THE WOEFUL STATUS OF AMERICAN EDUCATION - V

MY LAST WORD ON THIS SUBJECT (PERHAPS)

In prior post I have voiced my opinion on the negative results that politicians, school boards and watered down curriculum text have on our education system.   There is one other issue that has a pronounced effect on the outcome of a child’s education, and unfortunately it is a social effect that has no present solution. 

Let me reemphasize that teacher’s training and performance is not the problem.   Teachers presently meet demanding standards, constant evaluation and continuing education requirements that ensure their competency.  

However, having said this, all education content and societal beliefs of our teachers are not equal.   Teachers that matriculate through southern schools and southern colleges are extremely likely to carry religious beliefs into their classroom that conflict with hard factual information. 

Religion is, and always has been the enemy of enlightenment and free thinking.  

After retiring from teaching in Alaska, my wife and I moved to Kentucky, where we substituted in the local school system.   I took long term substitution positions in science, math and literature: generally the results of maternity leaves.  

When teaching science and biology I was told not to cover the family tree of man (Australopithecus to Homo sapiens – the timeline of mankind.)   I was told that that was one of a number competing theories and that it was best not to deal with it as it would cause parents to complain. 

 

Some of the teachers in the school kept Bibles on their desk; one of the teachers had a number of books entitled Chicken Soup for the Soul that she encouraged students to read; and at one high school assembly a Christian church group came in and gave a presentation on abstinence, complete with religious songs and Bible references. 

It was not an unusual thing in Kentucky for students to wear tea-shirts asking What Would Jesus Do.  

I also did a stent as president of Adult Literacy Council for the county.  One of the adult students was a Mexican named Jesus – the local community had refused to call him Jesus and so had nicknamed him Joe.  

I could go on and on listing the instances of religious compromise permeating the education system of that county; but, I must state that the school was a reflection of the norm of the community in general. 

The schools turned out students that were proficient in math, computer science and language arts.   The school also had an excellent shop program.  

The points of failure for most southern and many mid-western school systems is the blatant deficiency in science, civics and social studies, as well as the development of critical thinking skills.   This is the results of religious influences in the community that interject themselves into the school curriculum - often through the teachers. 

the Ol’Buzzard 

CAN EMPATHY SAVE THE HUMAN RACE?

It seems I often borrow from the blog Squalto’s Rant – and it is true.

Today I have co-opted the following video that he posted.  

This is the type of video that if you begin watching you must watch to the end.   The premise of the video is that human beings are moving toward empathy for all life on the earth and concern for the earth’s ecology in general.    

This is a consummation much to be desired.   Jeremy Rifkin is representative of a far left liberal thinker with a great ability to connect with his audience.   He leaves you feeling that there is hope for human empathy because of the evolutionary development of the human brain which has been stimulated by the technical advancements is communication. 

Being a cynical old fart I tend to see the down side to this argument.  Human empathy hasn’t changed much since four million years ago when Australopithecus walked across the savanna in Africa, picked up a stick, went over a hill and beat the brains out of his neighbor and fucked his female.  

We live in a tribal society and we don’t much concern ourselves for the tribes over the hill.    We seek validation from our family, our church, or racial identity or our local or national identity.  We decide which cult gratifies us the most and that is where we place our allegiance, while decrying other cults that do not stroke our ego.  

Abraham Maslow was an American professor of Psychology who defined the human hierarchy of needs.   People develop from the most basic needs of fulfillment toward the highest level of Actualization.   People can not move into a higher level until they are secure in the levels below them. 

The steps defined are:

PSYCHOLOGICAL: Breathing, food, water, waste, sleep, warmth, freedom from fear and freedom from sickness.

SAFETY: Physical security, family security, psychological security and financial security.

LOVE AND BELONGING: Friendships, family, sexual intimacy, group identity.

SELF-ESTEEM: Self respect, Respect of others. 

SELF-ACTUALIZATION: Able to embrace facts and realities, spontaneous, creative, problem solving, caring for others, morality independent of authority and judge the world objectively.  

