Institutionalize!

Hi Maggie,

I read the four secret steps. Perhaps the secret is to not get comfortable, not go to sleep.  I struggle most with understanding ego.  I can't tell if I'm egotistical or not.  I am the center of my world, but I think I have made room for others...if that's even a correct view...

Reading about your developing relationship with your possibly new foster son, and I would reverse the question. Why would you not put yourself out for him?  I wonder what your past life connections are!

I struggle with public education. I see it as an institution charged with forming an adequate, uncomplaining workforce.  It is based on competition - not everyone can get an A, grading on the curve - someone has to fail, it is devised to allow kids with a specific learning style to shine.  Others - well, their intelligence just isn't...it isn't good or worthwhile.  It is definitely based on obedience and conformity.  Ask permission to go to the bathroom?  Really?  And who is the good student?  The one who parrots the teacher.

This has become even worse since the original No Child Left Behind.  Friends who teach say they are simply teaching children to pass tests now, in order to maintain funding.  The law was recently revamped.  We'll see if there are any changes.

I was listening to Car Talk one Saturday morning and the brothers were talking about the lack of car technicians nowadays. Pay is improving, because there is competition for workers, not for jobs - as in other fields. This is true for all of the trades.  But we don't feel like successful parents unless our children gradulate from a university. What lingers in the back of my mind is a statement I read once, years ago:  More damage has been wrought on this planet with people with Ph. D.s than by any other group.

Schools don't teach critical thinking, nor do they applaud the individualist.

I was subbing in a middle school one day.  We were watching and discussing the documentary Supersize Me.  There was a segment where the guy doing the 'eat only McDonalds food for 30 days' experiment looked at school lunches.  Then he went to a school for kids with behavioral problems.  The school began a garden and most lunches came from their garden.  Behavioral problems diminished, simply because of the dietary change.

We watched, we discussed, we did the quiz.  These kids got it. They really understood the difference that came from eating whole foods.  After class, I followed them down to the cafeteria for lunch duty. Every single one of them ate shit.

That is what public school education is.

Worried about plastic in the environment?  Yet we buy plastic.  Understand the way animals are treated in a CAFO? Yet we eat cheap meat.  We demand cheap meat!

For some reason we have not made the connection between ourselves, our actions, and the way the world is. Public education!!!

I went to a used book store yesterday and found a revisionist history, Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.  Howard Zinn and his book, The People's History of the United States, changed my world.  I look for histories now that look at what happened from a fuller point of view, rather than from the pont of view of the winner.

What caught me last night, as I was reading, and I wanted to share it with you was the following passage:

Over the winter, as the Pilgrims continued to bury their dead surreptiously, Massasoit gathered together the region's powwows, or shamans, for a three day meeting "in a dark and dismal swamp."    Swamps were where the Indians went in time of war:  they provided a natural shelter for the sick and the old; they were also a highly spiritual landscape,where the unseen currents of the spirits intermingles with he hoots of owls.

Makes me wonder how sacred the swamp really is.  Maybe we have to muck around in it first, then climb out and see it in its entirety.

Hope you are having a productive day...

Love and hugs from Clare