No Journalist Left Behind

The recent Democratic "debate" in Pennsylvania provided an example for present educational theory in this country. It was a classroom, broadcast to the nation and the world. No journalist was left behind. Yet, when the long hour was over, many viewers were wondering just what happened.

The ABC extravaganza is yesterday's news. But, like a plastic flower, it does not fade.

At the time of the debate, people were losing their houses all over the country because of the unregulated greed of mortgage lenders. Oh yes, there were folks who thought that they could make a killing on their houses but the banks were the ones who profited. And, when it came time to pay the piper--when the house of cards collapsed and millions faced foreclosure--the government came to the rescue. It came to the rescue of the banks. The taxpayers of the United States bailed out the banks compliments of the present Republican administration.

At the time of the debate, the war in Iraq was moving towards draining a trillion dollars from the United States. The taxpayers of the United States were supporting a war that had lost all of the original excuses for waging it. Everybody knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That had been conclusively proved . That was the first major rationale of the Bush war--down the drain. Then, on the same day that the press danced its righteous dance over the governor of New York's dalliance with a prostitute, the second pillar of the war collapsed. The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense officially declared that there was no evidence (that's no evidence) of any connection between the government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The second pillar of the war in Iraq crumbled even though Vice President Cheney repeated the fictional connection on the same day the Department of Defense made the report public. But, hey, who cares about facts?

A few facts do remain clear, however. On the day that George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson confronted Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, the economy was going down the tubes, the rationale for the war in Iraq had disappeared, billions were flowing out of the United States into the coffers of Halliburton. And United States servicemen and women were dying as well as hundred of thousands of Iraqis in the war that had no rationale.

Health care is deteriorating in this country. The economy is going down the drain. Gas prices skyrocket while oil companies boast windfall profits. The government is no officially tied to torture. The United States has lost the respect of much of the world. There is certainly no shortage of issues this presidential campaign year.

ABC News' Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos used up the first fifty minutes of the debate asking why Obama Baraka did not wear an American flag in his lapel or whether his minister loved America as much as he did or whether he disavowed his association with a political activist who had been a Weatherman when Obama was eight years old. (I am surprised that Obama's early toilet training didn't enter the debate).

Now some people, like Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe, have suggested that Gibson and Stephanopoulos were biased. Some folks have noted that when the now sanctified Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in 1980 he chose a spot in Mississippi near where the three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 to proclaim his loyalty to "states rights" (i.e. segregation). Nobody from the media ever questioned Reagan about that in subsequent debates.

Some people have suggested that, as long as we are on the question of racial hatred, it is strange that neither Mitt Romney nor George Bush senior nor George Bush junior were ever questioned about their endorsement of and by Bob Jones University, a place that banned black students until the 1970's and prohibited interracial dating until 2000, just in time for the election of George junior.

Some people have suggested that the press, as represented by Gibsonstephanopoulos, is biased. Some have suggested that Stephanopoulos was a senior adviser to Bill Clinton might have some effect on the gentleness of his questioning of Hillary Clinton.

All of this may be true. But let me suggest that these two journalists are poster children for our present educational system.

The manic devotion to testing children has been rendered national in the "No Child Left Behind" act. Now, children are being tested from the first grade on. Simultaneously, play time, recess time, is disappearing throughout the country. When my daughter and I were investigating schools for my grand daughter in New Haven, we found a public magnet school that had a lovely feeling to it. The school boasted of two ten minute recess times for the kindergarten kids. That's twenty minute of play a day for five year olds. That qualifies as child abuse. But, the "No Child Left Behind" act deprives money from schools that don't meet the tests. And schools across the country, starving for funds, just aren't doing as well as, say, the mercenaries that taxpayers finance in Iraq.

The French educational pioneer, Jean Piaget, said famously that "play is the work of the child." These days there is no play and children are studying from the age of six to pass standardized tests. And teachers are teaching for the tests since they can lose their jobs if the kids don't score high enough.

