Category Archives: Social Studies

America, the violent (Part 2)

Here’s a link to part 2 of Ira M. Leonard’s America, The Violent essay for The Black Commentator.

…The development and use by Americans of the “just-war ideology,” intriguingly, is one of the major themes in a significant new reinterpretation of the 400-year American historical experience. In Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America , 1500-2000 (Viking Press, 2005), by two prize-winning historians, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, the authors say: “We construct a history of North America that emphasizes wars and their effects and stresses the ‘centrality’ of imperial ambition to the development of the United States.”

Americans should “see the imperialist adventures of 1812 [war with England], 1846 [war with Mexico], and 1898 [war with Spain], and the wars of liberation that began in 1775 [the Revolution], 1861 [the Civil War], and 1941 [World War II] as related.” They continue: “our purpose” is to emphasize “the importance of the wars Americans have fought less to preserve liberty than to extend the power of the United States in the name of liberty.”

Pointing up the book’s contemporary relevance, they write, “To this day the tendency persists … to justify war as an altruistic determination to rid the world of tyrannies that would crush the human spirit.”

War and imperial expansion, they argue in this engrossing and highly readable 420-page volume, have been the “central engine” of American economic, social and cultural development, but Americans still tenaciously retain the self-image of being a peace-loving people, who only respond to attacks upon them: indeed, “Americans … constructed their conquest of North America as a collective sacrifice in the service of human liberty.”

As a peace-loving people, “it is an article of faith that their wars have been forced upon them by those who would destroy their freedom,” and thus, “Americans tend to believe that by winning wars, they made the world a better, safer, freer place…”

In the June 30 Wall Street Journal Diane Ravitch–right-wing historian of education, nativist, ultra-conservative monculturalist, defender of American students from the red horde of social studies educators–derided (it was certainly not a critique or review) a new book by the Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson from Rethinking Schools in Milwaukee, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.

Ravitch’s WSJ article is a small sample of her career-long attacks on curriculum and pedagogical practices that are intended to produce public education in the public interest (as opposed to education in the interest of Plato’s Republic). In this context, here op-ed is not necessarily remarkable or surprising, though it is another indication of the schlock that passes for “intellectual critiique” of progressive educational practices from the right. (See the Where the Blog has No Name post “Shut Up and March” for more on this issue.)

[Below is Ravitch’s op-ed and the letter to the WSJ from Gutstein and Peterson.]Ethnomathematics

By DIANE RAVITCH

Wall Street Journal
June 20, 2005; Page A14

It seems our math educators no longer believe in the beauty and power of
the principles of mathematics. They are continually in search of a fix
that will make it easy, relevant, fun, and even politically relevant. In
the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued
standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed
on a calculator. The council preferred real life problem solving, using
everyday situations. Attempts to solve problems without basic skills
caused some critics, especially professional mathematicians, to deride
the “new, new math” as “rainforest algebra.”

In a comparison of a 1973 algebra textbook and a 1998 “contemporary
mathematics” textbook, Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton found a dramatic
change in topics. In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter
“F” included “factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set,
formulas, fractions, and functions.” In the 1998 book, the index listed
“families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food,
feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags,
flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang,
franchises, and fund-raising carnival.”

Those were the days of innocent dumbing-down. Now mathematics is being
nudged into a specifically political direction by educators who call
themselves “critical theorists.” They advocate using mathematics as a
tool to advance social justice. Social justice math relies on political
and cultural relevance to guide math instruction. One of its precepts is
“ethnomathematics,” that is, the belief that different cultures have
evolved different ways of using mathematics, and that students will learn
best if taught in the ways that relate to their ancestral culture. From
this perspective, traditional mathematics — the mathematics taught in
universities around the world — is the property of Western Civilization
and is inexorably linked with the values of the oppressors and
conquerors. The culturally attuned teacher will learn about the counting
system of the ancient Mayans, ancient Africans, Papua New Guineans, and
other “non-mainstream” cultures.

Partisans of social justice mathematics advocate an explicitly political
agenda in the classroom. A new textbook, “Rethinking Mathematics:
Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers,” shows how problem solving,
ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics
are: “Sweatshop Accounting,” with units on poverty, globalization, and
the unequal distribution of wealth. Another topic, drawn directly from
ethnomathematics, is “Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood.” Others include
“The Transnational Capital Auction,” “Multicultural Math,” and “Home
Buying While Brown or Black.” Units of study include racial profiling,
the war in Iraq, corporate control of the media, and environmental
racism. The theory behind the book is that “teaching math in a neutral
manner is not possible.” Teachers are supposed to vary the teaching of
mathematics in relation to their students’ race, gender, ethnicity, and
community.

