bearing blog

Battle of wits.

H. and I were dismayed at some of our seventh- and eighth-graders' writing recently.  We thought we had mostly mechanics problems, but some careful probing of their paragraph-composing ability revealed that they needed a refresher course in constructing logical arguments.  

So H. spent some time working with them on syllogisms.  

You know the sort.  All men are mortal.   Socrates is a man.  Therefore Socrates is mortal.  (Although it turns out that there are lots more kinds that I never learned about in school.  Fortunately H. is on the case.)

"Might as well do it anyway," I theorized.  "It's the sort of thing that lots of people get in school.  Can't hurt.  Might help."

Today H. gave them a copy of Vizzini's speech from The Princess Bride -- the one with the Battle of Wits over the iocane powder and the two cups of wine -- and challenged the kids to find and articulate as many syllogisms -- explicit and implicit, valid and not valid -- as they could.

 

It was a very fun lesson to overhear while I was making lunch.

 

This is the kind of thing they came up with:

• If you are strong, then you trust your strength to save you.  You are strong, therefore I can not choose the glass in front of you.
• If you have been to Australia, then you are used to people not trusting you. You have  been to Australia. Therefore you are used to not being trusted.
• If I can find out what kind of man you are, then it is simple.  This is not simple, therefore I can’t find out what kind of man you are.
• Iocane comes from Australia and Australia is populated by criminals.  You obtained the iocane.  Therefore you are a criminal.

 

We were amused to discover that the entire battle of wits includes one incorrect assumption (that one of the goblets is not poisoned) but that Vizzini repeatedly comes to the correct conclusion anyway ("Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me" and "Therefore, I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.")

 

 

I am hiding in my room to write this post.

Man, do I hate the first couple of days back at school after a long break.

Yesterday we had our "reading day" to wean them off the steady diet of video games and TV they enjoyed during our extended stay at the g-parents'. No screen time except for the hour after lunch (the usual amount), but they could play or read or go outside -- whatever -- while I got my schoolroom back together and figured out what I needed to do next. That went fine.

Today I sat across the table from my 6- and 9-year-olds and watched -- exhorted -- declaimed -- pulled my hair out as each of them took TWO HOURS to do a math lesson that should have been about half an houris (20 minutes, tops, for the 6-yo). My 9-yo has just started a new 4th-grade book that eases into things, and the first section of his lesson was simply to write out eleven different numbers, some given in digits to be spelled out in words, some spelled out to be written in digits. He was given a chart with all the necessary words spelled out, and a list of the hyphenation rules to refer to.

Readers, this is not a child with a learning disability. Readers, it took me more than an hour to exhort him to finish this lesson-part, occasionally having to run after him and bring him back to his desk ("Oh, yeah! I have to do my math!"), and he STILL miscopied "ninty" for "ninety" AND left out all the hyphens.

And let's not talk about the 6-yo. Things weren't so different for her.

You know, I am never tempted to send the children to school. Really, I am not. For one thing, I have never done it, so I have no memories of a golden age when I got several hours of quiet time every day, or a chance to work for wages at a job among grownups. For another thing, I am perfectly aware that problems I can see happening before my own eyes might well slip under the radar of an instructor, however gifted, in a classroom of twenty-five children. For a third thing, I am quite intellectually convinced of the adequacy of homeschooling and of the reasons it is the best choice for our family.

But I am tempted to raid the pile of Christmas chocolates at tea-snack time and then hide upstairs under the guise of taking a loooooooong shower. Also to spend the day shrieking things like, "Do you KNOW how RIDICULOUS this is? Do you know you could have been done with this NINETY MINUTES AGO? What is going on? No, it isn't because you are bad at math, it is because you are CHOOSING not to SIT in your chair and DO it!"

Something about there being two children instead of one who are both pulling the same thing, right in front of me, is crazy-making. I can only "make" one of them work at a time. When I turn to one, the other twirls her chair, sneaks jawbreakers out of her desk and wanders off to look for scissors to open them with; when I notice she is gone and go after her, the first one starts drawing ninjas in the corner of his paper.

I hope this is a passing phase related to the "first week back" phenomenon. Because while I am not exactly tempted to quit, I am sorely tempted to cast about wildly for something, anything, that will "work," whether that is concomitant with my long-term goals and values or not.

Or just to give up and start drawing ninjas myself. Pass the chocolate.

Jarring, yet intriguing, juxtaposition of the morning.

Grading papers as foot-washing, courtesy of Jamie (alias Dr. Most-Gladly).

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Thought on this one: Why do I always seem to encounter the insights that might have helped me make sense of and/or endure some difficult task, long after I have put that task long behind me, probably for good? I had to do some grading of papers as a TA a few times, and I did it back then with the expectation of a working life spent doing things like grading papers, among other things.

But I haven't put grading behind entirely, right, what with the whole homeschooling thing? Still doing it?

