a result, his value as a person. While these are obviously defined within varying contexts of socioeconomic status, location, and race, they all share the similar cultural values of physical force and a complete concealment of weakness. This is due to the simple fact that the only thing a boy is trying to prove is that he is, well, not a girl. As such, he must not only reject all of the things associated with girliness, but he must embrace to the utmost those qualities of dominance and coolness which define manhood (“The Search for Masculinity,” n.d.).
In my life, these challenges took the form of verbal and physical harassment, competition, and sports. The “cool” boys would hit and taunt each other, and the only acceptable response was to nonchalantly return the blows. In band class, the boys who played the loudest and who could master the most complicated songs were rewarded with respect, even if it meant their music was actually kind of terrible. During lunch recess, many boys would aggressively play soccer and roughhouse with each other in order to seem more powerful. As a matter of fact, the clique of popular boys were the ones who did all of these things, and despite their aggression towards each other they seemed to be close friends. They were all able to pass the tests of non-femininity, athletic prowess, and disobedience which are the typical measurements of how adolescents define successful manhood (“The Search for Masculinity”). The popular boys in my middle school were all very smart, seeing as we were all in the “gifted” math program which was the only distinction of intelligence outside of letter grades, but they never worked hard and actually did their best to act as if they didn’t have to work hard on anything. This represents the flip-side of the masculine tests: because emotional and educational prowess were consigned to girls, boys often do anything they could to avoid the image of hard work or passion (“The Search for Masculinity”).
I did not live up to any of their expectations. I was raised as a liberal, peace-loving Quaker, and was taught never to hit other people. I couldn’t bring myself to fight back, which made me an easy target. I was terrified of sports because to me, they represented a competition of athleticism and skill which I simply didn’t have. I would spend all my free time inside reading or playing games on the Internet, and I figured if I ever tried to play a sport I would simply embarrass myself. This became a vicious cycle: I could never be good because I never wanted to practice, and I refused to practice because I wasn’t already skilled. I cared about my education and liked learning new things more than playing outside, so I was described as the “lame nerd” who “never did anything cool.” In fact, one of the primary influences in my decision to attend a highly-competitive boarding school in the distant otherworld called Massachusetts was the yearning to be in an environment where my interest in education was not looked down upon but actually embraced by the community as a whole. Virtually all of the teachers in my middle school were men; this also matches studies suggesting that a severe lack of male role models in teaching positions causes boys to view learning as an unworthy, feminine pursuit in its entirety (“Boys in School,” n.d.).
This kind of taunting is obviously hurtful and unacceptable, but another key aspect of the masculinity ordeals is the repression of emotional response. An allegory for this is the “Fortress of Solitude” to which Superman (a comic-book inspiration for many superhero-obsessed boys, especially those in previous generations) would retreat in isolation after he courageously used his physical force to subdue his enemies. In essence, he never showed any signs of weakness or vulnerability to anyone; in the real world, boys suppress and internalize their emotions but remain solitary and silent on the outside. Stoicism to this degree can lead to catastrophic consequences: boys end up becoming deeply unhappy and insecure while simultaneously cutting themselves off from their friends and family and even using them as scapegoats for their own issues (Kindlon, Thompson, & Barker, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, 1999).
In my personal experience, silence served as both a coping mechanism and a vulnerability. If I responded with harsh retorts or physical violence, I would only be perpetuating and provoking their attacks. If I told the administration, I would be ostracized and harassed even further. If I remained silent, I would simply be “taking it like a girl” and opening myself up to more attacks. Ultimately, I chose the latter. I hardly ever defended myself, and as a result I quickly added my own internal voice to those of the boys who frequently belittled and laughed at me. I assumed that they were right, and that I really was a failure, and insults quickly transformed into a deep sense of shame which drove me further into isolation and insecurity. I avoided as many social interactions with my peers as possible, which made me even more alien (and therefore targetable) to boys and girls in my school. I closed myself off to my parents and my teachers, meaning that I had only a few close acquaintances to confide in entirely.
My personal experiences are practically verbatim to the editorials and studies we examined this term. I think that they very accurately portray the gender norms of hyper-masculinity (defined through individuality, physical prowess, and aggression) and hyper-femininity (put in terms of dependency, intellectual ability, and vulnerability). I experienced the isolation and depression inflicted on those people who don’t fit in, or choose to reject the social norms, and throughout my entire middle school experience I felt as if the only way anyone could define their identity and self-worth is through these competitions of gender-normativity which defined the social hierarchy of adolescence. I have only been able to start coming to terms with my own identity, restoring my self-confidence and building better systems of analysis, after a long period of psychological development. In addition, attending Phillips Academy allowed me to define myself in more meaningful terms and even explore, in depth, these issues of gender norms and sexism in a highly academic context.
From a neurological perspective, this could be a very good thing indeed. One of the most important reasons for all this adolescent conflict (which seems to span continents, centuries, and cultures) is the way in which our brains themselves are still developing into our mid-20s. Though our brains are at almost full size by the time we’re just six years old, adolescence is a period of systemic restructuring of the neural connections, called axons, which allow us to process ideas. Fatty myelin insulation slowly works its way from the back to the front of the brain, becoming an extra coat over these pathways which makes them significantly faster but also harder to change. The most complicated thoughts and processes occur at the front of our brain and in the outer layer of gray matter called the cortex, which means that they are still slow and malleable until the end of adolescence. Decision-making processes can be challenging for adolescents because their brains are developing unevenly, and we use the outermost and frontmost parts of our brains for the most advanced levels of cognition: including the assessments of risks versus rewards. While this means that teenagers are still developing, it puts us in the special opportunity of being able to enhance and restructure many of our neural pathways before they settle into a more permanent, adult state (Dobbs, 2011).
