In the current Telecom Digest, we find an article from the New York Times, which contains this sentence:
"Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online."
Young Mr. Gaudet may find, later in life, that Google is forever, and Google will never forget that, at the age of 16, he had "dyslexia or other learning difficulties". So much for his chances of getting a decent job.
Was it Larry Ellison who once famously said "You have no privacy anyway. Get over it!"?
***** Moderator's Note *****
Since my son has a learning disability, I'll chime in: I think that _more_ publicity is needed, not less. If the parents of LD children have to fear retribution from industrial bureaucrats after dealing with the faceless and callous bureaucrats in their local school system, then the U.S. has fallen a lot further than I'd suspected.
Citizens who can't understand a town warrant, a letter from the IRS, or their bank statement are in need of help, not recrimination: it's easier, cheaper, and a lot more positive to recognize and deal with the issue than to sweep - or to assume others will sweep - it under a rug.
Bill Horne P.S. According to Wired magazine, it was Scott McNealy of Sun:
"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.
"Get over it."
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Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
People sometimes think it's "big brother government" they must fear to protect their privacy, but actually the private sector is a big threat. The private sector can be very aggressive in checking someone's past out. Computerization and communication make it hard to hide past indiscretions.
As an example, many college graduates today are finding jobs scarce after prospective employers do a check and discover rather risque websites the student hosted or participated in, or other incidents of rambunctious behavior. Stuff that used to be forgotten as a collegiate indiscretion now comes back to haunt people in their future.
Yes, I do think people should be accountable for their actions, so a college kid who has a DWI or other offense deserves some punishment for it. However, I do not think such one-time mistakes should haunt a kid for the rest of his life (if the kid has a record of multiple drinking or other criminal offenses, that's another story). If a kid had a risque web page, it shouldn't hold them back in the future.
Some college kids also get caught up in sweeps, such as a raid on a party where everyone is charged, or perhaps a 22 y/o senior discovers the hard way that his girlfriend wasn't 18 but 16 and thus underage.
I agree that people named in newspaper articles may regret it down the road, thanks to computerization and powerful search engines.
Well, suppose your son is able to conquer his LD, but down the road some employer finds out about it in a background check. He won't know _why_ he was denied a job, but in a competitive market, such things will matter.
It used to [be] typical, in stories about the disabled, to disguise the name of the person to protect their privacy. There could still be stories about the disability but privacy [was] protected.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Substitute "helplessness" for "privacy", and I'll agree with your last paragraph. Unfortunately, the United States and its allies are no longer able to enjoy so myopic a perspective.
When a child falls off the American Dream Assembly Line [tm], the hardest thing he hits on the way down is the fact that _nobody_ wants to hear it, and the nobody includes his parents.
The hardest lesson that we parents of LD children learn is that when our child falls off the American Dream Assembly Line [tm], _everybody_ wants to tell us that we should "just" put the kid back on, by any means necessary. Very few ever, ever, question the reasons for this knee-jerk reaction - suffice to say that the view from the factory floor isn't very comforting to those who are still on the assembly line, and the thought of being left behind, looking up, while others glide to their carefully planned future is as scary as any thought a middle-class minion can experience.
The American Dream Assembly line [tm] has been running for a very long time, so here's a history lesson:
At the start of the industrial revolution, the Robber Barons who grew rich exploiting a cheap and plentiful supply of emmigrants found themselves in short supply of competent administrators to manage and support that pool of labor: it's easy to train Jurgis Rudkus to shovel guts, but surprisingly difficult to train the army of bureaucrats needed to make an industry operate in a mechanical age: bookkeepers, accountants, engineers, buyers, sellers, managers, etc. The class of educated people available at that time in history were, literally, gentlemen; i.e., they considered themselves to be the social equals of the barons and expected to be treated and paid as such. Their loyalty, morover, was to their peers, not to their employer, so that they had no qualms about striking out on their own when conditions were propitious - Andrew Carnegie, for example, was a manager of the Pennsylvania railroad before he founded United States Steel, and was responsible for innovations that last to this day, such as that of installing signals so trains could run at night.
Afraid that their minions would become their competitors, the barons decided that a cheap and plentiful supply of bureaucrats was in order: they knew that they had to prepare for the future, and they knew that if they didn't do it, their competitors would, so they decided to invest in education. In prototypical American fashion, they externalized the cost onto the taxpayers.
Little Red Schoolhouses, where the kids helped each other, and cooperation was encouraged, were suddenly out-of-fashion. In the name of a more properous America, schools were, almost overnight, changed to accomodate the needs of industry. Students were told to sit behind individual desks (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) and were given indiviually measured tasks to perform (stop me when this starts to sound familiar), which tested their ability to attend to oceans of minutiae (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) and which included the rote memorization of esoteric information (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) and incredibly boring and repetitive arithmetic calculations (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) under time preasure (stop me when this starts to sound familiar) in competition with their peers.
In other words, public education as we know it today: it is an assembly line intended to guarantee a cheap and plentiful supply of loyal minions to tend the assembly lines of industry. Of course, the robber barons didn't feel the need to see any future beyond their own: those children who didn't find themselves able to learn the date of birth of Paul Revere were, I presume, thought to belong in the reject bin which is at the end of any assembly line. They didn't count (pun intended), then or now.
Children do not "conquer" learning disabilities. They either find one of the niches were their abilities can be profitably expressed (art, terrorism, sports, crime, politics, entrepreneurship, etc.), or they spend their lives in the reject bin (prisons, welfare, subsistence jobs, etc.)
I no longer suppose that my son will "conquer" his LD, because that notion led to a war between my wife and he and me that lasted until I accepted that he was never supposed to be on the American Dream Assembly Line [tm], would never be able to get back on it, and could not now, nor ever, succeed by either of us pretending he ever belonged there in the first place.
In a competitive market, we need to exploit the abilities of the whole population, not just the skills of those who managed to traverse an assembly line dedicated only to the convenience of nineteenth-century factory owners. The United States, you see, is now in a market that competes all across the globe, and either we make use of the parts in our reject bin or we wait for our competitors to do it.
My son has just been awarded Eagle Scout [tm] rank in the Boy Scouts of America. He earned it by facing his challenges, taking advantage of his strengths, and by getting the help he needed, even though I must admit it was almost too late when I decided to seek it. He doesn't want or need "privacy", and neither do I: we both want the world to judge him by his achievements, not his disabilities.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
Copyright (C) 2008 Bill Horne. All Rights Reserved.
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I find this an extreme reaction. Many children with difficulties like these go on to be fully functional adults. James Earl Jones had a horrible stutter when he was a child.
I can't believe that anyone interviewing someone for a job would go back and check how well they did in grade school.
And I'm sure that the NYT had to get Mr. Gaudet's parent's permission to include his name in the article.
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