Author Archives: legallysociable

The role of sociology in Illinois learning standards for social science for grades 1-5

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Building on a post from yesterday about textbook errors in sociology textbooks for fifth-graders in Macedonia, I was interested in knowing more about Illinois learning standards for social science for grades 1-5. Here are the five goals related to social science (pgs. 3-6 of the PDF):

Goal 14 – Understand political systems, with an emphasis on the United States.
The preservation and advancement of a free society within a constitutional democracy demands an informed, competent, and humane citizenry. Toward this end, civic education must be provided to students to help them learn, practice, and demonstrate the traits of a responsible citizen. This goal can be accomplished through developmental steps by giving students the knowledge, skills, and opportunities to illustrate their understanding of the following…

Goal 15: Understand economic systems, with an emphasis on the United States.
People’s lives are directly affected by the economies around them. All people engage in economic activity: saving, investing, trading, producing and consuming. By understanding economic systems and learning the economic way of thinking, students will be able to make informed choices and more effectively use resources. Such understanding benefits both individuals and society as a whole…

Goal 16 – Understand events, trends, individuals and movements shaping the history of Illinois, the United States and other nations. History encompasses the whole of human experience, from the earliest times to the present. As such, it provides perspectives on how the forces of continuity and change have shaped human life, both our own and others’. The study of history involves more than knowing the basic names, dates, and places associated with an event or episode. This knowledge is an essential first step to historical interpretation of the past, but historical study also moves on to a methodology that develops a deeper understanding within an individual…

Goal 17: Understand world geography and the effects of geography on society, with an emphasis on the United States. The study of geography is a lifelong learning process vital to the well being of students, the state of Illinois, the United States, and the world. As an integrative discipline that brings together the physical and human dimensions of the world, geography strives to make sense out of the spatial arrangements of people, places, and environments on Earth. Geography is a field of study that enables us to find answers to questions about the world around us. Geographers ask and attempt to answer questions about where something is located, why it is there, how it got there, how it is connected to other things and places, how it is arranged in relation to other things, and the significance of its location…

Goal 18 – Understand social systems, with an emphasis on the United States. Humans belong to groups from the moment of birth. In order to better understand their roles as individuals and group members of a diverse society, students must know and understand how culture has changed and how it is expressed. Students should also understand how and why groups and institutions are formed. When students understand these concepts, they are better able to contribute to their community and society.

I suppose sociology would fit mostly into Goal 18 though anthropology could also fit here with the emphasis on culture. But it is pretty clear in these goals that politics, economics, history, and geography are emphasized and these disciplines are more clearly described.

Before these goals (pg. 3 of the PDF), there is some clarity about the disciplines involved in the social sciences: “Among the integrated social science disciplines are political science, economics, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.” And later in the document (pg. 76), in the glossary specifically for Goal 18, here is the definition of sociology: “Sociology: The scientific and positivistic study of society.”

It would be interesting to know more about how these goals were developed. A later portion of the document doesn’t suggest that the forming of Goal 18 was guided by national or state advisory groups; however, two sociology textbooks that are cited in the bibliography.

In practice, is the term sociology ever used with students in connection with these goals? Do common textbooks ever use the term? Is sociology introduced to students regularly before high school or college? The social science standards for grades 6-12 perhaps allow for a little more room (see page 60 of the PDF).

Connecting Arrested Development’s George Bluth and McMansions

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Amidst news that the television show Arrested Development will return via Netflix, I saw recently a connection between the patriarch of the show, George Bluth, and McMansions in an opinion piece dealing with a New York Times op-ed on sprawl from earlier in the week:

Rarely is a discouraging word ever spoken against government spending millions to widen roads, install sewerage mains, and build schools so George Bluth Bill Pulte can build yet another exurban mcmansion development.

