levertovfan | (no subject)

Some things just make your soul break. Like getting onto a bus and hearing a young man swearing at his even younger son for his mother making him (the father) provide child support and calling him stupid. It's so incredibly horrible and shocking when parents call their young children stupid to their faces, because the children grow up believing it. There's a woman, about 50s-ish, in my keyboarding class who castigates herself out loud for being stupid every two sentances. I've seen some people regularly on buses where they just call their child stupid by reflex, when it's really their own inability to manuver a stroller through a door, or provide adaquate, regular discipline, that it at fault.

I recently went to a talk by Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities and a regular contributor to The Nation, and he talked about how the adult world has this shocking tendancy to blame children for things that aren't their fault, for things that are embedded in the very system that is supposed to be educating them and raising them. He pointed in particular towards No Child Left Behind as part of a school system which fails to educate children and then castigates them when they perform poorly on standardized tests.

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In other news, I am having a wonderfully bookish, or book-themed, day. I went to the National Book Festival on the Mall, and sat in the Fiction & Fantasy Pavilion as Jonathan Safran Foer gave a talk, as John Irving was interviewed, and then as Neil Gaiman gave a talk/reading. Then I went to two libraries to get DVDs from both, and I'm contemplating whether or not to head to Politics & prose's 21st anniversary to top the day off.