There are a couple of flies in this testing ointment. For one thing, you can't test creativity. Creativity is based on what is not known. It is based on the ability to go beyond knowledge. The person who invented the wheel would not have done well on a test administered by the "No Child Left Behind" act. You can't test the ability to think for yourself. (Do you think it's possible that the authors of the "No Child Left Behind" act did not want kids to think for themselves?) You can't test thinking outside the box since the whole idea of standardized testing is a nationalized, standardized box. The idea is that if you can't test it, might as well throw it out. So art and music are joining recess as school districts across the country streamline for testing. You give the right answers for the right question so you won't be left behind.

In Japan there is a saying that "the nail that sticks up will be pounded down." The message is clear: you try to be unique or original you will be "pounded down." Seems like our educational system is taking a few pages from the Japanese book. Difference is that, in Japan, the trade off is that the individual is cared for by the society. No fear of that here where even wounded veterans are nickeled and dimed out of treatment and benefits by a government that needs to save its money---for war.

Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos are poster children for our educational system. they are children who have not been left behind. Far from entering into the creative or original thought they stay comfortably within the journalistic box. Why Stephanopolous even took his questions from Fox fulminator Sean Hannity.

Of course the question is who administers the tests. After all, the person that poses the questions determines the right answers. Who pays the piper calls the tune. Gibson and Stephanopoulos were following scripts that had been prepared by other journalists. Who know where it began? Just gets digested, redigested and re-redigested. There wasn't a single original question during the whole debate.

Not a single original question. Rehash of old stuff--old accusations--old red herrings. These guys passed their test well. These journalists would not be left behind.

Self appointed teacher, David Brooks of the New York Times dutifully graded his fellow journalistic students. ABC got a grade of "A" from the Times headmaster. Clinton got a "B" and Barak Obama got a D+. I think that Brooks was being kind to Obama. Maybe it was because he was Black. After all, Obama has been doing the unthinkable. He has actually tried to raise real issues and has, more and more, been thinking outside of the box.

Deja Vu All Over Again

I just saw an ad that was placed by one of the candidates for the presidential nomination. I had heard it earlier on the radio. Children were sleeping and there was the sound of a phone ringing--presumably a red phone. The voice over declared that your children are sleeping safely but the red phone showed that there was something going on the in the world. the voice over asked whether you wanted someone who could handle issues of foreign importance. Blah. Blah. Blah. RED PHONE. RED PHONE!!!!!!!!!! Get it?

I had assumed that it was the McCain campaign. After all, the Republicans have fostered and fed upon an atmosphere of fear for the past seven years. And fear, as the folks in the novel Dune declare, "is the mind killer." I assumed, of course, that it was John McCain.

It was sponsored by Hillary Clinton. Enough said.

LETTER TO HILLARY CLINTON, 9/18/01

After the "debate" in Ohio yesterday between Obama and Clinton, I looked through my old e-mails and came up with an e-mail that I wrote to Sen. Hillary Clinton a week after September 11. You didn't have to be a psychic to see where things were going. And I am not happy to say that I was right, as were many who opposed the response of the Bush Administration together with congressional rubber stampers like Sen. Clinton. I did not, by the way, get a response from her office.

Dear Senator Clinton:
senator@clinton.senate.gov

I am writing to express my grave concern over the United States government’s reaction to the terrorist attacks last Tuesday. Our grief and horror must not turn into blind rage. The
killing of innocents is vile and supremely reprehensible. We cannot do the same thing.

A massive military action against Afghanistan would result in the deaths of countless
innocent civilians—men, women and children. How can we fight terror with terror? Such
an action would escalate rather than defeat terrorism.

Further, calls in Congress to support the recruitment of “unsavory” people to aid the
United States effort are equally misguided. It was the training of such people by the CIA
that gave us a highly organized and trained Osama bin Laden. Are we to create and train
more bin Ladens in the name of fighting terrorism? Has not this policy shown itself to be
shortsighted and bankrupt over and over?

