And I’ve got a really nice pre-owned car to sell you
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Then again, it won’t hide the stink of a rotten egg to call it an overly-mature ovum.
But that doesn’t stop the reframing and renaming on the part of those whose mission in life is to make sure no one on earth should ever suffer the slings and arrows of low self-esteem. It’s gotten out of hand in Boston, where the Board of Education is seeking a better label for schools that fail to make the grade:
Instead of calling these schools “underperforming,” the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.
I’m not in favor of returning to the days of indiscriminate name-calling and shaming. The dunce cap doesn’t need to be revived. But surely it should be possible to say that a school system is “underperforming,” already something of a euphemism itself.
Constant verbal negativity is a downer that can impede improvement. But unremitting verbal positivity in the face of real deficits and failures does no one any favors—nor does it fool anyone, either.
But for some, the goal is not only to avoid calling a spade a spade, but to avoid calling anything anything:
“We just haven’t thought through a mechanism that avoids labels altogether, which is what I’d be really after,” member Sandra Stotsky said.
They’re working on it, though. Rest assured.
I’m reminded of a proposal a couple of years ago from one of the UK’s teachers’ unions. They proposed relabeling failure as “deferred success”.
Like you say – such linguistic contortions don’t fool anybody and they do no one any favors.
The desire not to call anything anything is a real low-grade fever in our culture.
The opposite of “call a spade a spade” is “Don’t call anything by its right name; don’t even think about what the right name for anything should be; don’t call anything anything.”
But this kind of inner submission lowers its practicioners. When you refuse to use words to name things, something inside you knows you have pulled away from one of your powers and been cowardly.
These public-school politicians are self-contradictiing. Their high school writing teachers are telling kids to write clearly, but these bosses at the top of the ed pyramid are emitting fog or squid ink. The kids can sense the dishonesty.
Language distortion actually harms people’s ability to think.
I read an article somewhere recently about employers who are discovering that recent grads entering the work force have an excessive need for constant praise. Companies are finding that, in order to keep these workers happy, they have to deliver praise at regular, frequent intervals, not because somebody’s work is wonderful but just because it’s adequate. This seems to me to be a direct consequence of the self-esteem fad that took over public education a decade or two ago. It has trained a whole generation to look outside themselves for validation, rather than building it from within.
Let me see if I can find a link. Here, from the Wall Street Journal online:
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB117702894815776259.html
Did I ever tell you about the time I broke my leg by stepping off a 30 foot cliff? No? That’s because it never happened. And that’s because discriminating among and labeling things appropriately is the key to basic survial. It’s as much part of the human condition as any other survival mechanism.
If I come to the edge of a rock and look down, my decision to proceed or not rests entirely on my ability to discriminate. Is it a 3 inch drop to the ground below, or 3 feet, or 30 feet? I can’t fudge the difference because the consequences of being wrong are too high. The 30 foot drop is not a “deferred height” version of the 3 foot drop. It’s a completely different situation and needs a completely different response.
Granted, no one will die immediately if a school is slapped with a euphemistic label, but the long term consequence of ignoring reality and failing to make legitimate distinctions will be heavy nonetheless. Opportunities will be missed, focus will be lost, and kids will be set adrift in the world without the tools they need to succeed. Self-esteem by itself is not enough.
Seems to me you’ll want to find a replacement for the phrase “calling a spade a spade.”
Lets just refer to them as schools that have successfully found the bottom of the barrel!
Or they’ve risen to the top of the barrel, from the antipodean reference point.
That one will send ’em scurrying to a dictionary. Always good to have a new experience.
The self-esteem fad coincided with the “non-judgmentalism” fad. Rendering a judgment on anything was (and often still is) rebuked as being “judgmental.”
As I see it, judgment – discriminating between what is good, what is bad, and what is indifferent – is what adults exercise, constantly.
Of course, many of those espousing the opposite view have no judgment, so it’s just as well they don’t bother trying to exercise it.
The first step in dealing with a problem is recognizing it. The second is admitting it. By hiding it under a pretty label, they are denying it and trying to forget about it.
This needs to be said plainly and loudly. Do you think Old Man McCain will have the gumption to do it after he’s elected?
It’s more of a problem than you think. According to The New York Times, the majority of Boston’s prospective teachers can’t pass the cert. test. So, the solution??
