Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Paglia fuels debate on schools; should we blame guns -- or government?
May 4, 1999 | American poison
BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
(04/28/99)
Paglia's tart assessment of the deplorable state of public education at the high school level was dead on. No surprise, then, that home-schoolers are blowing conventionally schooled students out of the water with their high test scores and sophisticated socialization skills. I agree that lowering the compulsory age of attendance is a good place to start some type of reform at the secondary level, but I think very few American parents would have the guts to allow their kids to voluntarily leave school at age 14. Why? It would disrupt the parents' bland, comfortable lives and incur more responsibility upon them.
-- Isabel Lyman
Amherst, Mass.
If Camille Paglia believes religion can serve as a tempering influence to our natural ferocity, then she's as ignorant about the realities in parochial schools as the media pundits who wail about computer games while ignoring the violence and hatred children learn in powdered communities like Littleton.
After eight years of St. Richard's and four years of St. Edward's, I can report that jock worship is alive and well in religious schools. After hearing about the realities of Columbine (as opposed to the happy rhetoric of the faculty) I was struck the by the similarities to my experience in Catholic schools. The notion that participation in sports magically bestows character and integrity was virtually a religious dogma unto itself.
Instead of having students mutter bland, insincere prayers before class, perhaps schools can turn away from this false and vulgar value system, which goes so far as to require attendance at bizarre pep rallies where one is expected to cheer for the thugs who make school dangerous for you.
-- Bernard Gundy
San Francisco
In her column on the Columbine massacre, Camille Paglia makes the classic reactionary error of assuming that things must always have been better in some mythical past era. Thus she can ignore the horrific reality of child labor conditions in the last century and advocate allowing children to be pulled out of school at age 14 to be thrust into the labor force. My wife is a high school teacher in a poor district in California where a lot of her students are the children of migrant workers. These parents are only keeping their kids in school because it is legally required, and would be quite happy to put them to work instead, supplementing the family income. Would Camille be where she is today if her parents had yanked her out of school at age 14 to pick beets? Somehow, I doubt it.
Another point: If the Columbine massacre can ultimately be blamed on the Industrial Era's replacement of the extended family with the nuclear family, how come we are not seeing similar incidents in schools in Europe and Japan, where a similar shift occurred? The answer is twofold: easy access to guns (sorry, Camille, but guns are part of the problem) and America's worship of individualism. Don't get me wrong, I believe that our love of individualism is one of the things that has made the United States strong and unique in the world, but it also has a dark side. At its worst it encourages a solipsistic attitude in which the wants and needs of the individual take precedence over those of society as a whole. Thus we have teenagers who are so wrapped up in themselves that their fellow humans become just targets in a video game.
-- Matt Frey
Am I the only one that finds it laughable that lesbian Camille Paglia considers herself to be an authority on male homosexuality? Once again Paglia drags out her rather dated (and somewhat offensive) theory that gay men are the result of some kind of early childhood developmental failure, and implies that there are certain sexual personae that are less valid than others.
Humans and animals are gay, straight, and bisexual for many different reasons, none of which really matter. If we lived in a culture where people weren't constantly trying to figure out why people are gay (and what went wrong in their developmental path), maybe there would be fewer Matthew Shepards and godhatesfags.coms.
-- Bryan Keller
Manhattan
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