I have been educating myself about education lately as I believe a key strategy to building a better tomorrow lies in the education of the world’s children. I am also concerned from my personal role as a mother. The below is excerpted from great web-site www.newhorizens.org.

It looks at the evolving needs of education from a very “big picture” standpoint. Contrast this with the energy being consumed by arguments over religion in the classroom, intelligent design etc. in the US. Another interesting article on the web-site highlights an interesting program attempting to address some of what Dr. Johnston describes in his article , check out http://www.newhorizons.org/spneeds/gifted/fraserhenry.htm

Erica

In thinking about the future of education, some overarching questions come to mind. These are three interwoven and indeed very big picture questions:
How do we best understand the times in which we live?
What specific skills, perspectives, values, understandings, and sensibilities will we need to meet the critical challenges ahead, the challenges of the future?
How do we educate for these particular skills and sensibilities -- and here I refer not just to the content of education, but equally the processes through which we educate and the nature of the relationships -- student to teacher, student to student, student to community and world -- through which we learn?

When culture is relatively stable, the average person doesn't need to give big picture questions much attention -- we appropriately relegate them to philosophers and the like.

But in times of significant change and challenge, the situation becomes dramatically different. The big picture comes to have ultimate practical importance.
When I look around us, I see change happening at a startling array of levels. Besides the obvious technological changes, we find all sorts of familiar cultural handholds becoming less secure: these from externally defined gender roles, to once and for all moral rules to teach our children, to institutions that we could once generally rely on to fulfill basic needs. Reality today is a newly uncertain and often "messy" quantity.

How do we understand this? Is it good or bad? And what does it mean to educate in such a reality and for the challenges such a reality presents?

Recent statistics show, for example, that while thirty years ago sixty to seventy percent of people in the United States had general confidence in their institutions -- in their schools, their governments, their churches -- today the figures range between twenty and thirty percent.

As a psychiatrist, and someone deeply concerned about youth, I find one statistic particularly troubling, and symbolic: this the more than doubling of teen suicide rates we have witnessed over the last ten years. We face the simple fact that a significant portion of our youth, often many of the best and the brightest, don't see an adequately compelling image of the future to warrant the vulnerabilities of daily life. The times we live in can easily seem at best frightening and overwhelming.

Today's changes ask a lot of us. But at least as I see things, the confusions we feel today are less often ultimately about culture being somehow broken -- about us having gone astray significantly -- than about finding the courage to turn some important next pages in the human story. Once appropriate personal and institutional assumptions have simply become too small for how large human experience has become.
Increasingly culture is not supplying the same kind of ready-made maps. And when we try to use the old ones, more often than not they bring frustration rather than fulfillment.

The challenges ahead ask a lot of us. And what they ask has the potential to make us more, often in very important ways. What do they ask? Quite a number of things. Let me touch on just a few

• They ask a greater comfort with uncertainty and complexity. (Things like gender roles have protected us by making life a bit smaller -- a bit more manageable. Gender roles dramatically reduce the variables involved in both identity and love. Today, more and more, we are being challenged to surrender such protection, to meet life's fundamental questions unadorned.)

• They ask greater self-knowledge (necessary if we don't have things like gender roles to guide us) -- and equally a greater knowledge of others, of those we engage -- from intimates and coworkers, to other cultures and species.

• They ask a greater completeness, if you will, in our being and our understanding (from relating more as whole people in love -- rather than as two halves that together make a whole -- to a similar greater wholeness and completeness in how we relate as parents, as leaders, as newly global citizens.)

• And they ask a new level of human responsibility. We are being challenged to address a growing array of new and complex moral quandaries -- from very personal concerns to the ultimate question of how we as a species wish to define progress for the future. Our times don't ask us to be God, but they demand more and more that we be willing to engage questions of Godlike consequence.

So today's new questions ask a lot. And they easily overwhelm, have us run from the magnitude of what they ask -- into addiction, diversion, absurdity. They ask big questions, challenge us to be large. (One could argue even that they ask a kind of growing up as a species.)

Recently, I tried out the previously mentioned of four specific questions on some friends and colleagues.. From their responses, they came up with a list of "tasks for education in the future."
I invite you to bounce your reflections off of this list, to challenge it, add to it. They put their seven tasks in the form of -- of course, more questions.

