The Education Industrial Complex
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“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency… Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.” — General Douglas MacArthur 1957
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. — Dwight D Eisenhower, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />April 16, 1953
I have taught high school. I have taught adults for the last 26 years.
.
As you’ll see over time on pogblog, my rage at the waste of war and of the disgusting Military Industrial Complex is the fissionable plutonium incandescing in the zircalloy synapses of my molten brain. It’s the education, stupid. Not these tame little underfunded tweaks reluctantly couched up by a cowed Congress, but a massive Manhattan Project to quantum the human experience thru intense, delicious continuous continuous continuous education. (Education to me is NOT trade school whereby you become a doctor or a lawyer or a plumber, as worthy as those may also be, but prejudice-shattering, mind-egg cracking, raw blazing discovery.)
When people tell me that “you can't throw money at the problem of education,” they simply do not know what they're talking about.
If we put the kind of primo-vigesimo-centillion money into Education that we put into the Military Industrial Complex, some of that $200,000 a minute, that $820,000 a minute, we could have a superb K-College public educational system that serves every single child with the best teaching and the best facilities. (As well as sending and sending adults back and back to school.)
This would be a quantum step toward the deeply human and humane species we could, well gee, intelligently design ourselves to be.
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The Real Pornography is not spending enough on schools.
Dear Pogblog,
The New York Times reported today that natural gas prices are up 60%–90%, with the onset of winter just around the corner.
All but the very richest Americans are getting by on dreams and/or credit, with no savings and no cushion against such an increase. I predict a major economic and financial disaster before the end of this year.
A word or a number is an abstract symbol for something we can touch, comprehend through past familiarity, or at least visualize.
I doubt that the very best economists or mathematicians, let alone Mr. Average Joe, can wrap their minds around millions, billions, or trillions.
We–No, make that They, because I'm not copping to either complicity or apathy in this, and IT'S NOT IN MY FUCKING NAME– spend $200 MILLION every 24 hours not to build anything, but simply to destroy, and borrow against the future, which is rapidly becoming the present, in direct proportion to the magnitude of our–make that THEIR–(nice word at one time; “our”– presenting at least the illusion of some commonality of purpose and fundamental shared humanity and sanity) what word can I use? We need a whole new lexicon for the enormity of what these people do.
It's as futile to try to picture the enormity of this crew's crimes, lies, hypocrisy, immorality, destructiveness, as it would be to count the grains of sand on the earth or the stars in the heavens.
More anon–namaste
1249 Days Left
Unless
The Blessed Rapture
Intervenes
But on our new Underground Railroad
On the Way
To the Abolition of War,
Crosstie by crosstie,
We must build Dreams
As well as
Curse
The Darkness.
Mr. Pogblog
I absolutely agree that education must be a an actual priority of our society. I would also say that public institutions tend not to be good at the education of the heart and soul that you seem to be referring to. THis is not to minimize the role of public schools. It's just that the kind of education you refer not only requires physical resources as in money, but a full on cultural commitment.
It's often pointed out that children spend more time watching television in many houses than they do actually doing academic work in school (some ungodly part of the high school day consists of going from room to room). The heart of television is about selling things. Any approach to full on education would be looking at all the factors that determine what our children learn about their world.