|
Archives -
September, 2008
We Are All Born Artists – September 29, 2008
Canada’s incumbent neo-con “leader” Stephen Harper (I guess he is a leader…the
worry is
about where he might be leading us) recently made some controversial remarks
about the arts. He said that “ordinary people” – whoever they are –
aren’t interested in the arts and that the arts shouldn’t be funded by
governments. I hope the October 14 election will prove him to be as out of touch
as I think he is (or perhaps he’s just a highly skilled, cynical, power-hungry,
anti-intellectual and manipulative politician). At any rate, his divisive
comment is indicative of a commonly held belief that I think can be traced to
schools and the way they encourage slotting, labeling and the cult of experts.
Only those with extraordinary marks in drawing, singing, playing an instrument,
writing and the other “arts” are said to have talent…and therefore to
receive elite training to “become” painters, singers, musicians and writers.
Everybody else is in the other camp of non-artists. And that’s the end of the
story because there apparently isn’t enough money or time to nurture
everyone’s abilities. But as writer Margaret Atwood put it in a
newspaper column last week, to be creative is ordinary, a
normal human characteristic. We are all born creative; school wrings it out of
us. And I guess Stephen Harper likes it that way.
Posted: 2008/09/29 4:55 PM
What Would Happen if Schools Taught Kids to Think –
September 29, 2008
In the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, former Harper’s editor Lewis
Lapham writes about education, one of his pet topics. I’m a fan of Lapham’s
intellectualism and ideas more than I am of his writing. Although he sometimes
manages a brilliant turn of phrase, I often find myself drowning in the middle
of a paragraph-long sentence. But in this article, he does a good and timely job
of explaining why schools are the way they are, and of linking our current
economic and electoral stresses to that system of education.
“The tide of mediocrity flows into the classroom from the
ocean that is the society at large, and if many of our public schools resemble
penal institutions, the students herded into overcrowded classrooms where they
major in the art of boredom and the science of diminished expectations, how
better to accustom them to the design specs of a society geared to the blind and
insatiable consumption of mediocrity in all its political declensions and
commercial conjugations—cf. the Bush Administration’s geopolitical theory at
work in Iraq, innovative money managers collapsing the country’s banks,
corporate executives paid $20 million a year for performing the miracle of an
$18 billion write-down.”
Posted: 2008/09/29 4:05 PM
Two New Books Available for Pre-Publication Ordering
– September 23, 2008
My company Life Media will be publishing two new books this fall. Life Learning:
How Children Learn Without School is a collection of approximately 25 essays
about the philosophy and the experience of living the unschooling lifestyle.
These essays are some of the best articles from the last six years of Life
Learning magazine and we are very pleased to give them a longer life and broader
distribution. Ask Natural Life: A Guide to Healthy, Eco-Friendly Family Living
is an updated and expanded collection of my popular Ask Natural Life columns in
Natural Life magazine.
Projected publication date for both books is December 1, 2008 and we have a terrific
pre-publication order special on right now: Order before December 1 and we will
pay the shipping (a $10 to $14 savings!). You will find links to more information and to order them both
here.
Posted: 2008/09/23 11:50 AM
Happy World Car-Free Day – September 22, 2008Every year on this day, people around the world walk, bike and take public
transit while leaving their cars at home. World Car-Free Day is a great
educational and awareness tool, but we need to find ways to allow people to get
rid of their cars permanently. There are lots of good ideas on the
website.
Posted: 2008/09/22 4:38 PM
Change Needs to be on the Menu – September 18, 2008
On Tuesday evening for dinner, Rolf and I had zucchini stuffed with brown rice,
garlic and tofu, and a spinach salad with pears and grated Romano cheese. We got
sick. Today, I composted the remaining veggies. They were fresh, grown locally,
supposedly organic and well washed. We’re okay today, physically at least. And
we haven’t contracted Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (mad cow), kidney failure from
drinking formula containing melamine or listeriosis. However, I’m scared. Not
being able to trust the food you buy is scary.
So I wonder, why isn’t the safety of our food supply at
the top of the political agenda these days? After all, we’re in the middle of
election campaigns in both the U.S. and Canada, as well as a national listeriosis outbreak in
Canada, for which the death toll is still rising. Oh, and then there was that
bisphenol A research, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, suggesting the chemical found in plastic food containers could
cause heart disease and diabetes (despite the FDA’s recent assertion that it
is safe for humans). Also this week, an editorial in the Canadian Medical
Association Journal – not a particularly radical bunch – claims
Canada’s listeriosis problem is the “worst in the world” and slams Prime
Minister Harper’s government for undermining public health safeguards by
allowing the food industry to inspect itself. But the only time I’ve noticed
the safety of our food supply surface in this election campaign is in a bunch of
tasteless listeriosis jokes by the Agriculture Minister, for which he’s had to
apologize but not (yet) resign.
