Category Archives: Education

January 31, 2012 · 7:38 am

Why We The Sheeple Will Lose Our Rights

WARNING:  this is a political post.  And it’s one in which I fear some of my anger may just boil over at the thought of  elected officials who are aggressively and deliberately creating and passing legislation that will remove our rights as citizens.

The election is near.  PLEASE, please, read, think, make an informed decision and go to the polls to exercise our singular right to vote.  If you don’t, there is only one person you can blame if your candidate for any office does NOT get elected…that’s you.  I am reposting this in the vain hope that some of you will read it, do your research and go to the polls.

Two points of interest before I begin:

  1. This post is based on a document entitled, “The Dirty Thirty – The GOP’s Rights Killing Agenda“.    I’d thank the people who did the research and put this together but I am way to upset right now to even be civil.
  2. THIS DOCUMENT WAS NOT PUBLISHED BY A POLITICAL PARTY masquerading as independent thinkers or analysts.  The people behind this post are all seasoned political reporters, analysts or scholars.  The information in their article is researched and documented and if you doubt it, you can check the legislation, yourself.

The “dirty 30” is a list of bills and legislation on the table in states all across our country.  Among the proposals are acts designed to damage everything from our right to unionize and use collective bargaining to getting rid of the current Child Labor Laws.

If demolishing human rights doesn’t really upset you, think about what’s going to happen to your wallet if bills introduced in Georgia, Michigan and Minnesota are passed.  Here’s a sampling of what the bills, which are aimed solely at undermining the middle class in this country, would do:

  1. Raise taxes on things like Girl Scout Cookies, groceries and gasoline but lower tax rates on corporate income, from 6 percent this year to just 4 percent in 2014
  2. Cut business taxes by 86 percent from an estimated $2.1 billion in FY 2011 to $292.7 million in FY 2013 while raising taxes on individuals  by $1.7 billion or nearly 31 percent.  Do the math – if you live in Michigan, you’re paying for the business tax cut.
  3. Cut the tax rate for the richest individuals and corporations to 25 percent to help spur job growth. This legislation is designed to help rich industrialists like the Koch Brothers, who increased their wealth by $9 billion last year but kept laying off employees, anyway.

Not worried about giving more to the rich and robbing the middle class to do it?  Try this on for size.  Two states have already passed legislation disenfranchising millions and millions of voters; 20 more states are preparing legislation to do the same.

In fact, 6 states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures are requiring voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and that number is even higher among young voters (18%) and African-Americans (25%).  That’s a lot of people who will lose their right to vote entirely.

There’s more but my head and my heart cannot take it so if you’re of legal voting age, I’m going to ask you to do a few things, yourself:

  1. DON’T read this post and make up your mind – no matter what side you fall on.  Read more.  Read mainstream and alternative press.  Read Mother Jones News and Nation magazines.
  2. DON’T listen to what politicians say; watch what they do.
  3. Think about everything you read and hear and then…
  4. Start thinking about who you want controlling your life from the vast distance of the State House or Capitol Hill.
  5. And make up your own mind.  Don’t vote like Daddy did or because your friends say you should.

This is your country, too.  Those of us who fought to win the very rights you enjoy today are fading from the front lines.  You need to step up and own the outcomes of living in a democratic society — a country where your vote should count and your rights should be protected.

If you don’t act, this nation of “sheeple” will get exactly what and who you vote for.

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January 25, 2012 · 8:41 am

Project 365 – Saving Animals & Saving Ourselves

Let me start this post by saying, I am not a vegetarian or vegan.   I eat beef, chicken and pork.

But I don’t buy any meat at the supermarket.  All of our meat comes from two local farmers whose animals I see grazing in the fields and lazing in the sun.  Why not just swing by the store and grab that plastic wrapped pork loin or t-bone steak?

Because I know where the meat in the store came from, how the animals were raised and I cannot enjoy my meals.  Restaurants and supermarkets rely on factory farms for their meat and poultry.

You’ve probably heard the term “factory farming” before but may not  really know what it means.  Let’s just look at chickens to help give you a glimpse inside factory farming.

Try to imagine thousands and thousands of chickens crowded into one small place, each chicken getting a 6 inch by 6 inch square to live in. Shortly after hatching, chicks have the ends of their beaks cut off.  Performed without anesthesia, large scale growers say it’s to reduce injuries that result when stressed birds are driven to fighting — for space, for food, for their very lives.

A commonly-held justification for keeping and killing chickens this way is that chickens aren’t smart.  Maybe…but what about pigs?

A baby piglet settles in with his friend. (Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary)

Recent research has shown that pigs are among the quickest  animals to learn new routines including herding sheep, opening and closing cages and playing video games with joysticks.

In fact, they are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs.  And they learn as fast as chimpanzees — the animal whose genome is 98% identical to ours.

More than 100 million of these smart animals are raised in factory farms every year, confined from birth to death and subjected to intense overcrowding in every stage of their short lives, until they reach a slaughter weight of 250 pounds at 6 months old.

Animals on factory farms never get to see the sun, never graze and some, like pigs, never even get to lie down.   The “farmers” say it’s a business; people who know better say it’s abuse.  And it’s this type of abuse that Farm Sanctuary has fought against for more than 25 years.

What started in 1986 as a group of dedicated volunteers has grown to the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization but its mission has not changed.  Farm Sanctuary is committed to, “… ending cruelty to farm animals.”  This group also brings its now considerable resources to education and advocacy.