Finally, the stability of moderate governments in the Middle East is tentative. A massive
United States military action in the area could easily result in the overthrow of these
governments by powerful and vocal Islamic fundamentalists. Once again, the United States
has the potential to create the conditions for even greater terrorism.

Terror begets terror. We must break the cycle. If the United States is to present any
leadership in this, we must look to the roots of the problem. The United States must use its
influence to see that the heart of the problem—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—is resolved
equitably. For a start, we must throw our support behind the implementation of the now
moribund Oslo accords. Once there is a fair resolution of that issue, the roots of terrorism
will wither and die.

In conclusion, I urge you to oppose any military action that targets or involves civilian
populations. I urge you to oppose any efforts to turn back to the discredit policy of allying
ourselves with people or regimes that oppose human rights. And I urge you to support
efforts to involve the United States in the fair and peaceful settlement of the Palestinian
situation.

Why I Cannot Support Hillary Clinton

A few weeks ago my daughter, Hira, called from Seattle where she lives. The Washington caucus was to take place shortly. She told me that she could not support Barak Obama.

One of the things about Hira is that she has a low tolerance for bullshit of any kind. That is something that I have always admired and supported in her. Another thing is that she does her homework.

Hira listed the ways in which Hillary Clinton’s policies were better than Obama’s. Health care, of course, was high on the list. She summed up several other policies and concluded that Obama was “Bush Lite.” I could not disagree.

I have experienced many decades of political bullshit. I have, for example, never been one of those who sanctifies President John F. Kennedy. I watched him debate Richard Nixon as they tried to outdo each other with their Cuba phobia. The main difference between the two men in those debates was that Nixon had five o’clock shadow. I read the stories of the way the election of 1960 was given to Kennedy by Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago who saw to it that large number of ballots for Nixon were dumped in the river. I saw the way in which President Kennedy sunk the United States into a murderous war in Vietnam—slowly, sneakily and inexorably. And, despite the cinematic pipe dreams of Oliver Stone, Kennedy got us deeper into not out of that war.

Whatever was happening domestically, foreign policy in the Kennedy administration was aggressive and imperial. Lyndon B. Johnson simply followed the legacy of his predecessor. And United States forces bombed, napalmed, machine gunned and poisoned a million people in a country that posed absolutely no threat to the United States.

So, when Edward and Caroline Kennedy anointed Barak Obama as the heir to JFK I was not impressed. The Camelot of King Arthur was much more real than the manufactured public relations fiction in Washington, D.C..

I began to resonate with the falseness of the Madison Avenue glitz of “Camelot” as the Obama campaign became vaguer and vaguer. Pretty soon all I was hearing was “change” and “unity” with less and less substance. Once again I was watching the hopes and longings of millions projected on the screen of a politician. Hira was right. In substantive domestic policies the small difference between the candidates balanced towards Hillary Clinton,

When I hung up the phone I had a gnawing sense of doubt. I felt an unease upon which I could not put my finger. Then it hit me.

Senator Hillary Clinton spoke for and voted for authorization of the war in Iraq. She did this for no other reason than political expediency. And she, together with her fellows, bears responsibility for the ongoing deaths of innocents.

I listened to the Congressional debate on the war authorization over five years ago. It was like something out of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Anybody who bothered to read the reports of Hans Blix and the United Nations inspection team at that time knew that there was little likelihood of weapons of mass destruction. Anybody who listened to Scott Ritter, former chief United States weapon inspector knew then that there was no Iraqi capability for constructing weapons of mass destruction. Anyone who bothered to go beyond the headlines could see the ways that Vice President Cheney was twisting arms to get the intelligence community to distort their findings in order to justify the invasion. If I was able to find this in 2002 then surely the junior senator from New York, with her efficient staff, could come up with the information. While the public might be excused for not digging deeper, a member of Congress, voting on war, cannot be excused.