Not even close. Grading your own child's papers, or the papers of a friend's child whom you know well, is NOT the same because the intimacy of critiquing lacks the discomfort, that sensation of boundary-crossing. I am supposed to help my child grow up, navigate the requirements of adulthood, which here are communicating like a thinking person in a thinking world, and sending the correct social signals. I am authorized by human sociobiology itself to perform such tasks for my children (and, I believe, for the other children in other family groups close to me). Bathing your own child, however grimy, isn't even close to foot-washing. Hey, mothers, if you've done time in the volunteer nursery -- isn't there a REALLY SIGNIFICANT difference between changing your own child's diaper and changing someone else's child's diaper? Admit it. Your own kid's poop doesn't stink quite as badly.

The essence of foot-washing is that it violates a boundary we would all prefer not to violate. It knocks down an imaginary wall that we put there for our own protection against a number of uncomfortable truths: the sort of truths that are common to human beings. There is something in it that reminds me of the confessional (as it should). There is something in it that reminds me of Snowden's terrible secret in Catch-22.

I wonder if Jamie might find some irony in the discomfort of critiquing existing alongside the imposter syndrome -- the collection of all such critiquing is the way imposter syndrome is communicated from teacher to student, in a sort of intellectual laying-on-of-hands. (Personally, I would be a little bit concerned for a budding academic who entirely lacked that sense of uncomfortable self-awareness. It's a useful faculty, if it can be channelled.)

It might be a little funny to think of such a thing in the banality of grading papers, but I think there is a lot to be said for the comparison. Someone did it for you, and now you're to turn around and do it for others. It's thoroughly uncomfortable for everyone involved, but it has to be gotten through and everyone is the better for it, even when nobody's very well-practiced at the task. It requires the will overcoming the reluctance that persists, for a good natural reason, in our nature. And the will has its own reasons -- not wholly natural ones -- why it is good and right that it should prevail.

Darwin's liberal arts program.

Darwin is writing about his own ideas for a redesigned "modern liberal arts curriculum:"

Last week I tried to expand a bit on the concept of the Liberal Arts as "the skills of a free man". I described the purpose of the ancient and medieval liberal arts education as being to develop a general and adaptable set of skills that allowed the liberally educated person to understand and reason about the world, and I attempted to contrast this type of education from being trained to perform some one task or set of tasks well.

The classic set of liberal arts is: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy

Some of these disciplines are defined rather differently now than they were in the pre-modern world, and the modern world presents its own particular challenges to understanding, so I think it's worth thinking a little on how one might update this list.

Darwin goes on to list thoughts on a slightly different set of arts: history and literature; writing and rhetoric; philosophy; language, grammar and linguistics; mathematics; natural science; computer science; and social sciences. Please go and read his thoughts; this post is my response.

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Even though I took a concentration in the sciences in high school, and went on to major in engineering, I appreciate and share the goal of producing broadly educated individuals who have a sense of the way different disciplines interrelate and who have had practice in writing, in forming arguments, and in taking account of the whole human person in their work in the world.

But I don't think liberal arts colleges always succeed in this goal, particularly today. I think there are three major problems here:

• Number one: the leftist political slant of nearly every liberal arts department in the country. Slant is inevitable, but it shouldn't always be in one direction, and departments ought to conscientiously try to correct it. They don't.
  
• Number two: Education isn't broad, general, and adaptable, and it limits the ability of the educated person to think and reason about the world, when mathematics and physical science are absent or only afterthoughts. It's utterly ridiculous to call an education "broad" and "adaptable" when the graduates have only a vague understanding of the physical laws that govern the world they live in; a poverty of knowledge about the human body, the organisms that inhabit its surroundings, and the materials that make those surroundings; and ineptitude with the mathematical language in which we express relationships among all these things.
• Number three: the declining academic standards of those colleges. Some of this is associated with the leftist slant, in my opinion -- not that leftist slants are necessarily less academically rigorous than rightist slants, but "slant" is generally expressed by ignoring whole points of view and areas of study. Theology, Western civ, and military history, once important aspects of their fields, are gathering dust. If it was a rightward slant, we'd see different things ignored. That's part of it. Another part of it is simple grade inflation and reduced reading loads. The physical sciences and engineering just have not suffered from this as much.

To sum up: I don't think a lot of liberal arts colleges really are delivering what Darwin describes as the mission of the liberal arts.

I haven't much advice about how to fix political slant or grade inflation, but I do know something about the sciences and mathematics. And here I will try to strengthen my liberal-education cred a little bit more: Even though in college I specialized in chemical engineering, and even though in graduate school I had to get even more narrowly specialized, at heart I am a science generalist: I enjoy being at least a little bit conversant in everything much more than I enjoyed becoming an expert in a tiny little area of materials science. This is one of the reasons why staying home to educate my children attracted me more strongly than going on to look for work in research, when it was time to make a decision. I could maybe make an argument for a liberal sciences major to complement the liberal arts major: why not develop a generally adaptable set of skills that would allow the person so educated to understand and reason about the physical world and its laws? (Bonus: the objective nature of physical laws insulates such a program, just a bit more, against political slant and grade inflation.) I could even point to my chemical engineering major and suggest that it comes pretty close to actually embodying a liberal science/engineering major, since the curriculum is a fairly broad combination of science and technology areas (particularly if you take biology electives). It's really why I felt so comfortable there as an undergraduate.

