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Posted by Randall Webmail on July 29, 2008, 7:46 am
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In the current Telecom Digest, we find an article from the New York
Times, which contains this sentence:
"Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter
Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to
search and read online."
Young Mr. Gaudet may find, later in life, that Google is forever, and
Google will never forget that, at the age of 16, he had "dyslexia or
other learning difficulties". So much for his chances of getting a
decent job.
Was it Larry Ellison who once famously said "You have no privacy
anyway. Get over it!"?
***** Moderator's Note *****
Since my son has a learning disability, I'll chime in: I think that
_more_ publicity is needed, not less. If the parents of LD children
have to fear retribution from industrial bureaucrats after dealing
with the faceless and callous bureaucrats in their local school
system, then the U.S. has fallen a lot further than I'd suspected.
Citizens who can't understand a town warrant, a letter from the IRS,
or their bank statement are in need of help, not recrimination: it's
easier, cheaper, and a lot more positive to recognize and deal with
the issue than to sweep - or to assume others will sweep - it under a
rug.
Bill Horne
P.S. According to Wired magazine, it was Scott McNealy of Sun:
"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of
reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his
company's new Jini technology.
"Get over it."
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or
I may never see it. Thanks!)
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Posted by on July 30, 2008, 10:57 am
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> Young Mr. Gaudet may find, later in life, that Google is forever, and
> Google will never forget that, at the age of 16, he had "dyslexia or
> other learning difficulties". So much for his chances of getting a
> decent job.
I think this is a good point.
People sometimes think it's "big brother government" they must fear to
protect their privacy, but actually the private sector is a big
threat. The private sector can be very aggressive in checking
someone's past out. Computerization and communication make it hard to
hide past indiscretions.
As an example, many college graduates today are finding jobs scarce
after prospective employers do a check and discover rather risque
websites the student hosted or participated in, or other incidents of
rambunctious behavior. Stuff that used to be forgotten as a
collegiate indiscretion now comes back to haunt people in their
future.
Yes, I do think people should be accountable for their actions, so a
college kid who has a DWI or other offense deserves some punishment
for it. However, I do not think such one-time mistakes should haunt a
kid for the rest of his life (if the kid has a record of multiple
drinking or other criminal offenses, that's another story). If a kid
had a risque web page, it shouldn't hold them back in the future.
Some college kids also get caught up in sweeps, such as a raid on a
party where everyone is charged, or perhaps a 22 y/o senior discovers
the hard way that his girlfriend wasn't 18 but 16 and thus underage.
I agree that people named in newspaper articles may regret it down the
road, thanks to computerization and powerful search engines.
>Telecom Digest Temporary Moderator said:
> Since my son has a learning disability, I'll chime in: I think that
> _more_ publicity is needed, not less. If the parents of LD children
> have to fear retribution from industrial bureaucrats after dealing
> with the faceless and callous bureaucrats in their local school
> system, then the U.S. has fallen a lot further than I'd suspected.
Well, suppose your son is able to conquer his LD, but down the road
some employer finds out about it in a background check. He won't know
_why_ he was denied a job, but in a competitive market, such things
will matter.
> Citizens who can't understand a town warrant, a letter from the IRS,
> or their bank statement are in need of help, not recrimination: it's
> easier, cheaper, and a lot more positive to recognize and deal with
> the issue than to sweep - or to assume others will sweep - it under a
> rug.
It used to [be] typical, in stories about the disabled, to disguise the
name of the person to protect their privacy. There could still be
stories about the disability but privacy [was] protected.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Substitute "helplessness" for "privacy", and I'll agree with your
last paragraph. Unfortunately, the United States and its allies are no
longer able to enjoy so myopic a perspective.
When a child falls off the American Dream Assembly Line [tm], the
hardest thing he hits on the way down is the fact that _nobody_
wants to hear it, and the nobody includes his parents.
The hardest lesson that we parents of LD children learn is that when
our child falls off the American Dream Assembly Line [tm], _everybody_
wants to tell us that we should "just" put the kid back on, by any
means necessary. Very few ever, ever, question the reasons for this
knee-jerk reaction - suffice to say that the view from the factory
floor isn't very comforting to those who are still on the assembly
line, and the thought of being left behind, looking up, while others
glide to their carefully planned future is as scary as any thought a
middle-class minion can experience.
