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A MIDDLE-AGED MAN I know was laid off almost two years ago. He could not find a new job in the private sector. After a long and desperate search, he finally took a position as a high school math teacher in a major American city. He now teaches 100 or so students a day and sadly returns to school this week, desperately depressed.

“Oh, I hate it,” he said recently. He has an engineering degree and is in his early fifties, with two children to put through college.

“Teaching” is far too strong a word for what my friend does and it is no wonder that he hates it. He is both prison warden and inmate, authority figure and whipping boy. He has no recourse against disruptive students and there are always three or four very disruptive students in his classes, thus very little is accomplished in the course of the day. The administration takes virtually no disciplinary action. If there is a serious problem, teachers are told to phone the police. Imagine being a teacher and having no recourse in the event of serious aggression but to call 911?

My friend is not permitted to consider behavior when grading. Suspensions and expulsions are rare, if not non-existent. Wherein lies this breakdown of authority? Why isn’t a teacher permitted to teach? (more…)

DALE F. writes:

Here’s a good article by Roger Scruton at the American Spectator on opera authentically done as the last refuge of the bourgeoisie.

I’m not as sold as he is on the quality of the Metropolitan Opera, but certainly compared to the sort of trashy European productions he singles out, the Met is superior. I think our own Music Academy of the West’s recent production of Don Giovanni was, in Scruton’s terms, nearly flawless. (Though to be clear about my own tenuous links to the bourgeoisie, at three hours, I found it a little long.) (more…)

THE DISCUSSION on what wives and mothers should call themselves continues here. In response to a reader’s comment that housewives should respond with defiant witticisms to any challenge, I write: 

[T]he hesitation for a woman to call herself a housewife does not purely stem from uncertainty or lack of confidence, it also comes from deference to other mothers. A housewife often feels she must hide what she has in the same way a rich person may feel the need to downplay his wealth. The housewife possesses great riches in the time she has to act upon her love for her children and husband and even though she may have traded material comfort and live in reduced circumstances in order to attain this gold, she may not want to show off her enormous wealth. Therefore she hedges when asked to describe who she is.

All this is inevitable in a society that does not explictly affirm the role of full-time mother and wife. A society that does not explicitly affirm this role becomes one that explicitly affirms the opposite: the absentee mother and wife. The idea of balancing social approval is a myth; such balance is impossible to achieve because these are mutually exclusive ideals. Society cannot approve contradictory standards.  (more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

Shocking news has hit the men’s rights community. Men’s News Daily, the biggest men’s rights site on the Internet, is going to shut down within a month. The announcement was made on August 28, 2010, in a letter from Mike LaSalle to his readers.  Though Paul Elam has acted as the manager of MND for the past year, Mike LaSalle is the person who actually owns the Men’s News Daily website and he is the person who has decided to shut the website down. 

Men’s News Daily got started shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a little less than nine years ago. (more…)

PRAYER is the expression of desire; its value comes from our inward aspirations, from their tenor and their strength. Take away desire, the prayer ceases; alter it, the prayer changes; increase or diminish its intensity, the prayer soars upward or has no wings. Inversely, take away the expression while leaving the desire, and the prayer in many ways remains intact. Has a child who says nothing but looks longingly at a toy in a shop window, and then at his smiling mother not formulated the most moving prayer? And even if he had not seen the toy, is not the desire for play, innate in the child as is the thirst for movement, in the eyes of his parents a standing prayer which they grant?

We ought always to pray is the same as saying: we must always desire eternal things, the temporal things which serve the eternal, our daily bread of every kind and for every need, life in all its fulness earthly and heavenly.

                              — A.D. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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ONE THING that has not been mentioned in the discussion on domestic violence is that violent women are celebrated on television and in movies as never before.

Robin writes:

While I am not sure either that this is what women actually desire to watch, I will say that women do watch such programs often because they are so terribly confused as to the actual definition of womanhood in society today. Often, the women where I live behave exactly like men in almost every way in their day-to-day lives: women operating heavy lawn equipment, women doing difficult physical labor, women working in traditionally masculine jobs in factories and women running the family finances and almost completely orchestrating the lives of their husbands and boyfriends, expecting their men to act as their “wives” when they arrive home from work.  (more…)

SIMONE writes:

Judging by the title of your blog, it is fairly safe to assume that you refer to yourself as a ‘housewife.’ I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that nowadays many married women who stay at home to raise their children and support their husbands prefer to be known as‘homemakers’ or a ‘stay-at-home-moms.’ If pressed on the issue, these women would probably argue that ‘housewife’ is an old-fashioned term which is not inclusive of single mothers and unmarried cohabitants who are not employed outside the home.  (more…)

JEAN-PAUL de Montréal écrit:

THE AUTHOR Joyce Maynard, divorced and 55, has satisfied a serious case of maternal lust by adopting two children from Ethiopia. Joining the significant number of Western parents who pursue global utopianism in their own homes, Maynard spent $20,000 to adopt the two girls, taking them far from their own county to bring them to California. Several months into the experience, she has written about it for More magazine, explaining how this new home filled with Western comforts and the love of strangers is better than the modest orphanage these girls left behind.

“I didn’t do this to be noble,” Maynard writes. “I was a mother in need of some children.” Well, at least she is honest. (A father is irrelevant; he doesn’t even come up as a necessity in any way.) Nevertheless, one suspects, given the amount of time she spends detailing the life she has created for her adopted daughters in More (a magazine devoted to more of everything), that she does indeed see her actions as noble. (more…)

AMY CHOZICK in today’s Wall Street Journal writes about the new television show “Nikita:”

The show reflects new thinking among television network executives: Their core audience—female viewers—want to see a woman take down the enemy, preferably with a little bloodshed along the way. The approach overturns years of belief that violent shows turn off women who prefer to watch earnest nurses, headstrong housewives or quirky career women.

I am not convinced that this is what viewers want, but this and the other shows mentioned by Chozick do reflect the cultural celebration of aggression in females. And, it is clear viewers will chow down on the junk that is fed to them.                                   (more…)

THE WORLD is full of Verena Tarrants. Verena, remember, is the heroine of Henry James’s 1885 novel The Bostonians. She is the naive girl enamored of feminism. It is her life and religion, but the main reason she has fallen under its sway is the power and will of one particular feminist, the Boston aristocrat Olive Chancellor. Olive is symbolic of the many demagogues, the Gloria Steinems and Simone de Beauvoirs, the Katie Courics, Oprah Winfreys, and Sarah Palins, who have led far more submissive women into the feminist trenches.

James’s hero, Basil Ransom, succeeds in converting a feminist. He does so in a way very similar to that described by Brandon B. and Heady G. in this entry. (more…)