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E5DF1F3FF931A35754C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
Lower the standards of course… Unfortunately, this nonsense has been going on for a decade. Here is an article dated 7/7/98. http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/flunk.html
Can we finally call this latest educational experiment a failure???
Back in the 70’s, I worked at a nearby institution for the mentally retarded on two occasions. When I was first hired, the trainer informed me and the rest of the class that we were not dealing with “patients,” but “residents.” The rationale was, we were informed, that the residents had a permanent condition, whereas most patients have a temporary condition. Moreover, they LIVED there: thus residents. When I was hired a second time several years later, I was informed was that they were not “residents,” but “clients.”
While I approved of the previous change from “patient” to “resident,” it seemed to me that “client” went a bit too far. Whereas a client informs his attorney or physician what he wants, the mentally retarded in most instances lack the capacity to inform others what they want. What they want in most instances is inferred.
I enjoyed my time working with the mentally retarded. The pay wasn’t bad, the work wasn’t stressful and often enjoyable, and I learned about the limits of institutional helpfulness. Perhaps that was my first falling away from Liberalism.
Illegal aliens become “undocumented immigrants”, terrorists become “insurgents”, liberals become “progressives”, appeasement in various forms is “diplomacy”; Ho hum, the times we live in…
The sad thing is that there is something to the self esteem thing. I teach Archery which (contrary to those that do not shoot it) is a mostly mental game. It only takes a few months for most adults to master the physical game and then the rest of their life is on the mental one. For some this is something they never understand and want to fix it with equipment (and I firmly believe this comes from the “Do No Wrong” stuff).
IMO this is where the “self esteem” stuff comes from that we are plagued with today. They took a really god idea and ran it out to a point where it was a HUGE detriment. In fact what they do today is *worse* than the negative re-enforcement.
For instance – as a coach you should *never* tell someone they did something wrong. For one thing they already know that and it doesn’t help to tell them so. They need to forget that shot and focus on the next (the bad shot is already gone, can’t get it back and you next shot needs to be perfect). Further they need to only focus on the shots that went well, if you focus on what you did wrong you only learn how to shoot bad shots.
But then, nowhere in there do we not have winners and losers. Nor do we even remotely pretend that 2’nd place is the winner of the tournament. We do focus on the good. I mean, lets face it, second place in nationals is great and all we have to do is work through that one or two misses that caused it. If the shooter were to work harder they can do it. Yet, you still didn’t win. There is no reason to down someone who came in second just as there is no reason to put them on the highest pedestal.
That is positive re-enforcement and is standard training in *any* sport you get Olympic Coach certification on (though my personal experience is only in Shotgun and Archery). I can assure you that the Olympic coaches do not pretending that the Silver is the same as a Gold, let alone last place is no different than First. However you still focus on the good, not the bad, but the bad still happened and we have to learn to accept it and move on to better ourselves. For archery you only have to look up Kisik Lee’s website to see this.
As seems to happen often the leftist and liberals have taken a good idea and run it to a point where it is a detriment – even a larger detriment than what they were trying to fix. There is nothing wrong (and has been shown to be more effective with respect of creating champions) with focusing on the good and trying to get to a greater amount of good instead of looking at why you failed all the time, there is something inherently wrong with saying that failure is the same as unmitigated success.
Hmmm, if I was going to a bad school it wouldn’t demoralize me (as a good student)… it would make me angry at the school… for giving me poor service (which, btw is pretty much how I felt through grade school… about my school.. which probably helped form my political opinions btw…)…
Anyway, it seems like they’re pulling an Obama here. Equating their failure to be a good school with the mental well being of the students.
I can no more criticize the poor performance of the school than disown our own students….
There is always a tendency in language to avoid unpleasant emotive charge of some lexical units by replacing them by euphemisms. But it never achieves its goals, because meaning is usage, and newly invented replacements soon aquire all stink and stigma of their precursors. When this process is a natural reaction of society, it is harmless and even creative, generating a lot of jokes and humour. But in hands of bureaucracy it serves repugnant goals to cover up its deficiences.
Confucius began his reformation of Chinese morals and customs by “correcting of names”. His philosophy emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity. He felt that language distortions made these goals inachievable.
To take what strcpy says just a bit farther down the insanity trial: my kid’s school holds the grand American tradition of “Field Day”. However, this past year even though races were held every child received a first place ribbon because “they are all winners and there are no losers”.
The educational establishment thinks these kids are morons. In no uncertain terms my kids and others have told me that they know who won each race, and that handing out ribbons to everyone was demeaning.
