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Friday Lazy Linking

School’s out forever

In Lakewood, Ohio, Stephanie Milligan, a 16 year old high school student, fell down a flight of stairs and hurt her back. She wanted to get back to school after Thanksgiving break, but the principal wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let her because she needs to wear loose clothing — sweat pants, in particular — because of her back injury, but the school’s dress code bans Oversize, saggy, baggy or tight fitting clothing. Her doctor wrote her a note asking that she be allowed to wear sweatpants. That a recommendation from a licensed physician is necessary to be allowed to wear sweatpants to school is obviously insane in and of itself, but the school’s principal, William Wagner, is both a medical expert and a scholar, and he questions the severity of Stephanie’s injury and her need to wear sweatpants.

Armetta Landrum wrote about it for the Lakewood Patch (2010-12-20). Here’s the headline and subtitle for the story:

Student on the Hot Seat for Wearing Sweatpants to School

Sophomore at odds with school’s dress code, missed nine days of school.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the school’s dress code is at odds with the sophomore’s health.

Here is Lakewood High School Principal William Wagner’s explanation as to why not even a doctor’s request is a good enough reason to consider making an exception to his interpretation of his saggy/baggy dress code clause:

They don’t understand what the dress code is all about or how it is imposed.

–Quoted by Armetta Landrum, Student on the Hot Seat for Wearing Sweatpants to School, Lakewood Patch (2010-12-20)

Indeed. A doctor’s advice is, usually, about helping people, and he no doubt wrote his note on the common, but mistaken, assumption that school policies exist to help students learn. But that assumption is a complete misunderstanding: the dress code is not about helping students; it’s all about controlling students, and a reasonable exception is the last thing you want to make if your aim is to ensure that you, as the controlling authority, will continue to be able to keep young people in line with even the most insane and petty of requirements.[1]

On a related note, Principal William Wagner is probably, like most high school administrators, a very stupid man, and intellectually negligent to the point of being functionally illiterate, especially when he is trying to defend his petty exercises of petty authority. I am fairly certain that what he meant to say is not that doctors don’t understand … how [the dress code] is imposed (as if that were some sort of mystery) but rather that they don’t understand how it is construed, or perhaps that they don’t understand the reasons by which it is justified. However, I will say that he has unwittingly highlighted the real issue here: how this sort of idiocy is imposed on perfectly innocent young people and well-meaning doctors and parents, because bellowing blowhard bullies like Principal William Wagner are appointed by politico-bureaucratic means, are supported by a political structure that crowds out any viable alternative and so insulates them from either popular voice or individual exit, and thus gives them the authority to insist on even the most insane policies, in the interest of protecting their disciplinary turf from any possible encroachment — even encroachment by minimal concern for innocent students’ education, comfort or good health.

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  1. [1]To be fair, the original purpose of the saggy/baggy dress code requirement itself was, no doubt, not to impose an insane and petty requirement on students, just for the sake of making them comply with insane and petty requirements. Like most such dress code clauses, the original purpose was no doubt to uphold institutional racism by selectively targeting ghetto styles of dress. Sadistic authoritarianism is always spilling over its original boundaries, so in this case an idiotic policy written with the purpose of racist social regulation now is construed and applied in an especially rigid way, with no clear motive for the rigidity other than a general defense of turf and disciplinary command-and-control.↩

Wednesday Lazy Linking

Monday Lazy Linking

  • Turning a new page… Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-01-01). This blog has gone through two previous phases, under two other names: The first was exploratory, a series of rambles “In the Libertarian Labyrinth,” with a primary goal of demonstrating that our tradition is far richer than we are accustomed to think; the second was also exploratory, but, having demonstrated… (Linked Saturday 2011-01-01.)

Clearing Up

A quote to-day from Chapter 23 of one of my Christmas presents — In the Land of Invented Languages, Arika Okrent’s delightful book on artificial languages, their inventors, and the communities that (sometimes) sustain them.

We should admire [the inventors of artificial languages] for their raw diligence, not because hard work is a virtue in itself, but because they took their ideas about language as far as they could go and really put them to the test. Who hasn’t at one time or another casually suggested that we would be better off if words had more exact meanings? Or if people paid more attention to logic when they talked? How many have unthinkingly swooned at the magic of Chinese symbols or blamed acrimony between nations on language differences? We don’t take responsibility for these fleeting assumptions, and consequently we don’t suffer for them. The language inventors do, and consequently they did. If we pay attention to the successes and failures of the language inventors, we can learn their hard-earned lessons for free.

We can also gain a deeper appreciation for natural language and the messy qualities that give it so much flexibility and power, and that make it so much more than a simple communication device. The ambiguity and lack of precision allow it to serve as an instrument of thought formulation, of experimentation and discovery. We don’t have to know exactly what we mean before we speak; we can figure it out as we go along. Or not. We can talk just to talk, to be social, to feel connected, to participate. At the same time natural language still works as an instrument of thought transmission, one that can be made extremely precise and reliable when we need it to be, or left loose and sloppy when we can’t spare the time or effort.

When it is important that misunderstandings be avoided, we have access to the same mechanism that allowed Shirley McNaughton’s students to make use of the vague and imprecise Blissymbols, or that allows deaf people to improvise an international sign language–negotiation. We can ask questions, check for signs of confusion, repeat ourselves in multiple ways. More important, we have access to something that language inventors have typically disregarded or even disdained–mere conventional agreement, a shared culture in which definitions have been established by habit. It is convention that allows us to approach a Loglan level of precision in academic and scientific papers or legal documents. Of course to benefit from the precision you must be in on the conventional agreements on which those modes of communication depend. That’s why when specialists want to communicate with a general or lay audience–those who don’t know the conventions–they have to move back toward the techniques of negotiation: slowing down, answering questions, explaining terms, illustrating with examples. . . .

When language inventors try to bypass convention–to make a language that is self-explanatory or universal–they either make a less efficient communications tool, one that shifts too much of the burden to negotiation, like Blissymbolics, or take away too much flexibility by over-determining meaning, like Wilkins’s system did. When they try to take away culture, the place where linguistic conventions are made, they have to substitute something else–like the six-hundred-page book of rules that define Lojban, and that, to date, no human has been able to learn well enough to comfortably engage in the type of conversation that any second-semester language class should be able to handle.

There are types of communication, such as the language of music, that may allow us to access some kind of universal meaning or emotion, but give us no way to say, I left my purse in the car. There are unambiguous systems, such as computer programming languages, that allow us to instruct a machine to perform a certain task, but we must be so explicit about meanings we can normally trust to inference or common sense that it can take hours or days of programming work to achieve even the simplest results. Natural languages may be less universal than music and less precise than programming languages, but they are far more versatile, and useful in our everyday lives, than either.

Ambiguity, or fuzziness of meaning, is not a flaw of natural language but a feature that gives it flexibility and that, for whatever reason, suits our minds and the way we think. Likewise, the fact that languages depend on arbitrary convention or cultural habit is not a flaw but a feature that allows us to rein in the fuzziness by establishing agreed-upon meanings at different levels of precision. Language needs its flaws in order to do the enormous range of things we use it for.

–Arika Okrent (2009), In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. ISBN 978-0-385-52788-0. 256-258.

Something important to remember: we are, after all, so often calling for clarity in language (whether as philosophers or political radicals or…) and when we do that it’s often easy to think that what we need is language that is perfectly clear. But this is a will-o’-the-wisp; what is interesting and important is clarification as a practice — not the ex ante features of a language or a text, but the process of a conversation.

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