Thinking about these issues in a complex and meaningful way as a teenager has given me the opportunity to restructure the way I think about gender norms and the societal values I take stock in before those neural pathways solidify and become harder to change. There have been numerous instances in which many adults internalized these stereotypes and maintained them throughout their development, until they reached a point where these values are an almost irreversibly-integral part of their identity and lifestyle. One psychologist noted that her adult female clients have the same emotional vulnerabilities and social insecurities as her adolescent female clients, despite the fact that many of these issues are irrational and based almost entirely in unrealistic gender norms (Pipher, “Saplings in the Storm,” 1994). My opportunity to analyze (and in many cases criticize) the institutions of masculinity and femininity which define the experience of contemporary American adolescence has given me the opportunity to break free from many of them in what will hopefully be a long-lasting psychological change. Considering the amount of adult-created media which incessantly perpetuates the ideas of the strong boy and the weak girl, I think it’s safe to assume that many adults don’t quite learn this information in time.
References
Boys in School. (n.d.). Retrieved May 30, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/school.html
Dobbs, D. (2011, October). Beautiful Brains [Editorial]. National Geographic Magazine. Retrieved May 29, 2014, fromhttp://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text
Kindlon, D. J., Thompson, M., & Barker, T. (1999). Raising Cain: Protecting the emotional life of boys. New York: Ballantine Books.
Pipher, M. B. (1994). Saplings in the Storm. In Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls (pp. 17-28). New York: Putnam.
The Search for Masculinity. (n.d.). Retrieved May 29, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/parents/raisingboys/masculinity.html
This paper was a component of the final project for the 2014 Spring Term of Developmental Psychology at Phillips Academy.
As Peter Singer says in the opening of the chapter “One Atmosphere” in his book, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, the immediate and long-term global problems caused by human impact on the atmosphere may well be the most pressing example of the necessity for humanity to work, in turn, towards global solutions. Simon Caney, in a paper published in the Leiden Journal of International Law, laid out a set of fundamental human rights (based on the theory proposed by Joseph Raz) and explained how, if the scientific findings and forecasts of the The Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are to be believed, climate change left unchecked would likely violate all of them.
Caney proposes that
“Persons have fundamental interests in not suffering from:
drought and crop failure;
heatstroke;
infectious diseases (such as malaria, cholera, and dengue);
flooding and the destruction of homes and infrastructure;
enforced relocation; and
rapid, unpredictable, and dramatic changes to their natural, social, and economic world.”
Singer, who also based much of his theory upon evidence gathered by the IPCC’s reports, agrees that the effects of climate change will be devastating, and that we need to find a suitable theory of ethics to deal with this problem. He lays out several different theories of equitable distribution, and explains the arguments for and against each. Our value system (or at least, the one we had before the long-term effects of our environmental impact became known, which was also when the process of industrialization put those impacts into motion) came to be, Singer says, in circumstances such that the atmosphere and other natural resources seemed unlimited. He refers to the justification of private property in the Second Treatise on Civil Government, penned in 1690 by John Locke. In it, Locke claims that all of the Earth’s natural resources belong to humans in common, but by mixing our own labor with that public resource we can make our own private property. At least, Locke says, so long as taking those natural resources leaves “enough and as good” resources available in common for others. Singer then analogizes the atmosphere to a global sink into which our wasteful emissions are poured. If those harmful gases simply vanished into the sink without negative consequences, Singer says, then anyone would be able to dump as little or as much waste into it as they wanted without violating Locke’s principle.
However, because our atmosphere is not limitless, there must be some global distribution of pollution rates so that there is “enough and as good” for all. Singer claims that the global rich use far more of the atmosphere’s pollution capacity than the poor, without providing any real benefit to the poor in return. He concludes that, using a historical principle, the developed nations “broke” the atmosphere and thus should be proportionally responsible for its repair. Singer adds that, because most of the atmosphere’s pollution was caused by people in the past who were unaware of its limits, a time-slice principle making a fresh start could be considered a fairer approach. Singer continues by saying that every individual deserves an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity for pollution. Carbon emissions could be stabilized at their current rates, he says, if the atmospheric sink were divided among each country, based on their expected population at a certain date. That way, countries are motivated to decrease population rates and therefore prevent the diminishing of each person’s quota to compensate for new populations.
Singer uses John Rawls’s argument of fairness, which states that we should aim to improve the conditions of those who are the worst-off. Singer points out that adjusting emission quotas based on their Gross Domestic Product allows countries like the United States to continue producing dangerous levels of pollution even though their economic activity mostly benefits only Americans, and as such, that kind of quota would be flawed. In short, he argues that the significant margin of wealth between rich and poor countries in the world means that the goal of improving the livelihood of the worst-off would still require the wealthier nations to pay for virtually all of the costs that aim demands. As a utilitarian, however, Singer disagrees with Rawls in the sense that increasing the happiness of the worst-off should only be the rule if, in doing so, it also causes the greatest benefit for the world as a whole.
Ultimately, Singer puts his favor in a system of “equal per capita future entitlements to a share of the capacity of the atmospheric sink, tied to the current United Nations projection of population growth per country in 2050.” The linchpin to this plan is the mechanism of emissions trading: nations polluting under the required limit can sell the remainder of their quota to countries exceeding their limits. This not only gives under-producing countries a strong motivation to minimize their emissions, it also gives them a bargaining chip to leverage the resources of rich countries and improve their own conditions of living. In addition, emissions trading decreases the economic impact sudden emission limits would cause to highly-industrialized countries. The issues of corrupt dictatorships misusing the emissions-traded money in poor countries and the inability to persuade governments in the most powerful countries would be solved, Singer says, if the international community as a whole could hold countries accountable for the damages they cause to other countries, and if corrupt regimes were simply not recognized as official governments.