These are two tools Farm Sanctuary uses to take its message to millions of people who had no idea how cruel life for animals is on today’s industrialized farms.  Farm Sanctuary also pushes for laws and policies to prevent the unspeakable conditions these thinking, feeling animals are currently forced to endure.

How can we help?

Start by understanding the real price that cows, pigs and chickens pay on factory farms.  Stop buying meat in stores.  Find and support a local farmer, instead.  Vote with your dollars  and tell factory farmers it’s time to clean up their act.  And you’ll be helping Farm Sanctuary change the world, making it a better place for our fellow inhabitants — farm animals.

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January 11, 2012 · 8:32 am

Project 365: Education At The Frontlines

Sticking with education because it is so important to our children, to our lives and to our future, there are a man and a project in Harlem that deserve to join the ranks of those who are changing the world.

Like Sal Kahn, Geoffrey Canada believes in the power of education so much that he has given his life to it.  Unlike Kahn, who uses the internet to reach as many people as possible, Canada’s quest is more focused and more personal.

Canada is the man behind The Harlem Children’s Zone Project (HCZ).

Founded 20 years ago as a program to address problems that poor families in this drug-riddled neighborhood were facing —  crumbling apartments, failing schools, violent crime and chronic health problems, HCZ grew into a life-changing force.

At the outset, the project centered on classroom education but Geoffrey Canada recognized early that this approach was not working. What they were teaching children inside classrooms just couldn’t counter what those same children learned about in the street, every day — drugs, shooting deaths, dire poverty.

That realization led Canada to look at the whole picture, the child within the community. It also led to expanded efforts to include after school services to kids as well as programs on parenting, early-childhood development, mental health counseling and drug and alcohol counseling for parents and care givers.

Understanding that education alone would not save these children from repeating their parents’ history, one of the  primary objectives of the overall project became “…to create a critical mass of adults around them who understand what it takes to help children succeed.”

Dubbed, “…one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time” by the New York Times, The Harlem Children’s Zone Project started with one block in that city; today it covers 100 city blocks and touches the lives of 8,000 children and 6,000 parents.

Based on HCZ’s data that show that it’s  impossible to separate education in the classroom from education in the streets, Harlem Children’s Project has also become the template for President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods program.

Geoffrey Canada is definitely changing the world, one child at a time.

On a personal note, as someone who pays an enormous amount of school taxes, as a person who is in the process of being disenfranchised by the autonomous school board in our district, I will say here, now, that I would gladly pay my school taxes to help support a Promise Neighborhood program.

I would even pay them to support HCZ because I know that the dollars going into these programs help teach children and adults how to live better, healthier lives.  The dollars in our district seem to go to larger administration buildings and bigger salaries for the people who work in them.

By they way, if you know a group or an individual that is helping to change our world for the better, please share their story with me so I can share it with my readers.

 

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January 10, 2012 · 7:39 am

Project 365: The Man Who Is Teaching The World

You gotta love this guy.  He’s literally a genius at math and science.  But he’s also a man who reached out to help his own cousin navigate these terrifying subjects.  Now, Salman Khan helps millions and millions of people learn, online at Kahn Academy.

And the topic list is amazing, ranging from Algebra (pretty much the subject that started the whole thing) to Venture Capitalism.  In between, users can learn about art, history, economics, information technology and health and wellness.  In fact, Kahn Academy now boasts more than 2700 video lessons that are offered free of charge to anyone who wants to watch and learn from them.

How did this happen?

As I mentioned, Khan started tutoring a young cousin remotely in 2004 after learning that she was struggling with math. They lived pretty far away from each other so Kahn decided to use the Internet and create some videos to help her.  Soon other relatives were asking him for help.  When he posted a series of lessons on YouTube, they went viral, and donors like Bill Gates offered to help him expand his efforts.

And Khan did just that!

Today, the academy has more than 250,000 YouTube subscribers and his videos have a total of 108, 697,000 upload views.  Khan Academy is the second most subscribed to non profit organization on YouTube.

This former hedge fund analyst quit his day job a few years ago to focus on teaching.  Now, he posts short video lessons to his site, khanacademy.org—where kids in dozens of countries learn about everything from Hubble’s Law to the French Revolution and get a chance to reinforce what they’ve seen with practice exercises designed for every level.

And Khan Academy isn’t just for kids.  Coaches and teachers who use this tool can access all of their students’ data. Summary data for the whole class is online as is data that allows teachers to dive into a particular student’s profile to figure out exactly which topics are problematic.  Again, it’s all free.

Running this enterprise is a lot of work and up until 2010, Khan was dipping into his own savings to help foot the bill.  Why do it?  Khan says he wants to provide extra help that kids  may not be getting at public schools like the ones he attended near New Orleans.  But he also wants to reach kids who don’t have access to schools, at all.

With $2 million from Google, Khan, who now has a small team (check out Ben Kamens who leads interns at Khan Academy) is translating his videos into languages like Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish, broadening the base and extending the reach of his organization beyond the limitations of the English language.

For a  lifelong learner like me, Khan Academy is a bit like a candy shop – full of lovely things to learn and all of them free for the asking.  And I am not alone.  A whole lot of people are watching and learning using a teaching tool developed by one man to help one young girl.

Sal Kahn is helping millions of children and he is changing the world.  If you want to learn more about Sal and his mission, check out these FAQ’s or see what Oprah had to say about him in the October issue of her magazine.

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