posted
How does a comparative look at the composition of juries have anything to do with the educational system? And besides, you've seen Law & Order before right? The court system is not the right place to go looking for objectivity or reality, court rooms are where people go to win.
quote: The concern of this essay, once again, is neither with whether judges or juries are better equipped for nor more efficient at dealing with social science research nor with the courts’ apparent disregard of Walker and Monahan’s particular proposal. Of interest is that social science research comes to displace the jurors’ common sense, the jurors’ own everyday notions of whom to believe, of how reliable eyewitnesses are, of how victims tend to feel and of whether and which defendants are to be trusted.
Should research displace jurors' common sense? If a jurors' common sense leads them to believe that minorities are the people who commit the most crimes, then hell yes it should. I'll remind you also that common sense is not all that common.
This article deals with how the legal system evolved, not what fact is. The use of research is a question of how society wants to apply it, not an inherent quality of facts. On top of that, the american legal system is inequity built on inequity, you can't have representative juries, because you can't counter balance for all the factors that contribute to how juries make decisions, to believe that you could is a pipe dream. Furthermore juries are not presented with an accurate representation of what a body of knowledge is when they only get a handful of representitives who are giving them version of what the world is like as it pertains to a particular legal case. On top of that, this article is wrong irrespective of the previous two points because lawyers do their damnedest to throw anybody with an education off the jury as fast as possible anyway. So the lauded "common sense" that this woman proposes simply means that she wants to throw science out of the court room. I know i, personally, don't want the court systems to be ruled by appeals to cultural stereotypes, and that's the consequence of what this woman is proposing.
More over, her argument relies on assumptions that i don't find warranted.
quote:For the objectivity of the modern jury does not refer simply to accuracy of results, where result equals verdict, but also concerns the accuracy of the sample, the reliability and neutrality of the process. If objectivity meant simple accuracy of result-a statement’s fit with some externally existent state of affairs-we would not need to bother with how many human beings of what sort are needed to figure out a verdict. If we thought we could know with certainty the existence of guilt “out there,” we would not need a neutrality (or a consistency) requirement.
The problem here is that she assumes that the goal of identifying whether a 12 person jury produces the same statistical profile as a 5 or 6 person jury, if as she says, they make no mention of "justice" and similar notions, simply means that all these social scientists have done is given an answer to the question "do 5 or 6 person juries behave in the same manner as 12 person juries." Such juries ability to find "the truth" then is entirely based upon how well one believes that 12 person juries were accurately identifying "the truth" or "finding justice". This sort of research does not determine the validity of a 5 or 6 person jury's ability to find "the truth". This article gets it totally wrong. This isn't an attempt to subvert the moder jury system, this is an attempt to preserve the decision process that makes up the american court system and more importantly, preserve it with all of it's inadequacies. This woman is fear-mongering.
The legal system we have is not the best legal system if you mean "best at finding the truth" (and by consequence, i don't think that it's an adequate location for the determination of what scientific fact is or should be). It's not there because it's perfect, just the same way our electoral system isn't the best system. Its just happens to be the one have.
[ December 10, 2004, 12:05 PM: Message edited by: Pod ]
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posted
Also, with that last quote, she's propping up a positivist straw-man.
Juries are used not because there isn't an objective reality, but because most of the time the only reports of reality is filtered through non-objective humans (since, unlike the pistons-pacers game, not all crimes are video recorded).
If there were some way that we could create omniscient judges, then a jury would be pretty moot wouldn't it? oh wait no it wouldn't! We try to build systems that are fault-tolerant which possess checks and balances (go see Minority Report).
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Finally on the subject of teaching judgement. I don't know why i can't get this through to Irami. The problem with our school system is not (only) it's inability to convey moral rectitude (if that is even possible in the US of A).
My complaint is that the schools are skipping a body of knowledge that is vital to an understanding of how people work.
See the irony is that irami has clearly never been introduced to this body of literature either, and as a result has no idea what i'm talking about. The fact of the matter is that what people believe is the nature of reality mediates their judgement. If they possess a notion of reality that is far a field from the facts of reality, then they are not going to be capable of making adequate judgements of new facts. So when you set someone on a jury, they bring their baises with them. If their biases totally don't jibe with reality, then theres going to be a problem.
So again:
View of reality mediates judgement. View of reality mediated/created by facts presented to children as they grow up.
Schools (are supposed to) teach facts. Given the chain above, in order to have a judicious populous, you had better be teaching them properly.
[ December 10, 2004, 09:05 AM: Message edited by: Pod ]
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Here's where we may part ways. It's not clear to me that even the most science-y of the social sciences (economics) is equipped to teach facts.
I think that such disciplines and the methodologies they employ are incredibly valuable and that they provide interesting ways at looking at societies and individuals, but in my experience (which, granted, is limited), these disciplines also tend to make theoretical claims that aren't base solely in facts and often are unable to fully capture a situation or often even ignore evidences that aren't consonant with or easily dealt with by their methodologies.
I'm sure this reflects a humanities bias (and, of course, on the other hand I have real problems with how the humanistic disciplines misuse and abuse both the social sciences and the more theoretical sciences [string theory anyone?]), but even accepting some of the truth claims of the social science disciplines, it's not clear to me that the level of 'facts' that one deals with on a K-12 level is really equipped to really explore and justify such claims.