While Singer sees the “polluter pays” principle as a general rule to be a good motivator for rich countries to avoid increasing their emission rates, Caney points out a number of problems with its implementation. First, there are multiple definitions of “polluter” which differ dramatically in their allocation of blame. Caney observes that the standard unit to which blame is usually ascribed is of countries, but it is possible that individuals, economic corporations, or even international institutions are to blame for causing pollution, or allowing other categories to pollute. Additionally, Caney notes that the common allocation of responsibility to people who live in countries which have, historically, produced greenhouse gases, actually violates the “polluter pays” principle because most of the actual polluters are people who lived in the past (and, if they lived before 1990, were unaware of the damage their activity was causing to the environment) and not people today. Caney also disbands an alternative “beneficiary pays” principle, in which the people who simply benefit from the processes which cause pollution should pay for its consequences, by pointing out that if those processes did not occur, the course of history would have flowed differently and those beneficiaries would never have existed in the first place. In addition, Caney says that it is unfair towards impoverished countries which cause pollution but which are still poor and thus cannot sustain significant changes to their economies.
Caney criticizes the “polluter pays” principle not because it is inherently wrong, but because it only applies to living people who are aware of the damages they are causing and who are both able and willing to pay for those damages. The principle works if and only if all parties are informed of the consequences of their actions, are able to pay for them, and are unable to use their power to avoid contributing their share. That said, he uses the same foundational principle of Singer’s argument: that the atmosphere is a limited sink of which we all have the right to a certain amount, and that an entity which exceeds that quota ought to be held responsible for paying for the consequences.
The difference is that Caney specifies that, in order to account for all of the greenhouse gases emitted before 1990, the wealthiest and most powerful individuals of the world ought to pay for the rest because they can bear the additional burden most easily. Even though they are paying for the consequences of the actions of others, Caney says, his proposal is still fair because the most-advantaged people have an obligation to design institutions which minimize non-compliance to his proposal, and that the cost of simply not compensating for the rest of the greenhouse gas emissions would be unacceptably large, and would unfairly affect impoverished people.
The proposals made by Caney and Singer are as complex and intertwined as the issues of climate change themselves are. Because both the causes and effects of climate change comprise the connected issues of consumerism, poverty, sovereignty, and responsibility, and because they implicate tremendous short- and long-term consequences stretching into the past and future, and because our understanding of these issues is so tentative, summarizing all of it into a single, 20-minute narrative told to elementary schoolers would probably prove to be a daunting and dangerous task. I think that, while these issues are difficult for anyone (let alone schoolchildren) to understand, it is essential for everyone (including and especially schoolchildren) to think critically and carefully about them. As such, I do not criticize The Story of Stuff’s attempt to explain its argument in a simple way so as to be accessible to a young audience. However, in my opinion one of the video’s primary weaknesses is its failure to present even one real, respectable alternative viewpoint, let alone encourage its audience to seek out more information and develop their own understanding of the topic. Presenting both Singer’s and Caney’s viewpoints would at least provide two proposals which are both, arguably, rational and well-thought-out arguments. I would propose that their arguments be presented, in as appropriately-simplified a manner as possible without distorting meaning or hiding important facts, as a multimedia presentation; having visual cues is a crucially valuable way for children to understand a complicated idea. However, instead of simply having a one-person lecture video, I propose presenting this information in an interactive website which allows students to explore the ideas and sources used in each argument in a deeper way. For example, an explanation of the sink analogy used by Singer could be accompanied with a diagram of a sink. A student could click on that sink to simulate adding pollution to that sink, making it more and more full until it can’t hold any more. This would allow a child to understand, in a more tangible way, the zero-sum concept of the atmospheric sink. They could also click on John Locke’s name, for instance, and an illustration of his face with a brief explanation of his life and its significance would appear on the screen to give students more context if they need it, without boring students who don’t want it. This format, which gives children multiple arguments and teaches them how to find additional information if they do not understand a concept, allows them to build the critical thinking skills necessary for understanding these issues in a meaningful way while avoiding misinformation and over-simplification.
In my opinion, The Story of Stuff does a great job of visually breaking down an argument, and of using emotional words and body language to convey the importance of these issues. However, its greatest shortcoming is that its format does not allow further explanation or interaction, and its creators chose not present any meaningful discourse within it. Designing a lengthier lesson plan (anywhere from a day to several weeks) to explore the evidence and theories surrounding this issue, and creating a technological framework for students to do their own research as well as consider multiple viewpoints, would be significantly more rational and productive. Finally, after letting students think about all the things they’ve learned and the arguments they’ve heard, a teacher could ask his or her class to come up with their own ideas and discuss with each other what they think is important. If students are taught to acquire a deep understanding of evidence, listen carefully to alternate viewpoints, and then discuss with others to develop and explain their own proposals, then they would not only have a much deeper understanding of this particular issue but also be better-equipped to think critically about everything in the world around them.
This essay was an assignment for the 2014 Spring Term of Justice and Globalization at Phillips Academy.
Few figures are as revered in post-9/11 American mythology as the courageous soldier, nobly sacrificing his (rarely ever “her”) life to protect the purity of his wife, family, and country half a world away. A recent New York Times article lampshades its own telling of Sergeant Shane Savage, whose “signature injuries” of head trauma and a crushed leg cast him into a “familiar arc” of depression, instability, and addiction caused by dramatic over-medication.
The Times is all too eager to throw him back into the front lines; it repeatedly calls his struggle a “War on Pain,” reminding me of the “War on Terror” paradox: apparently, Americans think the best way to alleviate the horrific consequences of war is to start another war against them.
The story of the article is, for the most part, a thinly-veiled derivative of the master narrative of American manhood. As a soldier he is tough, aggressive, and fearless: in fact, the article says that’s all he wanted to be. At 6’5” and sporting a six-pack, Sergeant Savage fit the perfect mold of the masculine protector. In fact, he re-entered the military after three tours because he missed the “brotherhood” its ranks offered him.
When he suffered horrific physical and emotional trauma during his military service, his subsequent suffering is not truly credited to his attackers (let alone the machinations of war itself) but to the medication which subdues, distorts, and weakens him. Neither he nor the article seem to hold a shadow of a doubt about sending young adults into battlefields to begin with.
While I’m certainly not doubting the awful effects of pharmaceutics which sometimes do more harm than good, I’m skeptical of the “cure” for his medicine: “his grit, his family, and a radical experiment in managing pain without narcotics.” Sergeant Savage found his respite in the very hallmarks of the American Western: donning a pair of cowboy boots, hopping on a horse and spending time with his loving nuclear family.
