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Science Fair Exhibits: Fair Game For Censorship
Jake_Man writes: "A rather intelligent young lady had her science fair project regarding racial preferences amongst adults and children yanked after being on display for an hour. Not only is this building tremendous confidence and self esteem in a young lady interested in the scientific field, it's just more of the "if we don't talk about it, it'll go away" mentality to which our nation's school children are subjected everyday. What a great way to help children learn to think for themselves ..."
IMHO, The child in question behaved quite responsibly, and with a maturity some adults could learn from. Like most of us, she sees that, whether it should or not, race does matter in today's society. Rather than trying to take sides, she conducted an experiment to quantify that phenomenon, and then presented her findings.
In response, the adults present removed a perfectly valid and useful science project from the fair.
As you state, children need discipline. That is, when a child does something irresponsible or wrong, they should be corrected. In this case, the child did something responsible and right. The exhibit was certainly controversial, but that does not make it wrong. It seems to me that they pulled the exhibit down because it was controversial. By doing so, they taught her that talking about race relations is wrong. They taught her, and all the other children there, that being controversial was wrong.
If we teach our children that being controversial is wrong, we raise stupid little sheep. And I, for one, refuse to raise mutton.
If the adults acted responsibly, they might point out the exhibit, and use it as a starting point for a discussion on race relations. This is certainly a topic worth discussing. For my money, understanding that we don't live in a colorblind society, understanding why, and understanding what we can do about it, is much more useful to an emerging adult than remembering which shape on the map represents Belgium.
Instead, they tried to further the illusion that we do live in a colorblind society. They taught the lesson "If you ignore the issue, maybe it will go away". I don't think any of us here are stupid enough to believe that.
--The basis of all love is respect
Based on this, The Boulder Valley school district web page is here. The public officials have all sorts of contact information, etc. Some even have email addresses.
Now remember that we would want intelligent discussion about this, so make sure that if you choose to communicate with them, to cite the original web page, and to use nice words. Personal attacks should be avoided, since most of these folks likely do not have a government issued flame retardant Web suit yet.
yes, the School has a web site as well, but it seems better that you send any comments to the Public officials, since it is part of their job description to occasionally be on the hot seat.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Actually, you can acheive statistical significance with such a small sample. Using the limited data available from This AP wire version of the story:
She dressed up a white Barbie and black Barbie in two different colored dresses. She asked 15 adults at her father's workplace which doll was prettier.
She then switched the dresses and asked 15 more adults. The doll wearing the lavender dress -- regardless of the doll's skin color -- was deemed prettiest by both groups.
Then, When she asked fifth-graders at Mesa Elementary, all 15 in one class picked the white doll. In the second class, after the dresses were switched, nine of the 15 students picked the white doll.
So, we know the following:
# of people (of 15) picking the White Doll
---------White+Lavender---Black+Lavender---Tot
Young...|..9 or 15......|....9 or 15.....|..24
Old.....|..8 to 15......|....1 to 7......|..??
Now, let's make some assumptions:
First, let's assume that Lavender is actually prettier, and that the 6 students that chose the black doll did so when she was wearing lavender. That means that we have:
# of people (of 15) picking the White Doll
---------White+Lavender---Black+Lavender---Tot
Young...|......15.......|.......9........|..24
This indicates a statistically significant main effect for doll color. A two sided chi-square (corrected with Fisher's exact test to accomodate cells with expected values less than 5) is significant p=.015.
Testing for a main effect for the adults and an age x doll+dress interaction would require knowing the cell values for adults, which are not reported.
What this means is something else entirely. According to the AP article, her conclusion was I discovered that most grown-ups liked the lavender dress on the black or white Barbie. On the other hand, kids mostly liked the white Barbie. Only six kids liked the black Barbie. Which is really just a statement of the results.
This could mean:
- that the kids are racist
- that adults are racist, but are able to supress racist feelings when they are in a study
- that adults really like lavender
- that black barbies are less common and therefore less preferred
- that black barbies are simply white barbies in a different color and look odd, as would a white person who's skin was dyed black.
- that she presented the dolls in a fashion that would encourage the kids to choose the white one, but would encourage adults to choose the lavender dress. (People have a tendency to choose the alternative on the right)
- Something else
Regardless, this doesn't speak to the issue of appropriateness. Personally, if I were a teacher, I'd use this as a golden opportunity to discuss prejudice and the importance of treating people as individuals.Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them.
Unfortunatly, our criminal justice system has shown that you have those 'responsibilities' from about age 10 on, with their insistance on prosecuting mere children as adults. If a 12 year old can be sentanced to spend the next 20 years of his life in prison, he better damn well get the Bill of Rights.
