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!

I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

I don’t think you have met Mr. Whitman’s poem let me introduce him to you.

First forget everything you learned at school and just imagine you, yourself are Walt Whitman’s poem – the big poem, the one that contains and encompasses EVERYTHING and EVERYONE and ALL TIME. You are full of lists of everything. “Work-box, chest, string’d instrument, boat, frame, and what not,”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are full of Walt Whitman, “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You are constantly in contradiction and constantly resolving your contradictions.  You are here and now and then: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem and you are and always have been waiting for you to read you, “I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

Imagine that you are Walt Whitman’s poem. You have been waiting for you to hear your rhythms, your cadences, “you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”

A Truly Great Blog

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What can we do to bring something back into the commons?

What can we do to bring something back into the commons?

We need to assure that we elect honest, intelligent, thoughtful representatives to public office. Representatives who are financially free from influence by corporations and/or wealthy individuals. In the USA that would mean completely reforming our election system and creating strict regulations to assure that the reforms stayed in place. (Hardin)

We need an educated, well-informed citizenry, who are watchful, as opposed to apathetic, and demand that the common good be protected and regulated without pressure from biased groups or from greed. (Singer)

In Ohio, public schools were established by the state legislature in 1825. From the beginning schools were open to all white children in the community. “The school law of 1853 required school boards to establish  separate schools for African American children if there were more than thirty children (in the district), boards could operate integrated schools if no parents objected. In 1887 school law revoked authority to maintain separate schools, requiring school boards to provide the same educational opportunities to students of all races.”http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Public_Schools?rec=2209

While there is a long history of agreement that all children should be educated, and lip service, but not dollars, to the idea that all children should be educated to their full potential -- the reality has been that Ohio's goal for most black children is that they be educated only to a level at which they can function within the laws of the community and provide for themselves at a minimum economic level that will prevent them from needing assistance from the state.

Ohio’s charter school movement was created in the late 90’s by Republican legislators who publicly stated noble goals and privately arranged for the transfer of seven billion public tax dollars – sorely needed by the public schools -- to private for-profit corporations.  Instead of increasing funds to improve public urban schools, Republicans shamelessly channeled tax dollars to enrich the rich. Hundreds of charters opened in former pet supermarkets, empty car dealerships, warehouses, and abandoned school buildings - most of them in high minority population areas. The results are the usual consequences of greed: Thirty-three percent of new Ohio charter schools close within two years. Eighty-three out of the bottom 84 schools in Ohio are charter schools. Large urban public school districts continue to decline while billions are misspent.

A similar pattern of greed and decline can be seen in higher education in Ohio. The Republican controlled legislature has steadfastly withheld support from the state’s universities while encouraging the growth of for-profit colleges specifically by intentionally refusing to create publicly funded competition with the for-profits by creating flexible schedules, online courses, and local sites that would attract the 12% of Ohio’s students enrolled in for-profits – most of whom are veterans and low-income students. Final tuition costs at for-profit colleges are more than twice the cost of a public college. For-profits account for 25 percent of federal financial aid (over $30 billion annually nationally) and 45 percent of student loan default.

I do not have a favorite poem.

I do not have a favorite poem.

A poem is something that happens to you without intention or choice.

Backing  out of your garage, you hit the building and knock off your sideview mirror. The rest of the day you see things differently.  

Whitman is like that. Who gets up in the morning and says, I think I’ll meet someone today who is so absolutely weird, someone I can’t forget, can’t ever escape. Whitman happens to you. You don’t happen to Whitman.

You are tired. You stumble around the kitchen late at night trying to get a glass of water, you drop the bottle, step on the glass, your foot is bleeding.  You would never make a plan to have that wound.

Shakespeare is like that. You would never choose  to know  the world is that cruel, that horrible, that beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. You only meant to go to a play or do your reading assignment and you will never be the same again.

You can read poetry, and close read it and turn it inside out and shake it,  but a poem is something that happens to you.

When I'm Sixty-Five

I've been sixty-five for almost a year now. 

June 14th, I quit the job that I had been doing for forty some years. 
I walked away because I felt that I was too ill to continue being of much real value, and that attempting to work on would hinder any chance I might recover at least some of my health.

I miss my friends and the common purpose and community that we formed. And so I'm stuck. Unable to go back and unable to move forward.

Its the dead of winter. I'm frozen in the snow.