The Hollywood image of the “Wild West” has reclaimed mainstream American obsession ever since 9/11 – at least, it has been an unbelievably consistent trend, as outlined in Susan Faludi’s thorough book, The Terror Dream. She recounts the (largely untrue) frontier narratives of Native Americans attacking Midwestern outposts, kidnapping their women and deflating the perception of America as a righteous nation kept safe by burly men with shotguns.
This story jolted back to life in September 2001, with Muslim extremists playing the role of the assumedly savage, dark-skinned enemy, widows of World Trade Center workers filling the shoes of the stereotypically innocent, virgin victims, and George W. Bush stepping up to provide a template for the men of America: athletic, outdoorsy men holding guns and shoot-first attitudes.
In fact, I got the impression that this article does not consider war the true cause of Savage’s suffering to begin with. Doctors are the real villains here, and the author reassures readers that insurance providers are “cracking down” on medical professionals. The piece closes with a somehow positive spin on pain, which it describes as Savage’s new lifelong companion. In short, the resolution of this narrative is for Savage to just “deal with it.”
After all, what makes the hyper-masculine lone ranger stereotype maintain such high esteem is not his experience of hardship, but rather his ability to (in colloquial terms) “take it like a man.” What makes a martyr a martyr is the acceptance of self-sacrifice for a noble cause; if Savage numbed his pain away with medication, he would not be enduring hardship and would therefore be stripped of his heroism.
In this narrative, succumbing to pain is considered weak, and avoiding danger to begin with is considered cowardice. Men aiming to fill the role of masculine hero must eagerly jump into battle and never leave. Even if they return from war dazed and broken, they are immediately thrust into a new, metaphorical war. The only path to peace is paved with unconditional domination of the enemy, whether that enemy is the concept of terrorists or the existence of pain itself. These are wars that no one can truly claim to win; the only way to survive is to be invincible.
Sergeant Shane Savage is this story’s Superman: though he was wounded in battle, his steely resolve and gritty individualism represent the narrative of an America whose moral beliefs are unflappable: exterminate the enemy at all costs. Anything else would be to show weakness, and thus break the image of invincibility.
This blog post was an assignment for the 2014 Spring Term of Media Studies at Phillips Academy.
When talking about popular music, perhaps no names pop up more than Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles. On the one hand, I have the prolifically repetitive innocent princess, T-Swizzle, as thin as paper and even whiter. On the other hand, I have the assertive and fanatically-worshipped Queen B, who not only embraces the sexualization of her black and curvier body but who is empowering in the act. In my head, I still can’t get Pharrell to go away.
I watched the first music video which popped up when I searched each artist’s name in YouTube. To be clear, I don’t frequently listen to any of these artists, but from what I can tell, I don’t think any of these latest hits are truly anomalies in each musician’s career.
Nothing Has Changed
First I watched “Everything Has Changed” by Taylor Swift (and featuring Ed Sheeran). Suffice to say I was horrified. I could hardly imagine a video more eagerly embracing the gender stereotypes formulated in the “traditional” 1950s era and laid out by Jessica Valenti in The Purity Myth, among many others. The theme of this video is essentially Swift reminiscing over her (apparently overtly sexualized) pre-pubescent days. You’d think that a record-setting artist who’d been a 6-year-old so recently would remember that elementary schoolers actually think about things besides slow-dancing with their significant others, but Taylor Swift had a unique life after all.
Unsurprisingly, the video opens with a young Caucasian girl living in a massive suburban McMansion, twirling her blonde pigtails and tugging at her skimpy white dress while she waits for the school bus. Already, the blinding metaphors of “innocence” and “childhood purity” are stinging my eyes.
She sits next to a pants-wearing boy, who barely acknowledges her between sips from his mug and glances at the Comics section of a newspaper in his hands. As you could probably predict, he plays the knight in shining armor to her princess in the school play, draws in a notebook while she sews, and even receives a fake tattoo from her in the subsequent montage of their childhood romance.
Neither character seems to care about their education, their friends (if they even have any), or anything that could possibly exist outside the sphere of their love story; instead of sitting in class, they sneak out to hide in a dark, empty classroom to play with a snake and build a pillow fort. Who needs subtlety, anyways?
At the end of the video, we get our first surprise when our characters get picked up by their respective parents – none other than Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. Considering the fact that both of these singers would have been sixteen when these kids were born, not to mention that both children have almost identical bodies, clothes, and personalities as their parents, it seems more likely that these kids are actually clones.
The overall theme of the song is a nostalgic reminiscing of the highly-conventional romance which allegedly dominated Taylor Swift’s early adolescence, and the video implies that she is seeing the same exact story playing out in the next generation. Who knows: if Taylor Swift songs are all the next generation is hearing, maybe her impossible fantasies of romance-obsessed 5-year-olds will wish their way into reality.
Hurt Pretty Bad
After watching that video, I was ready for something different. Something very different. Beyoncé was my immediate choice. The first YouTube result for her name was the recently-released music video to “Pretty Hurts,” which is one of the songs on the self-titled album she unexpectedly debuted on iTunes. Taylor Swift would probably cover her “daughter’s” eyes if they watched this video, which depicts the hardships faced by Beyoncé’s Miss Third Ward character in a fictional (but most likely realistic) beauty pageant. Where Swift longingly embraces the romantic narrative of gender, beauty, and sexuality, Beyoncé shoves its ugly side into the critical spotlight.
The women in this video are unhappy and unhealthy, aggressively damaging their bodies through under-eating, over-exercising, and purging. Wearing little more than swimsuits and underwear, these contestants (many of whom are black) are dramatically over-sexualized; a far cry from the virginal, innocent “good girl” of Swift’s video. It’s clear that the smiles on their faces are shallow masks (some seemingly quite literally made of plastic) hiding the loathing they have for each other and for the beauty pageant as a whole.
