Just an initial heads up here… if you have a problem with people talking about the “F word” and actually spelling it out in their piece, then read no further…
Using those more “colorful” words in our wonderful human languages is an adventure in cultural norms, with different expectations for different segments of the community… youth versus adults, men versus women. At the top of the patriarchal pecking order, men of course are generally allowed to swear, expected to even among each other, as a sign of their privilege, but women (at least in the presence of men) and kids (at least in the presence of adults) not so much. But certainly among me and my friends (when I was young) and among my kids (when they still were youths), swearing was one way of trying on adult behavior and trying to experience the coolness and swagger of being an adult. Continue reading →
The Dimensions of Adultism
So I’m continuing to explore youth-worker John Bell’s article “Understanding Adultism: A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships”. According to Bell most young people experience adultism from the day they are born until the day the world around them recognizes them as an adults. It is part of the structure of society and its institutions, including families, schools, churches and government. (If you did not read my first piece introducing the concept of adultism, you can read it by clicking this link.) Continue reading →
Defining Adultism
So you have probably already been “ism’d” within an inch of your life and may be ready to roll your eyes if I attempt to direct your attention to another one! Seems the 20th Century was full of positive movements and negative systems being coined as “isms”, including “feminism”, “progressivism” and “environmentalism” on the one side and “sexism”, “racism” and “militarism” on the other. Some might make a good argument that we should leave all those “isms” behind with the last century and turn our focus forward and reframe the way we look at liberating movements and the restricting systems that hinder human development.
Given those disclaimers I want to alert you to one more “ism”, “adultism”, that has been defined by and comes out of the milieu of thoughtful people, youth and adults, working in the democratic education and youth empowerment movements. One of my colleagues in the newly formed Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), Adam Fletcher, has compiled information calling out this negative system on his website (freechild.org) page titled “Challenging Adultism”. Continue reading →
Playing the Silver Ball
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. Continue reading →
Lean Education
History confirms that our conventional instructional public schools were developed on an industrial model invented in the 19th Century, which seems pretty obvious to me when you think about all the structure in those schools of periods, bells, uniform classrooms, desks in rank and file, standardized curriculum, etc. At the end of the 19th Century, universal public K-12 education with no tuition, paid for by the taxpayer, had become such an expensive proposition that school district executives and school boards went to great lengths to attempt to employ the latest best practices from the business world to justify that all that money was being “efficiently” spent. It may in fact be worth considering if some of the business methodologies developed toward the end of the 20th Century might appropriately be applied to today’s conventional schools.
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Acknowledging Obama & the Next Generations
Passing some sort of metaphorical baton to the next generation (along with the key to the closet full of skeletons) is never easy. Surrendering that baton, particularly in a cultural tradition steeped with 5000 years of patriarchal pecking-order thinking can feel very uncomfortable. In many of those old stories, still hanging around somehow in the cultural zeitgeist, the “old man” only surrenders power to his son on his death bed. And then there are all those embarrassing skeletons. Continue reading →
Healthcare Reform, Democracy & Schools
I am concerned about the unfolding process of working out changes to our healthcare system, and particularly how it is being covered in the media as a contest with winners and losers rather than an exercise in compromise to find a working consensus. I think the framing of the debate in the coverage reflects a conventional wisdom that our political and legislative process is more akin to a spectator sport (where our political elite are alone on the playing field) rather than a societal effort to mitigate conflicting interests and find a compromise that can begin to improve the healthcare context for all of us. I for one, put a lot of blame on our education system.
My personal preference would be to treat healthcare basically as a public utility and adopt a single-payer system like they have in Canada, which I think would unleash the currently tamped-down entrepreneurial spirit in our country and liberate a great deal of pent up creative energy that could be directed toward starting more small businesses and reinvigorating our economy. Short of single-payer, some sort of government-run “public option” would be a step in that direction, and I imagine that fact is why so many conservatives and others vested in our for-profit medical establishment are fighting so fiercely against any sort of additional “toe in the door” alongside Medicare, the VA, and Medicaid. Continue reading →
From Dawn to Decadence – The End of the Modern Era?
As much as I’m a student of history, I’d like to see us turn our gaze forward, and not obsess on that history and not accept its conventional wisdom. That said, I think it is still important to understand the historic currents that are the basis of those conventions before one sets out to consider challenging elements of that wisdom.
I’ve just finished slogging my way through a dense 800+ page book, From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun. It is a cultural history of the Western World during the past 500 years. Between working, writing, and family, it has taken me some eight or nine months to get through it. Continue reading →
More School?
I have a lot of thoughts as a former kid (who lived for summer vacation each year and felt that that last day of school each June was a day of liberation) and more recently as a parent who used to dutifully send my kids to school as well.
Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe. “Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas… But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”
Johnny 5 – The Learning Machine
Like “Ever After” did for his sister Emma, the movie “Short Circuit II” resonated with and inspired our son Eric, and is another one of those diamonds in the rough stories that speak to the values both generations in our household hold so dear. Also like “Ever After” it is a compelling tale full of classic scenes that we all can watch over and over again, smile, even laugh, and be reenergized to keep on keeping on.
The movie is humble enough commercial fare, aimed at a younger audience. It is actually the sequel to the movie “Short Circuit” which tells the story of the creation by a U.S. military contractor of a series of artificially intelligent soldier-robots, designed by two young “uber-geek” engineers, Newton and Benjamin. Through the field testing process the series of prototypes prove out their capability as highly adaptable and effective killing machines, except for one (number 5) which has a glitch and somehow becomes sentient and refuses to continue following orders to seek and destroy. Rather than terminate the malfunctioning machine, the two young engineers quit the program and smuggle this wannabe consciousness into hiding. In the process of its own emerging self-awareness, the robot decides it needs a name, not just a number, and adopts the moniker “Johnny 5”. Continue reading →