Blog John Silver

Today’s education system is based on academia and tests which are used to gauge progress. A high percent of students are in tune with the current system, but there will always be the 30% who cannot associate classroom instruction with the real world. This is especially true for students with creative minds that are searching for alternatives. I have increasingly come to believe that the education system is lacking perspectives – teachers teach just to cover the syllabus, not help appreciate the beauty and the usefulness of what is being taught/studied.

 What is education?

v     knowledge in basic skills,

v     Academics,

v     Technical,

v     Discipline,

v     Citizenship or is it something else?

Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers’, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley, they educated themselves with self-motivated projects. Academics were a byproduct that was acquired as needed and at the level needed to achieve their goal. These people were in conflict with classroom education. They succeeded because they discovered their natural talent and built a career based on discovery. Education supports on projects is highly motivating and is man’s natural learning process. The discovery and opportunity to develop natural talent inspires a productive lifestyle. Natural learning environments and the Project based education can give students that opportunity.

natural learning environments:

Natural learning is based on curiosity and projects where participants share knowledge to reach a goal. Knowledge that is useful for a project is customized to the project needs and personality of the participants. Knowledge is gained by tapping information sources through research, trial and error, networking, and intuitive forces. The ability to tap these resources and make sound judgments is the key to achieving the desired goal. As one goal is achieved, another is established. Each goal requires new knowledge and skills, and this is achieved through the ability to acquire knowledge from many sources.

Before compulsory classroom education, team environments were standard for educating the young. Usually, the team was made up of family members, who passed on their skills. Being inspired, by those who care, is a natural way to learn. The problem was that results varied widely and local governments saw the need for control. The efficient way for governments to educate large groups of students is in a controlled classroom by a qualified teacher. This is not man’s natural way to learn, it is an efficient way. The price of efficiency is the acceptance that many students will fall through the cracks.

There are many natural ways to learn and scattered groups are reintroducing them to society. The winners of spelling bees, as I write this, came from home schooled students. Teachers unions and textbook industries are attacking these programs and are trying to get politicians to pass laws against there use. As business and political monopolies increase their control over the education system, many parents are breaking away, taking on the task themselves to teach their children. In fact, a small portion of our society is going back to the days of parent-child relationship that was the norm before compulsory public education. Experiential education is man’s natural learning tool. When learning methods are in harmony with compatible learning environments, a love to learn develops.

Project Based Education: It is based on what interests and motivates the student. Because the instructor cannot customize lesson plans for each student, he must implement student responsibility. It becomes the student’s responsibility to develop and research projects and develop a plan of action. The instructor acts as a coach or facilitator. Instructors take an interest in students’ projects instead of students having to take an interest in topics handed down by administrators.Projects require a goal where students must search for a method, acquire skills and knowledge, accept failure and bounce back from it, and keep trying until the goal is achieved. They learn through experiences, more important, they learn how to research and apply knowledge. Success is measured by the complexity of the project and the ability to finish it. This type of education motivates one to learn more about the world we live in while creating a lifetime love to learn. The laws’ of nature is the motivator and instructor. Positive self-esteem is one of the many by-products.

     types of projects:

v     Class Motivated - In this case, the instructor initiates the project and sets the goal. Competition type projects are effective. Some students may need to be taught the art of project development before they are assigned to smaller groups.

v     Team Motivated – A team of 2 to 5 members agree on a common interest project. With teams, the opportunity to share knowledge has a powerful influence on team members. It motivates others to find ways to contribute information or skills. When things go wrong, strong team members can support and encourage the weaker ones. Support from associates is a powerful force. Peer pressure motivates all to excel.

v     Self-Motivated - Some students are independent, strong-willed and have a natural talent with projects. They might do best on their own.

Projects make it possible to offer a wide verity of subjects, determined by the interest of the students. It becomes the students’ responsibility to develop the project with available resources, not the instructor.

With a wide verity of learning environments, a student has greater opportunity to find a project that is in harmony with his natural talent. All teenagers want to learn, be creative and productive, but they need opportunity.

Having discussed above, finally an educationist, Gardner identifies five different types of minds that education today has to inculcate in the younger generation. They are as follows:
1. Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.
2. Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.
3. Creating Mind: the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.
4. Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings andhumangroups.
5. The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one’s responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.

