Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Use of mechanical tools may improve language skills.
The logistics crisis as an introduction to concentration risk.
Thousands of Chinese photographs saved from recycling.
Green shoots for nuclear energy–in the EU?
Why the ‘woke’ won’t debate.
Teams solve problems faster when they are more cognitively diverse.
The psychological and social costs of the college admissions game and the college treadmill.
The word literally translates from Spanish as “child-buyers” as defined by Wikipedia in one of their less politically unstained entries: “a concept coined by Victor Hugo in his novel The Man Who Laughs. It refers to various groups in folklore who were said to change the physical appearance of human beings by manipulating growing children, in a similar way to the horticultural method of bonsai that is, deliberate mutilation … stunting children’s growth by physical restraint, muzzling their faces to deform them, slitting their eyes, dislocating their joints, and malforming their bones.” The mutilated or stunted children were then provided as dwarves to amuse a noble court, or as performers in traveling circus sideshows. A historical truth, folklore repeated to frighten children into good behavior, or just a melodramatic literary creation? Who knows for certain?
My daughter and I have a local writer friend who teaches at the elementary school level a local quasi-magnet type school which advertises itself as offering a challenging college prep curriculum, and she is discouraged beyond words over how difficult it is to interest the pupils, especially the boys in her class in reading. Of course, given the run of books generated of late by mainstream establishment publishing, aimed at the YA and young readers and then approved by schoolteachers and librarians … most of them seem to be a grim wallow in social or familial dysfunction, misery, gloom, and despair … plus of late, lashings of sexual confusion as well of the latter, it seems the more explicit, the better.
Parents want to take responsibility, perhaps, but they have (I certainly often did) shirked their responsibility to keep track of the teachers and their good and bad teaching; this new movement is surely restorative, good, appropriate. Our public schools have been examples of the tragedy of the commons – who really was taking care of the children, nurturing their minds? Who respected the students/children enough, the discipline they taught enough, not to give gruel and expect equally watered down responses? For many school boards this Tuesday will be a reckoning – we’ll see how much parents cared, how much others cared.
She was born to privilege and a degree of wealth, at the turn of the last century Muriel Morris, an heiress of the Swift meatpacking fortune, and by most accounts conflicted over that circumstance. Like a scattering of her peers in the debutant world, she had an interest in social justice, as it was generally understood at the time. She is reported to have read Upton Sinclair’s polemic The Jungle as a teenager and been horrified doubly so as both sides of her family had made their fortunes in the industry which Sinclair portrayed as especially brutal and gruesome. Muriel Morris was also of an unexpectedly intellectual bent and determined enough to pursue her intellectual interests first with studies at Oxford, England in the 1920s, and then in of all places, Vienna, Austria, where she hoped to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. She briefly married a British artist, Julian Gardiner, by whom she had a single child, a daughter, before deciding to pursue a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1926. She had a trust fund sufficiently generous to support herself and her small daughter.