The Persistence of Poverty

The late Pete Seeger sang a song about two maggots that fell off a manure wagon. One fell into a dead cat, the other fell into a dusty crack in the road. After several days, the maggot that fell into the crack is nearly dead. He finally crawls back up to the road where he finds his brother fat and happy atop the dead cat. “What do you attribute your success in life?” he asks. His brother replies, “Brains and Personality, brother! Brains and Personality.”

I’ve lived in Ohio for over sixty years. I’ve never known hunger, never lacked for shelter or comfort of any kind. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep worrying that my children would not be educated to their potential, suffer from violence or crime, or not turn out to be the happy productive middle-aged people they have become. I attribute those things, not to brains or personality or hard work but to the fact that the last six generations of my family - back to the early 1800’s - were white Americans with college educations. Some folks in those six generations were sure they deserved their white skins and their money. Some weren’t so ungrateful.  I’ve always known that I’m like the maggot that landed in the dead cat. Just lucky.

A lot of people in those six generations were doctors or teachers -- professions that deal directly with poverty. I taught for thirty-some years in a district where eighty percent of the students were children who live in poverty and neglect. The lives of minority children in a America are often as harsh and brutal as many in underdeveloped countries. Millions of minority children attend schools which fail to prepare them for a future of beyond poverty. Schools where they are daily subjected to violence, drug abuse, and crime. More than a quarter of the students in my school district were in foster homes. Many in their fourth or fifth placement before they were 18.

Jeffrey Sacks describes the four step progression from a subsistence economy, to a commercial economy, to an emerging-market economy, to a technology-based economy. During the four decades I taught in a low-income suburb outside of Dayton,  I watched as Sacks’ progression steps moved backwards! Manufacturing left, retailing moved out, infrastructure and education funding declined sharply. Personal and family poverty steadily increased along with violence, crime, and child neglect.

I know my efforts had some effects. But I’m not the sort of person who is proud when they have just done a little. In the Nineteen-Forties, one of my grandfathers was the sheriff of a very small county in southern Kentucky. He was troubled that the sixteen black children in his town couldn’t read or write. Unwilling or perhaps unable to fight for their right to go to the public school with white children, he used his own money to build a schoolhouse next to his home and enlisted his grown children to teach there when they came home from college. He never bragged about it, because I think he knew he had only done a little of what needed to be done.

I think Sachs is right - technology and science have given us the tools to end poverty. But we have to accomplish and maintain  all of the four steps to make real progress. A lot of folks in America don’t know that they are just lucky. Somehow we have to convince the people who fell off the wagon into the dead cat to help out instead of stand in the way.

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Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth and http://goo.gl/9U8PBA

American educators were activists

After a half century of teaching in American public schools and much experience to the contrary, I still believe that good teachers are the most powerful individuals in their community and by extension on the planet. In each of the areas that we have studied in this course, poverty, disease, climate change, gender inequality, ultimately the root of a solution to the problem is education. For American students that means the hard facts of the state of human rights throughout the planet and an awareness of the complex connections that bind the well-being of women in repressive cultures to the well-being of every American have to become deeply integrated into the framework of our curriculum.

Here, I need to pause to make a qualification. A missionary teaching in his or her students in Uganda  that the Christian Bible instructs us that all homosexuals must be executed is not part of the solution. A racist white tea-party member teaching in a minority inner-city school in Ohio who sees the girls in his class as “drains on society” is not part of the solution. They are part of the problem,  but they must be taken into account because of the force against social good that they exert.

My generation of American educators were activists. In the early 70’s, we constructed a national revision in the teaching of social studies, history, and literature that emphasized global awareness and a rethinking of America’s historical role in world affairs.  Discussion of America’s support of apartheid in South Africa, and support for South American and Middle Eastern dictators  became part of the standard curriculum. Model UN’s sprouted up across the country - for the first time, tens of thousands of high school students did some deep research into global poverty, hunger, human rights, and gender inequality. Well and good, until conservative forces in the 80’s began to push the country back to “That’s their problem, not America’s problem” complacency.

Rapid globalization of production and the events of 9/11 woke us up. It has become clear now that girls and women like Malala  and the human rights of all women are connected to the peace and well-being of all Americans.Violent, repressive cultures commit violent globally disruptive acts. Repression slows the growth of the world’s economy to which we are now so completely entangled.(1.)

Martha Nussbaum reminds us that, “The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth.” (2.)

I do not want to leave the impression that all is well for girls and women in my country. It is not. The lives of minority women and girls in a America are often as harsh and brutal as in many in underdeveloped countries. Millions of minority girls attend schools which fail to prepare them for a future of well-being. Schools where they are daily subjected to violence and sexual abuse. More than a quarter of the girls in my school district are in foster homes. Many in their fourth or fifth placement before they are 18. Those who do succeed are those who fortunate to meet some of our most effective teachers. Teachers who know how to nurture intelligence and grit.  

My proposals are simple:

• Train, hire, and pay good teachers. To not hire the best is to fail.
• Teach a curriculum framed by global awareness. Ignorance is not acceptable.

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1.http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jul/30/phumzile-mlambo-ngcuka-un-women

2. Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach http://www.thenation.com/article/159928/what-makes-life-good#

Art can make arguments without distemper

For almost half a century I was an English teacher. It should not surprise then that Dr Haddad’s statement - that it is art that can make people care - struck a chord for me. Facts, reasons, consequences can be ignored. Art informs the heart, and only an informed heart acts with passion against difficulties.

For decades, since the first “Earth Day” in 1970, American teachers have included units on the environment and conservation of the wild. Most kids grew up hating pollution and loving rare animals. The discussion changed and became heated in the ’80’s when Reagan proposed opening the ancient Redwood forests of California to lumber corporations. Party lines were drawn and people concerned with the state of the planet became “Tree-Huggers” Global warming awareness in the scientific community unfortunately paralleled the rise of Fox News. In my classroom intelligent, science-based discourse ended as Fox News daily defined the battle lines. Students from “Fox News” families knew the Truth: Global Warming was a lie crafted by scientists to get grants, and reacted to any presentation of facts with loud disgust. 

I’m an English teacher, so I turned to poetry to channel the discussion to viewpoints my students hadn’t experienced before. The simple/complex nature poetry of Robert Frost opens up young eyes to their place in nature. I was lucky, my school was within walking distance of a beautiful state forest, so as soon as Frost got their heads in the woods, I took their feet there. An eight mile walk in the woods with a hundred fifteen year olds is more peaceful than you would imagine. The secret is the first five miles to get them tired. They slow down for the last three and start to look around and value what they see.

All of us will suffer the consequences of climate change, but the rich will suffer less than the poor. Some of my students lived in urban slums and others in run down rural shacks. On any given day someone may have laid on the floor all night because bullets had come through the wall of their apartment as they were watching TV, and someone else may have just come back from two days hunting deer with their dad. Deer that would be the main source of meat for their family that winter. Both students were responsive to images of the hunter and the hunted. 

The poets David Wagoner and Gary Snyder give powerful voice to the natural world. We read David Wagoner’s “Nine Charms against the Hunter” http://goo.gl/qWjpJF and Gary Snyder’s “Long Hair.” http://www.wenaus.com/poetry/gs-longhair.html

Art can make arguments without distemper. A great work of art can open hearts and minds that have been closed by lies. 

Therefore first, I am proposing that teachers teach those works that connect us to each other and the earth. Second, if in fact Dr. Haddad and I are right and it will be our artists who open the world's eyes, then they need to pick up their pens, cameras, and brushes and get to work today!