The Genius of Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss is the world-renownedcartoonist and authors of ever-present kids’s books like The pussy in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and How the Grinch Stole Chrismas. His books are so loved by children and older folks alike that his books have been evolved into eleven television shows, 3 full length pictures, and even a Broadway show. Thinking up characters, storylines, and literary devices so imaginative that kids were universally charmed by them, he released over sixty children’s books.

Theodor Seuss Geisel released 3 kids’s books before World War 2. Written in prose, they differed from his more well known style of basic readers printed later in his career. In the war Seuss was employed by a newspaper writing political cartoons in support of the war effort. He later signed up for the US armed forces, and was in control of its animation department makinging propaganda films like “Your Job in Germany” and Our Job in Japan.

Following the war, Seuss returned to writing youngsters’s books, making masterpieces that are among his most famous today. In 1954 Seuss commenced an amazing creativity in youngsters’s literature. After media reports about poor literacy levelsamong children, Seuss was requested by his publisher to produce a book only using 250 words of indisputable literary importance to kids. This kind of assignment had never been carried out in the past, but Seuss accomplished the task, the ensuing work being The Cat in the Hat. This marked the start of the “Beginner Books” series, and Seuss continued composing works in this fashion, regardless of the huge challenge it entailed. He also continued penning other books in his prior, more sophisticated style.

Seuss died in 1991, but appreciation for his work has kept on going as strongly as ever, receiving many post-mortem awards and honors all over the planet. With practically all children of the last two generations growing up on his work, Seuss’s influence on not only American society but on the world as a whole is undoubted and he will go down in history as one of the greatest children’s book athors ever.

Americans may find themselves asking how gender equality – particularly in the workplace – can continue to be a struggle in the country whose constitution has inspired fledgling democracies the world over. Actually, the Constitution doesn’t ever guarantee or advocate equality. All that nice stuff about everyone being “created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence, which, in terms of legal applicability, was little more than an angry breakup letter to the Brits.

The closest the Constitution comes to the issue of human equality is in the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which essentially says that the states can’t apply laws in a discriminatory manner. Note that enforcement is between the federal government and the states, not the federal government and private businesses or clubs. Only when someone is “clothed with the state’s power” does the federal government have any jurisdiction over whether he or she is practicing discrimination. Being that this is an incredibly cryptic statement, suffice it to say that the courts usually consider a state complicit only when it is a direct participant in discriminatory private behavior.

The 14th Amendment was added to the US Constitution in 1868 in an effort to improve the lives of former slaves in the South, but because the Amendment protects the rights of “persons” and not “freedmen,” it has since been interpreted in a much broader sense to apply to all people in the US. In fact, during America’s Gilded Age of big business and corruption, the Supreme Court broadened their interpretation to the point where the word “persons” suddenly applied to corporations. This made it much harder for the government to stand in the way of a ruthlessly expanding economy – not that it particularly wanted to.

In fact, Equal Protection was interpreted so broadly at this point in US history that workers petitioning for safer conditions and shorter workweeks were kept in the factories so that they would not be denied the “right” to support their families. Remember when you tried to convince your parents that being a teenager gave you the right to make your own choices, so they pulled the ol’ “with adult decisions come adult responsibilities” and doubled your chores? Picture that at a federal scale – only with more typhus – and you get a sense of how Equal Protection has been used against itself.

Nowadays, the Equal Protection clause is interpreted much less broadly. In fact, it actually applies to different groups unequally according to a three-tiered system of scrutiny. To honor the historical intent of the 14th Amendment, all state laws regarding race are subject to “heightened review,” meaning they are intensely investigated by the federal government and have to meet a huge series of criteria in order to be upheld. The only other laws that fall under this level of scrutiny (from time to time) are those involving citizenship.

The next-highest level of scrutiny is “intermediate review,” which the Supreme Court created in recent decades to address women’s rights and laws regarding gender classification. In order to withstand federal scrutiny, laws that treat men and women differently need to be “substantially” involved in achieving “important government objectives.” For example, in 1981, the Supreme Court upheld a California statutory rape law stating that while sexual relations between an adult male and a female minor are illegal, relations between an adult female and a male minor are not. Aside from being good news for Demi Moore, this distinction contributes substantially to the important government objective of reducing teen pregnancy.