It parallels conversations I’ve had with the college students I teach. When you get them to open up, they admit they think “diversity” indoctrination they are constanly being fed is BS. One of my minority students even told me she knows why she was admitted, and it wasn’t for her grades which were quite good. The up and coming generation does not buy any of this. They are not at all vocal about it, but what they are really thinking is interesting.
MikeM 6:41am: “The educational establishment thinks these kids are morons.”
HI Mike. I’d make one small change to your statement above. “Many of the educational establishment are morons.”
After all. We see that the teacher cert test is based on a 10th grade level then, after finishing high school and college many prospective teachers, can’t pass the exam…
When my oldest daughter was in the fourth grade she was assigned some math homework. She brought the work home. She was having some trouble with the math so she asked me for help. I looked at what she was being taught and showed her how to do the math in a bit different manner than the teacher was instructing. She quickly mastered the work using my method. She turned the work in the next day and was told that the work was wrong. She then explained that I had helped her. My daughter dragged me to school the next day to explain my method to the teacher. The teacher explained to me that she is an “educator” and that this is “New Math” and that I should butt out and let her do her job. I then explained that I’m an engineer and that math is a strong component of my profession and that her “New Math” is simply wrong. The argument structure was wrong and the answer wrong. Needless to say, she was in a bit of a huff.
What I saw was a woman who was not comfortable with even elementary school math, but was trying to use her “I’m an educator” line to cover up her lack of skills. What a sad state our education system has become.
I first heard this story on NPR’s Wait Wait, don’t tell me. What a fitting way to be exposed to the story: on a show that gratefully made fun of it.
I just don’t get it. If a school is failing, why not call it out? I know my parents did anytime I did poorly in school. I can just imagine heading home after getting a C or D on a test and my parents telling me that I was a “household priority.”
Perf Democrat:
socialistsbecomes liberals, liberals become “progressive”.
Liberal now requires clarifier “classical” to be understood in its original sense.
I’m ready right now to call the next educational experiment a failure.
“We just haven’t thought through a mechanism that avoids labels altogether, which is what I’d be really after,”
This lady, it seems, never read Orwell’s “1984”, where exactly such mechanism is proposed. It is called “Newspeak”, the language making thought crimes impossible by forbidding all “dirty words”, for example, un-PC labels.
Why these liberals never can propose anything really new, someting that was not tried before by real or imaginary totalitarian regimes?
When I was a young lad, and got pointed the wrong way, the thing that seemed to work best to correct my trajectory wasn’t praise, but a swift kick in the ass (figuratively speaking).
All the praise I got about my ‘potential’ and so forth just made me less motivated. Why is this so hard for them to understand?
*sigh*
Sergey Says:
“But it never achieves its goals, because meaning is usage, and newly invented replacements soon aquire all stink and stigma of their precursors.”
True… I’ve seen it several times with games over political labels.
Back in the 1972 Tim Gallwey wrote the “Inner Game of Tennis.” There is much to learn from this book. And not necessarily about tennis, but about life.
One thing I learned was that all of us have different levels of talents and skills. We can improve our talents and skills by practice and application, but only a few will rise to the top in any game, career, artistic endeavour, etc. So, if we cannot be the best, should we consider ourselves failures and have low self esteem? Of course not. Gallwey said we must learn to understand that our very best effort may fall short, but as long as we give our best effort we have succeeded. And that is what our children should learn in school. To kid ourselves about these things is to develop an inability to cope with life as it really is. When everyone doesn’t give the best they have, or think they are giving it, the performance of individuals and organizations trends downward.
He also taught that we do no favors to anyone by relaxing standards. When you play someone in tennis that is not as good as you, you are not doing any favors by easing up on your game. By playing your best, you are actually helping your opponent raise his/her game. Everyone working to do their best raises everyone’s standards.
I find this to be true for me when I work with a personal trainer. He keeps pushing me and never lets me off easy. I hate it, but I know his pushing me is really a good thing, because it is improving my fitness beyond what I would do on my own.
I also learned from Tim’s book to quit comparing myself to others. If you do that you will be either vain or bitter, for there will always be people greater or lesser than yourself. What matters is to be true to yourself and always try to do your best. If our children can learn that, they will not have self esteem problems.
