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Greetings all, I’ve been in trans-Atlantic discussions over the
future utility and significance of academic degrees, and I wondering if
Futurework members have some experience or ideas on this, especially pertaining
to advice for people now making choices re. going to universities. Our
questions: what may be the future relevance of degrees to job opportunities? To
relevant work skills? To one’s ‘standing’ in society’? Will some kinds of degrees be more valuable or necessary
than others? All ideas and forecasts gratefully received! I wrote this, in connection with ‘Elisa’, a 17
year old, of mixed French-American parents, now living in Paris. To what
extent is my characterization of her situation accurate? What should she do? “In a sense, she is caught between an American point
of view of education, and a French one, if I understand the philosophy of the
latter correctly. The French system is just that, a system, with fairly tight
and specific rules: different merit-based tracks, that use key exams as its
mileposts, with little flexibility in moving from one track to another, and the
idea that pursuing a track must be a full-time unceasing activity; no time for
time-outs, so side-ventures and inquiries. It is an approach that assumes that
a person’s professional destiny is set, or at least once embraced and at
a young age their will be nor deviation. Deviation is taken as a sign that one
is not serious about the track and its objectives. “In the American way, education is much more about the
emergence of the interests and abilities of the individual; this may take time,
and each student will do this is ways that are appropriate to him/her. There
may be changes in direction and interests along the way, and institutions are
expected to assist in these changes, or at least not punish the student for
them. Destiny is changeable and choose-able. To stick with one course of action
even after the student has reflected and is attracted to some other course is
viewed as unfortunate and pointless. “So when someone says to Elisa, ‘stay flexible,
choose your way, be reflective, don’t tie yourself into something that
you might not want, or isn’t your first choice’, an American point
of view is being reflected, it seems to me, and this view may not reflect the
reality for a student committed to the French system and French environment. Is
this what the question for Elisa is about? Is it not just a matter of this or
that school, but in effect of choosing between two different philosophies of
education? If so, I cannot honestly say that I find the American one the
better one; well-educated French people have an analytic ability and precision that
exceeds that of Americans, generally! But Americans seem to happier with their
professional activities, and certainly many very bright and capable French
people seem attracted to the US precisely because of the more open and flexible
opportunities it gives them. “Elisa, with her dual nationality and cultural
connections, is in a position to take advantage of the differing benefits of
both systems and both cultures; though it offers the anxiety of making choices,
it is a reflection of the wide set of choices she has before her, much wider
than kids brought up solely in one or the other have. In this important sense,
she is very lucky, though it also brings the uncertainty and discomfort of
decision-making in uncharted waters.” Cheers, Lawry From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole Finally, an apt moniker for the GOP-led Congress that
doesn’t include barnyard metaphors or sailor’s expletives. And why do we think Congress has gotten so bad?
Because it’s not doing what it is intended to do, provide checks and
balances through oversight. The rubber stamping must end before the
Constitution is shredded and we have something else than representative
democracy. Color highlights, italics, mine. kwc Kabuki Congress
NYT Editorial, Monday, March
06, 2006
Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local
legislature raise the limit so you won't have to pay the fine. It sounds
absurd, but it's just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits
the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge. It's a familiar pattern.
President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the
cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the
laws he's broken. In
2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that
American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the
administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the
world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the
laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply
changed them. Now the
response of Congress to Mr. Bush's domestic wiretapping scheme is following the
same pattern, only worse. At
first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some
Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the
Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one investigative hearing,
notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's refusal to answer
questions. Mr.
Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying
program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also
covers any other illegal wiretapping we don't know about — including, it appears, entire
"programs" that could cover hundreds, thousands or
millions of unknowing people. Mr.
Specter's bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court. A far more noxious proposal being floated by Senator Mike DeWine,
Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence gathering related to
terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. Let's
call this what it is: a shell game. The question is whether the Bush
administration broke the law by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on
Americans and others in the United States without obtaining the required
warrant. The White House wants Americans to believe that the spying is
restricted only to conversations between agents of Al Qaeda and people in the
United States. But even if that were true, which it evidently is not, the administration has not offered the slightest evidence that
it could not have efficiently monitored those Qaeda-related phone calls and
e-mail messages while following the existing rules. In other words, there is not a shred of proof that the
illegal program produced information that could not have been obtained legally,
had the administration wanted to bother to stay within the law. The
administration has assured the nation it had plenty of good reason, but there's
no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied information on the
details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the
Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that way. He has
refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying scandal. There
were glimmers of hope on the House side. Representative Heather Wilson, the New
Mexico Republican who heads one of the subcommittees supervising intelligence,
called for a "painstaking" review of the necessity and legality of the
spying operation. But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, is turning that into a pro
forma review that would end with Congress rewriting the
foreign-intelligence law the way Mr. Bush wants. Ms.
Wilson still says that the House needs to get the facts before it rewrites the law, and we hope she sticks to it. But she's facing a tough race this
fall, and her staff has already started saying that, well, she never called for
"an investigation," just "an oversight review." Putting
on face paint and pretending that illusion is reality is fine for Kabuki
theater. Congress should have higher standards. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06mon1.html?hp ALSO SEE AG
Gonzales denies more extensive NSA spying but Rep. Jane Harman isn’t
backing down. In a statement, Hoekstra and Harman also said their
committee will hold hearings on the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
"with an eye toward modernizing it to account for current and future
technological advances." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201783.html How the
Patriot Act came in from the cold: The addition of some new civil liberties
protections made the Patriot Act's final lurch toward passage possible. To
critics, these changes are but tissue-paper defenses. But the bill's defenders
say its provisions are necessary - and that much of the opposition to the Patriot Act is driven, not by
the bill itself, but by opposition to administration domestic-security policies. "It's
not about the Patriot Act per se. It involves larger questions of mistrust for
the Justice Department and the White House," says James Andrew
Lewis, director of the technology and public-policy program at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0303/p01s03-uspo.html |
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