For all laws that fall under the lowest level of scrutiny, the Supreme Court uses the “Lindsley Test”; so long as classifications between people can be argued to be reasonable and not arbitrary, laws will be upheld. However, because basic scrutiny is relatively easy to withstand, many people feel that laws impacting other groups, such as the elderly, the poor, gays, and lesbians, should fall under higher levels of scrutiny.

Others take it a step further, saying that the entire premise of applying the Equal Protection clause unequally is preposterous. While there is a certain undeniable irony to the three-tiered system, keep in mind that giving everyone the exact same rights would mean that your eight-year old cousin could marry a thirty-year old, or that grandma could enroll in the sixth-grade, or that when people put videos of their toddlers hittin’ the sauce on YouTube, it wouldn’t be a felony.

The year is 1955. The Fonz is blasting “Rock Around the Clock” on the jukebox and the McFlys are going steady thanks to a confused teen with a tricked-out DeLorean. Greasers and poodle skirts abound. America is prosperous, the middle class is enormous, suburbia is ubiquitous and, aside from the constant looming threat of global nuclear annihilation, life really couldn’t get more swell.

That is, if you’re white, straight, and sober. Never you mind the repression, segregation, homelessness, and suicide, the alcoholism, heroin, peyote and Benzedrine, the criminalized homosexuality and anonymous intercourse in the park, the madness, strait jackets, shock therapy and unconsenting lobotomies – and, of course, the censorship that tried to keep it all under wraps.

On the evening of October seventh, in an art gallery in San Francisco, a then-unknown Allen Ginsberg gave his first performance of “Howl,” a sprawling ode to the forgotten and discarded members of his generation. In it, he chronicled the exploits, excesses, and radical leftist leanings of a counter-culture movement that railed against tightly-laced 1950’s materialism. Dedicated to his friend Carl Solomon, with whom Ginsberg spent eight months in a mental institution, the poem also had a heavy undercurrent of insanity – though, at a time when hiding under a desk was considered a good defense against an atomic bomb, the question as to whose remains wide open.

Still more controversially, Ginsberg spoke explicitly about sex – of the heterosexual, homosexual, makeshift, and marathon varieties. Considering that it would still be another year before Elvis startled the world with his “suggestive” Ed Sullivan performance, it’s no surprise that the man who published “Howl” was arrested and charged with obscenity in 1957 – in a case which he won by proving that the poem had “redeeming social importance.”

“[Howl]” has since earned a position alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as one of the most emblematic works of the Beat Generation, which would go on to inspire the hippie movement during the Vietnam War. The past five decades have not, however, diluted any of the poem’s potency; in 2007, on the 50th anniversary of the censorship trial, a New York radio station scheduled to air “Howl” was forced to cancel the reading under threat of huge obscenity fines. **** that.

Character traits are one of the most valuable lessons that anyone can learn, and it is something that affects everyone. Students may already have an understanding of why character traits are important, but until they see how it relates to day-to-day interactions, it is hard to fully understand why they can make a difference.

There are six pillars of character traits that each student should be familiar with, and how they can positively impact or change how we all live. They are:

• Citizenship- Working to make the school and community a better place to live is positive to not only the student, but it also makes them informed citizens, capable of making sound decisions.
• Fairness- Students learn why it is necessary to share, be kind to one another and be honorable to themselves and their peers.
• Responsibility- Staying on task and doing the best job possible allows students to take pride in their work and actions.
• Respect- Being tolerant of others no matter what culture, race or religion is a very important trait to have during life.
• Caring- Showing others how to be compassionate and caring to those in need show how a positive character can help those who are unable to help themselves.
• Trustworthiness- A valuable trait, students learn how to be trusted by friends, family and peers, so that they can become reliable and honest citizens in their community.

School assemblies are great for exposing students to a positive message in an entertaining way. They can be used anywhere and during any time of the school year, whether for a specific message like Red Ribbon Week or staying away from drugs and alcohol or simply as an entertaining and thought-provoking way to share with students how character can affect their daily life.