Many people throughout the world today (including in the United States) are stuck in the SAFETY level – concerned with basic survival. 

A good majority in this country are striving to BELONG – to seek gratification through a social network.

Very few of society are secured enough to be striving in the ESTEEM level.  

And, an even smaller percentage (which must includes Jeremy Rifkin, - the producer of the video) find themselves secure enough to have reached SELD ACTUALIZATION.  

Only the people in the SELF ACTUALIZATION level have the security and ability to be truly empathetic for the human race specifically and all other living things in general. 

Add to this the high percentage of blatant human ignorance:  The IQ is represented by a Bell Curve. 

The top of the curve is declared to be 100 , with  fifty percent of the people above the curve and fifty percent below the curve.  The up side of the Bell Curve represents from high average to superior  intellect – while the down side of the curve represents from average to below average intelligence. 

The 100 IQ point shifts according to demographics of population growth.  At the present time humans on the down side of the curve are breeding at a faster rate than those on the up side; which constantly skews the intelligence quota of the human race downward. 

SELF ACTUALIZATION is not in the reach of everyone.  Empathy is a pipe dream – though a beautiful one.  But the reality is that the human race is not programmed for the gentleness that empathy would require. 

I will watch the video again: maybe a few more times – for there is much presented that stimulates the thought processes.   But in the end we live in the real world where human egocentricity has not changed much in four million years. 

the Ol’Buzzard 

I AM NOT AMUSED

Excerpt from: TIMELINE, by Michael Crichton.

“Everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time.   Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet list and animated graphics, so executives aren’t board.   Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us.   Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear.   Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television.   Students must be amused – everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties.   This is the intellectual reality of western society at the end of the century… The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom.   A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do.   A sense that we are not amused.”

Crichton not only writes a great story in TIMELINE, but between the lines are truisms that jump out at you if you read carefully.  

Look at today’s Republican Presidential caucuses – very few people are interested in the actual policies, and the future results these policies would have on the nation at large.   People hear only what they want to hear, and they will switch if their candidate is not amusing. 

Regardless of Democrat or Republican; any politician that dares deal with the dry, realistic, real politics of a party, without amusing, is dead in the water.  

Dead in the water: Along with that line of thought – by all means read Crichton’s EATERS OF THE DEAD (later repackaged as THE 13^th. WARRIOR.) 

the Ol'Buzzard

THE PERIL OF APATHY

IF YOU ARE NOT WORRIED; YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

To be truly free would be: to be free of all government constrains – to live a life of independence and make choices without conformity to other people's ideas and desires.   This sounds wonderful, but would require a regression to a hunting and gathering society. 

A free man - Jim Bridger - mountain man

Interaction with society is a necessary evil, and societies need governments to organize and run infrastructures, protect resources, oversee commerce and establish a judicial system that looks out for the rights of individuals.  

Corporations are not people – they are not individuals:  they are gangs or cults that are in the business of exploiting the needs of people in order to make a profit.  Their natural inclination is to make a profit at any cost.  Like any gang, mob or organized group of people, corporations have a persona and the person characteristics of an individual; and, just like individuals, it survives through the Darwinian principal of adjust to change or die.   No corporation operates for the benefit of man kind unless it is convenient for its business model. 

The ideal purpose of government is to furnish and maintain the things that an individual is not capable of alone: roads, bridges, mass transit, health care, police, fire and rescue services and protection of the environmental; but also for protection of the individual from the exploitation of corporations and other cults and organized groups. 

No government has ever operated primarily for the good of the individual.  Our government is no exception.   But now, more than ever, the United States is in real danger of being co-opted and moved in the direction of authoritarian rule. It is not operating for the welfare of the individual, but instead has become the tool of corporate greed and religious cults - whose goal it is to exploit and subjugate the individual.

The trend of the U.S. government at this time, especially as driven by the Republican right, is to go far beyond servicing the individual.   The government is now being manipulated by the class of wealthy people, who profit from the corporations, in order to accumulate more wealth.  