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project than I and my classmates used to do back then. I did a volcano that didn't explode because somehow I thought that any old liquid could replace vinegar. The girl right next to me did one on the planets. Well all the planets except for Jupiter that is. "Oh crap. That's ok," she said to me, "I'll just try to cover up the place where it's supposed to be when the judges come around."
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
The director of elementary education argued, "A science fair is not the way we choose to discuss race relations."
If a scientific forum isn't the place to discuss race relations, then what is? A riot? A lynch mob? If a young girl can't take a mature, scientific look at a major problem in our society, then how on earth is it supposed to be discussed? Please, oh please, can someone who agrees with this school director explain to me what is a more appropriate forum to discuss the issue than a (somewhat) scientific study? Sheesh...
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In all my science fairs I was never allowed to just go off, do something, and have nobody look at it until it made it to the science fair floor. Surely some teacher must have been told "I plan to study racial bias in children" and had the option to say "Go ahead." Where is the commentary from that teacher? I refuse to believe that it got all the way to the science fair before somebody suddenly decided that it was in the best interest of the children to remove it.
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...because you aren't thinking very logically. Let's say, for the sake of argument that you are right, schools intend to produce children meeting those characteristics. Let's further assume that they succeed. How does that rule out children thinking for themselves?
For instance, I consistently show up on time and am relatively organized. I have no discipline problems in my recent history (legal, work, etc). My wife doubly so. Yet both of us routinely hold opinions differing from that of the majority. Neither of us is a factory worker.
Good discipline and free thought are not opposites. Nominal "free-thinking radicals" can be just as conformist, within their subgroup, as a military academy.
PS: Note what I did NOT say: "Good discipline causes free thought."
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When I was in the seventh grade, my teacher asked us to do a persuasive paper on Flag-burning and the constitution. She told us that her husband had been in vietnam and that she was very passionate about the flag so if any of us wrote a paper that upheld flag burning as free expression, we would be given an F. I thought she was challenging us, so I wrote just such a paper. I recieved an F. The horrible thing was that not only was she interested in censoring flag burning, she was wished to censor those who disagreed. Censorship in schools is common. This little girl is by no means alone. What a terrible lesson to teach children.
"Think, dammit. Don't lash out because it's the easy thing to do.
...that they didn't have a place in a power structure, that they didn't have to respect authority?
I think this statement applies more accurately to your post...
What kind of society would we have if kids were taught that they didn't have to do anything on a schedule, that they didn't have to be on time and organized...
Schools don't teach kids how to create and implement schedules to help them achieve their goals. Instead, kids are taught to conform to an arbitrary and micromanaging schedule imposed by an 'authority' figure. In this light, traditional school schedules are devoid of content, since they lack any purpose except obedience and conformity training.
They have their place as voting citizens. In essence, they ARE the authority, and as such should be taught how to make responsible decisions. That takes practice. Children who learn to blindly obey authority figures get another kind of practice. I think this develops and encourages BAD HABITS. Schools today model an authoritarian system, not a democratic one. This is bad for democracy itself!
What the hell is wrong with teaching kids to NOT be little shits? Or would you rather raise a generation of criminals because it's not cool to follow the rules? Juvenile crime is bad enough already, why promote it? The fact is that rules make a society livable, and you have to teach people the rules at an early age. If you don't, you get a lot of punks who use violence to solve their problems.
This stems from the base assumption that we are all inherintly evil, and the evil side of us must be suppressed from an early age by means of punishments, rewards, and indoctrination into a top down authoritarian heirarchy. Otherwise we'd run wild! We'd all be criminals...
Personally, I think that if a kid is taught only how to conform to rules, they are more likely to become criminals because they've only gained a shallow understanding of the law in school. They never learn that the law is a tool that they, as a future voter, will help shape, depending on what they want to accomplish in society. Thus they never gain any respect, since rules always appear as something preventing them from doing what they want, not as something that helps them accomplish their goals. Combine this with the arbitrary nature of many rules in classrooms, and you are teaching a child to obey indiscriminately. Again, good for authoritarian, bad for democratic.
If the poster has a kid, I encourage him to adopt a hands-off method of raising him and see what happens.
Why is it you instantly assume that the alternative is a hands off apporach? Is it possible to be more hands ON, without using punishments, rewards, and authority sturctures? To me, people who have been trained NOT to think for themselves have trouble imagining more than one alternative to any particular problem.
Oh, and by the way, what can be more hands off than blindly sending your child to a government institution for a standardizing 'education'?
I suggest to you that the research I've done for the last 5 years backs up what I'm saying. Maybe you should stop apologizing for a system that clearly doesn't work, and start looking into alternative methods of education, methods that actually take the learning process into account.
