Every year I find myself reading some number of articles calling for an end to summer vacation–the practice of giving kids a summer break from school. The argument is typically made with an appeal to the the “summer learning loss” or “summer slide”, the tendency for kids to learn less during the summer than they do while in school, or even to regress academically. Adding further fuel to the argument is the tendency for the achievement gap, the difference in academic performance between higher and lower income students, to expand during the summer months. Opponents of summer vacation deem it an anachronism from a more rural, less air-conditioned age, and think we ought to do away with it altogether. Today, I seek to challenge these views.
Tag: Equality
Scar: The Lion Martin Luther King
Disney has made a lot of beloved animated films. All over the developed world, kids grow up with them. There is something that has long bothered me about them, however–they have long presented children with morally uncomplicated, black and white, hero versus villain narratives. In this way, these movies contribute to our moral socialization as children, normalizing deontological moral beliefs–the notion that actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of the outcomes they produce. There is also an anti-intellectual thread running through many of these films–the villain is typically a clever schemer, while the hero is typically an every-man who happens to have unusual physical abilities. Today I’d like to highlight this issue in our culture by taking the plot of the beloved film The Lion King and morally reconstructing it so as to make Scar sympathetic.
How to Fix the Voting Rights Act
Back in June, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Through negligence, I never got around to writing about it. Today, however, the Department of Justice has decided to attempt to circumvent the court’s ruling, asking a federal court to require the state of Texas to get federal clearance before it makes changes to its voting laws. This is as good a segue as any into discussing the quality of the court’s ruling and how the rest of the state ought to respond to it.
A Critique of Affirmative Action
Yesterday, the supreme court announced a non-decision decision on the issue of affirmative action by universities. The ruling itself makes no significant difference to the status quo, but it got me thinking about the issue. As regular readers know, I think economic and social mobility is very important. For this reason, I am opposed to affirmative action.
The Great Gatsby Curve
Today, Paul Krugman drew to my attention some interesting work by economist Miles Corak on what is called “the Great Gatsby curve”, the tendency for economic inequality to lead to decreased social mobility. The curve is fascinating, because it illustrates a genuine negative empirical consequence from the present distribution of wealth in the United States. This negative consequence is no more negative if you’re on the right or if you’re on the left. The most committed right-winger still thinks that we should have a high degree of social mobility–capable children born to poor parents should be successful, while incapable children born to rich parents should fail. The Great Gatsby curve indicates that this does not happen–our outcomes directly influence the next generation’s opportunities. This connects equality of outcome with equality of opportunity in a way that should be disturbing to the right.
Benjamin Studebaker 