Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 June 29

= June 29 =

Walter Savage Landor's two Roses
Ah, what avails the sceptred race! We all know Landor's Rose Aylmer. He also drew inspiration from another Rose, Rose Paynter, later Mrs Charles Graves-Sawle. I have it somewhere in the back of my mind that the Paynters and the Aylmers were somehow related. Can anyone help? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 14:52, 29 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Here's a family tree:

Henry, 4th Lord Aylmer (c.1750-1785)___Catharine Whitworth (d.1805)__Howell Price (d.1801) _____________________________________|________                    |                                                           |                                            |                     |                                        Matthew Whitworth Aylmer,   Rose Whitworth Aylmer   Sophia Catharine Price___David Runwa Paynter (1785-1864) 5th Lord Aylmer (1775-1850) (d. 1800)                                     | _______________________|_____________________________                                                                            |                                                    |                                                     James Aylmer Dorset Paynter  Sir Charles Graves-__Caroline Rose (d.1876)                    Sawle (1816-1903)    Paynter (1818-1914) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23A8:830:A600:6530:85E1:1D75:CE0F (talk) 18:08, 29 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Many thanks, that's very clear. DuncanHill (talk) 18:52, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

desegregation busing conventional wisdom
This is about the Kamala Harris-Joe Biden dustup that I heard about from a couple nights ago (didn't watch it myself). Biden was apparently anti-busing and is now trying to backpedal it. The battles over busing were before my time and I'm not seeking debate or personal opinions about it here. Rather I'm asking what the CW is (regardless of whether the CW is correct). What I'd like to know:
 * Whether it is still controversial today, at least in the centrist Democrat cohort (I guess that describes Harris and Biden). I.e, is it generally considered as having been a good thing, among people of that political persuasion?
 * I'm presuming that conservatives still see it as having been bad, but maybe I'm wrong.
 * What about the further left, i.e. the Bernie Sanders axis?
 * If (and obviously that's a big if) one does think busing was good, is Biden's current take inherently ridiculous? That take afaict is that the federal mandate for busing bad, but leaving it to local districts was fine.  If I understand Harris's criticism, it's that the local districts were segregationist and therefore would have not implemented any type of desegregation voluntarily, so it had to be imposed from outside if it was to happen at all.

Thanks 173.228.123.207 (talk) 22:08, 29 June 2019 (UTC)


 * The Supreme Court has greatly limited the scope of busing with a number of decisions, most notably 1974's Milliken v. Bradley, which excludes most busing across school district boundaries. Within these constraints, it has turned out to be unfeasible to expect middle-class white parents to send their children to schools where they would be outnumbered by poor minority children -- when such a situation was set up, it quickly led to "white flight" to the suburbs, and pretty soon there weren't that many white children left in the city school system.  In Boston, the situation was embittered when working-class whites came to the conclusion that upper-class whites (whose own children remained unaffected) were using their children as guinea pigs in a social-engineering experiment.
 * Nowadays most middle-class white parents don't mind a few middle-class black children or striving upwardly-mobile black children in the schools their children attend, but they would object just as strongly as ever to large numbers of poor black children being in those schools, and they generally have the political influence to prevent such a situation. However, see Jefferson County Public Schools (Kentucky) for one area that's achieved somewhat stable quasi-integration. AnonMoos (talk) 02:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Can you really blame them, though? I mean, if rich white people send their own kids to fancy private schools in order to avoid having their kids interact with poor kids, why can't middle-class whites have that same luxury?
 * Also, as a side note, if I was a teacher and my salary would have been judged based on my students' performance (which I would strongly object to since educational success is mostly determined by one's genetics), I would have likewise opposed bringing in a lot of poor kids from other school districts into my own school district. Futurist110 (talk) 01:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Not sure what that means. Performance on standardized achievement tests (SAT etc.) is most definitely not "mostly determined by one's genetics"... AnonMoos (talk) 03:19, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Robert Plomin's research appears to conclude otherwise, though: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/02/no-point-sending-children-eton-education-genes-says-geneticist/ Futurist110 (talk) 18:36, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Depends on what you mean by "mostly". For sure, genetics are a prerequisite, unless you are a creationist, disbeliever in evolution of far as brain is concerned. Quite as obviously, meeting prerequisites is not enough. Gem fr (talk) 11:19, 4 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, AFAIK most individual variation in IQs/academic performance is explained due to one's genes. Also, Yes, if everyone had the same cognitive ability, then evolution in regards to this would become impossible in either direction. Futurist110 (talk) 18:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)


