Engineering Childhood

 A report in the New York Times on June 13 (click to read) should raise alarms with anyone interested in freedom of thought and action - especially in the lives of young children.(Note the skepticism among engineers as well as some educators who comment in the article.)

The article is titled "Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It," and examines kindergartners in Glen Rock, N.J. who solve "engineering problems" in their classes. The article says "Spurred by growing concerns that American students lack the skills to compete in a global economy, school districts nationwide are packing engineering lessons into already crowded schedules for even the youngest students..."

The trend toward earlier and earlier "education" is, naturally, not limited to a small, upscale town in New Jersey. It spans the country and "educational" toys, games, books and online activities are a major industry. (Green eggs and ham? Turn 'em in for a calculator.)

Somehow, this refrain seems all too familiar. In fact, it was heard as long ago as the 1880s when the United States began its meteoric rise to world supremacy. It resurfaces on an irregular but perennial basis. We heard the refrain immediately following Sputnik in 1957. We heard it again in the mid 1970s when Japan burst upon the scene as an industrial world power and we hear it again when we may be challenged by China, and possibly India.

Familiar lyrics go along with the tune. The school year is too short, the curriculum is too weak, teachers are either under-qualified or underpaid. American kids are - mix and match - lazy, under-informed, unmotivated, and studying the wrong subjects.

Science, math, engineering and related disciplines are the usual antidotes that will lead us into the salvation of the nation.

The counter current that should be put forth is that it is the very easy going nature of past American education logistics and strategies that has put and kept us in the forefront of almost every major scientific and engineering development of the last 100 plus years. How can that be if we are always behind or about to fall behind?

When we as a nation do fail - high speed rail comes instantly to mind - it is not for a lack of certain skill sets, but for lack of political leadership or failure of the investment community to step forward and take useful, as opposed to mindlessly dangerous, risks.

If, as a liberal democracy, we believe in freedom in its most basic incarnations, then teaching "engineering" in kindergarten needs a resounding condemnation. Teaching tots to begin serving the needs of the corporate/industrial complex smacks of another kind of engineering - social engineering.

What we should be encouraging is individual development based on the freedom of a child to explore, invent, innovate on his or her own level, and yes, fail, at his or her chosen play forms. Not all children are meant to be engineers anymore than they are meant to be doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, farmers, Indian chiefs, etc.

When I was a child, my father arrived home one day with a little hand cranked printing press kit. You set rubber type and assorted cast rubber graphics onto a flexible template that was then attached to a cylinder; next the machine's reservoir was filled with ink, you cranked the handle and fed 5 x 8 inch sheets of paper into its mouth and voila... out came a tiny neighborhood newsletter authored by my 8 year-old self.

There was little guidance from my father, aside from the actual nuts and bolts part... here's how you do it, biff bam boom, now go knock yourself out, kiddo. It took me days and days to get it right on my own, but so I did. And The Gazette was born - and died all in the same hot, long summer in the cool of the basement.

The experience influenced me deeply. When I was in my late 30s, I started my own grown up magazine.

I wonder what my inclinations might have been had I been "taught" magazine-making in kindergarten.

Likewise, although there were many books, newspapers and magazines around our house, I can honestly say I only remember being read to sporadically. But, word play, jokes, word game books, a kids monthly named Jack and Jill, and tons of kiddie records surrounded me. It was all about playing, loafing, and relaxing with words and their myriad uses.

Kids learn through playing. And not the kind of ham-handed guided play that a fanatical hard core of educators seem intent upon foisting on our children.

Kids need free play much more than they need to learn engineering, math or reading at age 5. They need to let their little minds wander. They need to find, on their own, a path to what they do best and like best. The straitjacket of over-structuring will be our undoing, not the free form learning of yesteryear.

The marketplace will determine at some point in the kids' future lives how many engineers will be needed and where they will come from.

Dedication to one's life's "work" could not be taught to the tune of a hickory stick in days of yore, and won't be taught through an overwrought curriculum better suited to 12 year-olds than to 4, 5 and 6 year-olds.

Teach them to love exploring on their own, in their own time, in their own unique way. Allow them to make their own way.

Kindergarten should not be a junior trade school.
...