The reference to Bill Pulte refers to Pulte Homes, self-described as “one of the nation’s largest homebuilders.” (From personal experience, I can safely say Pulte did not build only McMansions.) This is not the first time I’ve seen this connection. Indeed, a quick Google search of “George Bluth” AND McMansion turns up 708 results. One poster in a discussion of McMansions at DemocraticUnderground.com even went so far as to ask ” WWGBD? What would George Bluth do?” Probably not the best question to guide one’s life.  An Entertainment Weekly review after the pilot emphasized McMansions as part of the setting for the show:

Shot in digital video and freed from the enhanced indulgence of a studio audience, the show romps in McMansionland and finds plenty to laugh at: grad students practicing Native American drum rituals, maids on public transportation carting racks full of furs for storage, and housing developments with names like Sudden Valley.

I don’t know if this is an authoritative site including all AD scripts but this search for “McMansions” turns up no matches. And having seen all of the episodes, I do remember the show poking fun at these neighborhoods (giant homes built in what looked like partially completed neighborhoods in a desert) but can’t recall the main characters really ruing the fact that the family business involved building McMansions. While the irony was surely intended to draw attention to the absurdity of such homes, are they ever specifically denounced on the show?

This isn’t the only television show connected to McMansions. The Sopranos also invited comparisons as they lived in a well-appointed New Jersey home and certain reality shows, like The Bachelor/Bachelorette have prompted critics to say the contestants live in McMansions.

Errors in sociology textbooks for fifth-graders in Macedonia?

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As part of a story about the larger “textbook trauma” in Macedonia, there was this interesting tidbit:

Widespread mistakes in Macedonian textbooks came to light last year when journalists wrote about an error-riddled sociology text for fifth-graders. The scandal resulted in the recall of that book and a massive, ongoing review of all of the country’s textbooks. Corrections and new books have still not been released, and in the meantime teachers and parents are essentially on their own to police the existing books…

In the case of the sociology textbook that started the controversy, the government spent 1 million denars ($22,000) to withdraw and replace a reported 15,400 copies. Among its shortcomings: listing popular entertainers alongside venerated names as lights of Macedonian culture; two visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad; no listing of Catholicism among the country’s faiths; contradictory estimates on the percentage of the population that is Muslim; and mistaken depictions of the flags of Macedonia and Kosovo.

The Education Ministry has sued the book’s panel of reviewers for the cost of pulping and replacing it.

The sociology book that took its place states, mistakenly, that Greece has a coastline along the Adriatic Sea.

The fact that textbooks contain errors is not surprising: sociologist James Louwen pointed some key American examples in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. But these errors seem quite problematic for an area of the world where there is a (tenuous?) blend of cultures and countries.

What is more interesting to me is that fifth-graders in Macedonia have sociology textbooks. Perhaps these books are similar to geography or history books but having sociology in the schools at younger ages sounds great. Students should learn about their own culture and society as well as think about how it differs from other societies. Perhaps they don’t need sociological theory at that point (Weber and Durkheim for fifth-graders?) but this could be a good start.

A musician who argues he can make more money by giving music away for free

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Musician Derek Webb argues that he can make more money in the long run by giving away his music than selling albums or tracks on iTunes and providing his music to streaming services like Spotify:

For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free.  This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention the fact that Spotify refuses to pay the same amount to independent artists as they pay major labels, unlike iTunes)…

If someone buys my music on iTunes, Amazon, or in a record store (remember those?), let alone streams it on Spotify, it’s all short-term money.  That might be the last interaction I have with that particular fan.  But if I give that fan the same record for free in exchange for a connection (an e-mail and a zip code), I can make that same money, if not double or triple that amount, over time.  And “over time” is key, since the ultimate career success is sustainability.  Longevity.  See, the reality is that out of a $10 iTunes album sale, I probably net around a dollar.  So if I give that record away, and as a result am able to get that fan out to a concert (I can use their zip code to specifically promote my shows in their area), I make approximately $10 back, and twice that if they visit the merch table.  I can sell them an older/newer album and make approximately $10 back.  The point is, if I can find some organic way to creatively engage them in a paid follow-up transaction, I increase my revenue 10 times on any one of these interactions.

This is all an equation of scale. I might be able to outright sell 20,000 albums for $10 each (again, netting around $1 each).  Or I can remove any barrier from someone hearing about or discovering my music by giving it away, which will result in an order of magnitude more albums distributed, maybe around 100,000.  If I can then convert 20% of those free downloads into paid transactions of any kind over time, I have probably well over doubled or tripled my money.  And I can do this repeatedly as I continue to grow, and learn more about and invest in my tribe, to whom I now have a direct connection (rather than having to go through Facebook, Twitter, or Lord forbid, MySpace to access them).

