The California Department of Education offers a potentially rather nifty service to parents on its official website: It provides recommended reading lists customized based on the kid’s grade level (K-12) and test score on the California Reading Arts exam, with 13 progressively harder lists at each grade level:

“Based on your child’s score on the California English-Language Arts Standards Test, a specific list has been designated as appropriate for him or her in terms of reading difficulty and interest level.”

These lists are much less driven by multiculturalist quotas than you’d expect. They’re heavy on The Classics of Western Civilization, including ones that nobody reads anymore, like Vergil’s Aeneid. And the multiculti stuff is pretty good, like Fences by August Wilson.

Unfortunately, educators are living in a dreamland about what kind of books are suitable for their lowest-scoring students. Let’s take a look at the recommended reading list for high school students (grades 9-12) who rank lowest out of the 13 levels of scores on the test. So, that’s like youths in the bottom decile in reading ability, right?

Here are five of the 57 recommendations from the bottom of the barrel list:

Collected Poems by W.H. Auden
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot
Paradise Lost by John Milton

Right …

Look, at this level, you just want these kids to read something, so you should be recommending, I don’t know, 32-page sports hero biographies in big type with lots of pictures. The Da Vinci Code is way too hard for these poor bastards.

This seems to be a general pattern, pushing public school kids toward books that are way over their heads. Let’s talk about average public school students. For example, Shakespeare is frequently introduced to students via Romeo and Juliet, which is the young Shakespeare at his most show-offy and incomprehensible. You should start instead with Julius Caesar, which is written in Shakespeare’s simplest style in imitation of Latin. And it’s about war and politics, which boys like, and boys are the problem these days. Most of them probably won’t get it, but at least they have a fighting chance with Julius Caesar.

For those high school students who go on to a second Shakespeare play, Henry IV, Part I has perhaps the most entertainment value, with war, politics, and some humor that’s still kind of funny in Falstaff. Avoid Shakespeare comedies that are based upon transvestism but aren’t actually funny, like Twelfth Night. They appeal to a certain type of English teacher, but not to most students. And avoid “problem plays” like Measure for Measure, which are problem plays because they have problems (i.e., aren’t very good).

If you are building a public high school reading list of classics, you should look for 1) simple, 2) short, and 3) appealing to boys, which means you’d start with The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

Suggestions?

This is from Time Magazine’s website–black voters in Indiana felt ignored by both Barack and Hillary.

Tuesday, Apr. 29, 2008

Indiana Black Voters Feeling Ignored

By Steven Gray/Indianapolis

For weeks, Delores Smith, membership coordinator at the Madame C. J. Walker Theater in Indianapolis, has e-mailed and called Sen. Barack Obama’s representatives, hoping he’ll hold a campaign event at the 937-seat theater. It is, after all, named in honor of one of the nation’s first black millionaires. And its place in the heart of one of Indianapolis’ oldest black neighborhoods makes it a key stop for candidates seeking this city’s nearly quarter-million African-American voters — the largest concentration in Indiana. But so far, Smith says, “I haven’t heard anything.”

Even before the major distraction this week caused by the remarks of black liberation theologist and former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright, black voters in Indiana have been feeling ignored. While both Democratic presidential candidates have been jockeying for the rural, working-class white voters who make up much of Indiana’s electorate, they have been largely absent from predominantly black neighborhoods that have historically been among the party’s strongholds. For much of the campaign in Indiana, as well as around the country, many black voters feel there has been little effort to engage them on issues that have particular impact in the black community, such as the home foreclosure and HIV crises.

Amos Brown III, one of Indianapolis’ most popular black talk radio hosts, says many African Americans here, like elsewhere in the country, were buoyed by Obama’s success in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and Idaho. Obama generated even more local excitement with his March 15 visit to a suburban Indianapolis high school. But since then, Brown says many of his listeners are asking, “Where is he? And, is he going to come to the ‘hood or not?’ Hoosiers, black or white,” Brown adds, “like to be courted. It’s important to go to the smaller towns, but it’s just as important to go out into the neighborhoods of the big city. I haven’t seen that with Barack or Hillary.”[More]

In the general election, blacks vote 90 percent for the Democrats. In the Hillary vs Barack primary, they vote more than 90 percent for Barack. That means both candidates can ignore them–Hillary because she can’t get their votes, Barack because he’s already got them. If blacks want more positive attention from the Democratic candidates, some of them will have to consider voting Republican.

I have to admit that once in awhile National Review produces some good material. Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot blog chastises the pundit class for denouncing white working class voters as as racists solely because they didn’t vote for Barack Obama.
Among the highlights:

Are white working-class voters really racist? How many and where? If a significant number of them are, should Democrats really court them on the terms of their racism? These are questions worth asking since, apparently, a lot of Democrats think they’re valid. But as long as the Clinton campaign continues to code the fact that it is counting on a base of white racist support, we’ll never have this conversation.

[How Does Hillary Clinton Feel About the White Racist Vote?,by Richard Kim The Nation, May 5]

“With the largest number of remaining delegates now being party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.”

-[ Ugly truth why Hillary Clinton won't quit, by Thomas M. DeFrank New York Daily News, May 7].