All the while, the anthem’s lyrics are decrying those very same gender roles as destructive and impossible. Beyoncé sings of a mother who tells her daughter that intelligence doesn’t matter, that “what you wear is all that matters.” She speaks (or rather, sings) out against the institutions of female beauty which pressures girls to transform their bodies into impossible plastic figurines. The song’s hook emphasizes the unattainable obsession with perfection which is so clearly manifested in the concept of beauty pageants themselves: “we shine the light on whatever’s worst / perfection is the disease of a nation.” After all, the goal of conventional beauty is set at the expense of self-esteem and physical health, as women are conditioned to feel deeply ashamed of their own bodies simply for being different: “we try to fix something but you can’t fix what you can’t see / it’s the soul that needs the surgery.”
The most powerful moment of the video comes at around 4:00, when the music stops and the pageant’s host asks Miss Third Ward a conventional pageant question: “What is your aspiration in life?” Miss Third Ward is at a loss for words. She has never been given a true voice before, never allowed an ambition other than the glittery crown marking her absolute compliance to the sexual appetites of men which constitute the pageant's norm of beauty for women.
What is the real desire of a woman who has overworked, starved, and abused herself only to smile coquettishly while an unsettlingly over-glammed Miss Shaolin takes the crown? According to Miss Third Ward, it’s “to be happy.”
I Can’t Hear You Over the Sound of Happy
Unfortunately for her, the rest of the pop music industry doesn’t want to listen:
“Here come bad news talking this and that, yeah,
Well, give me all you got, and don’t hold it back, yeah,
Well, I should probably warn you I’ll be just fine, yeah,
No offense to you, don’t waste your time
Here’s why:
Because I’m happy!”
Pharrell, emerging from the shadows of an urban alley wearing impeccable pastel beach clothes while dancing goofily and singing in falsetto, could care less about the suffering of women in beauty pageants. Or apparently any suffering at all, for that matter.
The annoyingly-catchy spring fever hit of the year is, unfortunately, left unexplained: Pharrell never explains just how the men and women of various ages, races, and occupations in his video decided to all dance emphatically.
Considering the fact that Pharrell grew up in the resort city Virginia Beach, Virginia, it seems odd that he decides to sing his song in rusty metropolitan basements; while that seems to be the backdrop for many famous male African-American performers, “Happy” is just about the polar opposite of the racy rap songs and often aggressively masculine culture which manifests itself in the “cool pose” of these artists.
Ultimately, I think just about the only real meaning in this video actually betrays itself through Pharrell: after all, how can a black man in what appears to be impoverished city slums emphatically insist that all the world’s problems will go away if you just express your glee through a jig or two?
Answer: When that man is a superstar worth $80 million. Who started his own luxury clothing line called “Billionaire Boys Club.” And has a half-pipe in his own house. (He insisted that he’s still a humble guy, though: “I’m building a computer shelter for kids who are, y’know, less fortunate financially and come from low-income housing… I’m gonna change the world, baby.”)
Dischord?
Together, what might be considered the Holy Trinity of the current moment’s pop music – Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Pharrell – is sending a lot of mixed messages. A 24-year-old white female singer from Pennsylvania (who maintains total artistic control over her $40 million-a-year empire and made her name as a country musician by singing generic songs more closely resembling pop) performed a song called “Everything Has Changed” about how nothing has changed. A black female pop star spontaneously debuted her own music without warning, decrying damaging gender roles and the over-sexualization of African American women, either despite or because of her own highly-sexualized career. And a hugely-successful black male musician from Virginia brought upper-class beach clothes to the alleys of Los Angeles to sing about how everything is great and we should ignore all problems.
One thing is clear, however: all of these songs and artists are unfathomably successful. Who knows – maybe there is a method to all this madness.
This blog post was an assignment for the 2014 Spring Term of Media Studies at Phillips Academy.
This blog post was edited on March 8, 2015 to remove what were undeniably problematic phrases regarding race and gender in African American pop culture, which can be found on the original WordPress blog post. I apologize for being insensitive and making generalizations, and I invite anyone to call me out whenever I make hurtful comments.
It is often said that the experiments you learn the most from are the ones in which you fail. What happens when the experiment is one of learning itself?
This second term of Hacking came to be largely out of the class’s almost unanimous desire to, well, keep being in Hacking. We all loved the subject matter, and I think we also found Mr. Palfrey’s teaching style to be the perfect balance of structure and flexibility; few of the classes I’ve taken at Andover have so consistently avoided being either too relaxed or too rigorous. We were also inspired by the rapid forward momentum of technology in the context of knowledge, be it in classrooms, libraries, or entirely on the web. We wanted to take advantage of the opportunity having Mr. Palfrey as a teacher offered: we could dedicate an entire class period to studying education and re-evaluating Phillips Academy as an academic institution and a community, and also have some chance of actually causing some change on campus. Many of us were excited by the prospect of leaving our mark on the school, of actually causing some real change in a way that most students are never able to: through the administration itself.
While our class was too unconventional to be formally approved as an Independent Project, to the best of my knowledge it has acted very much like one. We proposed the goals, course materials, and structure of the class in a syllabus we wrote ourselves, and outside of a weekly meeting with Mr. Palfrey we are totally unsupervised. For the most part, everything was up to us. Recently, I’ve found that Andover students given an abstract mission or a complex controversy can rarely agree enough to move past debate and focus on practical matters. In some cases, this could be a good thing; discourse, when it is respectful and thoughtful, is as valuable as it is rare, and acting without it is often dangerous and ineffective. However, when we give ourselves one term (with a grand total of 18 hours of class time) to plan, develop, and orchestrate a complete analysis and potential overhaul of education at a school with more resources (and expectations) than just about any of its kind on the face of the Earth, we might be just a little pressed for time.
