I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting. Well, there’s that and the freelance writing projects, reading assignments, and Jack, the four-week old kitten we’re fostering, whose cuteness doesn’t quite make up for his refusal to be weaned or his tendency to pee on walls, clothes, carpets, towels, blankets, couches, and people.
Universities Left Behind
The Times published two interesting pieces yesterday. In the first, “Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?” Elisabeth Bumiller argues that Bush’s broken promises might just catch up with him. The pattern should be familiar by now: Bush stands before a supportive crowd, drapes himself in the simple symbols of patriotism and Christian charity, then stumps for legislation that, if enacted, would demonstrate his “compassion.” But, of course, he never gets around to the actual politicking necessary to see that legislation through Congress. Instead, we’re left with frustrated people like Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal and a former Bush supporter.
Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and appealed to him for help by calling himself “a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” Now, Mr. Wallis said, “his policy has not come even close to matching his words.”
Add to that such highly-touted planks as AIDS funding, faith-based initiatives, child tax credits, and his No Child Left Behind act, and you get a whole mess of sound and fury but nothing much of significance. Well, that’s not entirely true. You also get great sound bites and photo-ops.
Only tangentially related is “Universities in Decline” from the Times editors. It’s a simple, four-paragraph statement of a disturbing fact: “Public colleges and universities, which grant more than three-quarters of this country’s degrees, have been steadily undermined by state budget cuts and a mood of legislative indifference.” No kidding. Last summer, thousands of my colleagues and I were deemed “non-essential” employees and given a week off when the Tennessee legislature was unable to balance its budget. (Unable, even, after reallocating its tobacco settlement money.) During my five years in Knoxville, three tuition hikes have placed a greater and greater burden on students, who are receiving fewer and fewer services in return. It’s sad.
And only tangentially related to that is this bit from the latest issue of Harper’s. A co-worker transcribed and forwarded this to me, and I’m now very curious to read the whole piece, “What’s Wrong with Public Education”:
Public education is not intended to help the individual but to create a populace that is easy to control, says John Taylor Gatto, the author of four books on education and a former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. The real purpose of mandatory public education, he says, is to train young people to be reflexively obedient to authority and to fill social roles that benefit government and commerce. “It is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform,” he writes.
The problem is not that public education is failing to reach its goals, but that it is succeeding in producing a culture of childishness and consumption, he says. “If we wanted to, we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids ‘take’ an education rather than merely ‘receive’ a schooling,” he writes.
Perhaps if President Bush had, at some point, learned to “take” his education he would better understand the consequences of his actions (including his frustrating refusals to act).
And Some Final Thoughts
From June Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict: Insight for the Ages:
A Zen story tells of two monks walking down a muddy, rain-logged road on the way back to their monastery after a morning of begging who saw a beautiful young girl standing beside a large deep puddle unable to get across without ruining her clothes. The first monk, seeing the situation, offered to carry the girl to the other side, though monks had nothing whatsoever to do with women. The second monk was astonished by the act but said nothing about it for hours. Finally, at the end of the day, he said to his companion, “I want to talk to you about that girl.” And the first monk said, “Dear brother, are you still carrying that girl. I put her down hours ago.”
The things we ruminate on, the things we insist on carrying in our minds and heart, the things we refuse to put down, the Rule warns us, are really the things that poison us and erode our souls. We dull our senses with television and wonder why we cannot see the beauty that is around us. We hold on to things outside of us instead of concentrating on what is within that keeps us noisy and agitated. We run from experience to experience like children in a candy store and wonder how serenity has eluded us. It is walking through life with a relaxed grasp and a focused eye that gets us to where we’re going. Dwelling on unessentials and, worse, filling the minds of others with them distracts from the great theme of our lives. We must learn to distinguish between what is real and what is not.