Slow News Day
skoolboy still has nothing substantive to say about Arne Duncan. But he's pleased to note that Duncan's a member of the tribe: his B.A. from Harvard is in sociology. Duncan took a year off from school to write a senior thesis on life in Kenwood, the south side Chicago neighborhood in which his mother Sue had founded an after-school program in 1961. Duncan's 123-page thesis, entitled "The values, aspirations and opportunities of the urban underclass," was read and praised by William Julius Wilson, among the most eminent urban sociologists of our time.
Duncan's appointment will vault him into the list of prominent Americans who majored in sociology. It's not a long list! Ronald Reagan double-majored in economics and sociology, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a sociology major. So too Rev. Jesse Jackson, novelist Saul Bellow, and a number of other prominent civil rights leaders and members of Congress. And Michelle Obama majored in sociology at Princeton.
But before too long, we're into B-list celebrities and leaders: Dr. Ruth, Regis Philbin, a smattering of NFL and NBA stars, Robin Williams, and a couple of Canadians: Dan Aykroyd and Late Show bandleader Paul Shaffer.
Oh well. At least there aren't any well-known crooked sociologists. Rod Blagojevich was a history major at Northwestern, and as for Bernie Madoff? Beats me. Nobody goes into sociology for the money.
Comments
Hello,
I found your blog while searching the web for information related to my blog.
I think your site content is very good and I think we would both benefit from a link exchange. This would bring more targeted traffic to our sites, plus increase our websites' weight at the search engines, as they give greater value to the links from the topic-related sites rather than irrelevant backlinks.
My blog at http://eschoolsearch.blogspot.com/ is definitely related to yours.
I would be glad to link to your site in return to you linking back to mine.
Please email me at info@eschoolsearch.com to discuss further details on this.
Thank You
Theresa Fox
Posted by: Theresa | December 22, 2008 3:59 PM
i like this piece on duncan:
http://www.truthout.org/121708R
" Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of his administration nor for the future of public education. Obama's call for change falls flat with this appointment, not only because Duncan largely defines schools within a market-based and penal model of pedagogy, but also because he does not have the slightest understanding of schools as something other than adjuncts of the corporation at best or the prison at worse. The first casualty in this scenario is a language of social and political responsibility capable of defending those vital institutions that expand the rights, public goods and services central to a meaningful democracy. This is especially true with respect to the issue of public schooling and the ensuing debate over the purpose of education, the role of teachers as critical intellectuals, the politics of the curriculum and the centrality of pedagogy as a moral and political practice."
Posted by: philip kovacs | January 2, 2009 3:48 PM