Even more dangerous is the cult of religious extremist who, through the Republican Party, are attempting to co-opt influence in the government, with the aim of creation a Christian theocracy.  Under the banner of ‘less government and family values’ these organized mobs, like a moral Gestapo, would insert themselves into our most private and personal lives; decreeing what we should believe, what we should learn, what we should read, and controlling our sexual and reproductive choices.   They would legislate laws giving preference to ‘White Americans’; they would establish English as the national language and Christianity as the national religion.  These extreme Christian groups are no longer a minority voice, but are represented by the Republican majority.  They would revel in an opportunity to establish Christian Shariah law and bring back the inquisition to persecute those who dare to believe or think differently.  

The parallels to Orwell’s 1984 are startling.   We have lost the guarantee of trial by jury under the hypocritical name of The Freedom Act.   The government now has the authority to access our e-mails and track our internet activity, they can read our letters and even monitor the books we check out at the library without proving just cause and seeking judicial approval.  We can be arrested and held indefinitely without trial and even detained by the military and tried by a military tribunal. 

The loss of these Constitutional rights is trivial when compared to the America proposed by the Tea Party – fundamentalist Christian co-opted Republican Party.   We could find ourselves moved back – not to the 1950’s – but to a new Dark Ages where the Bible would replace our Bill of Rights. 

 

During the Stalin era the Communist Manifesto claimed that war with the America was not necessary because the U.S would fall “like an over ripe plumb” because of the inequality among its people. 

Communist Russia in no longer a threat and the economic inequality has surely increased; but the real threat is ignorance and religious fanaticism.  

the Ol'Buzzard

THE SUBJECT NO ONE WANTS TO TALKABOUT

Back to the HOKEY POKEY

I know that people don’t care to sit down and read long post.   Like everything else in this time of computers, twitter and cell phones, people want to read a few paragraph from a blog they are following, make a comment and then move on to the next post.

For this reason I have decided to breach the subject of DEATH in two or even three installments.

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far from being on a cruise ship.   Most of your time is spent lying on your back.  The brain has shut down.   The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens and nothing is esxpected of you." 

STIFF, by Mary Roach

I recently attended the funeral of my wife’s aunt.  It is not the first funeral I have attended, but the first commercial funeral I have attended in a long time.   That funeral and my approaching birthday (no. 72) have me rethinking about death; and how death is handled by different cultures and how it is perceived by different individuals.   As I have said before: Death is the final debt we owe to nature for our time alive on this earth – but that’s bull shit.   I don’t question so much why I must die; but the real question seems to be why have I lived?

The only answer I can surmise seems to be that at some random point in time, one of the millions of sperms in one of my fathers random ejaculations (who ever the hell he was) happened to connect with a random egg passing through my mothers uterus.  The whole thing seems perfectly random: I am here via the butterfly effect described in the Chaos Theory.   I am a random male, that had a random birth, that has made random choices in life, that has led me to be a random old man, expecting a random death at sometime in the random future.

Without getting any more metaphysical than that, in the following post I will write about how death is handled in our culture, and how it differs from the death rituals I experienced while living in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska.

But first a little background.

From the earliest times death has been feared and misunderstood by man.   Early humans left their dead for the animals and the environment to consume, as evident by early archeological finds.   Early man was fearful of the unknown, fearful of death and fearful of the dead; and somewhere along his cognitive development the idea of gods and ghost and an afterlife evolved.

Early Neanderthal burial vaults have been discovered that contained weapons and personal artifacts, evidence of a belief in an afterlife.   Pharoses of Egypt were entombed with riches, personal belongings and even slaves.   Michael Crichton describes a Viking funeral pyre in his book Eaters of the Dead in which all preparations were made for the Viking chief’s journey to Valhalla. (Though fiction, Crichton researched his material thoroughly.)

Now we have the advent of major religions and their drive to take control of death



Ars Moriendi (The art of dying), a Latin text dating about 1415, contains woodblock prints presenting the Christians’ dilemma at the time of death.  