The American Dream Assembly line [tm] has been running for a very long
time, so here's a history lesson:
At the start of the industrial revolution, the Robber Barons who grew
rich exploiting a cheap and plentiful supply of emmigrants found
themselves in short supply of competent administrators to manage and
support that pool of labor: it's easy to train Jurgis Rudkus to shovel
guts, but surprisingly difficult to train the army of bureaucrats
needed to make an industry operate in a mechanical age: bookkeepers,
accountants, engineers, buyers, sellers, managers, etc. The class of
educated people available at that time in history were, literally,
gentlemen; i.e., they considered themselves to be the social equals of
the barons and expected to be treated and paid as such. Their loyalty,
morover, was to their peers, not to their employer, so that they had
no qualms about striking out on their own when conditions were
propitious - Andrew Carnegie, for example, was a manager of the
Pennsylvania railroad before he founded United States Steel, and was
responsible for innovations that last to this day, such as that of
installing signals so trains could run at night.
Afraid that their minions would become their competitors, the barons
decided that a cheap and plentiful supply of bureaucrats was in order:
they knew that they had to prepare for the future, and they knew that
if they didn't do it, their competitors would, so they decided to
invest in education. In prototypical American fashion, they
externalized the cost onto the taxpayers.
Little Red Schoolhouses, where the kids helped each other, and
cooperation was encouraged, were suddenly out-of-fashion. In the name
of a more properous America, schools were, almost overnight, changed
to accomodate the needs of industry. Students were told to sit behind
individual desks (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) and were
given indiviually measured tasks to perform (stop me when this starts
to sound familiar), which tested their ability to attend to oceans of
minutiae (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) and which
included the rote memorization of esoteric information (stop me when
this starts to sound familiar) and incredibly boring and repetitive
arithmetic calculations (stop me when this starts to sound familiar)
under time preasure (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) in
competition with their peers.
In other words, public education as we know it today: it is an
assembly line intended to guarantee a cheap and plentiful supply of
loyal minions to tend the assembly lines of industry. Of course, the
robber barons didn't feel the need to see any future beyond their own:
those children who didn't find themselves able to learn the date of
birth of Paul Revere were, I presume, thought to belong in the reject
bin which is at the end of any assembly line. They didn't count
(pun intended), then or now.
Children do not "conquer" learning disabilities. They either find one
of the niches were their abilities can be profitably expressed (art,
terrorism, sports, crime, politics, entrepreneurship, etc.), or they
spend their lives in the reject bin (prisons, welfare, subsistence
jobs, etc.)
I no longer suppose that my son will "conquer" his LD, because that
notion led to a war between my wife and he and me that lasted until I
accepted that he was never supposed to be on the American Dream
Assembly Line [tm], would never be able to get back on it, and could
not now, nor ever, succeed by either of us pretending he ever belonged
there in the first place.
In a competitive market, we need to exploit the abilities of the whole
population, not just the skills of those who managed to traverse an
assembly line dedicated only to the convenience of nineteenth-century
factory owners. The United States, you see, is now in a market that
competes all across the globe, and either we make use of the parts in
our reject bin or we wait for our competitors to do it.
My son has just been awarded Eagle Scout [tm] rank in the Boy Scouts
of America. He earned it by facing his challenges, taking advantage of
his strengths, and by getting the help he needed, even though I must
admit it was almost too late when I decided to seek it. He doesn't
want or need "privacy", and neither do I: we both want the world to
judge him by his achievements, not his disabilities.
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
Copyright (C) 2008 Bill Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never
see your post! Thanks!
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Posted by Barry Margolin on July 30, 2008, 10:58 am
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> In the current Telecom Digest, we find an article from the New York
> Times, which contains this sentence:
>
> "Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter
> Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to
> search and read online."
>
> Young Mr. Gaudet may find, later in life, that Google is forever, and
> Google will never forget that, at the age of 16, he had "dyslexia or
> other learning difficulties". So much for his chances of getting a
> decent job.
I find this an extreme reaction. Many children with difficulties like
these go on to be fully functional adults. James Earl Jones had a
horrible stutter when he was a child.
I can't believe that anyone interviewing someone for a job would go back
and check how well they did in grade school.
And I'm sure that the NYT had to get Mr. Gaudet's parent's permission to
include his name in the article.
--
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
*** PLEASE don't copy me on replies, I'll read them in the group ***
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