At least, that’s the way I have felt throughout much of this class. While I think that our discussions in class are valuable and have certainly taught me many things about the nature of education, I honestly believe that they are not as productive as they could be with a more traditional teacher. Over the past few weeks I have come to much more deeply appreciate the vast pool of knowledge, structure, and accountability that a teacher brings to the classroom. Most of us are teaching a group of students for the first time, and while I think our struggle to find truly effective course material and homework assignments is understandable, in a comparative sense it is rather undesirable.
So, has this experimental class failed? No, I don’t think so. But I don’t think it has succeeded in living up to our expectations, either. We have been organized, but not as organized as some other classes. We have created substantive work, but not as substantive as some other classes. For better or for worse, I can scrape by without spending much time working on assignments from this class and then use that time to work on more time-pressing projects (or, admittedly, spend as many moments as I can with my friends before I leave Andover). So I do that. My Phillips Academy experience has not shaped me to be a dedicated, consistent scholar so much as an economic one; the amount of work I put into a course is roughly equivalent to the amount of work its teacher requires of me to get an average grade.
Ultimately, Hacking class so far has reaffirmed my belief that the teacher is the most important factor in a student’s education. The relatively free reign Phillips Academy faculty are given results in a strikingly clear example of how many different ways any given subject matter or skill can be taught. Take English 300, for example: while there are certainly many advantages to letting English teachers expand their curricula to cover materials they may deem more important than the standard canon of literature written by old, dead, white guys, the program almost immediately blossomed into a collection of randomly-assigned English electives with very little bearing on each other. Studying contemporary theory and film about the Algerian War develops significantly different analytical techniques than reading Shakespeare’s plays, as I found when I did both in my own English 300 class. If a student struggles to adapt to any one professor’s teaching style or materials, they are compensated with little more than a sympathetic pat on the back by their friends.
I could spend many more pages addressing the issues of widely disparate teaching and grading styles between teachers of the same department and even the same course, but I am only bringing them up here to illustrate the extraordinary influence a teacher holds over the education of their students, particularly in schools like Phillips Academy with very small class sizes. And if Hacking: A Practicum has taught me anything consistently over the past few weeks, it’s that self-education is a tremendously challenging and risky method, especially for people like me who struggle to find inner motivation. A TED talk is not a teacher. Khan Academy is not a teacher. They are audio-visual textbooks, presenting us with valuable information that we can revisit over and over, but they can never answer our questions, or explain it a different way, or make sure we’re not slacking our way through the class. The best thing that has ever happened to me has been the Andover faculty, of whom many have been the most intelligent, well-read, interesting, and compassionate people I’ve ever met. Teachers bring an irreplaceable human connection and background of learning which, for the time being, computers simply can’t replace. Our vision of designing an efficient and well-rounded class without actually learning it first was, in retrospect, probably a bit short-sighted.
That said, I think it is better to design an experiment with too optimistic a goal than to fall back to the status quo. We have still made a great deal of progress, and I think the work we have produced so far is nothing to be ashamed of. This class is an experiment, after all, and its failure could teach us just as much as its success – as long as we keep paying attention.
This article originally appeared on the Hacking Andover class blog.
This week, I helped lead the class talk about discipline in an academic context. We looked at case studies including Groton School, the New York City Public School System, and Phillips Academy itself, to examine the relationship between a school’s expectations and the actions of its student community.
Ultimately, we focused our time on evaluating the disciplinary system at Andover, which we have all been exposed to in one form or another. One of the most important questions we raised was: What does the school want us to be, and how well do the rules make those values a reality?
According to my experience as a four-year student at Phillips Academy, not to mention the rules written in the 2013-2014 Blue Book, Phillips Academy holds its students to (justifiably) high standards when it comes to discrimination, sexual assault, drug abuse, and other activities which result in disciplinary action. In fact, it expects us to develop a thorough understanding of these issues on our own, and bases its disciplinary system on the belief that if a wrongdoing occurs, a student will be able to recognize it as such and then report it to the administration.
To the Blue Book’s credit, the introductory statements on many of their policies are prefaced with an explanation of some of the harmful consequences of banned activities, which form the basic reasoning behind their criminalization. For example, the first clause on Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs on page 6 explains that the use of those substances can cause serious damage to the health of individuals and the community as a whole, which is why they are banned.
I strongly believe that every student, child, and person has a right to know precisely why an authority figure is requiring them to act in a certain way. That’s not to say that they have to agree, but requiring rules to be explained both helps students learn about the potential consequences of their actions and ensures that certain rules are justifiable to begin with.
This is supported by the work of Diana Baumrind, a well-known developmental psychologist who found that children whose parents actually explained their commands ended up more socially responsible and independent than all other children. It turns out there’s a benefit to treating youth as intelligent beings capable of rational thought.
However, if the administration truly does “strive to educate students about the potential dangers” (page 6) of drugs, and if it honestly “makes every effort to achieve an educational environment that is free from harassment, discrimination, hazing, and bullying” (page 14), I’m far from the only student who doesn’t remember that happening. In fact, I have found that many of the problems associated with substance abuse, discrimination, and harassment are unclear or ignored by an alarmingly large number of students here.
Just this week, my dormitory had to hold an emergency dorm meeting when my house counselors overheard some students using racial slurs. In small groups, the dorm spent an hour simply reviewing the definition of “microaggression,” something many students had never actually understood. The week before, we all met in the common room to receive a lecture about sexting with a Q&A session. These are just the latest of a long series of dorm meetings over the past four years which made understanding the consequences of harmful actions a chore to be done after hours, as quickly as possible, so that we can go back to our homework.
When the administration says they “strive” to educate the student body about these topics, they mean that they confine virtually all official teachings or discussions of discipline issues to one or two brief meetings, at the beginning of the year, in the context of a dorm late at night, taught by house counselors who themselves are not trained to know more than the list of rules they are given before such meetings.
As someone who believes that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I think it would be in the best interests of the administration, the student body, and the entire community to reconsider a curriculum which values a student’s ability to solve, plot, and integrate a function as needing more time and emphasis than a student’s ability to be a good person.
