Some Odd Thoughts

As I write these little essays, I get the impression that I often have thoughts that are out of sync with the rest of the world. Perhaps I think too hard about things, but here are a few more random observations.

I picked up a small card advertising a kind of school system open house and presentation. In part it read, “Come hear about some of the new and exciting things happening at our schools.” This is probably a symptom of current advertising where everything has to be new and exciting or new and improved or innovative and sustainable. Buzzwords fill all advertising from shoes to cars to doctor’s offices.

But if I were a parent of a child attending one of these schools, I wouldn’t care two pins about new and exciting. I would want the school to teach my children how to read, write, add and subtract. These are basic skills that anyone needs in any profession or just to live a reasonably stress-free life. Instead, in another case I see a television news segment featuring kids in the early grades crawling around on the floor to get an appreciation of STEM subjects with “educators” gushing about how wonderful it is and how it “keeps them engaged.”

Shouldn’t it be the child’s responsibility to learn and the parent’s responsibility to ensure they do? It seems in too many cases teachers are entertainers, the students are the audience and the parents are automatic advocates for their children when they step out of line, setting up an unproductive dynamic.

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Some research shows that patients in nursing homes can be comforted by dogs and other pets, but can be equally comforted and cheered up by mechanical dog-like robots. What if airlines developed a policy that so-called support animals were no longer allowed on planes. Instead people could rent a teddy bear of other stuffed comfort animal at the departing airport and turn it in when they landed. (This would not apply to legitimate service animals.) That’s never going to happen. Society is headed in the opposite direction.

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CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment a few weeks ago about the $450 million makeover of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. In it the museum director mentioned that they “will also increase the number of works by female artists – five times as many [as] before.” Wow, that’s really a good thing – or is it?

Apparently the art world today harbors some resentment that the art world of the past judged art, at least in part, on the basis of whether the artist was a man or a woman, giving preference not to the quality of the art but to the sex of the artist. The quality of the art (as subjective as that can be) should be the criterion for judging what gets displayed and what is rejected, not the appearance, the status, the reputation or the political connections of the artist. That would be the really good thing.

So why is MOMA making it a point to call attention to the number of female artists? Isn’t that the same kind of objectionable thinking that prevailed in the past dressed up in a different costume? They express their objection to past flaws in the system by doing the same thing in the opposite direction and call it progress.