The Congressional debate on war was disgraceful. Never have I seen a group of legislators illustrate so clearly how politicians are not leaders, but followers. Never have I seen such a Congressional disregard for the truth. A runner up was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which facilitated the expansion of the Vietnam War based on another fiction.

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was a voice in the wilderness of this “debate.” By voting the President a carte blanche to wage war, Byrd said, Congress was abandoning its responsibility to the people, country and constitution of the United States.

Hillary Clinton followed Byrd and spoke for the war. Considering the venue it was practically incoherent. It was political word salad. She provided no justification for authorizing an attack on a country that posed no threat to the United States. It seemed quite clear that she was just getting on the bandwagon—no principles here—just expediency.

And the war was waged. Today, five years later, the war is still being waged. The United Nations estimates that almost five million Iraqi’s have been displaced since the United States invaded their country. If that occurred here that would amount to about fifty-five million Americans being displaced. As for casualties, the British medical journal, Lancet, has estimated over one million. And a large number of those have been women and children. To put it bluntly hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died because of a war that Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize. Thousands of young American men and women have died in a meaningless and unjustified war that Senator Hillary Clinton voted to authorize. It’s murder pure and simple.

The war in Iraq, for me, is not just another campaign issue be balanced against pro-choice, NAFTA or health care. There can be no trade for homicide. The United States entered into a war on Iraq based on a tissue of lies. And this war continues to claim Iraqi and American lives.

That Hillary Clinton supported this war is bad enough. Either she knew better or she is incompetent and irresponsible. That she makes no apology for her vote is arrogant and inexcusable. We’ve certainly had enough of that in the last eight years. It’s as if she keeps on voting for it again and again.

It is true that Obama was not in Congress when this vote was taken. It is also true that he clearly and loudly denounced it at a time when it was not politically expedient to do so.

It is time for people to stop playing political games. For me, the essential difference between the two candidates comes down to one issue. I will not support someone who has the blood of children on her hands and will not even wash them clean.

In Memoriam: Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D.

On August 26, 1948, Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D. ended his suffering that began four years earlier on the fields of France. My father was a country doctor. His love was medicine and he tended to the ill and wounded. It was his calling. In the small upstate New York town where he practiced he delivered babies in the office house where we lived. He drove out to remote farms to give the five daughters of a farmer their vaccinations. He healed broken bones and cut foreheads. But nothing prepared him for the slaughter that he encountered after he landed with the fourth wave at Normandy in June 1944.

My experience of the war was my father's absence. He would send my mother and me funny little letters that would have sections blacked out. This was V-mail. I always thought it was strange that other people would read my father's letters to me. But the censors did read them and blocked out areas that they felt were sensitive to national security or something.

He wrote me a continuing story about a friendly amoeba. There even were illustrations. In later years, when I visited India, I found it strange that people feared amoebas as much as they did.

To my mother and aunts and grandparents he sent letters and watercolors. He was an artist as well as a physician and would, in those rare moments when he had a minute or two, paint a watercolor of where he was. We cherished those postcard size pictures painted with love, for they were not only beautiful but they represented a part of the artist that could not be expressed in words.

Then, for what seemed to be an eternity, we heard nothing. No letters came. No pictures came. Nothing came. And with each day my mother became more and more distraught.

This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces. The German forces under the command of Field Marshall Gerd von Runstedt had encircled the American forces centered at Ardennes, France. This was the Battle of the Bulge. And for over a month, during the bitter winter, American and German soldiers slaughtered each other. Nineteen thousand American soldiers died. Six armies locked in battle in the coldest winter on record. Over a million men fought in what was to be recorded as the worst battle of World War II.

Torn, ripped, cut and blown apart, young men passed through the field hospital that my father headed. It was X-ray after X-ray after X-ray. It was an assembly line of death and dying. There was no time for the physicians to protect themselves from the deadly radiation. And it was this radiation that caused the skin cancer that later was to take my father's life.

