When the hurly-burly’s done

Check out what’s going on in Olmstead’s Civics class–his students have done some great blogging work.  There’s a great debate going on between two of them (with some additions by their classmates) about what is to be done at Guantanamo.

This is the best advice I’ve seen in a long time.  All of us–teachers, parents, students–are concerned about online safety.

We would never dream of going days at a time without speaking to our family! Well, children are speaking all of the time but adults who ignore their Internet presence are ignoring their children!

Vicki Davis’s entire post is a must-read.

This graphic goes with the article in your packet called For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be ‘Evil’.

Milgram, not “Milbank,” as I mistakenly said in class today. Milgram. Anyway, here are some links to information on this psychologist and his experiments with obedience.

Wikipedia article on Milgram’s life and career

Wikipedia article on his famous experiment

Here’s an account, written after the experiment, of what it was like to be a participant:

Like many others in the New Haven area, I answered an ad seeking subjects for the experiment and offering five dollars, paid in advance, for travel and time. At the Yale facility, I met a man who looked very professorial in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses. He led me into a room filled with an impressive display of electrical equipment. A second man was introduced to me as another subject for the experiment, and together we were told that the experiment was to test the widely held belief that people learn by punishment. In this case, one of us would be a “learner” and the other a “teacher.” The teacher would read a list of paired words to the learner and then repeat the first word of the pair. If the learner did not respond with the correct second word, the teacher would deliver a “mild” electric shock to the learner as punishment.

This struck me as bizarre, and although the instructions were in accord with what we had been told, I wondered if something else was going on.

Also, the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Let’s take it up a level.

I found a readable translation of the St. Augustine piece that was alluded to in the in-class reading. Here’s Augustine’s point:

…that which is called evil, when it is regulated and put in its own place, only enhances our admiration of the good; for we enjoy and value the good more when we compare it with the evil…

Meanwhile, here’s Michael’s response to something Regina wrote:

I find it incredible that Hollywood producers and directors can live with themselves knowing that they are misleading the world into thinking that evil will never triumph.

This’ll be huge when we read Macbeth in a few weeks. In Shakespeare’s time, the prevailing mindset was that order=goodness, so when the natural balance of things was restored and chaos defeated, goodness prevailed.

Sarah agrees with this, it seems:

Chaos is the root of all evil, if anything else.

I don’t think most people today, though, equate order and goodness. I think that we’re more nuanced in our views, at least in real life. But in the movies, the bad guy is defeated and the hero gets the girl at the end as the credits roll.

And Norma weighs in, too, saying that evil really is a subjective term:

Honestly, I don’t think I can give evil a good definition, or can think of one symbol or idea that can represent it. After all, evil is subjective, meaning that there are different opinions on what evil is. For example, I, like many others believe that Hitler was almost like an embodiment of evil, after all, he did kill millions of people, and targeted anyone who was not an aryan. However, there are people, though very few, who think that Hitler’s actions only made Germany a bigger and stronger empire. Personally, I totally think Hitler was awful, but there was still are, or perhaps were quite a few who looked up to him, and followed his every instruction.

This is great stuff, ladies and gentlemen. I can’t wait to continue this in class with some more readings. Tell me you can’t, either…