There’s a great series of shorts essays here that describe the approaching election.

Ronald Dworkin makes this point about Barack Obama:

He has a striking, deep intelligence, and a gift for combining clarity and strong feeling in his writing and speeches; and he uses these qualities to expose and explain complexity rather than bury it under slogans. It is said that he lacks experience. On the contrary, he alone among prominent politicians has the experience that counts most in a threatening and densely interdependent world: the crucial experience of empathy. He has lived, and been poor, in both domestic and foreign worlds that few national politicians can even imagine.

From Sherman Alexie’s 2007 novel; here’s two awkward, troubled kids talking to each other:

“What’s your point ?” Gordy asked.

“I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world. I use them to make fun of the world. To make fun of people. And sometimes I draw people because they’re my friends and family. And I want to honor them.”

“So you take your cartoons as seriously as you take books?”

“Yeah, I do, ” I said, “that’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it?”

“No, not at all, ” Gordy said. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

Wow, this dude was a poet.

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007).

“When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”

John Dewey, The School and Society (1899) in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1:19-20.

I found this essay while looking for good readings on the progressive era to accompany a batch of primary sources. I particularly like this quote:

We should realise that the school’s theoretical architecture, like its physical structure, is an historical construct crafted with a particular set of intellectual tools in response to social, political, and economic needs, and be alert to the fact that the common sense understandings this intellectual blueprint sustains are inherently problematic.

Thorndike and Dewey on the Science of Education, Oxford Review of Education 23, no. 3, (1997): 365-83

I’ve lived in the city of Philadelphia for eighteen years now and nothing I’ve seen quite captures what it means to live here quite like this story:

Why can’t us?

“Boston did it. The White Sox did it. Why can’t us? Why can’t us for once?”

will be off to buy this t-shirt later today.

George Vecsey, maybe the last sports editorialist in the Times who I can still stomach, offers this pearl yesterday:

Fans and bloggers and other outsiders who have no access to the mind-set of a professional athlete do not know how fully a young lifetime of pressure prepares athletes for the big game.

Given the resources of the Times, the access to athletes, and his years of experience, this is the best column he could come up with? Apparently his unique position allows him to say that athletes are actually prepared to deal with important games. Stop the presses, dude.

Apart from a few reporters, the sports punditocracy is in trouble. Only a few seem to understand that they should be using their ability to actually talk to the athletes as a way to gather unique information and to present it to folks who cannot walk into the locker room. Only a few reporters remain who offer thoughtful, viable alternative to the interpretations of those watching at home and hungrily building their blogs.

I’d rather read joyofsox or soxaholix any day; I don’t have time to keep up with the analysts at SOSH but they seem to ask the questions Dan Shaughnessy hasn’t thought about in years.

So I like this review by Linda Perlstein (Tested, Not much just chillin’) of Paul Tough’s semi-biography of Gerald Canada. (And I love both of her books; if they were slightly shorter, I’d probably assign one or both to my foundations classes. And I already use the Tough piece from Times magazine in 2006.)

My only complaint — and it’s minor — regarding both the review and the actual project emerges from the focus on “culture.” Certainly this is Canada’s explicit project; in his own words, he’s seeking to “contaminate” the prevailing culture in Harlem, to challenge the cultural values of this 97 block area of Harlem.

I’d argue that this is misleading and unfair to many of the students. Culture emerges from larger socio-economic and political structures; these larger structures provide limits to what children and parents can attempt to do. Not impassable limits — there will always be those families who rise — but don’t talk about changing the culture when there are no jobs, when the political players mostly ignore these families, and when necessary institutions consistently fail these neighborhoods.

A discussion of culture, though, gains traction on both the left and the right. Talking about structural inequality isn’t glamorous and is all but discredited within the political process.

Courtesy of Jane Mayer’s recent book, The Dark Side.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

“The realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration makes a democratic community more interested than other communities to have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education.”

1916 (p.87)

more later.

These quotes illustrates that the practice of coded language so enjoyed by Republicans over the past forty years (see Dan Carter or the Edsalls for a thorough description) has proven to be a great shield from direct criticism. It offers a kind of plausible deniability for those without integrity.

“George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

“As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all,” Lewis said today. “They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.”