Happy As Kings

Alan Watts: Work as play

The Serious Need for Play

From Scientific American:

• The Serious Need for Play
  
  Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed

Is 5/7ths a big enough piece of the tax pie?

History

Day after day, year after year, decade after decade I've read that 'education' needs more money, programs or clout. 'Education' usually translates to taxpayer-funded schooling.

For me, the awareness about 'education's' need came when I was young. Sputnik, the first bit of litter to leave the earth, launched not only public awareness of the space age when I was seven years old, but also launched a perpetual push to expand 'education.' Testing, hours spent, and infrastructure have all expanded, almost without question. If an action will expand 'education,' then questioning it seems to be heresy.

The catalyst for my thoughts today is a newspaper report about "specialty" schools "related to industries key to the development of the improvement district." For this blog post, I'll leave aside the integration of worker training with the sculpting of the future jobs market by industrial interests. Job training, while valuable, interesting and useful, is not comprehensive Education.

• Specialty school is sought in south KC

I am not against school improvement. I am not against education. I am not against Kansas City finding the silver bullet to turn news reports about its schools from usually negative to usually positive.

What I am against is the unquestioned expansion of the professionalization of expensive 'education' instead of a personalization of 'education' that individuals can explore on their own. Contemporary 'education' seems to be more about competitive job-training and ideology rather than about encouraging each of us to explore the world around us and our complex interactions with each other.

And yes, personalized education is already available. No, it doesn't get much airplay.

Concentration of fiscal resources

Another news report on the same page of the newspaper with the specialty school information is:

• KC Parks and Recreation Department faces budget cuts

Parks are a possible location for personalized education. Children can explore nature and exercise their bodies at the same time. But there are few tests at parks (depending on your concept of 'test'), nor does the parks-package provide a wide range of public-funded remedial services from many government-sector employees that require health-care benefits and paid-for retirements. Schools with laws mandating attendance are a better bet for adjunct-service-customers.

In news reports about 'education,' the usual course of action writers describe is for funding to go to large infrastructure projects with high maintenance and personnel costs, while broader infrastructure projects, such as parks and libraries (that aren't as tied to moneyed interests) go begging.

In the town I live in, 5/7ths of the local tax dollar go to the schools, and I don't think my town is atypical because other towns in the area have schools as visible from the roadway as our town. From the roadside, we all look about the same, and our town might even look a bit undersized compared to nearby communities.

The purple part is the schools' cut of my town's taxes as of 2007. (graph courtesy of NCES Kids' Zone Create A Graph)

Legal compulsion

In the United States, the trend seems to be that 'all things kid' are (for the most part) centered on the school. Sports, 'extra-curricular activities,' meals (lunch and breakfast 'programs') and music. Dance and horses seem to be in a separate category, but language clubs, chess clubs, and science clubs seem to be school-centric. I think this creates the impression that 'all things kid' belong with schools.

I think another viewpoint might be that 'all things kid' belongs (as a category) with families and communities. I do not see 'school' as synonymous with 'community' because 'all things school' are tied to compulsory attendance laws, while community services are used as needed. Yes, this is ranging far afield, but I think the 'all things kids' activities are connected to each other because of the 'extra-curricular activities'' attachment to legally mandated attendance in the same organization. This attachment allows the extras to be used as goads. "Maintain this (grades), or you can't participate in that (extras)." Even eating patterns have become fodder for compulsory behavior. A carrot and stick mentality seems to affect anything connected to the cultural compulsory attendance service-provider.

Unfinished conclusion

The emphasis on 'education' needs to shift from the professionalized to the personalized. To reduce costs to a more sustainable level than say 5/7ths of a total income, individual adults (since children have little power) must rediscover the concept of the uncoerced desire to learn. This is the same drive that all children start out with -- pish tosh on the "ready to learn" meme that seems to mean 'ready to sit unnaturally still for long times.'

Piggy-backing [do pigs really jump on each others' backs?] on concepts from The Big Bang Theory, the paradigm is in need of a shift.

LOWL

more animals

All fertilized eggs will become someone great

• Unborn Obama

Point 1:  declining to accept a production for broadcast is not synonymous with banning.  I just watched the advertisement, so it hasn't been "banned."

Point 2:  the implication that all children born to broken homes or in circumstances not conducive to a happy life will overcome the roadblocks in their lives has been around for a while.  The first time I saw this proposition was in a short questionnaire in which the series of negative life circumstances is finished with, "You just aborted Beethoven."

Do you think the same sadness at the loss of Beethoven's work would be feltif we'd lost the work of Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Baby Doc, Jim Jones, Ted Bundy, Mao Tse Tung, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Saddam Hussein (or his sons), Lucretia Borgia, Typhoid Mary, Lizzie Borden, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, and others?

My point isn't that abortion is a humdrum non-event when taken out of the personal context, only that the proposition of "abortion kills our future leaders" doesn't hold up logically when the point isn't carried through.  The equation must balance.

Bailout banks pledge allegiance to the bottom line

After a weekend of having fun online, my Monday-morning grownup-self lectured me on responsible use of time, and told me to do real-world necessities first (no one else is going to vacuum the carpet -- I know, I've waited for 'them' and 'they' haven't showed), and save online activities for my spare time. (right, 'spare' time) Then I read the front page of the newspaper:

Bailout Banks Sought More Foreign Workers

That bit of face-slappery was joined by ...

Medicare shortage could be billions

Those bits of merry sunshine made me feel that I needed to DO something. Now. Preferably something that would reverberate with the miscreants that mangled my morning. (again, yeah right) But what? What can I do, short of running down the street in my pink-roses dressing gown shouting to all the dogs behind the fences and plate glass windows -- I mean, there aren't even any people here to listen. I am left only with the immediate action of blogging.

Therefore, I'm online again without having even maintained a morning resolution to Do Something Actually Useful. Luckily, I'm female, so I don't have to look myself in the eye as I shave. Washing my face can be done with my eyes closed. Weenie.

My feelings are that the smart people in charge of us all ("They're 'rich' in many ways") may have social skills that put them at the top of the heap, but the decisions made by the current crop of smart people (apologies to Captain Sullenberger) seem to show their allegiance to a 'united corporate nation' rather than to the people of a nation whose tax dollars are supporting these smart people.  I'd like to vote them out of office, but it wasn't voting that put them where they are.

In any case, my morning tea and oatmeal are spoiled, my eyes are become jade, and I'd like to punch something. A fine way to start a morning.

And now the princess cat is up on the table drinking the milk in the creamer. I need to adjust the universe's settings as they apply in this dining room.