“There may have been some element of racism among these culturally conservative voters, who support Democrats if they think the politician is strong and empathetic toward their struggles; Obama appeared neither.”

[Obama's Tired Campaign Needs Victory, New Life, by Al Hunt Bloomberg News, May 5.

Geraghty notes that that Mormons voted for Romney, Evangelicals vote for Huckabee, and of course Blacks vote uniformly for Obama so “complaining about voters preferring candidates who share traits with them is like complaining about the weather.” The implication seems to be that it’s OK for working class whites to do the same. He concludes,

African-Americans are voting overwhelmingly for a candidate who shares their skin color, but it's being repeatedly suggested that white working-class voters are motivated by racism. Is this the "national conversation on race" that Obama had in mind in his Philly speech?[The Continuing Racial Polarization of the Electorate, by Jim Geraghty National Review Online, May 7]

This seems awful close to defending Ramesh Ponnuru’s dreaded “identity politics for white people.” If there is a silver lining to the Obama cloud, it is that conventional conservatives are becoming emboldened to take on anti-white racism and double standards.

Ilkka Kokkarinen sends a link to a Finnish government video recruiting skilled immigrants from other European Union countries. It provides some insight into Finns’ quietly self-confident sense of their competitive advantages in appealing to the kind of people they want:nlan

“Skilled people enjoy living in Finland. … Quality of life also includes peace of mind. An ordinary, normal life is good. Finns expect quality, freshness, and functionality as standard. The starting point is that everything works, in any weather or season. Everyday matters are easily taken care of.”

Canada has socialized medicine, which means overuse of non-essential services, and rationing of essential ones. As a result, at least a hundred women with high-risk pregnancies have had to come south of the Canadian border to get emergency free-enterprise medicine.

Of course, the babies naturally get dual Canadian-American citizenship as result of the circumstances of their birth, (and the current misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause) but they go right home with their mothers, assuming, God willing, that both mother and child survive the high-risk birth. [Canada's U.S. baby boom| With neonatal resources stretched thin, more and more high-risk infants are sent south to find a bed, By Lisa Priest, Globe and Mail, May 5, 2008 ]

Possibly in twenty years from now, the child will come back to the United States to work, and not need a Green Card, but that’s about it.

James Taranto [Send him mail] is trying to be funny about this in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

Aw, look at the cute little Canadian babies! It’s all very sweet and innocuous, right?

Don’t believe it. Read between the lines, and you realize this is a sinister Canadian plot to take over America. Canada’s military is no match for ours, so the crafty Canucks are using infancy instead of infantry to carry out their imperial designs.

Think about it. Canadian officials send women across the border, smuggling in “anchor babies” cleverly disguised as clumps of tissue. The women give birth inside the U.S., which means their Canadian offspring are entitled to U.S. citizenship. As these “children” grow and mature, they receive instructions from their masters in Ottawa about how to undermine American culture.

Before you know it, your kids are stuffing themselves with litres of back bacon, downing kilogram after kilogram of Crown Royal and Labatt Blue, and belting out “God Save the Queen” as they watch hockey on TV.

It’s all so horrible to contemplate, but it can be stopped. All we need to do is make America as inhospitable as Canada for expectant Canadian mothers. Hillary Clinton has the right idea: The U.S. needs socialized medicine.

This, for those not familiar with Taranto’s open borders advocacy and heavy-handed attempts at humor, is a satire of “nativist” concerns about Mexican immigration. Now, I could say that the main problem with Mexican immigration is that they’re not Canadians, but that’s not the most obvious thing here–the most obvious thing is numbers.

• The Canadian women are in the US for an average of 26.6 day–Mexican illegals are here for life. And they take over whole towns.
• The Canadian government is paying the women’s medical bills–the Mexican government is paying nada.
• The Canadians’ children are going home with their parents–the Mexicans’ children tend to stay, even if their parents are deported.

And the final big difference:

• Approximately 100 Canadian babies going home with US Birth Certificates tucked into their blankies–up to half a million illegal immigrant anchor babies whose parents came from Mexico and similar places.

Those kids are staying, and they’ll cost the US Taxpayer a lot of money.

Here’s Picasso’s 1943 sculpture Bull’s Head, which H.W. Janson’s standard college textbook on art history uses in the introduction to illustrate the concept of “creativity.”

“Now let us look at the striking Bull’s Head by Pablo Picasso (fig. 2), which seems to consist of nothing but the seat and handlebars of an old bicycle. … Of course, the materials Picasso used are fabricated, but it would be absurd to insist that he must share the credit with the manufacturer, since the seat and handlebars in themselves are not works of art.

“While we feel a certain jolt when we first recognize the ingredients of this visual pun, we also sense that it was a stroke of genius to put them together in this unique way, and we cannot very well deny that it is a work of art.”

Okay, but the thought that occurred to me in art history class in 1979 was this: “Why does everybody assume this was ‘unique?’”

