Month: February 2012

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America is Failing Its Children


I think everyone has heard the expression, “You have champagne tastes and a beer budget.”  Well, that is exactly the American mindset these days.  I will qualify  my remarks by stating that for the past four years I have worked as a teacher in the primary grades at a public school.  Not only that, the particular school is in the poor section of a blue-collar city.  The kids, for the most part, are absolutely wonderful.  The majority of them are of first or second generation Hispanic background.  The next ethnic groups are Brazilians, Haitians, people from India, and Tibet.  The caucasian population of the school is around 20% or less.

Four years ago this school suffered a devastating fire that displaced the students to two other aging schools.  Both of the buildings were built in the 1930s.  The students are still a year away from occupying the rebuilt school.  The reason for the long delay is mostly political but under the guise of financial.  To be certain the city does not have the financial means to build a new school quickly, but the state has more red tape than is reasonable.  Unfortunately, occurences such as this are not unusual for America’s cities.  To really understand the challenge you must look only at the city proper and not its extensive suburbs.  What is the economic background of each city?  What does its tax base look like?  What does a cross-section of its inhabitants look like?  All these factors, and more, actively feed into each city’s ability to educate its young.

You can go to the Federal Government’s census site and see a map that shows the distribution of wealth by city in the U.S.  What you will find is the central large cities and their immediate suburbs, as a rule, have significantly lower wealth than its more distant suburbs.  This is important because the ability of any municipality is directly tied to its wealth.  The Federal Government and the individual states do take measures to mitigate this inequality but it is still very skewed.

To fairly evaluate each community it is necessary to consider the challenges the face each.  In Massachusetts, Sherborn, a community of 4200 has a median income of $186,000 while Lawrence, a city of  70,000, has a median income of $36,600.  Lawrence has a school population of roughly 19,000 while Sherborn’s is roughly 1,400.  Lawrence is a distinctly Hispanic city while Sherborn is populated mostly by people whose first language is English.  What does that have to do with anything?  Simple, by law communities are tasked with providing an education that addresses the needs of its student base.  If that base is comprised by a large number of students who have English as their second language, it adds a level of difficulty.

This is just one of the many problems faced by schools located in America’s cities.  These are problems that the far suburbs and rural America do not experience.  obstacles such as poverty, transportation, child care, crime, are just a few of external issues cities deal with.  But they also have to build modern facilities with good educational tools, computers, labs, books, and attract the best staff possible are huge obstacles to America’s cash strapped cities.

In considering the quality of education any one student receives, you must first consider what is that student’s educational environment.  Is the building that student enters large enough, and equipped well enough to meet that student’s needs?  Or is it overcrowded, broken down, and out-dated?  Does the community have the funding level to compete with other localities in the state in attracting the best teachers available or must it rely upon something less?  To put a point on that last question, consider that most school districts require that its teachers obtain a master’s degree within a certain amount of time from hiring, if they do not already possess one.  The average salary for someone with a master’s degree in excess of $75,000.  The average salary of a teacher with a master’s degree is $50,000.  That is a serious problem!  Even more, consider the fact that someone with a master’s degree in math can command in excess of $100,000 why would they opt for something less, or, why would they not consider their options outside of teaching should they become disenchanted?

The thing is, this whole political argument about how education is failing our children is very disingenuous.  The problem starts mainly with those in politics failing to accept that they themselves have set unreasonable standards of education given the level of funding they are willing to commit.  It is similar to saying “Here is $25,000.  I want you to go out and bring back a new Cadillac.”  How is that possible?  It quite simple is not!  The offer that a voucher system will resolve such problems!  Really?  Same level of funding but changing the distribution model, how does that improve education?

America, if you want your kids better educated, if you want all Americans better educated, you have to stop kidding yourselves that there is any equality in the quality of education from one locality to another.  And before you can expect a better education system, you are going to have to address each and every problem urban educators are faced with.

 

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Spirituality and the Spirit World


I am dealing with two separate concepts here, but are they connected?  I think they are and I will explain myself.  But even if you cannot be convinced of the existence of spirits, I think it wise to accept the idea of spirituality.

A number of months ago a woman, who also happens to be a physician, told me she does not believe in spirituality.  More commonly, though, are people who do not know what spirituality means.  I was such a person even though I firmly believed in the concept.  But one day a woman asked me what spirituality meant to me.  I could not give her an answer and so I set out to figure it out.

The example I love to use as a particularly spiritual moment, and the one I suggested to the physician, is that moment when a child is born.  That moment between mother, father, and baby is an instant when you feel strongly drawn to each other, happiness fills you, and you feel a thrill like none other.  That is probably one of the most spiritual moments any human being can experience, in my opinion.  There are, of course, any number of other and different situations that are truly spiritual.  I think any moment when an individual feels at peace and filled with a joy of experiencing something qualifies as a spiritual moment.