 * This is entirely anecdotal, but my extremely left-leaning hometown was and still is stridently anti-busing. Actually, I'd say the community is just generally anti-interference when it comes to state and federal education programs. But with regards to busing, the stated concern is that the schools are expensive to fund, and parents don't want to share them with people who don't pay taxes in the school district. There have been serious suggestions in the face of anticipated state/federal action (from charter school programs and NCLB) to simply get rid of the public school system entirely, and let everyone send their kids to private school, or have an "official" private charter that gets town money. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:35, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * As AnonMoos said, though, such moves would likely be unconstitutional. !!!! Futurist110


 * Most likely not unconstitutional, federally. The cases brought up by AnonMoos involved attempts by state actors to offload segregation to state-subsidized private entities that were already discriminatory. That is, where white parents could send their kids to private school, counties were abolishing the public school system, leaving blacks with no opportunities for education. The Supreme Court tends to take a very dim view of attempts to make end-runs around previous rulings - in this scenario school districts had been told that they could not operate separate public schools for whites and blacks, so they found a way to do exactly that but say it wasn't their fault. The Supreme Court rightly did not like this. However, my own hometown, racist as it may be, did not have overt racial segregation in mind. The plan was simply to make sure local tax dollars didn't go to educating kids from out-of-town. The fact that kids from town were only 1% minority was not mentioned, though I think everyone was equally upset about poor white kids potentially "leeching". Anyway, I think it's highly unlikely that it would become a court battle over segregation. Far more likely the state department of education would attempt to force the local school district to participate in whatever plan it had come up with, or just abolish the school district and take direct control. Then it would become a court battle over local-vs.-state control, and the property tax issue could get really weird. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:55, 4 July 2019 (UTC)


 * They might want to look up "segregation academies", and especially the case of the Prince Edward County, Virginia school system, which went all the way to the Supreme Court (Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County). AnonMoos (talk) 06:29, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Refusing to enroll any black students at all in "segregation academies" is going a bit overboard, no? After all, there's a lot of overlap between black and white people in regards to IQs in spite of the one-standard-deviation difference in their average IQs. Futurist110 (talk) 01:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)


 * 1) everything is controversial today. This is the media (specially social media) current business model (I am not implying this was better/different anytime). a quote attributed to Churchill is why I mention media: there is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion
 * 2) pretty sure {opposing social engineering} (such like busing) is the very definition of conservatism. So I think you are right, conservatives oppose busing.
 * 3) further left, seems to me that busing stops to be a question, because the state choose where the children go to school, not the parents (unless they are the nomenklatura). And the schools are equally the best, so they say (you cannot complain, anyway).
 * 4) depends on your definition of ridiculous. For a politician, to speak so that voters may understand that they can have it both way (eg : support busing while being able to control it so that their children are in good schools) and don't feel hypocrites at all, is a skill, a feature, not a bug.
 * Gem fr (talk) 07:39, 30 June 2019 (UTC)


 * In contemporary United States politics, some conservative ideologues rant at length about the eeevils of big-government forced busing (conveniently ignoring the fact that there has been very little federally-ordered mandatory busing over the past few decades). The majority of center and center-left white middle class parents don't talk much about the subject, since they largely have the education of their children arranged to their satisfaction, and have no real reason to complain (not to mention that speaking out against busing could make them seem to be "sore winners" and/or call unnecessary attention to arrangements that benefit themselves at the expense of others).  Many blacks and people on the left are unhappy about the fact that school segregation has been on the rise in recent decades (since a low point in the 1980s), but probably very few of them are gung-ho about long-distance busing as the solution.  So there's no significant pro-busing current of public opinion in the U.S. now, but if you were too vehemently anti-busing in the 1970s, this can be a problem in internal Democratic party politics... AnonMoos (talk)


 * looks like the zombie walks again  Gem fr (talk) 22:34, 1 July 2019 (UTC)


 * It also doesn't help that zoning restrictions appear to be more widespread in liberal areas than in conservative areas (at least if Steve Sailer is telling the truth in regards to this). Sailer criticizes well-off white liberals for restricting large-scale new housing construction in their areas and neighborhoods in order to avoid getting the "wrong kinds" of neighbors while at the same time having no problem forcing less well-off Americans to endure the burdens of diversity--such as by supporting large-scale immigration (and not only of the cognitive elites). Futurist110 (talk) 01:40, 4 July 2019 (UTC)