If this is true for middling to struggling artists, what does this mean for the music industry in the long term? Will many artists follow Webb’s example and can they if they aren’t already established artists? I assume the low compensation for artists from streaming services has to do with the services making money.

I wonder if this is just about the money or if this is also about certain artists wanting to truly connect with fans as opposed to simply selling them music. Webb suggests there has to be a more meaningful relationship between artist and consumer for the whole industry to thrive:

Music does have monetary value.  But more than its monetary value is its emotional value, its relational value, its artistic value, even its spiritual value.  When you make meaningful connections with people based on artistic self-expression, I think you’re actually increasing the value of that art based on the many ways it’s valued.

How many musicians see it this way?

A side note: I haven’t yet tried Spotify but I have been tempted, particularly since my Facebook feed has been full of messages noting the songs my friends have heard through the service. If you think I should really jump on board, let me know. Webb’s opinion wouldn’t necessarily stop me from trying the service but I would now think more than before about joining.

The “theology” of “inevitable suburban decline”

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Joel Kotkin keeps firing at suburban critics:

Perhaps no theology more grips the nation’s mainstream media — and the planning community — more than the notion of inevitable suburban decline. The Obama administration’s housing secretary, Shaun Donavan, recently claimed, “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.”…

In the past decade, suburbia extended its reach, even around the greatest, densest and most celebrated cities. New York grew faster than most older cities, with 29% of its growth taking place in five boroughs, but that’s still a lot lower than the 46% of growth they accounted for in the 1990s. In Chicago, the suburban trend was even greater. The outer suburbs and exurbs gained over a half million people while the inner suburbs stagnated and the urban core, the Windy City, lost some 200, 000 people.

Rather than flee to density, the Census showed a population shift from more dense to less dense places. The top ten population gainers among metropolitan areas — growing by 20%, twice the national average, or more — are the low-density Las Vegas, Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Riverside–San Bernardino, Orlando, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Atlanta. By contrast, many of the densest metropolitan areas — including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New York — grew at rates half the national average or less…

What about the other big demographic, the millennials? Like previous generations of urbanists, the current crop mistake a totally understandable interest in cities among post-adolescents. Yet when the research firm Frank Magid asked millennials what made up their “ideal” locale, a strong plurality opted for suburbs — far more than was the case in earlier generations.

Is this simply a battle of interpreting statistics? For example, Kotkin says Millennials aren’t completely enamored with the suburbs while others have used these statistics to mean other things. Kotkin says that Americans continue to vote for the suburbs with their actions. When given a choice, Kotkin seems to be suggesting that a majority of Americans, young and old, would choose the suburbs if all things were equal. In contrast, Kotkin suggests that urbanists want people to want the city. This ideology (“theology” in his terms) guides their interpretation of the data and leads to wishful thinking.

This is a bigger debate that isn’t addressed directly here: are the cities or suburbs better for people, society, and the world? Kotkin’s writings lean toward giving people freedom which is found more in the suburbs. Urbanists make arguments the other way: cities are greener, more diverse, and more cultured. Would or could Kotkin make his arguments if most Americans lived in cities rather than suburbs? This is really a discussion about values: should people live in the cities and suburbs and isn’t just about current or future realities.

h/t Instapundit

Responses to AIDS as told through posters

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A collection of “more than 6,200 posters in 60 languages from 100-plus countries” regarding AIDS is being made available to the public through a website. Here is what these posters can tell us:

Well, naturally, you would think about it as medical history since AIDS was then a uniformly fatal disease. But the reason it’s more important as social history is because, if you look at a whole lot of the posters, you will see how different countries approached the subject. Here you’re dealing with a new disease, dealing with the closeted subject of sex, and it was really amazing to see the variation from country to country and even from groups within a country. To me, that’s by far the most striking thing about the collection.