What's In Store For The Gulf: GE's Battle To Leave PCB's In The Hudson River

How old will you be in 35 years?

If the 80-Years War over cleaning up PCBs in the Hudson is any indication, that's how old you'll be when the entire clean up of the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe is finished. (If you want to use another environmental accident as yardstick, the 250,000 barrel Exxon Valdez spill has still not been completely ameliorated in the almost 21 years since it happened.)

Monsanto began manufacturing carcinogenic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 1929. General Electric began using them almost immediately in the manufacturing of transformers, capacitors and other electrical equipment at their Hudson Falls plant for more than 40 years as insulating material.

The discovery of PCBs toxicity and subsequent government action began in 1977 when the manufacture and use of PCBs was outlawed. The Hudson is still not cleaned up almost 35 years later.

Because they are long-lived, semi-volatile and don’t dissolve in water, PCBs can travel long distances (the 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River below G.E.’s factories is considered the biggest Superfund site in the United States).

The potential impact doesn’t stop at the tip of Manhattan. Because of their stability and ability to travel long distances, PCBs can migrate around the planet. PCBs are part of a global class of chemicals known to migrate from warmer regions to colder regions. Inuit people living in the Arctic thousands of miles from any industrial source are known to carry some of the highest body burdens of PCBs on the planet.

PCBs are also fat-soluble, which means that they concentrate as they move up the food chain. Animals at the top of the food chain – especially marine mammals like polar bears and dolphins – have dangerously high levels of the chemical, which they lack the ability to detoxify.

Humans, too, are contaminated. PCBs regularly top the list of chemicals found in human tissue surveys.

As early as the 1930s, problems caused by PCB exposures of workers were widely known by G.E. executives who met with colleagues from Monsanto and other companies to share information on the “systemic effects” of PCBs and other chlorinated hydrocarbons, including chloracne, a disfiguring skin condition.

Dredging finally began in earnest in May of 2009, almost 25 years after the first lawsuits against G.E. were brought.

According to The New York Times, "G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)"

The Times also says, "...G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company."

Chances are that a good proportion of us reading this will be long dead before the Gulf is cleaned up and restored. The rest of us will be well into middle age. If they're lucky, our grandchildren will know the Gulf as it stood on April 18, 2010.

If they are very lucky.

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The Educated Tea Bag

OK. We already know there are lies, damn lies and statistics. But this week's NY Times/CBS Poll of people who consider themselves part of the Tea Bag movement has generated some particularly bizarre contradictions.

The report summary says: "Fourteen percent of Tea Party supporters have a post-graduate education, compared with 10% for the general public. Twenty-three percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 15% for the general public, according to the poll."

However, the summary also notes, "Although the Constitution requires American presidents to be natural born citizens, as many as 30% of Tea Partiers say they think President Obama was born in another country and another 29% aren't sure." That's a total of 59% in the doubter column.

What colleges and grad schools did these people attend? Has a Tea Bag University been set up without our knowing it?

I can't think of even one post graduate degree holder I know who doesn't believe, or doesn't know if, the President is a natural born citizen. I did know one undergraduate degree holder who had doubts, but a few beers together and the threat of taking a belt sander to his face disabused him of the notion.

62% of Tea Party Activists believe the economy is getting worse in spite of the fact that the stock market has recovered almost 4,500 points since Obama has been in office. And employment figures, while unsteady, are on a definite up trend.

77% have a favorable view of Glen Beck, while 75% have a favorable view of Sarah Palin.

32% believe that violent action against the government is justified. (Maybe we should check THEIR birth certificates. Sound like enemy aliens to me.)

77% get their TV political news from Fox.

What person with a college or graduate degree could possibly name Fox as his or her primary news source? It's like naming Homer Simpson your favorite philosopher, except even Homer is right occasionally.

Of course, a vast majority of the Tea Baggers are "older" Americans, so one must take into account the possibility that their education ceased 50 years ago, or their brains have actually been eroded from all that tube time with Fox.

In Animal House, Flounder is admonished that "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life."

To the Tea Baggers: "Misinformed, angry and scared is no way to spend your twilight years."

David Brooks Invents The History of The New Left. Thanks!