# 1 --Times of change require a capacity to innovate and skill at managing process and uncertainty. How do we educate for greater creativity in this sense -- and not just for the artist types, but for everyone?

# 2 --Increasingly, today's challenges require us not just to be knowledgeable, but to address deep questions of meaning and value, moral questions if you will. How does one teach the engagement of questions of meaning and value and do this without imposing narrow moral dogma on one hand or falling for an empty, anything goes moral relativism on the other?

# 3 --Increasingly, today's questions demand that we step across the lines separating usual domains of understanding -- they are multidisciplinary, systemic, dynamically interwoven. How does one teach for the ability to work with wholes and interrelationships, as much as specifics and parts?

# 4 --Today's challenges more and more require us to engage questions collaboratively -- at all levels, from small work teams, to neighborhoods, to global interaction. How does one teach for the ability to collaborate?

# 5 --The questions ahead require us to better understand diversity of all types -- gender, ethnicity, religious, temperament, learning style, as well as the contradictory complexities of our own psyches. How does one teach for the capacity not just to tolerate diversity and complexity but to be enriched by it, use it powerfully and creatively?

# 6 --Increasingly, today's challenges require us to be facile with new technologies, particularly new communications technologies. These technologies have equally the power to enrich the connections between us and to isolate us from others and ourselves. How does one teach for greatest skill in the use of new technologies, and for the greatest wisdom in that use?

And finally #7 -- and perhaps of greatest importance -- More and more, today's challenges ask us to take responsibility in questions that before have not been human concerns. How does one teach for this degree of personal and social awareness and this degree of personal and social maturity?

As I see it, bring the greatest courage and wisdom to the single question that all of these others are ultimately about: Simply, what does it mean to educate for a future that matters?

In conclusion. Much in the best of education is eternal -- good education is just good education. But as well, if this list gets at anything important, in the decades ahead we will need to be rethinking the goals and processes of education in some fairly fundamental ways.

The following article is based on a keynote address given by Dr. Charles Johnston at the Albuquerque Conference on the Future of Education at the Albuquerque Academy in October, 1996.

Is the tower starting to crumble?

The media is finally waking up and calling shots as they see them, and there are certainly many many shots to be called. This collection of investigations is from Trish Wells and is carried on Yahoo News. I certainly recognize there are corrupt Democrats as well. I support accountable and responsible government, no matter which party.

In fact, I believe party politics is a leading reason of WHY there is so much corruption. Much of it is about staying in power. Anyway.... Here is the list from Trish.

Sen. Tom DeLay's indictment Wednesday isn't the only legal trouble involving Republicans. Among other woes:

-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is being investigated over whether he used insider information in deciding to sell Hospital Corp of America stock from his blind trust shortly before the price fell. The sale netted him millions.

-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California is under investigation for the sale of his California home to a Pentagon contractor at an inflated price. He's on the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense.

-Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio faces questions over his connections to Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who in turn is being investigated for his business dealings with the Tigua Indians and the funding of trips for members of Congress.

-A special prosecutor is investigating who revealed the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. The probe has reached as high as White House adviser Karl Rove. No charges have been filed.

-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced conflict-of-interest allegations over a $5 million contract with two bodybuilding magazines.

Dear concerned (breathing!) Americans,

The web-site ourfuture.org makes it very easy to write to your representatives and demand they take action to reinstate the minimum wage.

Are you looking for a very easy, immediate action you can take right now?

We must stop this ridiculous pattern of cronyism, corruption and favoring the rich and the power elite. Three of the first things Bush did in
reaction Katrina was to say there will be no new taxes to pay for Katrina,congratulate Brownie on a good job and to suspend a law requiring decent minimum
wages.

We now know his administration, led by a man who is now facing criminal charges (at last some accountability!) has signed no-bid contracts that will give billions to multi-national corporations like Halliburton without any guarantee that they will hire displaced people to rebuild their own communities.

Congressman George Miller has just introduced legislation (H.R. 3763) to reinstate the wage protections that were suspended by decree of President Bush, and I call on you now to demand that congress supports Rep. Miller's legislation.

Everyone that works hard should be entitled to a decent wage - especially the people we want to help get back on their feet after this enormous disaster.

We must ensure that our government works for us and reflects our wishes. You must let your representatives know what you want them to do. They work for us!

