"That's the Way We Live in Slovakia"

In today's post I must refer to the actual name of the country where I am located.

Two days ago, after a long work day, I went to Tesco, the British-owned supermarket, to buy milk.

As I stood in line, I notice a large, tall, beefy skinhead munching on a roll. He was two or three people in front of me.

He looked like he was in a bad mood.

The fact is that such characters are commonplace at the entrance to Tesco in the center of Bratislava. They hang around at the front entrance or just inside the front door.

What are they doing there? At busy times of the day they certainly add to congestion. They certainly don't make the store look "upscale". After all, they are, plainly spoken, gangsters.

How can Tesco, a British company, allow this? Would Tesco allow this to happen at one of its stores in London or Manchester?

When the large man got to the cash register, there was an argument. I don't know what exactly happened, but I know that the older lady working behind the cash register had to chase after him to get 20 Crowns from him (approximately? almost half a Euro?)

Since she was much smaller than him, I was surprised. Also, he was very rude, even threatening.

He stood there along with two other men, just hanging out in the front entrance.

I commented to the person in front of me in line "I don't understand why there always have to be gangsters hanging around at the front entrance."

One of the men heard me, and confronted me, "What don't you understand?"

I told him I was a foreigner and did not understand Slovak well. At that point he cursed me in the most vulgar manner in English. I returned the compliment in Spanish.

Another skinhead glared at me, threateningly.

A woman said to me, "Now you see how we live in Slovakia."

Indeed, foreign companies like Tesco make a good bit of money here. They also have responsibilities. Do they fulfill their responsibilities, or is their exclusive concern profit? Would Tesco allow gangsters to hang out in their stores in England and threaten customers there? Are Slovaks lesser customers than residents of the UK?

(Incidentally, a colleague who regularly visits the Ukraine told me that she has seen exactly such incidents there.)

I recall a self-proclaimed Oxford graduate who I met when he had just come to Bratislava to publish a glossy magazine, a free magazine mostly full of advertisements, whose articles seem more like free advertising for local businesses... but which always includes a commentary written by the editor himself.... I asked him if it weren't necessary to pay a bribe to run his business. He suggested that "bribe" was an over-used word. He preferred to speak of "business expenses".

That's how people live in Slovakia. They wait in lines and keep their mouths shut lest they be brutalized by a gangster. There's money to be made here. But by whom? And how much do ordinary people really benefit? In any case, I would say without hesitation that Tesco is not behaving like a good citizen when it allows unsavory characters to hang around.

In a previous entry I also pointed out local reports that Tesco has found a loophole around the 40 hour work week... a way to have people work overtime without receiving overtime pay...

Shame.

Hanba.

Infallible Perception of Rudeness?

If I were to attempt to argue about how the world must be on the basis of some behavior I've seen recently, behavior by my colleagues, I'd wind up saying we have immediate incorrigible access to the property of rudeness....

That's quite odd, considering this property of rudeness gets manifested in conversations between monolingual English speakers speaking to Native Korean speakers who have only partially achieved fluency in English....

The truth is that I do not believe my colleagues. I believe that they cry "rude" when they feel that their authority is threatened. They think it is rude if a student asks "too many" questions. That's a belief I have about them, one I've been forming. This morning I had another chance to confirm my theory...... (well of course it's hardly so objective or scientific as that, but....still)

I found one of my students, 15 years old, sobbing.... crying uncontrollably. Another teacher had been, she said, "rude" to her. He didn't have to talk to her "that way".

When I spoke to the teacher, he said the student had been "rude" and told a story with the upshot that he'd been only doing his job.

Listening to him recount what had happened, and hearing her explanation, I could hardly reconstruct the entire story, but it did become clear to me that there was a common factor--a factor I've noted before, and about which I commented on this blog.

My fellow teacher did not like the way in which the student asked questions before she followed his command... ("talking back" is, I believe, what it's called in colloquial American..)

And it reinforced my conviction that among my fellow American teachers there is a sort of authoritarianism running not too far below the surface....

I've also had the thought (and not more than once) that the Adminstration at the Pretty Good International School does tend to confuse obedience with responsibility. All in all not a healthy picture....

