This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Scott wants a place where smart and well-behaved students like him will not be bored to death. Freddie wants to use the school as a tool of redistribution. Neither are willing to discuss the impact of culture, so they argue around each other. There's a distributed motte-and-bailey going on here, where Scott and Freddie switch between three different concepts of "good schools". They're actually three different things, "good teachers/facilities", "well-behaved students", and "rich students". The three are correlated, but distinct.
It's not socially acceptable to talk about anything other than "good teachers/facilities", so everyone pretends that's what they care about.
When middle-class parents are buying a house in a "good school district", they pretend to talk about "good teachers/facilities", but they're really looking for good peers because they don't want their kids to fall in with a bad crowd or be bullied. Unless you're an immigrant, you don't say that out loud. Nobody seems to be checking on teacher effectiveness, they just look at test scores, which are mostly a proxy for parent involvement.
Freddie wants to use the schools as a tool of redistribution. He cynically accuses middle-class parents of being rich people who want to hoard the "good teachers/facilities". This is of course false. If middle-class parents were told that their school district boundaries were to now include a neighborhood full of poor Chinese kids, there would be no complaint. The reason "bad schools" are bad is not because of their funding, facilities, or teachers, but because are full ill-behaved kids. Whatever schools these kids are put in become back schools, because these kids are the problem.
Since you cannot discipline or expel badly-behaved poor kids in America, rich kids escape to better districts while well-behaved poor kids become the hostage.
Scott, who is mildly on the spectrum and from top-1% Irvine Unified School District, doesn't understand the sub-games being played around him and earnestly talks about the teachers/facilities/curriculum. He doesn't get that the middle-class parents are using education-talk to justify escaping the underclass, and Freddie is using education-talk to enact redistribution to the underclass.
Yes you do. You leave out the part where the ‘bad crowd’ can often be identified by the prominent skin color, but lots of parents say the quiet part out loud that they’re looking for their kids to have peers from stable middle class families. It’s what’s keeping catholic schools full(and catholic school tuition might well be cheaper than buying a house zoned for a ‘good school’- it certainly has less risk of bussing). It’s the main red tribe explanation for why poor kids do worse in school, too.
Now I’m not discounting that there might be some pockets of the blue tribe who pretend that they’re more concerned with their child’s access to a science lab than with their peer group, but it definitely doesn’t seem predominant.
Yes there would. Middle class whites don’t want to have to become tiger moms to keep up with class rank.
NJ is lousy with those types, but the peer group is already table stakes for them. These are the parents who want their kid to go to Princeton-Plainsboro* school district, with the robotics program and space camp and telepathy lab and what have you, rather than a more normal decent school district. Also all their kids are simultaneously geniuses and need extra help with their ADHD and/or high-functioning autism.
Yep, that group exists too, the term they tend to use is "pressure cooker".
* OK, it's actually West Windsor, there is no Princeton-Plainsboro whether it's a school district or hospital.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link