Generally speaking, in the United States, the posters were less interesting because they had to be neutral. They had to be careful not to offend some group or some sensibility so the best American posters were usually put up by private organizations. Abroad, that wasn’t quite as true. There were some good ones that the CDC put out. One shows a young woman sitting on a chair dressed from the waist down, her legs are crossed, and it says, “A sure way not to get AIDS.” Another one, my children’s favorite, shows a young man and woman necking through the back window of a car. It says, “Vanessa was in a fatal car accident last night. Only she doesn’t know it yet.”…

The watershed was October 1986 when Surgeon General [C. Everett] Koop published his AIDS report. That totally changed the picture. That was the beginning of a huge outpouring of posters all over the world, not just the United States. He really made [it acceptable] to talk about using condoms. If you look at The New York Times, the word “condom” I don’t think appeared until the mid 1980s. I may be mistaken but it certainly didn’t appear very early.

This sounds like a very interesting collection which would be useful for examining two things:

1. How the medical knowledge was translated into cultural narratives across different countries. As the cited part above suggests, this public message would need to fit with cultural messages regarding sex and diseases. It is also interesting to think in which countries and settings posters are very effective ways for disseminating information as opposed to other options like television or radio shows and commercials, public service announcements in various forms, or through state influenced facilities like schools and hospitals.

2. How the cultural message changed over time, particularly as medical knowledge improved and the public became more educated. For example, did more recent posters have to be more edgy in order to remind people that AIDS is still something they should be concerned about?

This may just make a great example for a class session on medical sociology.

As a side note, I wonder if there is much interest in posters among historians, art museums, and those interested in social history. Earlier this year, I saw an extensive exhibit at the Art Institute in Chicago of TASS (the “Soviet press agency”) posters during World War II. The exhibit was quite interesting as the posters combined art with text and design in creating a negative cultural image of Germans. Are posters primarily a mid to late 20th century phenomenon and how much can they tell us about the larger society compared to other media options?

A consequence of white flight: costs for aging infrastructure born more by minorities

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The phenomenon of white flight in the United States refers to whites leaving urban neighborhoods in the decades after World War II and going to the suburbs to avoid growing minority populations. Several researchers recently uncovered a latent consequence of white flight:

Racial minorities pay systemically more for basic water and sewer services than white people, according to a study by Michigan State University researchers.

This “structural inequality” is not necessarily a product of racism, argues sociologist Stephen Gasteyer, but rather the result of whites fleeing urban areas and leaving minority residents to bear the costs of maintaining aging water and sewer infrastructure…

The researchers analyzed Census data on self-reported water and sewer costs in Michigan. The study found that urban residents actually pay more than rural residents, which refutes conventional wisdom, Gasteyer said…

Detroit is the “poster child” for this problem, Gasteyer said. The city has lost more than 60 percent of its population since 1950, and the water and sewer infrastructure is as much as a century old in some areas. Billions of gallons of water are lost through leaks in the aging lines every year, and the entire system has been under federal oversight since 1977 for wastewater violations.

Very interesting: another infrastructure problem to be solved and it happens to fall disproportionally on minority populations. It would be interesting to see this analysis extended beyond Michigan – is this primarily a Rust Belt phenomenon where the big cities have some infrastructure that dates to around 1900 or does this also apply to newer Sunbelt cities?

Overall, it might be helpful for those who argue the United States needs to seriously put a lot money into infrastructure to demonstrate how much this matters to everyone and how much the aging (leaks, potholes, etc.) costs everyone each year. It is pretty hard to live without water and sewers but it wasn’t too long ago that these were not regular amenities. Indeed, 1890 was roughly a turning point when both big cities and smaller suburbs could put together their own infrastructure systems to serve residents. (This also lines up with the period when suburbs started resisting annexation to big cities as they could handle these amenities themselves.) Add roads, electricity, and natural gas to this and you have a system that is vital to modern life but is relatively behind the scenes. If you could add a fairness/social justice dimension to it (the most aging infrastructure is in places that can least afford it), this could be a very public issue.