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I return to the vignette sketched above. Key considerations are that an adult in a position of authority has power of the younger person. This means a sort of sensitivity is required. From the conversations I've had, I 'm not sure that most of my colleagues are aware of this fact. Secondly, "politeness" is surely something subject to important variation in the way its expressed, even if such drastic theories as Whorfianism are wrong..... But, again, any appreciation of the possible complications is absent....

NOTE: This rant needs to be supplemented by a reference to some of the literature about how we perceive non-native speakers. Intonation patterns vary between languages. Additionally, there are variations between speakers. There is a literature here which should be cited. It would only support the conclusion that judgments about rudeness are very fallible when they are made by a native speaker about a non-native speaker.

Who Evaluates the Evaluators?

This week at the Pretty Good International School in exotic Fastvakia, we are being visited by a "team" of evaluators.

They are going to decide if the school deserves accreditation.

I've had a few conversations with the Accreditation Team today.

One individual commented on the fact that I am not wearing a tie.
Hmmm, I wonder what that has to do with education. Do students learn more from bona fide AUTHORITY figures? And what do they learn?

Among the arguments against ties are that they are unnecessary and that we live in an age where a responsible individual should be aware of resource scarcity. (See, e.g., Diamond's new book, Collapse. There are places where airconditioning is mandatory in order to make it comfortable for people wearing ties. And airconditioning itself is both unhealty and harmful to the environment.

But, what I really wanted to say was, "Our students are sufficiently class conscious without any such costume..."

And, btw, who does evaluate the evaluators?

Comments on Wikipedia's IB Theory of Knowledge Article

The articlefails to mention that Plato's famous definition of knowledge is widely believed (by professionals who specialize in the theory of knowledge) to be incorrect. How a course can be organized around a definition known to be flawed is, to say the least, problematic.

Furthermore, the claim that the definition is flawed is easily found on the web. Just find Edmund Gettier's article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (I quote the title from memory; but even if it's not right, a little time with Google will correct my error.)

Secondly, the article claims that the course "teaches" that among the forms of justification for our beliefs are "consensus", "authority", and "faith". These are all dubious sources of justification. Five million Americans or Frenchmen could be wrong. "Authority" begs questions about how you know who the experts are. "Faith" is especially problematic. The faith of many Americans leads them to reject well-established scientific claims. If "faith", e.g., is not a source of justification, you simply cannot teach that it is--and pretending that you are doing so is, at the very least, a dubious and confused enterprise. What the course should be doing is not t e a c h i n g that these are the forms of justification, but e x a m i n i n g their claims to be forms of justification.

That's more a problem with the article than with the course itself as conceived by IB. But, the course itself has problems too. The fundamental problem with this course--and I know because I teach it--is that there is no real theory here. At any rate, it's not theory in the way that one finds theories in the sciences. So, the title is misleading. There are epistemologists who doubt the very possibility of giving anything like a general characterization of knowledge. There are just too many forms of knowlege, and justification itself varies too much. (And, if, by the way, that' s what you teach when you teach "theory of knoweldge", a more accurate description would be "Anti-theory of Knoweldge".)

Another problem with the IB TOK course--a danger for teachers--is that one reverts to a knee-jerk sort of conservatism. All the things we believe turn out to be pretty much true, and everything is left where it was before we began our inquiry. Something similar occurs in in traditional epistemology in the Analytic mode, if one accepts the testimony of Bishop and Trout in their book "Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement", published by Oxford University Press. <http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-516230-7> They provide something like the following characterization of analytic epistemology: We are supposed to be engaged in a serious intellectual enterprise; yet, at the end of the day it must turn out that our ordinary beliefs are pretty much correct. To my ears, that sounds like a recipe for anti-science, and when I read Bishop and Trout's book I immediately thought of IB Theory of Knowledge. The article above illustrates my point. Inclusion of "faith" on the list of forms of justification above is evidence of extremely strong intellectual conservatism--as if it's right to be there were a fait accomplis merely because many people would like it to be. What a proper epistemology course should do is examine the claim that faith is a form of justification. (And, it's not written into the unspoken rules that faith must, in the end, prove to be one.)

Note: Bishop's homepage has an article (co-authored with Trout) about the above, on the "pathologies" of "standard analytic philosophy": http://www.niu.edu/phil/~bishop/Research.shtml