Here are some thoughts. I am cribbing a little bit from what I wrote in Darwin's comboxes.

Mathematics. The key to making math work as a liberal art is to think of it as a means of expanding cognitive abilities. It isn't all calculation - it is a means of understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases. Many people don't get to see the beauty of mathematics, even if someone has been wise enough to show them its utility.

MrsDarwin wrote in response to that comment,

One of the ways I've tried to make our homeschooling different from my own experience is that I'm trying to present math as a mode of thinking, not just as an exercise in memorization....

I, like Darwin, worked my own way through Saxon Math, but although I learned much about following formulas exactly as they were presented to me, I learned little to nothing about mathematics as "understanding the world and what is in it, how stuff moves around, interferes with other things, increases and decreases"....But that could also be because math and science had never, not even in my early years at school, been presented as anything other than formulas or drudge. I do think that if I had been inculcated with an interest in, if not a love for, math from an early age, my later studies would have borne more fruit. But I also think that having a good instructor would have been key.

Mind you, not every scientist or engineer winds up with the attitude toward math that I have. But my experience was that (except for proof-based geometry and much later, in graduate-level continuum mechanics, which sounds like science and was taught by an aerospace engineering professor but is really math) it wasn't in my mathematics classes that the "beauty" of math happened. It was in science and engineering classes. It is in the study of "stuff" that it becomes clear how math works its magic on it: setting limits on the world, describing how that stuff moves around, increases and decreases. Writing a mass balance on a differential element of a spherical shell -- a basic problem in introductory chemical engineering -- always felt beautiful to me.

Yeah, I am kind of a weirdo. Please don't roll your eyes at me.

That being said, I would think that proof-based geometry would tie in neatly to the liberal arts curriculum. You could easily put a historical emphasis or logic emphasis on it, or even use it to substitute for a different type of logic course. I plan to use proof-based geometry as the main way of including logic in my homeschool curriculum.

But geometry is so useful with such wide application that it goes beyond logic. Geometry, the calculus specific to understanding related rates, and maybe a study of functions -- any of these could be applied to a wide range of intellectual activities.

 

Sciences. If you have to only have one science, I nominate physics. For one thing, it gives you a shot of putting all that mathematics in context -- of working together with mathematics to demonstrate how we use it to grasp the world. For another thing, even elementary Newtonian physics does a good job of demonstrating how things are not always as they seem -- how we become fooled by the specifics around us into misunderstanding general laws. Air resistance and friction and frames of reference create so many red herrings! For a third thing, it's the most "generally applicable" of all sciences. Biology is just chemistry at bottom, and chemistry is just physics at bottom. For yet another thing, it encourages the contemplation of the fundamental nature of the material world. It is the interface of creation.

But since "general" is the aim, it might be better to have a little physics, a little chemistry, a little bio, and then maybe an elective in some other area of science.

How to design such a course in order to create scientifically literate citizens would be instructive. And difficult: to take two whole semesters of the chemistry program, for instance, barely scratches the surface of chemistry. You would want to design it from scratch, not just rely on the introductory material that science majors have to take. You want a "chemistry for liberal arts majors" that isn't just code for "chemistry for people who hate math and need an easy way to get the science credit the stupid college says they have to have." And in many universities that would be hard: the chemistry department will want to save its best teachers for its own students (the chemistry majors). So unless you have buy-in from the department chair, and professors who have a passion for sharing their subject with students in other majors, it'll be so hard to put together a quality science series.

 

Languages. In countries where English is not the spoken language, I would require the study of English for the same reasons that the medievals studied Latin and Greek: it is a modern-day lingua Franca. But here in English-speaking North America, I would advise learning a second language: not so much for the ability to converse in the language or to read its literature, but for the cognitive development and deep knowledge of "how language works" that comes from translating one's thoughts into another idiom. I don't think you can really understand your own language until you have studied a different one for long enough to get its grammar and it's mode of thought. Sure, you could learn about language by studying linguistics instead. I have never taken linguistics, so I can't really judge. But my instinct is to say that you can learn enough of what is generally applicable about language by delving into the process of learning one language well.