This fusion of political correctness and relevance may be the next big
thing to rock mathematics education, appealing as it does to political
activists and to ethnic chauvinists.

It seems terribly old-fashioned to point out that the countries that
regularly beat our students in international tests of mathematics do not
use the subject to steer students into political action. They teach them
instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and
meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi and Chicago. The students
who learn this universal language well will be the builders and shapers
of technology in the 21st century. The students in American classes who
fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will
not.

Ms. Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Koret Task Force
at the Hoover Institution.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111922877339463719-email,00.html

# # #

OUR RESPONSE:

Justice for the World, Through Mathematics

Diane Ravitch (“Ethnomathematics,” editorial page, June 20) can’t seem to
get anything to add up quite right in her critique of our book,
Rethinking Mathematics.

First she ridicules the idea that math instruction can’t be neutral but
then asserts that the only purpose of math is to help students become
“the builders and shapers of technology in the 21st century.” That’s not
political?

Ms. Ravitch also implies that students who rethink mathematics won’t play
a part in building and shaping our future. What about helping students
become the people who will make the world a better place? Shouldn’t
educators suggest that math can help solve poverty, the AIDS crisis,
global warming, overreliance on fossil fuels, and so many other vexing
problems? Why is it a curricular crime to suggest that maybe math could
help people and the environment? It’s our experience that when students
recognize that math can focus on real world issues, their motivation to
learn increases.

Finally, Ms. Ravitch asserts that a socially responsible mathematics
lacks rigor. Where is her evidence? Indeed it’s Ms. Ravitch’s critique
that lacks rigor. Instead of actually evaluating the substance of our
book, she lists the titles of various chapters. We think it is teachers’
responsibility to help students sharpen their analytical skills through
mathematics so that they might contribute to social and ecological
justice.

Bob Peterson and Eric Gutstein
Milwaukee

(Messrs. Peterson and Gutstein are the editors of “Rethinking
Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers”)

Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2005

Zinn: The myths of American exceptionalism

For your US Independence Day reading pleasure:
The Power and the Glory

Myths of American exceptionalism

Howard Zinn

The notion of American exceptionalism–that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary–is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”

The idea of a city on a hill is heartwarming. It suggests what George Bush has spoken of: that the United States is a beacon of liberty and democracy. People can look to us and learn from and emulate us.

In reality, we have never been just a city on a hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians. Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village.

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

The kind of massacre described by Bradford occurs again and again as Americans march west to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. (In fact our celebrated war of liberation, the American Revolution, was disastrous for the Indians. Colonists had been restrained from encroaching on the Indian territory by the British and the boundary set up in their Proclamation of 1763. American independence wiped out that boundary.)

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from very early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained. On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.

Invoking God has been a habit for American presidents throughout the nation’s history, but George W. Bush has made a specialty of it. For an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the reporter talked with Palestinian leaders who had met with Bush. One of them reported that Bush told him, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” It’s hard to know if the quote is authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is consistent with Bush’s oft-expressed claims. A more credible story comes from a Bush supporter, Richard Lamb, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who says that during the election campaign Bush told him, “I believe God wants me to be president. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay.”Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”).

Not every American leader claimed divine sanction, but the idea persisted that the United States was uniquely justified in using its power to expand throughout the world. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the owner of a vast chain of media enterprises–Time, Life, Fortune–declared that this would be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

This confident prophecy was acted out all through the rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.

The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world.

Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look overseas.

On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing–indeed, eager–to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.” Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, orprogressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed.

The following year American marines occupied the Dominican Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war.

Theodore Roosevelt was considered a “progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines–he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.”

During the Cold War, many American “liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home.

The idea of American exceptionalism persisted as the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and then went to war against Iraq.

The terrible attacks of September 11 gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral war.

This was a repudiation of the United Nations charter, which is based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive war, far from self-defense.

Bush’s national-security strategy and its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many Americans.

But it is not really a dramatic departure from the historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign policy.

Sometimes bombings and invasions have been cloaked as international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea, or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.” Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism was never clearer.

Some liberals in this country, opposed to Bush, nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the world.

In a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the editors write, “Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties. . . . When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.”

Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government. This is all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is about the use of violence by the state–in fact, about preemptively initiating the use of violence.

There may be an acceptable case for initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening party–just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but against “states that support them” invites unfocused and indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of terrorists.

It seems that the idea of American exceptionalism is pervasive across the political spectrum.

The idea is not challenged because the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much in our educational system. A couple of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” The president apparently never learned the story of the bloody conquest of the Philippines.

And last year, when the Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The ambassador was soon removed from his post.

The major newspapers, television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New York Times). The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were meaningless.

Only a couple of days before Bush uttered those words about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to death by nervous American soldiers.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers–the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola–have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

Fortunately, there are people all over the world who believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around the world demonstrated against that war.

There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guant

Uncle Sam really wants you

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert on the when the Army goes to school

[Note that the so-called No Child Left Behind Act mandates each district that receives funds under NCLB comply with requests by military recruiters for high school students’ names, addresses, and telephone numbers, unless a parent has “opted out” of providing such information.

Districts receiving federal funds are also required to give military recruiters the same access to high school students as they provide to postsecondary institutions or to prospective employers. For example, if the school has a policy of allowing postsecondary institutions or prospective employers to come onto school property to provide information to students about educational and professional opportunities, it must afford the same access to military recruiters.]

June 16, 2005
Uncle Sam Really Wants You

By BOB HERBERT
With the situation in Iraq deteriorating and the willingness of Americans to serve in the armed forces declining, a little-known Army publication called the “School Recruiting Program Handbook” is becoming increasingly important, and controversial.

The handbook is the recruiter’s bible, the essential guide for those who have to go into the nation’s high schools and round up warm bodies to fill the embarrassingly skimpy ranks of the Army’s basic training units.

The handbook declares forthrightly, “The goal is school ownership that can only lead to a greater number of Army enlistments.”

What I was not able to find in the handbook was anything remotely like the startlingly frank comments of a sergeant at Fort Benning, Ga., who was quoted in the May 30 issue of The Army Times. He was addressing troops in the seventh week of basic training, and the paper reported the scene as follows:

” ‘Does anybody know what posthumous means?’ Staff Sgt. Andre Allen asked the 150 infantrymen-in-training, members of F Company, 1st Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment.

“A few hands went up, but he answered his own question.

” ‘It means after death. Some of you are going to get medals that way,’ he said matter-of-factly, underscoring the possibility that some of them would be sent to combat and not return.”

That’s the honest message recruits get once they’re in. The approach recommended by the recruiting handbook is somewhat different. It’s much softer. Recruiters trying to sign up high school students are urged to schmooze, schmooze, schmooze.”The football team usually starts practicing in August,” the handbook says. “Contact the coach and volunteer to assist in leading calisthenics or calling cadence during team runs.”

“Homecoming normally happens in October,” the handbook says. “Coordinate with the homecoming committee to get involved with the parade.”

Recruiters are urged to deliver doughnuts and coffee to the faculty once a month, and to eat lunch in the school cafeteria several times a month. And the book recommends that they assiduously cultivate the students that other students admire: “Some influential students such as the student president or the captain of the football team may not enlist; however, they can and will provide you with referrals who will enlist.”

It’s not known how aware parents are that recruiters are inside public high schools aggressively trying to lure their children into wartime service. But not all schools get the same attention. Those that get the royal recruitment treatment tend to be the ones with students whose families are less affluent than most.

Schools with kids from wealthier families (and a high percentage of collegebound students) are not viewed as good prospects by military recruiters. It’s as if those schools had posted signs at the entrances saying, “Don’t bother.” The kids in those schools are not the kids who fight America’s wars.

Now, with the death toll in Iraq continuing to mount, it’s getting harder to sign up even the less affluent kids. So the recruitment effort in the target schools has intensified. Recruiters, already driven in some cases to the brink of nervous exhaustion, are following the handbook guidelines more rigorously than ever.

“If you wait until they’re seniors, it’s probably too late,” the book says. It also says, “Don’t forget the administrative staff. … Have something to give them (pen, calendar, cup, donuts, etc.) and always remember secretary’s week, with a card or flowers.”

The sense of desperation is palpable: “Get involved with local Boy Scout troops. Scoutmasters are typically happy to get any assistance you can offer. Many scouts are [high school] students and potential enlistees or student influencers.”

One of the many problems here is that adolescents should not be hounded by military recruiters under any circumstances, and they shouldn’t be pursued at all without the full knowledge and consent of parents or guardians.