When he returned from that war I was six years old. My father rarely spoke to me about that war, only once, that I remember, to joke that he had a rifle in the back of his jeep and that's where it stayed. He was a healer, not a killer. He even received a Bronze Star for bravery and never told me what he did. To this day I don't know why he got it.

My memories of Dr. Nathan Bluestone are fragmentary and impressionistic. Mostly I remember how we would sing together in the car, my father and I. "I've Got Sixpence", "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and rounds and rounds.

Much later a psychic told me that my father had been deeply wounded by his inability to heal in the face of such overwhelming carnage. His soul, as much as his body, had been gravely affected. That rings true.

We moved back into the office house and my father continued the practice that he had left four years earlier. But the cancer, first on his finger, spread and slowly, he began to die. Bit by bit the doctors cut away my father. First they took his finger. Then they took his right breast. And then he died.

It has been almost fifty-nine years since my father died. I have grown far from that nine year old boy who couldn't understand why such a thing was possible. And yet, after all this time, I still cry at the loss.

On this day each year we are called upon to remember those who have died in the service of their country. Politicians give speeches, flags are unfurled and hot dogs are consumed.

What we tend to forget is what General William Tecumseh Sherman once reminded a group of young men. "War is hell." And the hell is for the living, for those who survive the deaths of their beloveds as much as it is for those who die on the fields of battle or in the hospitals.

What we tend to forget is that war leaves lots of fatherless sons and daughters. Today, for example, thousands of American and Iraqi sons and daughters will grow up without their fathers and mothers. And for what?

What we tend to forget are the children who are left behind. We forget that fifty years from now there will be adults who still grieve for the loss of a father or a mother--who still cry at the remembrance. Let us truly remember.

Two Poems:

Plague Light

Where was the light in the Dark Ages?

Did it shine in the huts of the serfs,

Those stinking, dim hovels where birthing entwined dying

And food, piss and shit

Coexisted with pigs and writhing sweating bodies?

Or did it glow in the halls of the lords

Sputtering and hissing in the burning animal fat

That illumed the cold, moist

Steps and walls, always clammy?

Did its rays fall upon the plains of war

Bouncing off bright crushed skulls and glistening viscera

Swiftly covered by the diaphanous wings of flies and vultures?

Or was it in the churches

With their eternal darkness

Reeking with a black bright hell

And promise of fiery damnation.

Or, did it sparkle in the fire of righteousness

That burned under the sizzling bare feet

Of the sinful

As it slowly rose in clouds of smoke

And cooking living flesh?

No.

The light was seen in the gleaming eyes of rats,

As they streamed and stumbled off the Genoan boats

Carrying the shiny shelled fleas

With their innocent deadly bite.

It billowed high on burning pyres

Where bodies stacked like wood

Melted, their bulbous bubous black pustules

Consumed forever.

It broke through the clouds like an angel’s beam

And shone upon a landscape

Forever changed,

Forever changed

Amen

Boulevard l'Hopital: Paris--March 2006

Frozen in time

Fixed in space

A shutter speed

Stopped:

The young mother

Face turning

To face

The viewer

And her ten year old son:

Smiles

Cascading

In waves

As does her

Wild brown hair

Kept demurely tamed

But not conquered

(Never conquered)

We cannot see the boy’s face;

He is turned

To face

His mother

Head tilted

To take in her warmth

(As a dandelion faces the sun and rain)

Dancing on the far side

Of her mother

The eight year old

Daughter/ sister

Braids flying

Leaping

And laughing

At her own dance

And at some joke

That is hers

(Alone)

Frozen in time

Fixed in space

A shutter speed

Stopped.

ALBERT EINSTEIN--FAILURE

Today is the birthday of Albert Einstein. What a failure he was. Of course we know him as the creator of the Theory of Relativity and Nobel laureate. But that is unimportant. He was a failure. Many of his early teachers thought he was mentally challenged. In those days they used the German equivalent of "retarded".

