Hello all,
I think Bill and Scott make VERY valid points about the Diploma.
Let me add to the discussion an account of an incident that hap-
pened only yesterday. It is most enlightening.
A couple of weeks ago my son Cyrus, who attends a public school
here in Ottawa, Canada (mainly because there isn't a Sudbury school
here), was given an assignment to do in his Science class on the sub-
ject of Genetically Modified Organisms (or GOM's). He opted to do
a paper on the future possibilities of this technology, pointing out the
advantages as well as the dangers inherent in it. And among the dan-
gers, he pointed out that when and if this technology were taken far
enough, it would make possible sexual exploitation on a scale far
beyond what has hitherto been possible. To quote a few excerpts
from only the sexually explicit parts of his essay (and there were
other parts as well, which had nothing to do with sex), he wrote:
[QUOTE]
But probably the most diverse bad thing of them all will be
in the arena of, well, prostitution and rape. Imagine: not
only could willing prostitutes use perfect bodies to bond
helpless people to the pleasure only they can provide, and
they could make a wide variety of humans for different
sexual purposes, like women would are always virgin or
always not, or men with the perfect sexual instrument, or
women who produce an unusual amount of urine and
women designed to give that perfect blow-job thing. Most
will be GMO's of women because men fall most for this
stuff; but there probably will be women to just imagine it:
people made just to enjoy and experience your pleasure,
and who experience the largest most excruciating orgasms
-- or on the other side, people who really true, no acting in
their soul, don't like it but want it like a craving, so the me-
dia and the government can't outlaw it, but people can ex-
perience the truth of the rape of a person, the domination,
the power, the lust of it, without breaking the law. And the
possibilities of the companies selling perfect kids who on
the outside seem to like you to others, but alone they are
addicted (at least in there mind where it counts) to your
sexual body secretions and are your sex slaves.
[END QUOTE]
Before submitting the paper he showed it to me and asked me if it
was okay to write such sexually explicit material in a school paper.
I said, perhaps naively, that it was perfectly fine, especially since
this was supposed to be a scientific paper, intended to teach sci-
ence and meant for a class in science; and to censor science is per-
haps the worst thing any educational institution could or should be
doing: and thus I did not think the school would have any basis for
censoring his paper -- and even if they did, it would be their fault
and their stupidity, certainly not his.
Yesterday I and my wife got a phone call from the vice-principal of
the school Cyrus attends, telling us in no uncertain terms that such
material -- and the language he used -- is unacceptable in a paper to
be handed in at their school, and that not only would Cyrus's paper
not be put up on the board for everyone to see (as would be done
with the papers of the other students in his class), but that he would
be getting an almost failing grade for it. I tried to point out to the vice-
principal that this was as bad as the reaction the Kinsey report had
received more than fifty years ago from a very un-enlightened North
America, and that we should by now have moved far beyond this
sort of nonsense, but he -- and the science teacher later on, when
my wife called him -- were adamant that what Cyrus had written
was unacceptable, in both language and concepts, for their school.
I told Cyrus that if this was the attitude of the school it was a stupid
attitude, and that at the very least he should pay no attention to it:
and that if he wanted, he could fight it. I also explained that although
the science teacher had said that Cyrus's low grade was due not only
to the fact that he used sexually explicit language but because, accord-
ing to the teacher, Cyrus had not given any references at the end of
his paper, I felt that it was merely an excuse on the part of the science
teacher, because if Cyrus had come up with the ideas in his paper
WITHOUT the benefit of reading material, that was all the more cre-
ditable on his part, especially since his ideas were perfectly logical
and rational. I explained that it was clear to me that the science teacher
was trying to find an excuse to legitimise the omission of Cyrus's paper
from the board where the other students' papers were to be put up, be-
cause if he gave Cyrus's paper a high grade and yet did NOT put up
the paper on the board for all to see, that would obviously be incon-
sistent with reason and rationality.
I told Cyrus that it was up to him whether or not he decided to fight
the system in this regard. I told him that I myself would have, in his
place, but I was not telling HIM to do so: it was up to him to decide
how to live his life. But my wife was of the opinion that Cyrus
should simply offer to re-write the paper, omitting all the sexually
explicit material from it, and ask the school to re-evaluate it, since
the subject of the paper is not Cyrus's main interest, and neither is
the matter of fighting censorship: his main interest is and always has
been engineering, even from the age of four or thereabouts; and she
added that he ought to remember that if he gets bad grades in high
school, he is unlikely to get into engineering school later on.
Cyrus seems to have accepted my wife's ideas, and does not want
to buck the system. Which leads me to conclude the following:
(1) Although there IS such a thing as the right to free speech in
Canada, guaranteed by the constitution, actually exercising this
right can be detrimental to one's future prospects; and
(2) There is ALWAYS pressure on students to achieve good grades
-- and *ipso facto*, a diploma -- if they want to do something in
life later on ... and they ignore this pressure too at their own peril.
I mention this incident not only to illustrate the insidiousness of
grades and diplomas, and to show how even constitutionally guar-
anteed rights can be subverted in numerous subtle ways, but also
to ask the opinion of all of you on the subject of censorship, espe-
cially as it applies to the Sudbury model.
Best wishes,
Ardeshir <http://homepage.mac.com/ardeshir/AllMyFiles.html>.
_____________________________________________________
> Scott David Gray wrote:
>
> Actually, Ardeshir is giving voice to a long-standing
> argument of mine.Personally, I think that offering a
> diploma is a "dangerous" path for a non-coercive school --
> just because there are _so_ many coercive pressures outside
> the school that push people towards a diploma, and there is
> no clear "need" for a school to offer it.
AND:
> Bill Richardson wrote:
>
>Dear Scott,
>
> Thank you very much. You wrote that:
>
> "the diploma is alien to the heart of Sudbury".
>
> Exactly. There is a whole set of questions that we can answer by considering
> the heart of Sudbury. Remember the question about "essential skills", and the
> one about whether Sudbury had produced any trully outstanding people, like
> Eienstien or such. The diploma question is a like minded question.
>
> Just consider very carefully that the heart of Sudbury is this stunning
> little notion that the child is a full person deserving of respect. And as a
> consequece of that notion we offer no agenda or curriculum. And thus we come
> to see that Sudbury has constructed the quite rare view that the child is not
> an improver.
>
> ...
>
> But also, I understand that people want stuff. Let's be crystal clear. The
> diploma is the staff or parents or founders wanting something. Wanting ain't
> bad. Just don't manipulate it till it looks like the child is driving this.
> The notion of preparing to become responsible in the larger community is
> simply not a notion that has informed much of the child's life at Sudbury.
> Such a notion asks them to recast their experience into something it was not.
> It asks them to make up a story. A fake story.
>
> But in fact, the child has a real story. And like all the other parents and
> staff and founders, I want something. I want that story. But the only thing
> we can do is ask. After thanking them, we can only ask that they tell us. We
> can ask them to write their own story, their real story, their own
> ethnography. We will all bless the day we can sit around and read that.
(By the way, Bill, Einstein was NOT a truly outstanding person:
in science at least he was a blithering idiot -- excuse my French.
Read my articles on Relativity at:
<http://homepage.mac.com/ardeshir/Relativity.html>.
Ardeshir.)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Wed Mar 27 2002 - 19:39:48 EST