Computer science. Darwin had some thoughts about this in his post. I agree with them. If you are going to have a basic understanding of the social forces that shape the modern world, then at this point in history you need to have an understanding of computing. I suggested "a notion of the algorithm" as the fundamental concept around which to build a liberal computing art. Darwin has some more ideas. Whatever you include, I think it would be instructive to include a little bit of computer programming: just enough to demonstrate the thought process that goes into instructing a computer to execute step-by-step instructions. See how a loop works, and an if-then command. Experience the frustration of accidentally dividing by zero. Debug something: discover how important accuracy really is when you are dealing with a machine that cannot guess what you really meant. Understand a tiny bit of what makes human intelligence so unlike machine language, and appreciate the human accomplishment that is inventing computer languages.

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I think what I have written here demonstrates a piece of my educational philosophy, or maybe you could call it a bias, or a theme that pervades my understanding of learning. It is this: To acquire mastery of a skill is a way to acquire generally applicable knowledge.

This has certainly played out in my own life. I could not appreciate the general beauty and utility of mathematics until I exercised my mathematical knowledge in wrestling with physics and engineering problems. I could not have taught myself Latin and Spanish (enough to teach them to children) without the experience I had being taught French -- a specialization! -- to fluency. To the extent that I understand the notion of an algorithm, the process of formulating a problem in the way a machine can understand, and other abstract aspects of computer science, I understand them because I have written computer programs, and struggled to debug and improve them.

I think you can't really learn linguistics until you've learned to speak a language. I think you can't really say you appreciate music until you've attempted to play an instrument well.

You might argue, well, linguistics is more than learning the grammar and vocabulary of one single language. Music is far more than convincing a French horn to emit the notes written on the page. Mathematics is more than a mass balance. And so forth and so on. You need context.

Yes. You need context. But I think it isn't so terribly hard to start with a practical skill and work outward to generalize it. One could argue that the necessary context is provided by acquiring practical skills in a variety of fields -- as mathematics, physics, and philosophy work together to create context for the understanding of creation.

Or we could put it this way. The liberal arts are supposed to educe an individual who has a general and adaptable set of skills. I argue that to be able to specialize -- to be able to dig deeper -- to be able to apply knowledge -- to make the abstract practical and concrete -- to check one's theories against the problem of the physical universe is itself a "generally applicable skill" that is utterly necessary in order to reason about the world.

And you can't acquire that generally applicable skill without practice specializing, without practice developing expertise in something, without practice in "practical skills" here and there, without asking yourself if reality confirms that your thoughts are correct.

More business...

Gosh, I had to stay up until 1 AM to finish that not-very-new-or-exciting summary post about post secondary education (what I have learned so far). Often I find that I have to clear the pipeline of some annoying clot of material before I can get on to the good stuff. Hopefully I will have some new material soon.

If you have been following the post secondary education series and would maybe like to discuss related topics in a different forum from mine, let me point you to the blogs of two other commenters.

Darwin, a known liberal-arts graduate, is writing about the liberal arts education (broadly defined: he says I can count engineering) on his own blog. The most recent is here. An older one in response to Mark's guest post is here.

Jennifer Fitz, who has graced me with some links, is asking questions about college on her blog and inviting combox discussion?

Please visit and comment!

Postsecondary education options: The four things you're buying.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.  Are you getting tired of this yet?  I noticed that the comments dry up over the weekends.  Well, I have a lot more of this coming, because it is clarifying my thinking marvelously, and I really needed my thinking clarified before I start kids in ninth grade.)}

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I think we can break down the value of a college degree -- or any form of postsecondary education, really, including trade-school studies, apprenticeships, intern experience, military training, studies for licensure exams, and the like -- into these sources.

1. Signals of quality
2. Required credentials
3. Vocational skills
4. Valued experiences

Let's talk about these one by one briefly, and then I'll look more closely at the ones that warrant separate posts.

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Signals of quality.  We discussed the "signalling" value of education in the comments on the post where I linked to Megan McArdle's Newsweek piece.   Megan sums up the "signalling model" like this:

 It’s hard to prove to employers that you’re intelligent, conscientious and persistent, and so you use a diploma to demonstrate it.

Or you could look at it this way (this is me talking, not Megan):

It's hard to figure out which potential employees are intelligent, conscientious, and persistent, and so employers use a diploma as a proxy.

Megan says in her related blog post that there is signal value even in having had "some college." Different degrees (e.g. an engineering degree versus a communications degree) have different signal value to potential employers. The prestige or perceived difficulty of the university also provides perceived signal value.

Whether we like it or not, possession of signal value is an economic good.   It is also, in principle, measurable.

Required credentials.  At first glance it may seem that a credential is just another kind of signal, but they are distinct.  Credentials are different from signalling because they are codified by the gatekeepers of a profession.    

Whether a "required degree" is a credential or a signal depends on how much discretion the employer has.   An employer may write "B.S. required" on the job description for a lot of reasons; but if the employer is allowed to hire an impressive, skilled candidate who didn't finish his degree, the degree is not a credential.  You can imagine this happening in fields like technical sales or journalism:   a sufficiently interesting candidate who can get himself noticed might be able to land a job despite lacking the "required" degree.

