Anyone know this education prof. at the U. of Oregon? He seems to have some interesting criticism of U.S.. educational policy. Ken Hanly
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``His next book, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students.''
I don't trust anybody who uses a phase, `entrepreneurial students' or writes a book about these sorts of students. I read entrepreneurial as equivalent to asshole sociopath who engages in lying, cheating, stealing, and bullying.
Anyway, dispite this almost absolute prejudice, I went to look through the Common Core curriculum in California and was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't as bad as I thought. I didn't see Darwin or Marx, but you know, you can't always get what you want, but you might find, what you need. There were pretty demanding math and english requirements. The poetry wasn't half bad, sure. They had Langston Huges. Carl Sandberg, John Steinbeck, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman. Even the art wasn't half bad. Nice essay on the Pyramids, more as impressionism, even mentioned spiritual in the experience.
What's really missing is probably the core of teaching, which is to help creat a conceptual grasp of the world and its peoples. Maybe its my religion or something. We are not Americans. We are one of thousands of peoples of the world and its history---that's the story I want kids to discover. They can see it in their own bodies and features. Nobody but the Native Americans were from America. They are from just about everywhere but the Americas.
About the only saving grace of my mis-spent childhood was going to so many different schools in the LA basin, that I have forgotten most of their names. For grades k-6 thirteen is the number. I saw and played with kids from all over the earth. It's lesson was itself a radicalizing experience. I looked like Huck Finn, being mostly Irish and all. I was a serious chow hound and eat everything, which the Chinese immigrant community cooked at Danny Choy's father's laundry. Our after school job at eight was to greet customers, and find their laundry from a tag they brought in, collect money, put it in the register and made change. In slow hours we put cardboard rollers on coat hangers with a nice little piece of paper with the store name on it. The Dad, Henry was in back steam pressing suits and jackets. The traffic on South Hoover was smogging up the south central flats of miles and miles of millions. The asshole cop on a motorcycle was stationed behind a liquor store blind in the ambivalent shade. Me and Danny used to watch him out the window across the street. I once asked this prick something about his motorcycle and he told me to go away. Nice. I guess black and latino kids learn much earlier than I did that cops are assholes.
So there is that missing from the schools. And, of course the idea that sex ... nevermind. Do I need to mention that sex was on my mind about every twenty minutes for at least five minutes, from ages 11-25. I finally got a construction job that boiled the sex right out of me. I wanted rest more than sex... And I don't know how, but sex or its thoughts, desires, syndrome if you will was integral to creativity and don't ask me how. I have no idea.
Meandering thoughts ...
CG