"Together we will bring order to the universe!" D. Vader.
I wonder if the young Miss Thielen had been a black girl whether the teachers would have been so hasty to pull her project...?
I live in boulder and have judged other elementary science fairs there. I saw the project before it was removed (although I wasn't a judge at mesa). This was hands down the best science fair project I've seen in a long time (at that level).
hypothesis was clear and testable
methodology was clear, simple, and tested the hypothesis
data was well tabulated and presented
conclusion was valid and didn't overreach
topic was relevant and current
It could have used a larger sample size, but it blew away all the chemical volcanoes
Censorship is not an effective means of dismantling a meme. It's short sighted, and in many cases can only fan the flames. Censorship removes an idea from debate, as the author of the article has noted.
Removing debate is dangerous in a free society. In North America, our participation in any sort of public debate is minimal, and doubt is often frowned upon. Doubt in free-trade warrants the label of a protectionist. Doubting America's motives abroad (ie. Vietnam, Iraq, Chile etc.) is un-American. The very same for my own Canada as well.
My solution to racism and other bad ideas is to not censor them. The onus is on us to prove why they are bad ideas. Censorship is lazy, if we really feel strongly about an idea, then we should be prepared to discuss it, prove or disprove it.
There will always be idiots who feel like denying the holocaust, or putting blacks beneath asians on a bell curve. But let the unpopularity of their ideas shine. Let them feel free to make asses of themselves.
Furthermore, isolating a group of bad-ideas-supporters does not help to win them over. Censorship merely ignites them with more passion, convincing them that the government is against them, because of the Zionist conspiracy or some other nonsense.
So really, all censorship does is impede debate, which harms the good ideas and decent common narrative that a culture should have. It isolates instead of healing, it's a bad habit to get into (what if an unpopular idea, like democracy, or socialism, or whatever someday proves correct?)
The only real way to handle bad ideas is to challenge them with better ideas.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
" Officially, the school district condemns censorship. As the district decrees, students' constitutional freedoms include the right to free expression and free inquiry."
IN other words, the school district only suppors students constitutional freedoms when they conform to the political agenda of the administrators.
Which defies the purpose of the 1st Amendment. Thhe whole purpose of the 1st Amendment is to protect UNPOPULAR speech. Popular speech (ie that which doesn't offend the establishment powers) never did need protection. Why, even in China, your freedom to loudly praise Mao is unquestioned.
The 1st Amendment exists to protect the rights of those with unpopular beliefs and opinions to express them without POLITICAL (ie governmental) reprisals. Since this is a GOVERNMENT school, that this student is REQUIRED to attend by law, the administration is clearly as bound as the city/county/state government to subordinate itself to the Constitution.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
From the article:
I think I see what we're aiming for, here. What we want is to develop the Whiffle Life for children so that they grow up to be Whiffle Adults who are shocked and amazed when they burn their fingers on a stove, and then sue the stove manufacturer for not affixing a warning label to the stovetop.
You know what I think makes "students of color" uncomfortable? Calling them "students of color". Jeez, what the hell's wrong with calling 'em "students"? Crikey, I'm a "person of color", that color just happens to be "extremely pale".
That this child is 8 years old is irrelavant. This is a pretty sophisticated experiment for an 8-year-old, and she should be allowed to present it. Will it make the kids ask questions? Probably -- that's a GOOD thing. Will it make them uncomfortable? Not likely -- do these administrators remember being 8? 8 year olds aren't bothered by much. Witness them causing scenes in Wal-Mart or the grocery store.
Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them. The issue here is "should this project be tossed out" and to me, the answer is "no".
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Boston has historically been one of the most racist cities in the US. Because it is a center of liberal thought, though, racism is swept under the carpet. Witness the busing debate of twenty-odd years ago.
The Boston sports teams are not immune to this. The Red Sox were the last baseball team to integrate. I believe the Bruins (hockey) had a black player before either the Red Sox or the Celtics (the Patriots weren't founded until 1960).
Probably the ultimate reason for the racism was the large Irish population in Boston. The Irish had a tendency to racism for the very simple reason that the blacks would compete with them for the same menial jobs (due to the bias of the Brahmins). When the Irish essentially took over the city in the early 20th-century they effectively did all they could to marginalize any black population.
Except this girl clearly was prepared to deal with this question, as her (apparently) well-presented project shows.
While I agree with you in principle, this is the wrong case for you to argue this point on. This is a simple matter of the school authorities being embarrassed by a child questioning their assumptions, and dealing with it in a stupid manner. Business as usual in our public schools.
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