Food safety isn’t a new issue. In fact, it’s a growing
one. So why aren’t people clamoring to have this issue put at the top of the
election issue menu? Why are the politicians and political parties not being
confronted with it by voters? Toronto Star columnist James Travers today
politely suggests that the problem is “democratic dissonance” – group failure to
apply the available information to a logical conclusion.
Posted: 2008/09/18 12:15 PM
What’s the Point of Staying in School? September 14, 2008
Companies can help encourage Alberta youth to get their high school diplomas by refusing to hire dropouts, according
to the province’s chief school official. Alberta
has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the country – around 15
percent. The national average is 10 percent. However, it
also has a booming economy and lots of high-paying jobs. Young people can leave
high school and get a job earning $60,000 a year in the oil patch.
Nevertheless, the Education Minister Dave Hancock told the
Calgary Chamber of Commerce that, “It’s not a good idea for business to
entice people away from school.” But
Heather Douglas, the president and CEO of the chamber, said there is an urgent
need to have young people working. She also pointed out that work tends to
mature kids and that they can take that maturity back to school if they want to
continue their education after being in the real world for awhile, later to
become “very effective in the workforce.”
Sounds like
the business community is light years ahead of the school folks in understanding
how the world works. We need to support young people to “rise out” of school
when appropriate (i.e. when they don’t want to be there), instead of
disparaging and punishing them for “dropping out” of school (or, worse,
trying to coerce them to stay). High school, with its regimentation, insulting
rules, prepackaged and sometimes out-of-date curriculum, and irrelevant tests is
boring and pointless for many young people. Functioning as an adult is just what
some (most?) teens need. Getting a job is the bait that their keepers use to
bribe them to stay in school. But if they can get a good-paying job without
school, what’s the point?
Posted: 2008/09/14 3:12 PM
Not My Grandmother’s Sack-like Hemp Dress – September 11,
2008
I’ve been environmentally conscious for three or four decades. And that makes
me old enough to know that organic cotton underwear and hemp dresses didn’t
exist in the 1960s. Or the ‘70s or ‘80s, for that matter. So why is it that
every newly eco-righteous reporter, PR hack, web writer and blogger writes stuff
like this:
“I think we all remember the days of brown organic underwear
and sack-like hemp dresses. The underwear looked like it had been marinated in
Grandma’s herbal tea, the scratchy dresses fit like a circus tent and came in
three muddy colors. Being a hippie chick definitely meant compromising style
for the cause. Well, organic clothing and environmentally friendly fashion has
come along way since the 1960s. Now everyone from Bono to Natalie Portman to
Stella McCartney are offering hip organic clothing or stylish vegan fashions….”
This is a
direct quote from the promo I received this week regarding a new green website
(yet another!). I won’t say which one, because you don’t want to go there, do
you? But what is this about? That I am too old to be part of the young “hippie
chick” demographic that they’re trying to reach? (Then why are they emailing
me?) Or am I a person who will
compromise “style for the cause”? Are they insinuating that my 20-year-old self
wasn’t both stylish and eco-aware in 1970? Or that style isn’t rooted in its
own era? Was I that arrogant when I was their age? Have I ever written such
condescending advertising copy? Do these people not understand how dumb this
rhetoric is? Oh, maybe there are people who fall for it…which makes me feel
very old indeed.
Posted: 2008/09/11 9:15 PM
Back to Fear and Anxiety – September 1, 2008
In case you hadn’t noticed, tomorrow is back to school day for many
unfortunate kids. I would rather ignore this nasty aspect of an otherwise lovely time of year but my in-box
inevitably alerts me to it. And just now, a PR person thought she’d help me
get a head start on reporting on tomorrow’s chaos. She’s apparently trying to
solve the problem that “many young ones…end up facing each weekday with
fear and anxiety” due to school’s resumption. Her client has a website that allows you to make cards and
albums with your photos. And that is supposed to alleviate the higher level of
stress that kids feel about “getting back into the groove of school than they
care to admit.”
I’m appalled that anybody would suggest that a bunch of fancy
page layouts, backgrounds, fonts and text colors – at a cost of just $9.99 –
could alleviate children’s fear and anxiety. Yes, this is just somebody trying
to sell a product. But it’s indicative of the callousness with which our
society treats kids. And of a profound misunderstanding or misuse of the word
“fear.” Yes, many children fear school. And ten dollar software isn’t
going to help. Try giving them enough respect to allow them to ditch the
coercive warehouse and learn on their own.
Posted: 2008/09/01 8:28 PM
|