Einstein didn't like to study except for those things that interested him. Albert was interested in mathematics and philosophy. He just didn't bother with the other stuff.

A high school official wanted young Einstein expelled from school. The teacher complained that Einstein never said anything. He just sat in the back of the class and smiled. At the age of sixteen Albert dropped out of school.

Albert Einstein would probably have fared even worse today in the United States than he did
in late Nineteenth Century Wurtemburg, Germany. He definitely would have been one child left behind in the era of No Child Left Behind.

The No Child Left Behind act is a dismal reflection of the low level to which pedagogical discussion has sunk in the United States today. There are innumerable things wrong with this act. For those interested in checking out some of these issues I suggest visiting www.educatorrountable.org. But let's take one aspect.

How do you quantify education. How do you measure how a student is learning. The simple (and simplistic) answer is through testing.

The work of Howard Gardner has shown that people learn in different ways. Another educator pointed out that children's learning styles are as varied as the colors of the rainbow. There are probably as many different ways of learning as there are people. but, at least, we need to recognize that someone who does well on a test might not be the most intelligent on many levels.

Testing only deals with accumulated knowledge. So a test can ascertain just how well a person has memorized required material in a course. Testing can measure how well a student can spew back what he has ingested. Digestion of this material is often not essential and can even be a distraction for the person taking the test.

Testing determines the material to be tested. And there is a time and a place for that. However, only that which can be easily tested will be included in the testing program. As Albert Einstein put it, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"

The present obsession with testing leads to an ever increasing number of teachers who teach solely for the test. Even the importance of the material itself falls by the wayside. The test's the thing. Students focus on what the "right" answers are.

Creative teaching becomes more and more a luxury for school districts that face obliteration unless certain test scores are met. It is not surprising that the poorer school districts are in the greatest bind. These are most often the ones with the greatest problems and the greatest need for innovative approaches. But how can there be innovative approaches when the universal "fix" is testing? How can these schools encourage creativity in the face of the cyclones of "test-osterone" blowing in from Washington?

Creative teachers fall by the wayside. Either that or they buckle under to meet the new "mandates."

The Advanced Placement courses have long been infested with the test virus. As an historian I was shocked to see that the Advanced Placement course in American history at a local high school was simply a prolonged preparation for the test. The vital, complex and fascinating issues of American history were reduced to multiple choices or "correct" interpretative essays.

It seems to me that one of the basic goals of education is to encourage people to think for themselves. It seems to me that one of the goals of education is to encourage people to find and develop their talents and potentials. Testing and the teaching associated with it do little if any of this.

It's bizarre. They are testing kids in kindergarten. A whole new generation is growing up thinking that education is simply a succession of tests. Not only that. There isn't any break.

Homework is the handmaiden of the testing model. Kids have to do schoolwork on weekends--even during the summer. It seems like robots have taken over the American school system. Or maybe it's just a repackaging of that old Puritan axiom: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." Busy work substitutes for education. If Albert Einstein were a kid today he would probably drop out of school by third grade instead of eleventh.

Of course testing is profitable--for the testing companies and all the peripheral industries. But there are a few things that can't be tested.

You can't test creativity. You can't have a box that tests the ability of people to think outside the box. So Thomas Edison, Galileo, and e.e. cummings would simply not pass.

You can't test art. You can't test music. Oh, yes, you can test knowledge of the scale. You can test musical theory. But how about the art itself?

You can't test imagination. You can test knowledge. Once again some words from Albert Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," he said. "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the globe."

Since you can't test creativity, the arts and imagination, they have little use as part of a school's curriculum. In fact, the arts are disappearing from schools across the country. The money is all in the tests.

Where would we be without creativity and imagination? We would not exist as a species. For these are what take us beyond our limited known world. It is imagination and creativity that gave us fire and the wheel. And Albert Einstein.

Which gets me back to the beginning. Happy Birthday Albert. Maybe you were right when you said, "The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." It's becoming more and more true for millions of kids.