To be fair, those students who happen to come in as Freshmen or New Lowers are required to take a pass-fail, one-term class (often during lunch) to talk about social issues. PACE (Personal and Community Education) isn’t inherently bad, but it once again limits official discussions of extremely important topics such as race, class, gender, and sexuality to brief sessions for underclassmen in an after-thought setting.
If the administration is practicing what they preach, apparently they don’t think upperclassmen or day students even need any education on these topics. I think it’s possible that the administration earnestly believes that the brilliant, talented, hard-working students of Andover come in with a mastery of discipline, a deep knowledge of social issues, and an underlying commitment to being kind people; it’s certainly true that some Andover students do step onto campus with those tools under their belt.
Sadly, that’s simply not the case for everyone. As much as admissions tries to admit nice people (the Class of 2014 was dubbed the “nice” class based on that effort), the ability to be a good person is not as clearly marked on an application as the ability to solve, plot, and integrate a function. Besides, virtually none of us have been in a place with such a diverse group of people, causing us to be aware of identities, values, and actions we never had to think about in the past. The flip side of diversity is that we also have such different educations and backgrounds that it’s simply not fair to assume that we share common knowledge about any of these complicated issues.
For example, students from states in the South have said that they never had any sex-ed to begin with. Some of my friends from European countries are shocked that the administration considers alcohol to be a significant danger to minors.
Because our disciplinary system consists of committees and discussions which, except in the most extreme cases, rely almost entirely on anecdote provided by students or other members of the community, it is imperative that everyone in the community has a strong common understanding of what exactly the Blue Book is talking about.
In a school full of people whose common trait is a tendency towards academic success, many students are going to prioritize the materials they are required to learn, practice, and be tested about on a regular basis and in a academic manner over the materials which are treated like a chore. I don’t think my dorm would have such a struggle to understand microaggression if they had to define it and use examples.
The idea that “Knowledge” and “Goodness” should complement each other is written in our very school constitution. “Goodness without Knowledge” is described as feeble. Personally, I don’t think it’s even possible to have the former without the latter: how can you be good if you don’t know what “good” is?
This article originally appeared on the Hacking Andover class blog.
Phillips Academy is frequently considered one of the most liberal and progressive schools in the circle of prestigious prep schools of New England – including Phillips Exeter, Deerfield, and St. Paul’s. Yet even without certain regulations like dress code and limited Internet access, the values of the administration are taught to students through the structure of the curriculum itself. I closely examined the Course of Study class catalog to establish and unpack the patterns of conspicuous leisure between its covers.
The Academic Curriculum section on page two summarizes the broad purpose of an Andover education:
“The curriculum of Phillips Academy comprises a required core of studies that the faculty believe are fundamental to lifelong learning along with elective courses designed to fit the interests of the individual student. Instruction is given in all subjects usually required for entrance to higher learning institutions.”
This paragraph concisely defines the academic goals the faculty and administration believe an ideal Andover student should have as “lifelong learning” and “entrance to higher learning institutions.” The assumption here is that a successful Phillips Academy student will continue in the field of academia for at least a few more years, if not longer, and that everything a person needs to be a good learner are described in the 84-page pamphlet.
The very same section makes it explicitly clear that this structure of values has been established by the administration’s careful and thoughtful selection but that disapproval or objection on the part of the students or their families will be universally rejected. For better or for worse, the only way for a student or parent to take control of a particular student’s Andover education beyond a pre-determined scope of choice is to somehow persuade the entire faculty to change the structure of the school for everyone.
To see what kinds of things the faculty find essential to every lifelong learner, I examined the diploma requirements of a 4-year student printed on page 5. Because virtually all classes earn exactly one credit per term, the most significant metric used to determine whether a student has the skills to be a lifelong learner is simply how much time they spend in a class:
“World Languages,” “History and Social Science,” “Math,” and “English” are each required for the equivalent of three years of classes.
“Lab Science” and “Art, Music, Theatre, and Dance” are less valued, given only about two years each.
“Philosophy and Religious Studies” and “Physical Education” are least important, being required for only one term each.
Conveniently, the grouping of each subject into general categories and the use of a universal numerical system make the Andover education presentable in a simple table, and also easy to analyze.
Each class is assigned a department based on their subject matter (as opposed to, for example, mode of teaching) and a three-digit number value. According to the Course Numbers section on page nine, the first digit of each number “corresponds to the ‘level’ of the course,” which presumably refers to the difficulty or sequence in which a department is to be learned.
The “conspicuous leisure” I mentioned earlier is defined by Thorstein Veblen, an American economist who lived in the 19th and 20th century, in Chapter 3 of his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Having previously described the distinction between the “working class” (people who live by producing or interacting with inanimate goods) and the “leisure class” (people who can afford to manipulate others, consume goods, and devote their time to doing things not necessary for survival) in the first two chapters, Veblen describes “conspicuous leisure” as the intentional display of status or wealth by the leisure class. As our society develops, he argues, the leisure class creates increasingly sophisticated methods of winning favor from others by showing off objectively arbitrary tasks and objects (like sports and expensive clothes).
From Veblen’s perspective, the Andover experience would almost certainly be one of the leisure class: our examination of fiction and poetry, our understanding of world history, our capacity to speak fluently in multiple languages, and our ability to write concise statements supported by logically presented and properly referenced concepts found in a library’s books, are not fundamentally skills used to create products and sustain ourselves directly. As members of the leisure class, Andover students engage in conspicuous leisure through one universal code: numbers.
Ferdinand de Saussure, who lived in the same time period as Veblen and was an important thinker in the study of the meanings of signs and sign systems called “semiotics,” might have described numbers as a very simple code of meaning, which are universally understood by the people who use it (three is more valuable than two, which is more valuable than one, and so on).
In this case, numbers are signifiers of a course’s difficulty and value. Classes with a higher number are understood as requiring a greater amount of skill or knowledge to complete; departments with a higher credit requirement for graduation are understood as deserving more skill or knowledge in the completion of an ideal education.