But whether they want to or not:   hospitals aren't allowed to hire nurses who aren't certified as R.N.s or  L.P.N.s.   Engineering firms aren't allowed to assign certain tasks to engineers without their P.E.   Trucking firms can't hire drivers who don't hold a commercial license.  Rite Aid can't hire a pharmacist who doesn't have a Pharm.D.   These are credentials.  No amount of experience, demonstrable skill, or character can substitute for them.

Vocational skills.  These are the abilities and knowledge, acquired through education and training, that are really called upon in daily work.  

It includes things learned in specific coursework that apply to a job or to managing a household or other economically valuable activity.

It also includes generally useful learned abilities such as quickly digesting technical information, or communicating clearly, or discreetly handling a delicate situation, or staying up all night to meet a deadline -- as long as those are skills that are really used and needed.  

I would expand it, broadly, to include skills that underlie latent competencies:  the learned ability to acquire more competencies as needed.  For instance, I took a minor in French; I rarely get to speak French; but in learning French I acquired skills that enabled me to teach myself other Romance languages, which I am now teaching children in the homeschool.   Speaking French didn't turn out to be a vocational skill, but "the ability to self-teach a language" did.

Valued experiences.   All the other good things you hope to get out of a postsecondary education.  This category by its nature is subjective, broad, and difficult to measure even in principle.  It includes things like learning to get along with roommates, immersing oneself in a subject for pure love of the subject, staying up late arguing with friends over beer and pizza, building character through hard work, exposing yourself to culture, opening your mind through difficult thinking, and acquiring skills that are valued without necessarily being evidently valuable  to others.  

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When I was telling Mark about this yesterday, I listed the first three categories -- signals of quality, required credentials, vocational skills -- and then said, "And then there's a fourth category.  It includes everything else that you can't put your finger on quite as easily.  Learning to analyze great literature -- of course, for English teachers that will turn out to be vocational -- or having good class discussions -- or sitting in coffeeshops really diving into a difficult math problem, if you like that sort of thing -- or --"

He laughed and told me, "It's the error term."  He took a pull of his beer, apologized for laughing at me, and said, "I can't help it.  The differential equations book is open on my desk right now."

I hung my head and admitted, "Yes.  Now that I think about it, it's the error term.  I guess I can't break anything down into a list without including one."  

I suppose that remembering to include a "...plus everything else you can't measure or forgot to include" term at the end of a list is, after all, a vocational skill for me.

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The benefits of an education = S + R + V + E, where

• S = signal value,
• R = required credentials,
• V = vocational skills,
• E = experiences valued for their own sake (or E can be for error, if you ask Mark).

These four things are what you hope to buy with your money when you set out to purchase a postsecondary education.  

If you are lucky, you may get components of each term that you did not expect but that turned out to be a bonus and that did not cost you anything extra.

Your money will also buy you things that you didn't necessarily want -- things you never wanted in the first place, purported vocational skills that turned out not to be useful, experiences that you thought you would enjoy having but that ended up disappointing you.  

How do you win this game?  How do you maximize the return on your money and your time?  And how do you judge the relative importance of the four terms in the equation -- because different educational choices will give you a different mix?

More on that later...

Post secondary education questions: the religious education.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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This post is the third in a set that includes "The provider's education" and "The humanist's education."

I want to emphasize again, as I did in the other posts, that I am aware that the three "educations" don't separate neatly, that they are overlaid upon one another and every element supports every other (and in some ways contains every other). It is really a sort of trinity, and carving it up into three separate purposes necessarily obscures the whole.

That doesn't stop me from trying, because I think it will help. Here is a carefully chosen subset of the elements of the necessary content of education that relates most directly to religious and spiritual development and the reception of the sacraments.

Elements of moral, religious and spiritual development that THE FAMILY is expected to inculcate and teach

That true happiness is found in God alone, the source of every good.

The family teaches that the material and instinctual dimensions are subordinate to interior and spiritual ones.

The family must teach children a sense of true love, understood as sincere solicitude and disinterested service.

The family must introduce children to personal dialogue with God.

The family must teach children to know God, to worship, and to love their neighbor.

The family must teach children the Gospel.

The family should educate children so that, if they marry, they can by means of that education establish their family in moral conditions which tend to promote or facilitate the establishment of that family.

The family is called to give children a sex education that is built on the premise that love is self-giving.

The family must educate the child for chastity.

The family must teach children to know and respect the moral norms of human sexuality.

The family builds the proximate preparation for the sacraments of Christian marriage upon the foundation laid in the remote preparation for marriage.

The family will teach, in that proximate preparation, that marriage is an interpersonal relationship of a man and woman that has to be continually developed.

The family will encourage, in that proximate preparation, the study of the nature of conjugal sexuality.

The family, in proximate preparation, will prepare young people for the family apostolate, for collaboration with other families, and membership in groups set up for the human and Christian benefit of the family.

The family must begin the formation of the child's conscience, awakening the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law.

