My sappy gauge registered pretty high on this one! Please do not read to much into this post. I am just trying to understand why we seem to expect our lives to be so clean and safe. I’m exploring this from the perspective of an American in his mid 50s — which certainly influences my impressions.
Many years ago (decades), I watched a program on PBS about the tumultuous ’60s, the years of love, of protest, of experimentation with drugs, and dropping out of society. It prefaced these years of generational contentiousness — the rise of the hippies and yippies — by going into our childhood, one that was almost as unique as that of our own children. We were born of parents who had come of age in the Great Depression, survived a world war, and now enjoyed a golden American age of prosperity and a new culture of entitlement.
Great diseases were cured. An amazing road system was designed and constructed. Machines were invented and mass-produced that would afford us leisure time that had only been enjoyed by the elite. We grew being entitled to food, education, jobs, entertainment, and safety. From the perspective of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights, we grew up believing that the U.S.A. was the greatest of countries and the golden hope of the future — land of the free and the brave and a land of opportunity. Then, by our teenage years, we started slamming into the fact that our country was not always so great nor always so right. We resented it and rebelled…
Yet, we continued to grow up with those expectations, those entitlements of prosperity, entertainment, jobs, and safety. As news and entertainment have come to merge, we see so much more to be afraid of — fear and death. As diseases have emerged, we wear blue gloves to protect ourselves from the deadly ailments that we hear about on the news. We establish elaborate lockdown procedures, search airline passengers, welcome more police, build more prisons, ….
We hide from the problems, rather than solve them. What are we doing to cure the desperation from which terrorism is born and crime grows? What are we doing to understand sexual deviancy and predatory behavior? What are we doing to treat drug abuse, greed, dominance, and a satisfaction to be ignorant and to practice power from that ignorance? What are we doing to replace fear and hatred with compassionate and creative solutions to our problems?
Have we asked our children what they would do?
Are we teaching them the learning literacies that they will need to solve these problems?
Image Citation:
Parks, J. “Safety Vision.” VaXzine’s Photostream. 23 Aug 2006. 1 May 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/vaxzine/222961073/>.
Sometimes I feel as if we are spinning out of control, terrorism, school violence, global warming, increase drug use, increase crime and more. I am not saying that the American society was perfect, but living in America has changed. Therefore, we should be preparing our children to think critically when using the internet because there is no guarantee that the information our children access would be from reliable sources. Inaccurate sources of information consumed by our children could present further threats to the ‘culture of entitlement’ and threats to teachers as played out recently at Virgina Tech.
My gut initial response to your post is the sky isn’t totally falling, Henny Penny. Try not watching FoxNews and CNN or listening to talk radio. Gather news from sources without spin… if that is possible. I am sure that Europeans felt this way in 1914 leading up to WWI. You had the specter of war, great medical advancement, political upheaval, waining empires and colonies, communist ideals promising worker utopias, children rebelling against the Victorian ideals of their parents that would eventually manifest itself in the “Roaring 20s.” WWI did start with a terrorist act that drew the whole world into conflict. The Balkins were referred to as a “powder keg” back then, much like the Middle East is today.
I suggest looking at things in a little historical perspective. I am always bothered by the myopic view of our times as something that is unique to world history. The guy who is standing on the street corner who believes these are the end times is always brought to mind. There has alwasy been that “end of the world is now” guy. The clothing styles change. The players are diverse, The technology is different, but the general historical themes stay the same. You need only read Shakespeare and Homer to know that.
That is not to say we don’t live in dangerous times. We certainly have more capacity now to bring about our destruction. but roughly 90 years ago the thought was this steam powered, telegraph/telephone connected world where education for the masses was becoming commonplace was on a fast track to greatness or misery. I think we are doing alright today. I just wouldn’t take any vacations to Iraq or walk down any dark alleys.