I would guess that more than a few people preceded Picasso in coming up with the idea of, and then carrying out, connecting handlebars and seat to imitate a bull’s head. It’s the kind of thing my dad came up with every year or two while puttering around in the garage. Maybe he got the idea of assembling two things to look like an animal from Picasso, but I really doubt it. I suspect lots of folks’ dads came up with a bicycle seat and handlebars Bull’s Head before Picasso did.

If somebody came up with proof that, say, a Bulgarian bicycle repairman created basically the same thing in 1927, would that render Picasso’s 1943 version valueless? Would Janson take out Picasso’s Bulls Head and put in a picture of the repairman’s Bull’s Head as the exemplification of artistic creativity?

Yeah, right.

Something that’s frequently overlooked about art history is that there has to be a “story.” That, say, Bull’s Head was independently discovered/created in, say, Bulgaria in 1927, in Uruguay in 1930, in Siam in 1931, and so forth, isn’t a good story. It’s just a bunch of random stuff that (hypothetically) happened.

That Picasso from Spain, the land of bullfighting, an artistic genius obsessed with masculine vitality, who had prominently painted a bull’s head in his famous Guernica, one day looked at some junk from an old bicycle and realized that he could create a bull’s head from two everyday objects … now that’s a story!

Short answer: No.

But, a lot of people suspect it is, so it’s worth exploring the question.

In 1993, I attended the enormously popular exhibition at the formidable Chicago Art Institute of the paintings of the Belgian Rene Magritte, a commercial artist in dreary Brussels who did witty Surrealist paintings in his off-hours.

After listening to a lecture on Magritte by the curator of exhibition, I approached her and told her how much more popular Magritte had gotten in just 17 years. In 1976 I’d visited a major exhibition of Magritte’s work at the museum of Rice University in Houston, which, at the time, consisted of two quonset huts made of corrugated metal out in the football stadium parking lot. Almost nobody was there.

(more…)

Last week I reported on the efforts in Houston to mask the data on attitudes to immigration revealed by a local opinion survey. (Un PC Results from The Houston Area Survey April 29).

The Houston Area Survey’s website has now posted a 10-page summary of the study An Historical Overview of Immigration in Houston, Based on the Houston Area Survey (PDF)

This document differs from a normal academic paper in two ways: first, the extreme stridency and tendentiousness of the pro-immigration spin it exhibits, and secondly the professional fluency of the writing–far removed from the turgid jumble usually emerging from University Sociology Departments (I speak from bitter editing experience).

Perhaps it is not too much to detect the hand of the Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Falkenberg, [Send her mail] who managed to publish a long (and fluent) pro immigration foil to the Survey the day of its press release. (I am informed she has the role of pro immigration Commissar on the Chronicle – thanks JC and GW.) Certainly it is clear that the complaint of the Survey’s progenitor, Professor Stephen Klineberg [Send him mail]:

“No matter how you ask the question,…every measure shows growing anti-immigrant sentiment.”

(VDARE.com emphasis) was heart-felt.

Quite out of place in a professional academic essay is this happy burble:

The United States, which throughout all of its history was an amalgam of European nationalities, is suddenly becoming a microcosm of the world — the first nation in history that can say, “We are a free people, and now we come from everywhere!”

(p2)

Or this polemical fulmination:

Between 1924 and 1965, under the notorious and viciously racist “National Origins Quota Act,” immigration into America slowed to a trickle, and explicit preference was accorded to Northern Europeans.

(P2)

(As Professor Kevin MacDonald has decisively demonstrated, the 1924 legislation was a clash between two groups, one seeking to preserve historic America, the other wishing to overthrow it. Both could be said to be serving their ethnic interests. In 1924 the former won, in 1965 the latter.)

Apart from employing glaring historical falsehoods–(The United States remained overwhelmingly a British, Protestant nation until the 1840s; there is a ridiculous effort on Page 4 to blame the abysmally low educational attainments of Houston’s Mexican immigrant population on the family reunification provisions of the 1965 Act–whereas of course the overwhelming bulk of this group are in Houston because they walked illegally across the border)–the main argumentation in the essay seems to be based on the assumption that the serfs reading it cannot think. Thus the information that half of third generation Hispanics have only Hispanics as their three closest friends is presented as evidence of assimilation! (P8)

As noted last week, the main evidence the report offers of assimilation is the irrelevant one of converging economic profiles–even having access to a computer! (P6-7)

Of course, I suppose it could be that the Klinebergs and Falkenbergs see being American merely as a matter of having similar possessions.

It is clear that the report realizes that Houston has imported itself a probably lethal problem:

More than 40 percent of all Houston’s Latino and Asian immigrants are recent arrivals, having come here since 1995…if the socioeconomic disparities with Anglos are not reduced, if too many of Houston’s “minority” youth remain unprepared to succeed in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for the region as a whole…How the public responds…will do much to determine whether the region’s ongoing demographic transformation will become a significant asset for this port-city as it positions itself for prosperity in the global economy, or whether it will instead become a major liability, reducing rather than enhancing the region’s competitiveness and setting the stage for serious social conflict.

The strong implication is that the burden of adjustment should all fall on the historic Americans.

Instead, “the public” would do well to consider how it was this mess was created.

Tell Professor Klineberg to improve his scholarship - and get a more honest ghostwriter!