These numbers affect the way students perceive their educations here. Classes with a higher number value (and departments with a higher requirement value) are signified as having greater intrinsic value for everyone. Based on this structure, an unsuspecting reader of the Course of Study would consider MATH-380, Accelerated Precalculus, to be more valuable for college admissions (and therefore a life of learning) than THDA-380, “Technical Production” of theatre. Students taking MATH-650, Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra, are generally considered to be objectively “better” – not just as a mathematician, but as a scholar – than students placed (according to faculty review of placement tests) in MATH-100, Elementary Algebra.
Applying the theories of signification and conspicuous leisure, the numerical valuation of classes makes the enrollment in a class designated with a high number to be a signifier of great cultural capital. If I so desired, I could literally add up all the numbers of the classes I’ve taken – in this structure, my wealth is determined by the accumulation of literal numbers – and this is all without even the mention of grades!
The catalog’s assignment of universal values across the entire curriculum creates an arbitrary structure of comparison facilitating the belief that:
The materials the faculty chooses to teach are inherently more conducive to lifelong learning than those not offered;
The departments in which the faculty requires a long period of study for graduation are inherently more valuable than those with shorter requirements;
The classes with high faculty-assigned numbers require from students more advanced skills and knowledge than those with lower values;
The students who are enrolled in classes with high numbers or in departments with greater requirements are better at learning than others, regardless of talent, interest, or situation.
In short, the Course of Study teaches students to actively participate in conspicuous consumption through measuring the value of a subject, their peers’ (and their own) cultural capital, and their ability to learn as a sum of numbers signifying only the beliefs of the faculty themselves.
This blog post was an assignment for the 2014 Spring Term of Media Studies at Phillips Academy.
Television is lit up with sitcom after sitcom after sitcom cataloging the adventures of American family stereotypes, and the hilarious mess they cause whenever they break from the norm. I watched an episode of the hugely successful Modern Family, currently in its fifth season, to see how things have changed since the heyday of the mother of American sitcom:I Love Lucy.
A smash hit which quickly became a landmark of American culture, Lucy was funny when she ran in direct contradiction to contemporary gender stereotypes. Sadly, most of that running was in circles. She brought in the laughs when she said something impolitely or tried to escape the house – where, if less edgy contemporary sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and Leave It To Beaver are any indication, she was supposed to spend all her time tending.
Ricky, Lucy’s husband, represented the previously-avoided Hispanic demographic. Unlike other sitcoms, he owned an apartment in the city instead of a house in the suburbs. While he was breaking new ground, he did maintain his stereotypical gender role as the family breadwinner and gentleman. He was calm, rational, and unambitious, a complete male foil to Lucy’s unconventional female rebel.
In the episode “The Camping Trip,” Lucy tries to cling to her husband Ricky every moment to prove to herself that they have everything in common, and that their marriage will last forever. When she invites herself to the camping trip Ricky is going to attend with his male friends, Ricky schemes a preliminary camping trip to make Lucy miserable and convince her not to go with him to the men-only wilderness vacation.
Ethel, their landlady, overhears his plan and decides to help Lucy. Together, they attempt to trick Ricky into thinking that Lucy is just as capable of running, fishing, and hunting as a man using the tools at their disposal – a car and the supermarket. The audience’s laughter when Lucy seems to have caught more fish than her husband seems to say, “Of course a woman couldn’t do that on her own!”
The episode ends when Ricky discovers that they both knew of each others’ schemes. He jokes, “I guess this makes us even?” Lucy acts as if she believed him.
I Love Lucy’s reliance on the contradictions between stereotypes and counterstereotypesultimately makes the entire show’s humor hinged upon the image of the nuclear household pervading 1950s culture. Lucy wasn’t resisting an oppressive patriarchy, she was a naive housewife who couldn’t even succeed in pretending to belong anywhere but inside the home.
The television industry in Lucy’s era barely allowed an interracial marriage on television and considered the word “pregnant” too offensive for mainstream sitcoms. They couldn’t possibly have imagined that Lucy’s metaphorical grandchildren could have been an obese gay man with an adopted Asian daughter.
Over 50 years after I Love Lucy, Modern Family hit the airwaves. It isn’t so much a break from form as it is the next generation of the sitcom family Lucy has been credited with rearing. Even though its demographics – a soon-to-be-married gay couple, a middle-aged man whose second wife is a Colombian woman half his age, and a nerdy girl who seems disinterested in traditional beauty, among others – seem totally from those in I Love Lucy, their traits and actions in the episode “Other People’s Children” are all evenly balanced mixtures of stereotype and counterstereotype.
Mitchell Pritchett and Cameron Tucker are two flamboyant gay men, who always wear neatly-maintained sweaters and button-down shirts and whose high-pitched voices are almost always being used to explain how everything they do is motivated by appearance and sex. They are also a loving couple with unconventional body types, and they don’t seem to have a problem with their daughter attending their wedding in a Disney princess costume.
Andy the babysitter’s muscles and crew cut give away his enrollment in the Coast Guard. He is also an extremely emotional boyfriend who is dedicated to making a cheesy, love-filled anniversary gift.
Claire Dunphy is a protective mother who works at home to take care of her children and family. She also hates fashion, greatly preferring jeans and plaid shirts to dresses and heels.
Manny Delgado is a hispanic kid. He’s also smart.
Though Modern Family’s mockumentary style doesn’t allow a laugh track, the awkward silences left in their place occur whenever anyone does something unexpected – that is to say, contrary to their stereotype: Andy is funny when he reveals his passionate, vulnerable side. Claire is funny when she reveals that she never wore a wedding dress. Manny is funny when he says something intellectual.
Almost every aspect of the characters’ personality and appearance is defined by generalizations. Just like I Love Lucy, the only time these characters diverge from sweeping racial and gender stereotypes, is when they act exactly the opposite.
Cue laughter.
This blog post was an assignment for the 2014 Spring Term of Media Studies at Phillips Academy.
dededos
snowghoul
kaledo-art
pixelskylines
baratheonpilled
yousharknotpass