Articles and editorials abound hyping the growing selectivity of elite colleges and of parents’ obsession with getting their children into one. However, this website of an admissions consulting firm will take you into the true twilight zone behind this craze. For example, the mission statement says:
IvyWise is an educational consulting company committed to providing comprehensive admissions counseling services to students and their families worldwide. IvyWise counselors are devoted to educating and guiding students through each step of the application process, enabling students to gain admission to the most selective nursery schools, kindergartens, secondary schools, colleges and universities, and graduate and professional schools
Well-to-do parents have so fallen off the deep end that they are paying five figures to get the upper hand in admissions processes. Unfortunately, this trend represents a growing materialism in our society. Yet, I do not want to give the impression that companies such as IvyWise are the problem. In fact, they derive their existence from the social factors that have created this ultra-competitive meritocracy which now reaches into the lives of toddlers.
At any rate, I was seriously disturbed at the concept of admission coaching for nursery school. I leave it to you to decide whether I am overreacting.
Abuzachary
In many of his writings, Religious scholar Hugh Nibley used scripture and other ancient sources to point out one of the great prevailing evils through all human history: Trading human life for money or profit.
The recent scourge of fraud in the wake of Katrina has angered me enough to actually make a post here about the hurricane–something I had decided not to do originally.
I encourage anyone making donations to the relief effort to read the article I ‘ve linked to above and to be very careful about where they send their money–especially through the internet. As in many other instances following a major disaster, corrupt people are spoofing the the Red Cross website and creating fake websites to take donation. This is a vile and revolting phenomenon, and I hope that as few people as possible will be fooled by it.
The above cartoon is from Al-Jazeera. The text at the top right reads: Israeli tunnels near the Aqsa (Mosque).
The bubble on the top left says: Oh Aqsa! Have Patience; He who digs a pit for his brother will himself fall into it.
Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz has written an Op-ed column in the Chicago Tribune expressing his optimism for the current peace prospects of Israel-Palestine. He astutely points out some of the main obstacles to a prudent two-state solution:
There still are many barriers to a real peace. Some come from the Israeli side, others from the Palestinian side. The greatest barriers, however, come from outsiders: right-wing American Jews and Christians who are more Israeli than the Israelis, Islamic fundamentalists and left-wing European and American academics, politicians and church leaders who are more Palestinian than the Palestinians.
I would add to this list certain groups of exiled Palestinians. They often have not had to face the harsh realities on the ground in Israel and in the occupied territories that result from Israeli crackdowns and retaliations to terrorist threats. For this reason, their concept of the conflict is more abstract and idealistic, and it is less amenable to compromise.
These types of forces, combined with those in Professor Dershowitz’s list, are very powerful. Both the far Right and extreme Left comprise at least some elements who desire to make this a symbolic, cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. So while I would like to share the Professor’s optimism, I feel my hopes being tempered by the major variable, which is: How powerful will these uncompromising centers be?
Through ifeminist I have become aware of a debate in Australia to ban the Islamic headscarf (Hijaab) in public schools. One proponent of such a ban called the scarf “Uncompromising retrograde curtailment of women’s rights”. In The Australian the same commentator is quoted as saying:
As a female MP, I am concerned about women’s rights in this country. There are those who subscribe to a belief system that devalues and degrades women, that accepts a legal system that would relegate women back to the Dark Ages.
It is true that in some Islamic countries, harsh dress-codes including head and face covering have been prescribed as a means of denying women their rights. However, in most of the Muslim world women themselves have interpreted it as lawful in Islam, or have adopted the headscarf to express themselves.
Nearly a century ago Egyptian activist Huda Sha’arawi uncovered her face in public as a show of independence and solidarity for women. This, coupled with other political tides of the time, triggered a widespread unveiling. However, many of the the next generation of girls, in political and religious protest, took up the hijaab. They saw this as an expression of their religion, and as a manifestation of their adherence to political ideals apart from those of their parents.
In modern times the hijaab is freely worn and is meant to express certain things about the woman wearing it. It is not an instrument of supression, as the “women’s rights activist” in Australia has wrongly state.
In reality, there is more going on here than a fight for women’s rights. Another article on the issue gives entirely different reasons for which some are backing the ban on the headscarf. For example, one person says
But this has really been forced on us because what we’re really seeing in our country is a clash of cultures and indeed, the headscarf is being used as a sort of iconic item of defiance,” she told Channel Seven.
Isn’t it interesting that one proponent of the ban calls the scarf a tool for supression while another calls it an expression of defiance?