I’m not saying that the world is a less safe place. It may be. It may not be. I do not know. It does appear that we perceive it is a much less safe place than we did when I was young. This is the idea that I’m exploring here. I’m wondering if it is both our perceptions of the world, as reported by the media combined with a feeling that may be unique to my generation, that we are entitled to a large degree of safety.
I’m probably getting to far of topic here… but it’s out there now!
As a person of a certain age, I have also recently been asking myself just when and why my generation has decided the sky is falling. I perceive entirely too much fear over minimally real threats. It sometimes seems to me that our government and the media encourage this view so that we will stop questioning them. For this reason, I find an urgency in my teaching. We must make sure our children and our students question every piece of information given to them. As a school media specialist, the most important job I have is to teach kids to evaluate information and reject propaganda and half truths, even from or maybe especially from the mouths of the “authorities”.
This article certainly struck a chord with me. I am a retired educator new to blogging but an experienced computer user. When I began on the blogging trip, many of my friends expressed alarm and warned others in their midst to be very, very careful what they put online. My stock answer always dealt with the parallel between the newspaper and an online blog. Were I to send a letter to the editor, citing personal experience or giving my view on a particular issue, I would expect that my name would be printed. It is only fair. In the city where I live you can look me up by doing a google search. My question is “Who are we hiding from”. Predators have always been around and most generally they are the people we know. When I read A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, a book published by Harper & Brothers in the early 1940’s, I found a chapter about a predator in it. So the question one more time, what are we afraid of? Things have not changed, only the way that bad things can happen. We teach the children what to look for when they read, watch and listen. But we certainly don’t want to ruin these experiences for them As in the 1940s we need to be watchful when it comes to our children. I think truly that we need a sense of optimism. I love my computer and the things it offers my children and grandchildren.
David, not trying to downplay your post, not trying to breath more into what is there. My point of view, me being 31, varies greatly from yours. I was a history minor in college so I always try to put things into that perspective. Some people think in binary, I think a little like Patton. Great post. It got me thinking early today!
To your question at the end of your post… Are we teaching them the learning literacies that they will need to solve these problems? That is difficult to answer. However, to date, again looking at history, we as a world are at a breakneck pace with regards to innovation and invention. There have been very few times in history where the human race has gone backwards, not forwards. Even the “Dark Ages” weren’t all that dark… progress was slowed compared to what had just past, but in other parts of the world (i.e. China) there was a golden age.
Have faith, brother. Good you are vigilant. That is something we all need to be.
I completely agree with you… add “How are we being proactive in dealing with mental health issues?” to your list.
Instead of asking the GOOD questions (“how can we being to solve these problems?” or “how can we learn from these events?”), we play the blame game and then go on to bury our collective head in the sand. One example- instead of teaching kids to be responsible web users, we just block EVERYTHING that might be harmful. It’s amazing to me how much our kids actually learn in spite of what we’re doing in schools.
David, I think there’s a major difference between asking if the world is headed towards a major downfall and asking if the U.S.A. is heading towards a major downfall. WIth regard to the first question, I’m not sure. With regards to the second question, I’m unfortunately pretty confident. I don’t think our fellow citizens understand how much jeopardy our nation is in right now. In a few yaers we won’t have the leading economy. We’ve lost two of the last three wars we’ve been in (Vietnam and Persian Gulf II), possibly as a result of cockiness and I don’t think are elected officials are doing anything about it. You ask if we are discussing these issues. Social studies is the subject area within which we should discuss these issues and social studies is the only one of the big four content areas within which NCLB does not mandate testing.
Not just Social Studies, but any subject where kids get information should be a problem solving “class.” It doesn’t matter whether the information is delivered (via teacher or book) or discovered, it needs to be weighed and questioned. Math class works with statistics and, ideally, with the many ways those statistics can be used to mislead a reader of them. Science classes are confronting issues of disease and environmental risks, and ideally, ways to cope with those hazards. Now that media are truly “mass” media, information, good and bad, accurate and inaccurate, is at our fingertips, piped into our ears, and ever present on crawl lines. Healthy skepticism should be encouraged at all levels.