Follow the link below to write to your representatives.

http://action.ourfuture.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=27805 or visit www.ourfuture.org

Thanks! Erica

Help! We must fight this agenda in a vacuum.

Although there are some steady streams of criticism and a growing chorus of rallying calls, the Bush Administration appears to still be getting away with murder, at least figuratively although many would say literally.

The chances of proper investigation into Katrina are beginning to grow slim. It has now become clear that even while most of the world was deep in mourning and shock, the Bush in crowd was busy trying to make a buck through no-bid rebuild contracts. This was largely being led by Mr. Safavian, a G.O.P. loyalist and veteran lobbyist appointed to run the entire government's purchasing policy without any proper experience or credentials, until he had to resign abruptly to face arrest on charges of obstructing justice in a deepening investigation into lobbyist corruption in Washington.

Day after day I am now reading the papers with completely mixed emotions. I completely outraged by many of the facts I am reading. But, my heart starts racing with excitement because at last the unbelievable cronyism and corruption in the government is being exposed. Then I feel sick as the realization sinks in that this still may not be it, they still might get away with it. Then I feel energized as I vow to help lead the charge and create a civil society movement that will take back government and create a system that is actually by and for the people. Then I feel frustrated because I am not sure how to do this, especially since I live in Singapore and have two small children. I am not prepared (yet!) to hop a plane and camp out in front of Bush’s ranch, although I admire those who do just that.

The facts remain though. You do not have to dig deep to find case after case of cronyism at best and possible corruption and outright criminal offenses or criminal neglect at worst. Franch Rich in his article “Another Gilded Age of corruption” highlights many, some of which I have listed below:

-There is the whole Safavian, Jack Abramoff circle that is too complicated for me to understand or recap here. Suffice it to say that arrests are beginning to happen which indicates it must be serious stuff.
-The appointment of “Brownie” to head FEMA with no qualifications.
-The recent nomination of Julie Myers as the new head of immigration and customs enforcement for homeland security. Myers is the niece of General Richard Myers and has just married chief of staff for the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff. Her chief qualification to run an agency with 20,000 employees and a $4 billion budget was serving as associate counsel under Kenneth Starr.
-Tracy Henke has been nominated as Homeland Security’s new executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. She is apparently an “Enron-style” spin master who has ordered politically damaging information to be deleted from high-level reports in the past. (When the official, Lawrence Greenfeld, complained about this, he was of course demoted).
-Another official, Bunnatine Greenhouse, has recently been demoted for question irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion in no-bid contracts in Iraq to a Halliburton subsidiary.
-Lawrence Lindsey, the president’s chief economic advisor, was pushed out when accurately projected the cost of the Iraq war.
-General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff was pushed out after estimating the number of troops required for securing Iraq.
-There continues to be no proper inquiry into human rights abuses at U.S. military bases, despite the fact that dozens of men are now going on hunger strikes.
-Senate Majority Leader Frist has both had a total conflict of interest between his political agenda and his stock holdings and now, on top of that, is possibly going to get away with a monster case of insider trading.

So, we can see there is a definite history of surrounding themselves with friends, qualified or not, and clearing out anyone who dares talk about things that do not fit in with their agenda. Remember, this is a President who used to brag about not watching or reading the news. A President who therefore was unaware about people being (and dying!) in the Superdome until days after Katrina hit when an aid finally gave him a memo.

Bush could not possibly have any serious intentions of even trying to do what is right and best for the country and the world if he has no interest in even understanding the real situation or trying to put qualified people in important postings. It is all about spin so that they can implement their own agenda in a vacuum.

How can we continue to let these things happen? How can we stop them? Where is congress? Where are checks and balances?

Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? Where's the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds? Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?

I need a hero!

The last paragraph of the post on Sachs and Jolie should have been:

It is a good example of the concept that aid and effort should be focused at the village level rather than on bureaucratic agencies or macro efforts. I also think it is a wonderful way to generate awareness and support for the campaign. It turns what often can be a bunch of hard to grasp words and figures into something real, something you can touch and feel. I fully support any efforts that cultural celebrities undertake to use their celebrity in support of a cause. Why not?

This is a lead in to my next post which will be about Bono.

Yesterday’s (September 22, 2005) IHT ran an article applying the age old wisdom of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure to both hurricane Katrina and in the looming “perfect storm” in Africa.
Katrina has provided a convenient example to what many African advocates have said for years “we must spend some billions to erect levees against those forces now, or be ready, as in New Orleans, to spend countless hundreds of billions to clean up the mess later.”