The dying man is surrounded on one side by the demons of hell and on the other side by saints and angles.   A battle is in progress for the dying man’s soul.   The only chance this man has is for the last rites to be administered in order to purify his soul so that he might be received sinless by the body of angles.   Early Catholics feared the prospect of sudden death because dying unconsecrated could result in being abducted by demons into the inferno of hell.

The early Catholic Church, with its doctrine of purgatory, was able to manipulate huge financial benefit from the policy of priest receiving money to pray to the saints for the deceased’s speedy trip through purgatory.  The more someone paid the more prayers the priest would offer – thus insuring the rich man a prominent place in the heavenly realm.

(Side note: even today the Catholic Church is one of the biggest individual owners of funeral homes in the city of New York – again profiting from death.)

Notice the early church was all about men going to heaven – the Christian church has never be overly concerned about women, other then to pose them as wanton, temptresses, debasers of men and the cause of original sin.

The image of The Church as the protector from death was lain bare during the mid-14th century when the Black Death swept through Europe, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.   During that time traditional burial customs collapsed as most victims were consigned to mass graves.   It has been claimed that not only the dead, but also the dying were buried in public pits in an attempt to stem the contagion.

Today death is a big business.   Funeral homes are never short of business and they prey on the grief of surviving family members to sell the biggest and most elaborate death ritual the family can afford.   Cemetery lots increase the value of land from cost per acre to cost per square foot.   Massive cemeteries blanket our country and tie up valuable land from productive use for the many centuries to come.

The dead in our culture are feared and considered an unnatural macabre spectacle to be endured, avoided and dispensed with as fast as possible.   Death is a damn profitable business, and the major recruiting tool for religions of the world.

I know reading a post about death is a bummer - but maybe it can help you

LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE



The Ol'Buzzard

ATHEISM

Last Friday Bill Maher was prodding a Christian conservative on his program with the fact the Christians can be and have been as violent as Muslim fundamentalist. The panelist had obviously rehearsed her response before being a on his show: her answer to his taunt was that Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia were atheistic countries that basked in blood baths.




I am always agog at the simplistic, head in the sand bull shit these morons use to defend the violence of religion.



Again (earlier blog,) she was trying to invoking a negative: Atheism is not a religion or an organized movement with tenants to adhere to and believe in, so you can’t really identify anything as being atheist. It is simply that atheist can’t bring themselves to believe the fantastic lunacy that you are required to believe in as a member of an organized religion - a tenet of beliefs that the religious wish to inflict on all others.



Conservative arguments are usually summed up with ten second catch phrases; so I have an atheistic one for the Christian conservatives that pretty much explains atheism:

God and Jesus!
Are you nuts?


thanks to the blog Dumb Perignon for the link to the above clip.

the Ol'Buzzard

WHAT THE FUCK!

You ever have one of those days and you look at the world around you and say “What the Fuck!” Going through Blogs today and seeing rants about religion and politics – child killing and mistrials – global warming and genocide – corporate malfeasants – war and soldiers dying – government corruption – pandemics and environmental destruction; and in general stupid people doing stupid things.







The fact is that 400 children die every hour from cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, hepatitis; every year millions of people – most are children – die from starvation; there is a rape every three minutes and a murder every twelve minutes. These are things we could correct, but we don’t give a fuck. We are focused on petty politics, inconsequential news and sports.






You get what you pay for; or in this case you get what you deserve. We celebrate death and war, we focus on the trivial, we make up gods to tell ourselves we are special and we ignore what we don’t wish to deal with.






The human race is a producer – but other than the ability to make things we are a pitiful and destructive life form. In fact we have produced ourselves into a technological dark age where common sense and basic intelligence no longer applies. We walk around with cell phones and i-pads absorbed in the fantasy world of the World Wide Web.






We need to go out and touch base with reality: do physical work – fuck somebody – get drunk. I think that’s a prescription I need.


Have a good day


the Ol”Buzzard