Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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I think she's spot-on about lots of the problems with modern interventionist child birth (with the ideal being for women get on with birthing with midwives, partners, doulas, whoever, but have the life-saving stuff available if necessary).
But is she equally spot-on about these bits?
1. She thinks the power balance shifts after childbirth between the parents of the child, with the equality our generation takes for granted disappearing like a will-o-the-wisp.
2. She thinks the solution is state-funded maternity leave, child care provision, paternity leave, flexible working hours etc. The state is the solution, with lobby groups pointing the way.
I'd have thought the ideal would be for both parents to enter parenthood expecting to work from home or part time or flexitime or whatever solution works for both of them. But Naomi Wolf gives the impression that men are never going to sacrifice their careers for this unlesss the state steps in... (Anyone read "Who stole feminism" by Christina Hoff Summers? That's a GREAT book, exploding some of those male-conspiracy myths!)
Whaddya think?
UPDATE: The woman is a professional victim. Look at this article!
Also on my brief excursion through a school today I happened to see a maths worksheet, with a list of questions. One was "How much would six magazines at 54p each cost?" And I froze. I couldn't think what the answer might be. I had a weird adrenilin surge and it was only when I reminded myself that I am no longer required to answer such questions at the behest of other people that my mind relaxed enough for the answer to pop in.
You should know that I have A'level maths, and only dropped Further Maths to concentrate on other things...
If just glimpsing a maths worksheet on my way past was enough to induce such abject fear in someone who left school covered in mathematical glory some years ago, how can it be for someone for whom there is no escape? I was reminded of the good bits of John Holt's "Why Children Fail".
I was reading Brian Micklethwait's post about Richard Dawkins writing about Oundle school many years ago, where staff meetings could be interrupted by small boys who had spotted black terns, and where the headmaster would spend an hour talking about interesting stuff with a boy caught in the library in the middle of the night.
In a teacher's newspaper I happened to see as I was passing through a school today on my way somewhere else, I saw an article about how a bunch of trainee teachers had had a wonderful time doing spoof TV shows in foreign languages with some teenagers, and how confident and articulate the pupils became.
And I put these things together and the answer was: syllabuses, timetables, national statistics, testing and all the other props of modern "education" kill learning. Even assuming a school was full of teachers who treated all their pupils as rational human beings, there would still be no chance for the pupils to relax enough to learn what they want to learn, using the teachers as resources, because syllabuses and league tables make it impossible. It's those days when the syllabus is abandoned and the pupils all play at doing Blind Date in French that someone might be inspired to learn something. But with the best will in the world, a UK school on a normal day is not a place that is conducive to learning.
> Have you heard that Voldemort is being
> played by Rowan Atkinson in the Goblet of
> Fire......what are they thinking?!!?!?
This I had not heard. I think I know why that odd casting decision might have been made, though. In two words: moral relativism.
Most people don't really believe there is such a thing
as evil, or as a truly evil act, instead always attempting to grant victim status to the perpetrator and instead blame something that could never really be held accountable, like "society".
This means that where villains 20-50 years ago could be truly villanous (the Wicked Witch of the West for example), villains nowadays have to be sugar-coated in irony.
I recently saw a horrible RSC production of Richard III where the actor played the lead for laughs, and some of the audience were still laughing along with him as he was killing off all his relatives (it was brilliantly done - the revolting thing was the audience collusion with something they should have known to be evil).
I also recently saw Home alone. Now there's a film where we laugh almost all the time the baddies are on screen, but it's with Macauley Culkin and at the baddies - we revel in the misfortune which is so appropriately theirs, never losing sight of their evil motivations and actions.
Even if Rowan plays it straight, people expect to like him. Big casting mistake. JKRowlings' Voldemort is unadulteratedly evil. We never snicker along with him, but we'll probably be expected to with Rowan Atkinson in the role. Children know what a baddie is; it's just a pity none of them did the casting for this film.