Elements of religious and spiritual development that THE INDIVIDUAL is enjoined to seek for himself

Each person must form his conscience to enjoin him to do good and avoid evil.

Each person must form his conscience to bear witness to the authority of truth in reference to God.

Each person must form his conscience to welcome the commandments.

An individual becomes capable of respecting and fostering the nuptial meaning of the body by building on the virtue of chastity.

An individual grows responsibly in human sexuality by building on the moral norms that are taught by the parents.

An individual learns control and right use of his inclinations by building on the moral norms that are taught by the parents.

A layperson is encouraged to receive a sufficient formation in theology.

 

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To these I should add that, on the cusp of entering into marriage, the individual is responsible for obtaining the educational content of immediate preparation for marriage.

Recall that we have been restricting the discussion mostly to the case of young people who will likely be called to marriage and family life, so preparation for holy orders need not here be considered. In the Roman rite, the formation in the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, penance and confirmation generally take place under the parents' auspices, unless for some reason confirmation was delayed. (It isn't unheard of for Catholic parents to agree to let a young person decide for himself when -- if ever -- to be confirmed. Let's not debate right now whether that is a good idea, and simply point out that it could happen that a young adult might put off confirmation until later.). But the immediate sacramental preparation for marriage is educational in nature and is the responsibility of the engaged couple.

It seems pretty clear that a complete foundation in moral and religious training -- as distinct from "theology," which is an academic subject -- is the responsibility entirely of the parents. Latent competency in practically every aspect of the Christian life, married or single, ought to be developed before the child is emancipated.

In this day and age, it seems to me, parents need to anticipate future challenges and aggressively head then off by equipping their children with the tools to find answers to those challenges. This may mean stepping outside comfort zones and being more frank than parents of earlier generations would have had to be.

Here is an example that is highly specific to Catholicism. Parents can expect young adults to encounter aggressive promotion of contraception as a necessary and good part of a healthy marriage. Unfortunately, we can expect them to encounter the viewpoint that contraception is healthy and necessary even from organizations that are directly connected to the Catholic church. Many of us have heard stories from people who claim they were given permission to use contraception in the confessional itself.

Because parents can expect young people to encounter this view, parents have (I would argue) a serious responsibility to equip their adolescents with clear information about trustworthy sources of Catholic teaching, to provide enough medical and biological information about licit means of family planning to counteract common falsehoods about its efficacy and difficulty, and to discuss family planning as a specific area in which to live the truth that love is self-giving.

That is just one example.

Parents should not count on a religious college to inculcate values that they have failed to pass on. It seems plausible that parent and offspring together could come to the conclusion that a particular private religious school could offer necessary support to a particular young person's development, and that the extra cost would be well spent. But it doesn't seem plausible to conclude that a private religious school is objectively necessary.

Very little of the religious and spiritual formation delineated here is dependent on formal enrollment in an institution of higher education. Mostly, it seems, the individual is called to maintain and build upon the foundation laid in childhood and adolescence: to continue forming his conscience, to distinguish good from evil in ever thornier dilemmas, to deepen his resolve through constant practice of right living.

Remember that the young person not enrolled in a private religious school still has access to a parish (and that needn't be the one his parents and younger siblings attend); he still has access to voluntary religious associations and clubs; he still has access to religious publications; he still has access to the sacraments; he still has access to private prayer. If he is enrolled in a public college or lives near one, there are likely student religious organizations available. Many of the same advantages of studying at a private religious college can be found in these other environments.

Post-secondary education: For the sake of completeness, filial responsibility laws.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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I've been blogging about how, legally speaking, parents' compulsory obligation to support their children ends at age 18, but how there's at least some evidence of a social expectation that parents will continue providing material support at least for a while.

For the sake of completeness and symmetry, I ought to point out that some states have on the books a "filial responsibility law" which compels adult children to provide material support to indigent parents.

There's a little bit about this here 

Filial responsibility laws typically don't apply unless your parent has to accept financial support from the government or she incurs a nursing home or other medical bill that she has no possibility of paying. If she has no financial resources, you might be expected to pay for her care. The nursing home, hospital, government or a third party can file a lawsuit against you in states that allow it, seeking a judgment that would obligate you to pay your parent's bill.

The law gives courts some discretion when enforcing filial responsibility laws. If you're barely making ends meet financially, courts typically won't require you to impoverish yourself to pay for your parent's care. Likewise, if you're paying significant costs for your own child, such as college tuition, this may exempt you from being responsible for your parent as well.

... If your parent abused you or abandoned you as a child, the law allows that she's undeserving of your financial support. However, some states have statutory requirements for abandonment. In Pennsylvania, your parent must have abandoned you for at least 10 years before you reached age 18.