The article, by Michael Wines draws heavily from Jeffrey Sachs. A few more quotes below:

“Sachs essentially argues that a perfect storm is building in Africa: a confluence of the AIDS pandemic, extreme poverty, mass hunger, illiteracy and, he would say, potentially devastating climate change. Not tackling these problems now, he says, is penny-wise and pound-foolish, for the costs of salvaging the continent later are likely to be huge.”

“Spending money wisely now to forestall Africa's problems is both an economic and political no-brainer, even if one believes the continent's problems will never worsen. “

“Hunger, he says, is but one example: Across much of the continent - and certainly in Niger - rich nations have spent billions to rescue nations from famine but a tiny fraction of that to introduce modern farming practices that might make the continent self-sufficient. Malaria is another: Spending to prevent or eradicate the illness, while rising, is far below the economic cost of the sickness and death it leaves behind. AIDS, illiteracy - the list is long. “

Another recent hit in the media by Jeffrey Sachs is The Diary of Angelina Jolie (http://www.mtv.com/thinkmtv/features/global/diary/angelina_jolie/). Sachs and Jolie travel to a village in Kenya where Sachs shows Jolie first hand how small efforts, such as a $10 mosquito net, in the village are fundamentally changing life in that village forever.

“Spending two long days in Sauri, Sachs exposes Jolie to every corner of village life to reveal his vision for ending extreme poverty by 2015. In a small hut, he demonstrates how a simple $10.00 bed net keeps families safe from Malaria, a disease that kills over three million people every year. In an open field, Jolie learns how basic instruction in proper farming techniques and fertilizer use can produce enough food to keep villagers alive on land that has failed to yield sustainable crops for generations. And, in a moving sequence featuring the town's young people, Jolie discovers how free school lunches are giving children a reason to come to class and learn - and that one computer is connecting this tiny village to the rest of the world.”

One of the very first things our dear, focused, on the ball president felt compelled to decide immediately after Katrina and the ensuing disaster was that there would be no new taxes to pay for rebuild efforts. WHAT??!!

Even if in the end the Administration was going to go that route, how could it possibly be decided before any understanding of the extent of the situation or any review of the options and their repercussions was done??

Oh, yes, I remember now. Our Administration does not like to look at facts or reports or real numbers. They don’t affect them and their friends and power-elite buddies anyway. Who cares if the country is bankrupted for centuries. These people have their own accounts and investments. They will look after themselves. They don’t need a safety net.

They can afford private healthcare, will never need social security or welfare, will always have a ride out (be it car, plane, helicopter, yacht) in cases of impending disasters, and of course they can also stay at the holiday house, or ranch as the case may be. Interest rates going up, well that is probably a good thing, right, more interest income. No need to borrow in these households. You get my point.

Some current early estimates are putting a price tag on Katrina of about $200 billion. Bush is suggesting to fund this completely by debt or possibly with some more spending cuts. Remember, government is a bad thing we need to get rid of entirely. Yes, let’s further cut those frivolous entities like Medicare, HUD and FEMA.

The papers have put the interest price tag on this borrowing at $10 billion per year indefinitely. Your great- great-great grandkids will be saddled with this debt, all so that the wealthy and really, really wealthy of today can get their tax cuts.

Cutting taxes for the rich is an outrageous reason to pile up debt. “Since 2001, tax cuts for people who make more than $200,000 a year, the top 3 percent of the income ladder, have accounted for about $330 billion. Republican leaders have now pledged to push ahead with more deficit-inducing tax cuts for the wealthy - costing up to $70 billion over five years. Their most cherished is an extension for two years of temporary low rates for dividends and capital gains, scheduled to expire in 2008. About half of those cuts would flow to people making more than $1 million a year. “ (NYT Editorial, September 19, 2005)

Do you think people making more than $1million a year need some help from the government at the expense of your children and their children, at the expense of the families who have lost everything in Katrina, at the expense of our brave soldiers risking their lives in Iraq without the proper equipment, at the expense of the poor and the lower income in our own country that cannot afford healthcare, at the expense of the billions of poverty stricken people the world over that will suffer as our aid budgets are cut?

Getting up and using words to say I am accountable is commendable but a far cry from truly being accountable or responsible. We can not let this happen. Please.