Forecast: US homeownership rate to hit low of 62% in 2015

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One forecast suggests that homeownership rates in the United States will drop to a low in 2015 before rising by 2025:

All this could push home ownership down to levels not seen at least since before the Census began tracking this data in 1963. Home ownership soared to 70 percent in 2005, but it could fall to 62 percent by 2015, according to the number crunchers at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. They suggest that the effect of foreclosures drops home ownership 5.6 percent, and cyclical trends, like poor consumer confidence, tightening mortgage credit and the weak economy drop it 3 percent. Positive demographic trends would only offset that by 0.7 percent…

Burns believes home ownership will return by 2025 to around 67 percent, as previously foreclosed borrowers return to the housing market, cyclical trends improve and positive demographics start to carry more weight.

This is quite an extended process that first requires foreclosed and underwater loans to get off the books before the homebuyers turn the numbers again. It is interesting that there is little political discussion about the length of this process – does it benefit any current politician to be forthright about how long it might take to turn the housing market around? Do people care that much about homeownership while issues like jobs and debt are also concerns?

If the process does take this much time, it could also lead to a long-term reassessment of real estate. I doubt that people will no longer value owning a home or that homeownership will disappear from the cultural image of the American Dream as some have hinted. However, there is less of a chance it will be considered an investment and people will be more careful with their purchases, particularly paying attention to being able to pay for it even in rough patches.

Would wealthy homeowners rather live in or next to a McMansion or modernist house?

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A short look at a Great Falls, Virginia modernist house got me thinking: would the typical wealthy homeowner rather live next to a McMansion or a modernist home? Here is how this house is described on Curbed (and there are lots of pictures as well):

A wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., Great Falls, Va. is better known for it’s sprawling McMansions than its modernist masterpieces, but this glassy new construction in the woods is adding to the town’s architectural street cred. Distinguished by stark white walls and huge expanses of glass, the sleek home was designed by architect David Jameson and won the 2011 Washington DC AIA Award of Excellence. Thanks to the broad swaths of glass, the modern house achieves a connection to nature that would evade one of NoVa’s typical Italianate McMansions. Worthy of special note is the courtyard, which utilizes a frameless glass railing.

So what makes this modernist house more attractive than a McMansion? Several reasons are given here:

1. It has “architectural street cred.” Namely, it was designed by a known architect and won an award.

2. It is better connected to nature than McMansions.

3. It is not an Italianate facsimile of which the articles suggests there are too many. This house is unique.

But I would be interested in knowing how many suburban residents would choose to live in or live near this modernist house versus choosing a McMansion. The modernist style is not common in the suburbs; unless this house is in a unique neighborhood or has a really big lot, it may stick out from surrounding houses. For the average suburbanite, do the looks of this structure really invoke feelings of home? Might this be of architectural interest but not somewhere people could imagine living?

“City residents still yearn for the rural experience”?

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Beside a story about the declining rural areas of Iowa, a sociologist talks about the link between cities and rural areas:

Even city residents still yearn for the rural experience, says Paul Lasley, the Iowa State University sociologist who founded the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll. He describes a gradual cultural blurring of urban and rural Iowa: Cities are preserving rural culture as a reaction against the “massification” of recent decades.

Consider the boom in farmers markets, he says: 7,175 nationwide this year, a 17 percent jump over 2010, as measured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Iowa claims 237 markets.

A couple of thoughts come to mind:

1. The most noticeable place where the cities and rural areas blur is the suburbs. From the beginning, picturesque suburbs like Llewellyn Park, New Jersey had winding subdivision lanes and big lots that were meant to invoke country life. Even today, many suburbanites can fairly quickly drive to Forest Preserves or out to the metropolitan fringe where there are still some open fields.

2. Are farmers markets really the best evidence that city dwellers want more of the rural life? Don’t these simply make the rural life a caricature or another commodity that can be purchased? There have to be some other ways in which city dwellers really show an interest in rural life.

In the end, I wonder how much city residents really would want to live in rural areas or spend significant amounts of time there opposed to just visit. Surveys like the “2011 Community Preference Survey” show that roughly 30-40% of Americans would want to live in small towns or rural areas but we know more than 50% of Americans live in suburbs and 30% live in central cities (around 80% total). So if preferences don’t exactly match up with realities, what exactly do urban residents, urban or suburban, want from “the rural experience”?