In today's New York Times, David Brooks, while conflating the Tea Party "tactics" with the "New Left's" mass movement activities, literally invents history. Makes it up. Creates facts from whole cloth and ignores the core of what the New Left was all about, where it came from. (Click for his opinion piece.)

The first thing that Brooks gets wrong (please let me keep my blood pressure in check) is the difference between an organic movement and an inorganic one, or in today's parlance "grass roots" vs. "astro-turf."

The New Left flowed from many, many previous currents in American political thought, while the Tea Party has been born of money provided by the likes of the Koch Energy Corporation and Exxon Mobil in the space of a few months, and is largely a racist response to America's first African American President.

The New Left finds its roots in the Progressive Movement of the 19th century, the Suffragette efforts of the early 20th century, is connected to New Deal philosophies, Ban the Bomb protests of the 1950s and early 60s, and the Anti-Segregation battles of the 60s.

The New Left began to flower politically out of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid 1960s, and came to full fruition during the Anti-Vietnam era. While they have since taken on a life of their own, parallel to New Left politics but not entirely apart from it, the Women's Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the ongoing struggle for racial equality are part of the larger picture.

The New Left has also been a cultural movement through which entirely new modes of art, music, literature, architecture and cultural criticism came into being.

The New Left originally was largely a youth movement.

The New Left did not and does not despise government as a force in American society. What the New Left and its descendants and offshoots fight against are immoral, unjust or unfair features of society often created and perpetuated by government.

Unlike the right, the left does not want to dismantle government, it wants to improve it, even perfect it. Mr. Brooks must be bright enough to understand the distinction.

Were there excesses by factions associated with the New Left in its heyday? Certainly. Although significantly they were considered fringe elements by the mainstream New Left. The vast majority of protests were extremely peaceful. Some were disruptive, and a small handful were violent.

The reaction of authorities and of private citizens who were against the progressive ideas of the New Left were routinely violent and sometimes deadly. Whether it was the murder of children in a Birmingham church in 1963, the murder of innocent college students at Kent State and the murder of two students at Jackson State College in 1970, or the bloody police riots of 1968 in Chicago, the reaction was, to put it kindly, barbaric.

In retrospect, given that the Vietnam War, focal point of the New Left's outrage, ended up killing 3 to 4 million people needlessly, the efforts of the movement seem rather weak-kneed. 60,000 of our own soldiers were killed or left missing while 153,000 were wounded.

In 1967, 400,000 people marched against the war in New York. Two years later in 1969, millions of people in all parts of the country protested against the war. From 1967 through 1973, crowds of 100 to 200,000 routinely showed up in dozens of big cities, nationally and internationally. (Another point about the New Left is that it was actually the largest component of a movement that swept the whole of Western Civilization, particularly in 1968.)

The Tea Party gatherings routinely consist of crowds in the low thousands, and occasionally a crowd in the 20,000 to 25,000 range. It is not a mass movement, but a media phenomenon financed by corporate money that represents a fraction of a fraction of America's polity.

It has even gone so far as to phony up numbers and use "documentary" photos of other gatherings - most notably, ironically, of the Million Man March by African Americans in 1997 - to stretch their crowd counts, a sort of Hamburger Helper method for fringe movements. (See this analysis on PolitiFact.com.) Haven't they at least heard of Photoshop?

The Tea Party is composed mostly of older Americans. It is mostly white (another giveaway as to the racist nature of its thrust). It represents only the disgruntled middle to lower middle classes. (By contrast, the composition of the New Left is as diverse as a movement can grow.)

The Tea Party has no antecedents, unless one considers the John Birch Society and illegal citizen militias. It surely can't claim roots in Nixon's Silent Majority, which was indeed a majority and at the polling place not so silent after all. The Tea Party is more like a Vocal Mini-Minority.

The gravest distinction, which I rephrase from above, is that The Tea Party seeks to destroy government, whereas the New Left set out to eradicate genocidal policies in a pointless war, create true equal rights for all our citizens, and clean up the environment. (Sounds unsettlingly familiar to what the left seeks today, eh?)