OK, I was not actually personally watching with Thomas Friedman, but, as an American who is living in Singapore and who is also a Thomas Friedman fan, I of course took note of the below article.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 14, 2005
Singapore

There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down.

That is certainly the sense I got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone's college roommate.

Indeed, Singapore believes so strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line.

From Singapore's early years, good governance mattered because the ruling party was in a struggle for the people's hearts and minds with the Communists, who were perceived to be both noncorrupt and caring - so the state had to be the same and more.

Even after the Communists faded, Singapore maintained a tradition of good governance because as a country of only four million people with no natural resources, it had to live by its wits. It needed to run its economy and schools in a way that would extract the maximum from each citizen, which is how four million people built reserves of $100 billion.

"In the areas that are critical to our survival, like Defense, Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs, we look for the best talent," said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. "You lose New Orleans, and you have 100 other cities just like it. But we're a city-state. We lose Singapore and there is nothing else. ... [So] the standards of discipline are very high. There is a very high degree of accountability in Singapore."

When a subway tunnel under construction collapsed here in April 2004 and four workers were killed, a government inquiry concluded that top executives of the contracting company should be either fined or jailed.

The discipline that the cold war imposed on America, by contrast, seems to have faded. Last year, we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis.

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: "We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?"

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ...[But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

Shorly after I posted HEAD IN THE SAND I came across a glimmer of hope. Bush is at least giving lip service to vitally important concepts and policies. Let's hope (and more importantly demand!) he keeps his word.

The New York Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2005

Let's face it: Most Americans wouldn't know a Millennium Development Goal, a Monterrey Consensus, or a Doha round if all three jumped out and hit them in the head. But those phrases have life-or-death importance to more than two billion people around the world who survive on barely anything. And at the United Nations on Wednesday, President George W. Bush used them in front of the world.

To understand this good news, here's a quick primer.

The Millennium Development Goals make up an ambitious agenda adopted by the United Nations in 2000. Chief among them is the goal of cutting global poverty in half by 2015 by tackling such problems as hunger, disease and women's inequality. The goals also include vague wording about how poor countries need to adopt good governance, and about how rich countries need to give them money.

As this week's UN summit meeting approached, Bush's flame-throwing UN envoy, John Bolton, struck all mention of the Millennium Development Goals from the text of the agreement the world leaders are supposed to sign. After saner heads prevailed, some of that language was restored, although the agreement remains weak. On Wednesday, Bush said it clearly: "We are committed to the Millennium Development Goals." Full stop.

That's important because the United States, the richest country on earth, is most able to help poor countries reach these goals.

That brings us to the Monterrey Consensus, named for the city in Mexico. (Diplomats like to name things after the city where they decided to do something.) In 2002, many members of the group meeting in New York this week trooped down to Monterrey to figure out how they were going to pay for the Millennium Development Goals. The text they signed said, "We urge developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts toward the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product as ODA [official development assistance] to developing countries."

Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced how they plan to do that by 2015. The United States, which was rated the world's second-stingiest rich country (behind Italy) by a UN report this month, gives just 0.18 percent of its GNP to poorer countries. And since Monterrey, Bush administration officials have taken pains to tell everyone that the United States didn't commit to the 0.7 percent goal. But it's right there in Paragraph 42 of the Monterrey Consensus. And Wednesday, Bush said, "I call on all the world's nations to implement the Monterrey Consensus." Including, we hope, America.

We end today's lesson with the Doha round, the trade negotiations begun in Doha, Qatar, in 2002. That was just after Sept. 11, 2001, when America and Europe, trying to woo poor countries to join the war against terrorism, finally agreed to start negotiating an end to farm subsidies. Those subsidies hurt farmers in poor countries because they keep the price of products artificially low, giving poor countries little chance on the world market. Since then, no one has cut anything, and the negotiations have degenerated into the usual bickering between Europe and America. Meanwhile, the poor keep starving.

On Wednesday, Bush declared: "The United States is ready to eliminate all tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to free flow of goods and services as other nations do the same. This is key to overcoming poverty in the world's poorest nations."

These were exactly the right words, and we applaud them. Now, America, let's get to it. The world is waiting.

A bit of inspiration was needed today. Here is a great quote by George Bernard Shaw:

Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one is the true joy in life. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege - my privilege - to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love.

I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.