So I guess that fundamentally, I agree with Irami on the idea of judgement -- it's just not clear to me how to bring moral concerns into the mix, and I'm also more willing to see the value in the disciplines as such and I think that art (esp. narrative art) while valuable also needs to be situated in a societal context. Or in other words, I'm kind-of anti-modernism/romanticism (although not exactly anti-universalist). Again -- this is why I advocate a comparative approach (just don't try and pin me down on exactly what I mean by that).
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Many of you who've responded to my post are missing my point: the problem isn't what's being or not being taught at school, the problem is what is being done to children in their homes. How can I get a child excited about understand how the universe works if that child has been carefully programmed by his parents not to give a shit about anything beyond the quotidian?
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Oh, for sure. It's definitely a two-pronged issue.
And I don't have answers -- esp. for the parents thing.
One method that you may already be using and that I've seen tried (although my knowledge is entirely shallow in this area) is sort of captured by my incoherent post on the previous page.
You start with something that the student cares about. You get them to respond to it personally. Then you give them theoretical tools to approach it from a more academic perspective. Then you toss in a comparative study as well as try and extend the scope of their subject so that it's a little more germane and rigorous.
I don't know how it works, but the idea of students becoming an expert in something that they care about and using that as a launching pad for a cross-disciplinary, comparative approach to reading and writing sounds cool to me.
I would imagine, however, that getting students like the ones you describe to buy into the project is difficult. But from my limited experience, this does help those who have a spark of desire that would normally be crushed by the standard approach to composition studies.
The government can't force parents to read at home or to their kids, but the government can make it very clear in ethos that's a person's and a parent's responsibility and that it is of utmost importance, and anything short of this effort is dire neglect.
posted
Zal, what you've described is precisely the strategem I employ, and the only way to reach students of this type. However (aside from the logistical difficulty of differentiating this way for a dozen young people), I have also to deal with this schools requirement that curricula be IB and that all students take the AP Exams in every area, so it's pretty complex...
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posted
Irami, the government can make all sorts of things clear that will have no impact on the ethos of individuals: society itself, the memetic milieu in which minds evolve from birth through adolescence, sets these priorities. Not only the government, but artists and actors and comedians and musicians and the whole gamut of public figures must take it upon themselves to promote the sort of intellectual curiosity and academic focus this country needs. Then, perhaps, a generation of parents equipped for the modern age will coalesce.
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posted
Telling parents what they ought to do is really hard. I'll give you an example of something recent: we have a student who is failing nearly all his classes, who refused to do his history fair project and his mythology project/speech, who barely passed into 9th grade to begin with. We finally, after several attempts to get her in, had to actually stop his mom in the parking lot when she came to pick him up at 6 on Thursday from academic detention and make her agree to come to a conference yesterday at 1:15. She came, and she reported being totally clueless about his progress: she speaks Spanish only, and she used this as an excuse to rationalize not knowing, as she claims not to understand the progress reports (though this seems disingenuous given that progress reports simply have GRADES on them and any IDIOT can see that her son has 40s, 50s and 60s). According to her responses to my prompting, the young man goes home, place football with friends, comes in to eat, then, when she asks him about homework, he goes into his room, shutting himself in the rest of the evening (he's got a TV in there). She does not, she answered my pointed question, monitor him in any way.
So what did I do? I walked her through the contract she signed upon enrolling him (by CHOICE: this is a charter school) and through our systems:
1) student walks into classroom, takes out planner, notes homework (in every class) 2) student shows planner to parent at home, gets it signed 3) parents should be looking at the assignments, making sure the student is doing the work, and check to make sure all is done before student puts things away 4) parent OUGHT also to make student explain the essentials of the work just completed to double check for comprehension and truthfulness
I told her, "I don't want to be the one telling you how to raise your son, but trusting him to handle things on his own is obviously not working. If you are really dedicated to his getting into college, you need to take the TV out of his room, make him do his HW immediately upon arrival from school, and monitor him constantly as he does so."
I said this as nicely as I could, but it was obvious that, as saddened (she was actually crying) as she was, she wasn't really thrilled with my telling her, in essence, that she wasn't doing her job. We'll see what happens.
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A very tough task you had to take on, Unmaker. I hope for the sake of this student and for you that Mom figures it out and starts becoming more involved in the process. Not only will the student's grades improve, but I'm willing to bet that his home life improves as well. Congrats for standing up for him!
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Ah... Goody, i think you're missing the point. This isn't solely the mom's fault. The kid's being irresponsible. The mom's being irresponsible in that she's not keeping the kid's irresponsibility in check.
And, if the mother has already started losing control of the kid, it's going to be hard for her to apply pressure on the kid to get his work done. As a chronic slacker, i'd argue that if she starts doing her part, the kid will chafe under the new pressure and his home life will get more complicated. Maybe it'd turn out for the best, maybe it'd drive them further apart. I don't know. but your assesment while encouraging sounds a tad optimistic.
[ December 11, 2004, 04:49 PM: Message edited by: Pod ]
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oh wait no it wouldn't! ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
We try to build systems that are fault-tolerant which possess checks and balances (go see Minority Report).
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