The liberal/progressive agenda is, of course, both much broader and particularized now. At the heart of the movement lies a belief in government's potential for good, and the faith that the people can wring that good out of government.

The Tea Party gang, and much, if not the entire right wing, believes that all government is inherently evil and would return us to Thomas Hobbes's "war of all against all." You can see it in their faces. Read it in their foul posters. Hear it in the hoarse shouts of people who have stopped believing in their country.

Think Local, Ummm… Think Narrow?

(See video at end of post)

On February 18, the New York Times published a profile of urban sociologist, Sharon Zukin, a professor at Brooklyn College. (link) As many of us do, Professor Zukin decries the passing of neighborhoods with special charm and character. But Zukin is wrong; they have not passed. They have moved to northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and countless neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

From what the Times says of Zukin, one would think that the entire swath of the five boroughs has descended into an 8 million person shopping mall more worthy of Phoenix than the Northeast. What seems closer to reality is that the likes of Zukin keep their middle-class binoculars focused on the old ethnic enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn that were made up largely of white ethnic groups. 

To cite one "colorful" ethnic group - Italian Americans - not very long ago, there were about 2 million people of Italian descent living in the 5 boroughs. Now there are about 625,000. (However, there are 3.3 million Italians living in the overall metro area.) To greater or lesser degrees, this holds true for the Jewish, Irish, German and Slavic populations. Of course their descendants are living in New York City, but they are more homogenized, less colorful and thus less able to lend their old neighborhoods ethnic flavor. As a coda, in the last census estimates, fewer than 100,000 people living in Manhattan identified themselves as Italian-American.

Yet we know that there are ethnic groups abounding in the great metropolis.

New Yorkers speak 170 languages in their homes and there are about 275 ethnic newspapers and magazines published here in 40 or so different languages. The striving, struggling and dreaming goes on, just not in the narrow confines of the Village, Soho or Noho, or formerly German/Slavic Yorkville on the Upper East Side. But, from what The Times says of Zukin's point of view, one would think that the entire swath of the five boroughs has descended into an 8 million person shopping mall more worthy of Phoenix than the Northeast. Nothing can be farther from the truth.

A visit to most of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and especially Queens - the most ethnically diverse county in the country - will confirm this. Ya want ethnic flavor? Get out of town!

Behind the picturesqueness or lack of same, however, comes a portrait of the new ethnic individual, however. A majority are working class, but they are not employed in manufacturing since New York's factory world has been disintegrating since World War II. Now there are less than 100,000 manufacturing jobs here, a loss of 1,000,000 since 1942.

The European-American, hearty lunch-pail image of the New York that we know so well from movies like On The Waterfront and The Naked City is gone for the foreseeable future. 

30% of people with less than a high school diploma who are employed at all, work in manufacturing. The remaining low skill workers toil in the food service industry, retail, and menial labor jobs. Since manufacturing jobs traditionally pay more than those other categories, this does not bode well for us. The difference, once upon a time, between a white collar professional and a skilled blue collar worker was largely a matter of luxury income. Now the chasms are gargantuan. (The blue collar workers of the building trades, and the light blue collar telecommunications and health care fields somewhat ameliorate the situation.)

Is the flavor of Manhattan below 110th Street becoming Walmarted? It surely is. Can that be governed? Probably not. The chaining of America is not a micro, but rather a macro trend.

To recreate the faded industrial era, one would have to bring back the garment industry that once made 70% of all women's and 40% of all men's clothing in the country. Or bring back the dozen and a half big breweries from Rupert's to Rhiengold's to Lion's. Or the slaughterhouse and meat packing business. And shipbuilding, brick making and railroad tie making.

David Brooks, Extremism, Elitism, Corporate Racism and Workers' Wages

Today David Brooks in the New York Times has written a spurious, inaccurate column (link to it here) about America's power elite in which he feebly tries to explain the angry disaffection abroad in the land.
 

Among the dim-witted statements he has made (and quick commentary following them) are:

• "As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted."                                                                                                                      Meritocracy, indeed. In fact, for instance, the U.S. Senate has one African-American, one Asian-American, one Hispanic member, and 16 women. There are 4 African-Americans heading Fortune 500 Companies, only one woman among them. The first black Fortune 500 CEO was only appointed in 1999: Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae. The Executive Leadership Council, a group in Alexandria, Virginia, notes that the percentage of Fortune 500 CEO seats occupied by white males, stayed steady in 2009 at 73%.