I would dare say that these days, the greater problem with self esteem is that too many kids have too HIGH self esteem, and are far too inflated with their own importance.
douglas:
“I would dare say that these days, the greater problem with self esteem is that too many kids have too HIGH self esteem, and are far too inflated with their own importance.”
Ah, future democrat voters. “Dumbing them down” first wont be a huge difficulty, as OsoGrizzly above had mentioned, dumbing down by now must be second nature.
Some of us conservative extremist like the idea of merit pay and promotions, but hey, that idea upsets the teachers unions currently supported by liberal voters.
You know, some of the most elitist liberals like to arrogantly pretend that Americans with actual values, (us extremists again I suppose), cling to meaningless issues rather than to get enlightened and vote against our own economic self-interests.
Then you have these liberals that purposely choose to opt into an educational status quo that creates more parents glued to the cycle.
Now, this arrangement might very well suit the elitist John Kerry and Barack Hussien Obama wing of the democrat party, (the socialist aristocrats); a dumb electorate, dependant upon politicians, bureaucrats and academic types for how they should live their lives, but me, I dont look forward to this version of Utopia and would rather “cling” to the original intent of our founding fathers.
Its not that I may not need a master, Id much prefer to make that decision myself.
I hope I havent offended any “moderates” or “independents” here.
The libs will turn the entire western world into a giant Special Olympics; everyone gets a ribbon no matter how poorly they perform at anything.
Yay!
Conservatives never resort to euphemisms. And the military: they play everything straight up, no chasers–just the plain facts Maam.
Same with born again Christians: they tell everything in plain language with no euphemisms or “cover up” language.
It’s only bad, bad, bad, bad liberals who make up euphemisms to cover up….
Let me note one of the most obvious cases of label changing not working:
Negroes — those people that Martin Luther King talked about who should, along with whites, be judged on their character instead of their color.
They were also called “Colored people”, like by the NAACP. Or, less politely coloreds. Or more racistly, the n* word (the NewSpeak Obscenity?).
But Negroes were disproportionately poor.
So “Negro” made way for Black in 1968, with the Mexico Olympics (and Lew Alcindor, like Cassius Clay, changing his name as he became a Black Muslim). Black Power.
But Blacks were disproportionately poor, and so were Colored People, and Americans of African descent, and People of Color, and Afro-Americans.
(I would guess most churchgoers to Minister Wright’s sermons were “poor”, too — despite Barack’s attendence)
No new label will change the problem of disproportionate poverty, or homes with children but without fathers. Only cultural behavior change — and it is to avoid behavior change that the liberals want to change the labels.
The label name is also an issue in Congestion Pricing, or Road Pricing, or the EcoPass:
Try link again above. Now below with /a:
one of the favorite games of the soviets, was to change names of things and not really change the thing underneath the label.
by promoting that the labels are everything and material is nothing, they get to change the material, by chaning its label.
its easy to demonstrate with restaurants.
you open a restaurant and you have char broiled, steak smothered in onions and mushrooms on the menu.
another store has the same exact dish, except that they call it burnt dead cow with burnt vegetables scorched in animal fat rendered for the purpose.
the material has stayed the same, the label has changed it.
so the negro project later became planned parenthood, when the democrats found out that most people didnt want to exterminate the blacks. so they reformed it, and repackaged it, but it still has the same purpose of eugenics, but a softer one.
heck… how about liberal… liberal used to be on the right… but it became progressive, then neo liberal, and all kinds of name changes. meanwhile, they are what they have been since the communists took them over, and the socialist party stopped running for president as they said “there was no way to distinguish their platform from the dmocrats”.
this is all part and parcel of the soviet system (of which we have been copying!!)
i explained this before, but peopel dont seem to get it.
the name changes are about getting material, people, to move the way that the controllers want them to.
they first picked the negro project because they thought that people would side with their program outright… hitler wrote for advice to the feminist heroes organization for his programs.
however, with hitler doing what they were talking about, the tide changes, and so they change theirname.
the controller doesnt care what the horses actually think as long as they move and dance to their tune.
name changes are a part of that. it makes the history too hard to follow, it allows a democratic party who hated blacks, to suddenly become the party of the blacks because they bait the moustrap with cheese. to the mouse the person putting cheese in the moustrap looks better and kinder than the person who refuses to give any cheese.
here is the most classic example.
the cheka became the OGPU, then NKGB, MGB, MVD, KGB, and now the FSB…
the organization has not really changed, but its name changes always went with a new polish that often wore off too quickly.
all this is about making the horses move where they want to so that the horses plait the rope that they will use to hang them with.
heck a great example of name games is Southern Conference Education Fund, SCEF
to quote one of the people…
“Dr. Dombrowski told me on several occasions that he preferred to be called a Left Socialist rather than a Communist; that he could serve the revolutionary movement better under the Socialist label than the Communist label.” – dombrowski
labels mean nothing… and chaning them as part of the game means everything.