My state, Minnesota, repealed its filial responsibility law in 1974.  But filial responsibility laws remain on the books in many states: 

 In a 2002 article titled, “Filial Responsibility: Can the Legal Duty to Support Our Parents Be Effectively Enforced?” by Shannon Frank Edelstone, appearing in the Fall 2002 issue of the American Bar Association’s Family Law Quarterly, the author listed thirty states that had filial responsibility laws on the books. 

Those states were Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. 

While each state’s laws vary, most provide that children have a duty to provide necessities for parents who cannot do so for themselves.

A recent Wall Street Journal article explored the question of being "on the hook for Mom's bills," describing a case where an adult son in Pennsylvania was ruled to owe more than $90,000 for his 65-year-old mother's hospital and nursing care bills after a car accident:

The ... family's experience serves as a warning for middle-aged children with parents who are racking up long-term-care bills. In many states, including Pennsylvania, the filial-support law doesn't require lack of cooperation or asset shielding on the children's part. They simply have to be deemed by a judge to have the means to pay the bill, Ms. Pearson says.

The best defense against such laws, elder-law experts say, is planning. "If your parents aren't multimillionaires, then you need to get some advice way early, maybe when they're 65," says Carolyn Rosenblatt, a San Francisco mediator, elder-law attorney and registered nurse. "By the time they're in their 80s, most people need some help. How would you pay for that?"

Among the possible strategies: buying long-term-care insurance before health problems begin or building an in-law unit that you could rent out, perhaps to a child in college or starting a first job, until your parents need it.

I'm not really sure whether it is relevant to the discussion.  But this is, I think, perhaps the flip side of considering whether parents should allow their adult children to live at home.

 

Post-secondary education questions.

I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but this week we started back to school.

I always have to work hard the first couple of weeks to help set the new schedule into stone, so I have clung to the self-discipline of not sitting down and blogging when I should be waking up the children and getting them started.

All this is to say: I have several posts queued up in my head, but haven't written them yet, and I hope to get to one this weekend, maybe Saturday afternoon or evening.

But I want to get one started, and I thought I would start with the discussion part.

The first one I want to write is about post-high school education (call it "college" if you want, and I will here to be concise, but I mean for it to be broader than that, encompassing trade schools, apprenticeships, certain military options that include training, community colleges, and the like). Questions for readers to get the ball rolling:

Do you anticipate that your kids will graduate into a significantly different economic paradigm, when it comes to paying-for-school, from the one you entered? Will the best advice for them be different than was the best advice for you and your peers?

Are you closer to the "parents should pay for their offspring's college" end of the spectrum or the "eighteen-year-olds are adults and they should be responsible for their own post secondary education" end of the spectrum? Is that different from your parents' view? If so, why do you think your view is different?

What is parents' responsibility when it comes to educating their children? What kind of financial or other assistance do parents owe their grown or nearly-grown offspring and is there an age when it needs to stop and the offspring should be "launched?"

How would you feel about having one or more of your offspring living with you the entire time they were in college? Would they have to compensate you in some way for you to be okay with that?

If you yourself are a college graduate, how attached are you to the idea that your kids should go to college at all? To the idea that they should attend college full time immediately after high school graduation?

Student loans: good idea, bad idea, necessary evil, or "it depends?"

Mark and I have been doing a lot of talking about this lately, because we feel we should have at least a rough idea of our options by the time our oldest starts 9th grade, and that is only two years away. Take the next couple of days to throw some comments out here, and then I will start writing.

"How not to be a creeper" and assorted followup discussion.

If you are at all interested in male-female interaction culture of both the positive and negative variety, how to deal with social awkwardness of both the neurotypical and the Asperger's varieties, how to teach social rules to young people, scifi convention or geek culture, and the like: I would like to direct your attention to a rich and engaging discussion thread at Whatever, the blog of scifi author John Scalzi. (This isn't just about scifi conventions, so bear with me.)

The scifi/geek-con blogosphere has been buzzing somewhat about a perceived culture at conventions in which unwelcome sexual advances and other "creepiness" have perhaps been overly tolerated (I am qualifying with "perceived" and "perhaps" only because I am not a con-goer and cannot give a first-hand opinion of the scene). In response to an emailed query, "Any tips on how not to be a creeper?" Scalzi wrote a post entitled "An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping," in which he suggested ten rules for interacting with people -- in general, not just at cons -- in order not to inadvertently transgress other people's personal boundaries. Here is a sampler from the middle of the pack:

4. Acknowledge that other people do not exist just for your amusement/interest/desire/use. Yes, I know. You know that. But oddly enough, there’s a difference between knowing it, and actually believing it — or understanding what it means in a larger social context. People go to conventions and social gatherings to meet other people, but not necessarily (or even remotely likely) for the purpose of meeting you. The woman who is wearing a steampunky corset to a convention is almost certainly wearing it in part to enjoy being seen in it and to have people enjoy seeing her in it — but she’s also almost certainly not wearing it for you. You are not the person she has been waiting for, the reason she’s there, or the purpose for her attendance. When you act like you are, or that she has (or should have) nothing else to do than be the object of your amusement/interest/desire/use, the likelihood that you will come across a complete creeper rises exponentially. It’s not an insult for someone else not to want to play that role for you. It’s not what they’re there for.

