The last five hundred years of Western history have been all about championing the worth, dignity, rights and responsibilities of individual human beings in the context of increasingly egalitarian institutions. Not that it hasn’t been three steps forward and two steps back at times. I just hope that as we settle into this new century, this third millennium of the “common era”, that we try to take a breath, relax, find our balance and our internal compass, and continue to “move the needle” in our egalitarian embrace of “all of us” rather than the millennia of hierarchical “us and them” thinking that we are coming out of.

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In his October 14 piece for the Economic Policy Institute titled “How to fix our schools”, Richard Rothstein quotes President Obama as saying…

I always have to remind people that the biggest ingredient in school performance is the teacher. That’s the biggest ingredient within a school. But the single biggest ingredient is the parent.

I agree teachers and parents are two key players in an educational environment, and I think there is way too much money and focus spent building a huge educational bureaucracy above and beyond this nexus. Also, I think Obama here is guilty of getting caught up in the prevailing hierarchical thinking and leaving out the most important player in this actualization model… the student.

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For better or worse, whether in the context of a “global village” or a “brave new world”, the Internet has given many of us a larger presence in the world that may well be redefining what it means to be human. If we have email addresses, contributions to on-line listservs and forums, social networking pages, blogs, websites and other such virtual edifices, our availability to be viewed, reviewed, and connected with is a quantum leap beyond the pre-web days when most of us just had a phone number and a street address. And as we continue to live our lives we have an ever-growing artifact trail accessible to anyone with a browser, much of it perhaps beyond our control and not necessarily what we would choose to share with strangers or maybe even friends and family. This virtual edifice of artifacts, words and pictures of ourselves captured as binary information in electronic data repositories, that continues even past our death.

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Commenting on my blog “Much More and Much Less than a Boss” on Daily KOS, Alpha99 put up a link to a video on YouTube that they thought I would appreciate called “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us”, done by Daniel Pink, who writes about business and human motivation, based on his book by the same name. I played it and was practically mesmerized by this visually captivating and provocative piece, done on a white board with markers and a rapid-fire voiceover by Pink. The issues it calls out are a perfect illustration of what I see as the transformative shift going on in our culture from the hierarchical control model to more of an egalitarian circle of equals.

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I recently read a May 7 article in Education Week, “Embracing Wikipedia”, where author and science teacher Matthew Shapiro makes the case for Wikipedia as a research tool, particularly for students (and therefore I guess for any casual life-long learner), competing favorably (at least in Shapiro’s opinion) with the “Gold Standard” Encyclopedia Britannica.

Heads up folks… you might even want to sit down! Wikipedia uses an anarchic form of governance. In fact, though it may be a long time until “brick and mortar” institutions adopt it, this portable, adaptable and minimalist governance model, may well be one of the biggest trends of the 21st Century, particularly in cyberspace.

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I believe we are approaching a developmental crossroads in the evolution of our human species, though we might be a little bit stuck and in need of some sort of inspirational push. With all the violent religious (and secular) fundamentalism in the past century, we need to come to a new covenant among more tolerant belief systems and traditions to accept “many paths”, acknowledging that your path through the transcending mysteries is just as appropriate for you as mine is for me. That is, as long as both of those paths follow a few basic principles, like the Golden Rule. (more…)

In 1971, when I was sixteen years old and still living with my mom and younger brother Peter in Ann Arbor, our old washing machine in the basement broke down and my mom (who could barely pay the regular bills) decided she could not afford to fix or replace it, at least not right away. Who would think this would be the catalyst for me to have a transforming experience.

Tears in her eyes, she pulled the wet clothes out of the broken-down and leaking washer and threw them in a plastic laundry basket. Her life was already heavy on her shoulders, a divorced single parent with two teenage kids, suffering from depression, and just barely paying bills on the child-support payment from my dad. Having to take laundry to the Laundromat (until she could somehow magically move the money pots around in her budget to get a new washer) felt like the last straw. (more…)

In the late 1970s during my last couple years in my hometown of Ann Arbor, inspired by that song from the Who’s rock opera “Tommy”, I became a pinball wannabe wizard, making time each day I was on campus for my college classes to drop a few dollars worth of quarters in the slot and transcend my muggle life into the world of metal spheres, plastic flippers, bumpers, targets, spinners and those accursed ball-eating gutters. Inspired by reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine some years earlier, it was a time in my life where I was experimenting with living in the moment, at times aided by smoking marijuana, and beginning to wrestle with life at a more metaphysical level.

It was a profoundly simple and dazzling universe of exotic noises and lights highlighting the spectacular laws of kinetic physics guiding that iconic silver ball on its course (whoa… way too many adjectives!), a compelling game of skill that required a calm mind, hyper focus, extreme sensitivity and the ability to meld with the machine and bring it alive. (more…)

In 1977 and 1978, as a young adult now living on my own in my hometown of Ann Arbor (my mom and dad had remarried each other and she had moved down to Ohio to live with him), I was somehow able to live almost completely in the moment, aided by the transcending joy I found walking from place to place in town. After twenty plus years of navigating these streets on foot, by bicycle or by car, I knew them so well I could head out towards my destination of the moment, let my mind totally drift with any thought so at times I barely knew exactly where I was but still managed to get where I was going, experiencing the joys of all four full seasons and continuing my exploration of the magical side to life. (more…)

Reading Ray Bradbury’s book paved the way for my own encounter with, and embrace of, the magical side of life, while still not believing in god. I think I read the book over forty years ago in junior high English class, and I can hardly recall any of the details of the story, but no book I’ve read has had more impact on my life. It’s one of those cases where you encounter an idea that does not seem to impact you immediately, but seeds a thought in your mind that maybe comes to fruition at some later time, when that idea addresses a new need.

I think as a child I lived in a world of constant magic, creativity and imagination, so acknowledging a magical side of life was not an issue… there was just life and it was what it was… and for me that included being magical. Now looking back, I acknowledge the context of circumstances, the privilege of being a white male growing up in a progressive, middle-class community in America. I also acknowledge the proactive effort of my parents to raise me “outside the box” and dedicate time and money (given their modest means) to create an enriched environment for me to bloom within and explore life’s enchantment. (more…)