Working with Dombrowski in SCEF is its Field Secretary, Carl Braden. In 1954 Braden was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for bombing the home of a Negro who had just moved into a white neighborhood and for attempting to place the blame on the Caucasian neighbors. Braden was released from jail when the Warren court declared all state sedition laws void.
“Carl Braden was a national sponsor of the notorious Fair Play For Cuba Committee which spawned the assassinator of President John F. Kennedy, Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald.”
anyway, want to see how effective name games can be?
well, ministers are VERY big in communism of the blacks… from sangers quotes to using them, to their history.
The President of SCEF is the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, an ex-convict who according to federal government files has been involved in seven Communist-front activities since 1960. The interlocking structure which pervades the entire civil rights movement is demonstrated here by the fact that Shuttlesworth serves as a link between the Communist SCEF and Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Shuttlesworth is Vice President of King’s organization.
The Reverend Shuttlesworth replaced Aubrey Williams as President of SCEF. Williams until his recent death was also Chairman of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, (sic), a Communist front of which Martin Luther King is a leading member. The Chairman of this Committee is Frank Wilkinson, who has been identified, in sworn testimony by an undercover FBI agent, as a member of the Communist Party.
so with all the label games, and lies going on… the meanings disappear or change.
waht is the meaning of “rights” today, when people use the term for everything EXCEPT rights?
heck.. look at christine quinn using false charities (FRONTS), to take tax monies and store them for her games… somethign that the dems have been doing for ages… but now suddenly, you can see so many of them getting caught its ridiculous… but the newspapers are careful not to put their (D) next to their names…
According to city records, allocations in the City Council’s 2006 budget include $300,000 to “The Association of Community Partners,” $150,000 to “Moving Up, Building Bridges,” and $300,000 to “The American Association of Concerned Veterans,” among others. The fifteen shell organizations were slated to receive a total of $2.57 million for the 2006 fiscal year.
so whats in a name? they had to give their charities good names…and so they gave them good sounding charity names..
by being so focused on the names and labels, we forget what they are used for. to assign a meaning to something.
its a game over two different words that mean the same thing, and the same word having two different meanings.
hows this…
old laws use the term sex.
gender was promoted, and people started using the term in legal breifs.
however, sex means male or female. gender means sex.. AND it has another meaning…
so now, they are seeking to apply the law using the broad term genders other meanings since they allowed it to replace sex as a term.
http://www.indiana.edu/~lggender/sex-vs-gender.html
“Sex is biologically founded.”
Gender
Definition: a socially-constructed notion of what is feminine and what is masculine
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952, p. 267)
so the socialist game is to play with meanings and labels and shake them up till only they can declare what they mean.
http://www.sundials.org/about/humpty.htm
read this piece, and think of the word games being played. humpty dumpty is a egg… a nest egg? the future, etc…
if your careful you will pick up on what and why the game..
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
remember the movie the last mimsy? what is a mimsy? Well then, “mimsy” is “flimsy and miserable” (there’s another portmanteau for you). ‘unhappy’.
but people think it has to do with wimsy…
and deconstruction allows you to rip the wings off of anything, and claim anyting in the text you want…
eventually we wont understand scripture, lessons, schooling… in fact we often no longer can talk because of the changes.
they took lessons from teh bible, and reversed them so we think we are heading for eden, not hell.
welcome to babel.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
[this is something the soviets created, as well as the nazis, and our current propaganda. it allows a man to be a brute in a concentration camp, then come home to be what appears to be a great parent. they are politically schizophrenic like most of the left today who can hold conflicting things in mind and not notice them or have dissonance from them. ]
orwell again – In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Investigation into the Soviet Union, Lenin and Stalin requires a lot of work, patience, and perusal of literature and sources(which are not made easily accessible by historians in the service of imperialism). Majority of the time, the historians omit the primary and necessary sources from the public, and the public simply relies on what the historians have to say, without even realizing there is a vast amount of information out there that gives quite another picture of reality.
anyway… back to orwell quotes.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?