Let the Army be honest and upfront in its recruitment. War is not child’s play, and warriors shouldn’t be assembled through the use of seductive sales pitches to youngsters too immature to make an informed decision on matters that might well result in their having to kill others, or being killed themselves.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Americans irk Canadians: study

And “survey says”… that Americans pretty much agree with the Canadians.

Seventy percent of Americans consider themselves as “greedy” and 40 percent say they are “immoral”. Hmm … primarily Republicans I bet!

Sixty-nine percent of Americans agree that they are “disliked” by others, so I guess that means the survey’s findings are self-confirming.

BTW, my closest Canadian “friend,” after of years of personal experience with one American in particular, confirms that Americans irk Canadians.

Seems we Yanks, while generally admired by our “Neighbors to the North” for our hardwork and inventiveness, are considered loud, rude, and obnoxious by quite, polite, and chaming Canucks.

My friend does disagree about a couple of survey findings (e.g., the “hardworking” and “inventive” parts) … but like most American I think I pretty much agree with her Canadian perspective.

Americans irk Canadians: study
Anti-U.S. sentiment has grown fastest here since 2002, survey of 16 countries suggests
By ALAN FREEMAN
Friday, June 24, 2005 Page A18

WASHINGTON — Canadians have an increasingly dim view of Americans, considering their neighbours as rude, greedy and violent, yet at the same time an overwhelming majority of Canadians smugly believe their country is beloved by people around the world.

The growing discontent of Canadians with the United States and its foreign policy was highlighted yesterday by a 16-nation attitude survey published by the Pew Research Center.

The institute said the survey shows anti-Americanism in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, which surged after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, has shown some sign of moderating, but the United States “remains broadly disliked in most countries surveyed.”

U.S. policy and President George W. Bush, in particular, remain distinctly unpopular in France, Germany and Spain, but the Pew Center says among traditional U.S. allies, it is in Canada that opinions of the United States have declined most markedly since 2002, when the survey was first taken.While a majority of Canadians still have a favourable view of the United States, that proportion has fallen from 72 per cent in 2002 to 59 per cent.

Only 45 per cent of Canadians now back the U.S.-led war on terrorism, while 78 per cent backed the war three years ago; 80 per cent of Canadians now say they are glad Canada stayed out of Iraq. And 75 per cent of Canadians say they have a less favourable view of the United States since Mr. Bush’s re-election.

“There’s no question there are negative feelings,” in Canada, said former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who co-chaired the survey. “Some of it has to do with the fact that we are the Big Foot to the south.”

She added that she believes it was primarily a “family squabble” and that views and values in both countries remain similar.

Canadians’ views of American personal attributes are more negative than residents of any other traditional U.S. ally.

While 77 per cent of Canadians surveyed believe Americans are hard-working and 76 per cent believe they’re inventive, 62 per cent say Americans are greedy and 64 per cent believe they are violent.

What the Pew institute found particularly remarkable is that 53 per cent of Canadians found Americans to be rude, compared with only 36 per cent of French respondents and 29 per cent of Britons.

Americans did not lack in self-criticism. While a large majority of Americans consider themselves to be hard-working and inventive, 70 per cent see themselves as greedy and 39 per cent see themselves as immoral.

Americans recognize they are unloved, with 69 per cent agreeing that “we’re disliked” by others, while only 26 per cent feel as if the United States is loved.

Canadians, on the other hand, are utterly convinced of their popularity, with a breathtaking 94 per cent believing Canada is popular with others and only 4 per cent believing it is not liked.

Among developed countries, only the Dutch at 83 per cent, come anywhere close to Canadians in their conviction that they are beloved in the world.

But Canada doesn’t win the sweepstakes as the world’s leading land of opportunity. Asked where a young person should emigrate to in order to “lead a good life,” Australia was picked by respondents in four countries, including Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Canada. Canada was chosen as the leading land of opportunity in three countries — France, the United States and China. Two countries picked Britain and Germany.

Many of those surveyed believe it would be a good idea for the U.S. to face some rivalry for pre-eminence on the world stage, with 85 per cent of French respondents believing it would be good if the European Union or another entity emerges as a military rival to the U.S.

Canadians share this desire for increased autonomy, with 57 per cent looking for a more independent policy from the United States, compared with 43 per cent in 2003.

The Pew survey was conducted among almost 17,000 people in 16 countries from April 20 to May 3