The Bloom’s Already Off the Rose

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Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed “card check” by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union — rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.

But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.

Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one “sweat” sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar, it’s equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That’s the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees’ rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.

Art Levine, Posted January 24, 2009

The inauguration of President Obama was breathtaking, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve done something unprescedented in the developed world– elected a member of a historically oppressed minority as president. President Morales, of course, who’s Indian, was elected a few years ago in Bolivia. Still, this is one of those turning points that happen only once in a lifetime.

On the other hand, unlike President Morales, President Obama may not be fully what at least some expected. He’s begun the process of shutting down the base at Guantanamo, for example, and the so-called secret CIA bases, but he wants the military to use an interrogation standard that may be just as bad as the old policy, which endorsed torture. His economic team, too, includes people who’ve demonstrated a freakish love of the market.

And Noam Chomsky, among others, can’t see much difference yet between Obama’s position and the Bush position in Gaza. All this seems very healthy to me. As Naomi Klein says, “free your base, and the rest will follow.” That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. But we should give credit where credit is due– the Bush family planning policy had to end– but if progressive people don’t push back, nothing good will come of all of this.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Writing

Writing Instruction in the Age of Digital Reproduction

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CAN COMPUTERS TEACH CHILDREN TO write better? Michael Jenkins,who teaches language arts at Estancia Middle School in central New Mexico, tells the story of Maria (a pseudonym), who so struggled to put her ideas on paper that she used to cry whenever he gave the class a writing assignment. That was before Jenkins began using writing-instruction software that provides feedback on students’ essays and offers suggestions on how to improve them, all within seconds. By the end of the school year, Maria had more confidence in her writing abilities—and passed the writing portion of the state assessment test. “It’s not a cure-all, but what a difference it’s made in what the kids have shown they can do,” says Jenkins, who began using the software last year.

Greg Miller, www.sciencemag.org, January 19, 2009

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, famously argued that mechanical reproduction fundamentally changed the work of art by transforming our sense of originality. The unique, singular object, with its “aura of originality” was superseded by the “transitoriness” of infinite reproducibility. The painting is replaced by photography and the film.

You see the very same tension in the emergence of software designed to asses student writing, a fear that the machine will strip out the individuality, the unique aura of individual expressiveness that was supposedly the goal of composition instruction. Benjamin argued, I think, that there was no going back; you can’t unscramble the egg.

Who’d want a culture without film and photography anyway? And painting has survived just fine. That might be a good way to think about this software too. It can assist students in those aspects of writing, most associated with our shared ethos of written communication. It can help much less with those ineffable qualities of writing that mark individual style.

The real question is economic and political, as Benjamin suggested. Will we be willing to invest our time and money, in other words, both individually and socially, in this complex set of tensions and desires, sharp concision and sloppy art, both irreconcilable and both necessary? Or will we use the machine to make excuses for denaturing education.

Posted in: Language, Professional, Writing

The Bush Whitewash

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President Bush’s poll ratings were among the highest and lowest that modern presidents have ever received — but feelings about George W. Bush the person never fell as far as his job approval numbers.

Ask his staff or his friends to describe the president, and they’ll say “Normal, regular — if he moved in next door, you’d be friends.” The president made an effort to keep his life normal. He likes meetings to begin and end on time; he likes a schedule.

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 11, 2009

I’m increasingly irritated at National Public Radio’s coverage of current events. It’s always been, “Most Things Ignored,” of course, but the alternative media has grown so strong in recent years that it hardly matters. You can learn more from any given Fresh Air episode than you can from a week of “All Things Considered.” You can get a good outline of what’s going on from NPR but it’s no longer any more substantive than, say, the networks’ nightly news programs.

Even worse than the lack of substance is the substitution of an angry, argumentative tone for real analysis and understanding. It’s been particularly obvious in the last few weeks as the Bush propaganda machine attempts to re-tool the brutality and sheer stupid incompetence of his administration. Bush and company began their long campaign by creating a ‘good-old-boy’ image that they felt would be easy to market to their core constituency. He seems to be bringing it back one last time.

What drives me crazy about NPR is that the reporters seem to buy into the public relations campaign almost whole-cloth. Instead of talking about why the Bush administration is peddling their oldest story again, reporters seem to be “analyzing” the question of whether or not Bush is or is not a really fun guy. Some of the reports even seem to feel sorry for him. Meanwhile, of course, the economy continues to collapse, the wars go on, the horrors of Gaza go on.

Posted in: Language, Writing

How Change Happens

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Economic storms historically have prompted more adults to seek shelter in the classroom. But this time around, two-year colleges and private for-profit institutions are especially optimistic about attracting more students—and many of those older students will probably take courses online, according to one of the authors of a recent survey.

The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, released in November before the extent of the recession was clear, found that while all types of colleges anticipate enrollment bumps because of high unemployment, two-year and private for-profit institutions expect to increase their rolls more than others since they “tend to offer programs that have traditionally been tailored to serve working adults.

Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses, STEVE KOLOWICH, January 9, 2009

Step by step, we are creating a new education system without any sense of where we are going. The outlines of the new system have begun to become a little clearer, however. Much of this change is dependent on historical timing. There was the internet boom, which led to the dot-com crash, and then the housing boom. This created a new sort of infrastructure fed by an Utopian ideology that said these technologies ought to be in every home and classroom.

The internet boom jump-started the internet infrastructure, and the collapse of that bubble fed the housing boom, which bought everyone enough time to get these technologies to the point where their effects cannot be reversed. Utopia got us over the rough spots. Now that the housing bubble has burst, dragging the entire economy with it, more people will take advantage of the new infrastructure to use education to improve their chances on the job market, once the bust plays itself out.

All of this is just the public theater of change; behind the scenes, more profound transformations are taking place. As a profession and a public service, higher education has become lopsidedly bifurcated. An increasingly small minority have what was once a relatively secure position in full-time, tenure track positions. The majority do not. Similarly, the old liberal arts model of education threatens to become the privileged experience of a minority.

I understand the funding concerns but I don’t think this is a funding problem. if something is a priority– say, a bank or auto bail out– the money is available. The real questions have to do with the nature of jobs and job security and with the purposes of education. Conservative ideology has made the notion of job security seem antiquated. That magical force, “the market” has supposedly made such a thing impossible. Why should professors be any different?

And technology, rather than education in the old liberal arts mode, has the Utopian edge that pushes people into long term commitments and projects. Don’t get me wrong. I make my living teaching on the internet and I can see the reality of how these new infrastructure has made a certain kind of education more accessible. I worry, though, that as we are busily trying to get through this recession we are normalizing some deep cuts in our expectations.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, War, Writing