• "It could be that Americans actually feel less connected to their leadership class now than they did then..."                                                                                                         The reason, Mr. Brooks, is not that the rich and powerful grow ever more so, but that the meat-and-potatoes middle and working classes grow steadily less rich and powerful. Until the 1970's, the standard of blue collar "middle-class" was a $20 per hour wage (adjusted to 2010 money). Since then the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling in 2008 to 16 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of post-World War II gains. The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much, down 60 percent since 1979, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This neatly coincides with the rise of "Free Trade" and helter-skelter immigration policies that have pushed wages down and kept native born African-Americans, among others, from good paying jobs that were traditionally the second rung on the ladder of group success. “The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, “was the middle class for blue-collar workers.” 
• King Harvest (Has Surely Come) by The Band

• "[S]ociety is too transparent... I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it."                                                   Where does one begin to point out the deficient thinking of such statements? Perhaps with the Bush Administration's manipulation of intelligence that lead to the Iraqi War? Or should we dally in the vale of the meltdown of the banks, of which 99% of Americans were unaware before the hard rains came? Or perhaps we should consider that details of the bailout of the same devious banks are perniciously being kept secret by the Federal Reserve? How about secret renditions, the pressure for closed military trials of terrorists, or even the rules governing chemicals in the food we eat? Democracy argues eternally for MORE, not less transparency, except in time of dire emergency, and I do mean dire.

Finally, the top 1% of Americans controls almost 43% of the wealth in the country. About 17% of our population controls 93% of the wealth. That means that 255 million Americans are splitting the remaining 7% of the wealth. This is a prescription for________________ (fill in your favorite doomsday scenario.)

Look no further for the lack of trust in the power elite, or the ever quickening rage boiling in so many of our fellow citizens. As always, follow the money. 

College Loan Revamping Threatened By Greedy Lobbyists and Complicit Senators

From The New York Times February 5, 2010 (Click here for full article):

"Sallie Mae, a publicly traded company that is the nation’s biggest student lender with $22 billion in loans originated last year, led the field in spending $8 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double the year before, and other lenders spent millions of dollars more, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics." 

As discussed on New York Liberal State of Mind, January 29, 2010, the revision/rehabilitation of the way Federal college loans are administered is being threatened by self-serving lobbyists. (See original blog post).

The projected savings in the bill over 10 years would be $80 billion dollars.

The private lenders are often enormous institutions like Sallie Mae, Citi, and Wells Fargo, although there are many mid-size competitors, many of which are not household names unless you're in the market for a student loan.

Industry lobbyists claim that some, although they can't or won't say how many, of the 35,000 jobs will be lost if the government takes the reins of the out-of-control profits the companies are making. Let's make an extreme case: one quarter of those 35,000 jobs will be lost under the new plan, or 8750 jobs.

By distributing that $80 billion dollars in savings amongst those theoretical 8750 workers if they are not laid off, each of those jobs would be subsidized by taxpayers at the rate of $91,000 per year, every year over the ten year cycle. Who wouldn't love to run a company with that kind of government subsidy? I volunteer immediately to receive my $91,000.

Put another way, the financial institutions will be receiving $266 from every man, woman and child in America in order to save these pointless jobs. (We know that children don't pay taxes, and we also know that about 1/4th of all adults pay little or no taxes, so you can figure your real share is more along the lines of $400 to support big banks and the like. Great, isn't it?)

There are many alternatives to the current system leaving aside straight up federal administration. States could administer the loans, as could colleges, or scholarship foundations. Direct grants could be made to students using the savings.

Interestingly, Sallie Mae, while it was spending $8 million in lobbying last year maintains a "scholarships" program. The amount they give away? $250,000 - about 3% of what they spend for lobbying. Click here for their "scholarships" page.

There has also been a shocking degree of corruption and lack of oversight of the program as now administered. Educational institutions are entwined with the lenders on an unimaginable scale. Click here to read some highlights - or low-lights, as the case may be.