I believe everyone experiences many spiritual moments throughout their lives.  Anytime something happens and two people enjoy the exact same feeling, and, know without saying a word to each other that they feel exactly the same exemplifies this.  But I take that one step further.  I believe there is a particular type of energy shared by those two people.  That energy flows evenly between them.  That leaves the question, is there truly real energy that flows between these people?  I believe the answer to be an emphatic yes.  That being true means that something real, if not tangible, travels from one person to another, energy.

Back in the early 20th Century Albert Einstein offered that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.  This is 0ne of the basic facts of physics and physicists have proven this to be fact in a million different ways.  There is no debate on that subject whatsoever.  Because of that simple fact a noted physicist, whose name I do not remember, remarked when asked about the possibility of spirits commented that it is certainly well within the realm of possibility.  It is not uncommon to hear about a person’s life-force.  Is that force a real thing, a type of energy?  Again, I think that it is in no small part because of one very simple principle.  We are the only animal on the planet that knows it is going to die.  This particular sort of consciousness, I believe, may well be our life-force.

About 20 years ago, or so, I read a series of books by the author Mary Summer Rain.  She wrote a number of books known as the “No-eyes Series.”  They were then, and are now, considered “New Age” books, whatever that means.  Mary Summer Rain is a full blood Shoshone who was brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition in Colorado.  Her books are written in the first person as they are an autobiographical account of her years when she was learning the ways of the shaman.  One book in particular, “Spirits Aloft,” recounts her encounters with the spirit world.  I chose then, and choose now, to believe her accounts.  There is nothing in any of her books that leads me to believe that she is concocting anything she has written.

I wrote a while back of my questioning the existence of God.  This concept, however, I believe exists independently of God.  I do believe, however, that spirits have a leg or two up on us in grasping God conceptually, and may well get such an answer immediately upon death.  But what I do not believe in are the reports by people who have experienced “near death” and their seeing a white light and other sensations.  I think all such experiences are fully explainable within the physical world where we live.

Physicists are presently discussing the possibility of as many as 11 dimensions, the three we live in plus another 8.  I think it highly likely that when our existence in our life dimensions ends we can well enter into one or more of the other 8 dimensions.

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Is This the Year We Return to 1912


I have a great deal of knowledge about 1912 in the U.S. because I did my master’s degree thesis on that year.  I am certain that more than one of you will wonder how I can possibly ask such a question considering what things were like then and what they are like now.  I am going to present here what 1912 looked like in many of America’s east coast and mid-American cities.  The west coast was not at all developed save for San Francisco, and to a lesser degree, Seattle.

Child labor

Child labor, such as seen above, was unfortunately very commonplace in 1912.  Many states had labor laws restricting children under the age of 14 from working in factories.  But states such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama had no such laws and children as  young as 10 were found in workplaces.  The picture above was taken in North Carolina in 1908.

These children were sent to work at such a young age because working class families were having great difficulties in just putting food on their tables.  Of course they also had trouble with living conditions, health care, and clothing.  They were forced to make choices between buying a pair of shoes or buying a loaf of bread.  The people most affected with the new immigrants of the day, mainly eastern and southern Europeans.

The early 1900s saw the rise of the Progressive movement.  These were people who immersed themselves frequently in immigrant neighborhoods.  Most notably were Jane Addams who founded “Hull House” in Chicago to help immigrant women, and Margaret Sanger who brought her nursing skills to the lower east side of New York to help the immigrant women there.  Both women believed that health care in the United States failed to meet the needs of these immigrants.  These immigrants clustered in particular portions of America’s cities.  These people were viewed as ignorant and draining the resources of the communities they lived in as well as taking jobs for those born in America.

Lawrence MA 1912

Images like the one above were unfortunately very common in 1912 but are we heading in that same direction today?

In 1912 there was no federal tax on personal income.  People took home every penny they earned.  Still, America’s wealth existed largely in the hands of a very few.  Industrialists of the day joined associations dedicated to their particular product.  These associations in turn lobbied Congress to do their will, usually successfully.  They convinced Congress that their desires were always good for all Americans.

In 1912 unions were extremely weak, and seldom won any strikes.  Industry was largely unregulated.  Child labor laws were basically non-existent.  There was no minimum wage.

I am not suggesting that we are definitely going to return to just the way it was in 1912, that would be foolish.  What I am saying is, there are those who are trying to change existing laws that would effectively return us to a state similar to that in 1912.