So those are some overarching things to incorporate into your thinking. Here are some practical things.

5. Don’t touch. Seriously, man. You’re not eight, with the need to run your fingers over everything, nor do you lack voluntary control of your muscles. Keep your hands, arms, legs and everything else to yourself. This is not actually difficult. Here’s an idea: That person you want to touch? Put them in charge of the whole touch experience. That is, let them initiate any physical contact and let them set the pace of that contact when or if they do — and accept that that there’s a very excellent chance no touch is forthcoming. Do that when you meet them for the first time. Do that after you’ve met them 25 times. Do it just as a general rule. Also, friendly tip: If you do touch someone and they say “don’t touch me,” or otherwise make it clear that touching was not something you should have done, the correct response is: “I apologize. I am sorry I made you uncomfortable.” Then back the hell off, possibly to the next state over.

6. Give them space. Hey: Hold your arm straight out in front of your body. Where your fingertips are? That’s a nice minimum distance for someone you’re meeting or don’t know particularly well (it’s also not a bad distance for people you do know). Getting inside that space generally makes people uncomfortable, and why make people uncomfortable? That’s creepy. Also creepy: Sneaking up behind people and getting in close to them, or otherwise getting into their personal space without them being aware of it. If you’re in a crowded room and you need to scrunch in, back up when the option becomes available; don’t take it as an opportunity to linger inside that personal zone. Speaking of which:

Go check it out, it is worth reading, and almost certainly worth showing to your teenagers.

Anyway, the post sprouted a very long and interesting discussion, which Mr. Scalzi has carefully moderated (meaning, he deleted egregious trolls and off-point material), so that pretty much the whole thread is worth reading -- note, this does NOT mean that I endorse every opinion expressed in the thread, just that the remaining discussion, while heated, is mainly respectful and thoughtful. Warning: the discussion may be triggering, as a few people describe past unpleasant experiences.

One of the sub-discussions that I found particularly interesting had to do with people making excuses for individuals who, in their mind, simply lacked the social skills to avoid being "mistaken" for a sexually aggressive creepy person. (Most of these alluded to or mentioned Asperger's syndrome, but others cited cultural differences as the cause.) There ensued a fairly lively debate about the agency of socially impaired individuals. I think the strongest voices came from people who live with and love someone who is so impaired, and who argued that in fact they still need to be held to the same standards of behavior as everyone else, because they are capable of doing so as long as they understand it is necessary.

Another good sub-thread had to do with the responsibility of assertive people (particularly men) to intervene, either as a bystander or especially when the creeper is one of their friends.

Scalzi followed it up with a "Tangential Personal Note" in which he described a personal experience struggling with the temptation to be a creep:

On the flip side of this, I noted that the rules I noted yesterday are ones that I use myself when I try not to come across as a creeper to people I’m meeting. I didn’t use a specific example of a time where I was concerned about being considered a weird, creepy dude because although I did have a story that applied, I hadn’t cleared it with the other person involved. But now she’s cleared it, and now I’ll use it.

Back in 2006, at Readercon(!) I was wandering around the dealer’s room when I saw John Joseph Adams talking to a woman I didn’t know. I knew JJA very casually, so I went up to say hello. The woman he was speaking to was the art director of Shimmer Magazine and her name was Mary Robinette Kowal. JJA introduced the two of us, and Mary and I started chatting and within about five minutes I was aware that I was really intensely attracted to her, in a way that actually kind of spooked me and which I was sure was immediately and clearly obvious, and possibly immediately and obviously creepy.

So here’s what I did...

He goes into detail describing his conscious behavior intended to avoid making the woman uncomfortable, and then explains:

...I mention this for two purposes. One, to make the point that I think the guidelines I set out work (or at least work for me). Two, to make the point that saying that only certain types of men — ugly ones, aspie ones, socially sheltered ones, ones who aren’t going to pay attention to someone offering advice — have the potential to be creepers is kind of stupid. Hi there, I’m generally considered to be socialized, neurotypical and a decent guy. And oh my I had quite the potential to be a creeping assbag on Mary, among others. But I haven’t been, because I’m responsible for my own actions and I realize no one deserves to be creeped on by me even when the reptile portions of my brain are howling TAKE HER TAKE HER TAKE HER NOW. At the end of the day, as regards being a creepy assbag, it’s not about who you are, it’s about what you do.

Since Scalzi was married at the time, and says (in the comments) that he immediately came home and described the events to his wife, there's plenty of food for thought there about marriage and trust as well as about -- for want of a better term -- deliberate nondouchebaggery. The comments there are highly recommended as well.

What do you think about the posts? Is Scalzi's guide a good start? What tips would make it less "incomplete?"