Touchstone of Knowledge

I think about teaching sometimes. I think about being lucky to have had some good teachers that helped me understand the world and sparked my thirst for knowledge. I've often wondered what makes some people better teachers than others, and I've often considered teaching. My teaching fantasies are just that, scenes where you transform young minds and catch them on fire with a yearning to learn.

I was thinking that the idea of teaching children in a classroom was similar to the teacher pouring knowledge from a container into the smaller containers of the children. I envisioned the teacher with a big urn of liquid and the children each with their little cups, the teacher walking around pouring the knowledge into the children's containers. The more I thought about this, them more I realized that it is a bad analogy. This makes knowledge to be a finite resource and students to be passive vessels. It breaks down when you consider that the teacher is not expending or giving away their knowledge, but sharing and multiplying it.

A better analogy would be to visualize a teacher with a glowing stone and when it touches student's dark stones, they light up. I like the magical flavor of the image. This is more like an ignition of knowledge inside children's minds, where they always had the potential for this knowledge. In this case, knowledge multiplies through education. It spreads out and takes root in a broader audience. In many ways this is what makes us human. When we look at animals, we marvel that they know how to hunt or care for their young through instinct. A certain amount of skills are probably a result of having a body and being hungry and following its natural urges. Culture and other useful skills are taught to the younger members of the species. For humans, this includes written language and such intangibles as ideas, which may not have a direct physical representation in the world.

I also thought of another analogy of the spreading of human knowledge. It is kind of like a brush fire spreading, as ideas ignite and spread. The direct example of this is how early man learned about making fire and taught this skill to other men. This wildfire analogy has an interesting contradiction in it, because fire is destructive and we think of knowledge as constructive. Fire used by man made life easier and gave them control over their environment.

In any case, knowledge should spread like wildfire, but care must be taken that it does not burn us.

Draining down Science

We need to step up our efforts in science in this country. We had a wake up call once before, when the Russians launched Sputnik. That panicked Americans because until that time we sat back in fortress America, secure in the certainty that we were ahead and invincible. Spuntik taught us that if the Russians could launch a satellite, they could launch ICBMs and wipe us out.

Our panic spurred the space race, drove a generation of students into science and engineering, put men on the moon, and provided us with the boost to keep us ahead in technology for decades.

We stand at a point similar to that right now. This crisis isn't as clear as Sputnik but its implications are just as dire. The problem is that we are divided in our understanding and perception of this crisis. In fact, have a sizable faction of the country that doesn't think there is a crisis.

The main crisis I'm speaking about, of course, is climate change, but that is just a result. The root crisis is energy and our using up resources while polluting our planet. The tragedy is that not only are we not prepared with enough engineers and scientists, but we aren't trying to increase our pool of qualified people or fund the institutions that train them and produce our basic research.

These are not new thoughts to me, but lately, there are some things that have happened that remind me of the horrible position we are in. I love the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Last month's decision to scale back the Martian Probe program and idle the probes shows a lack of spirit and squanders a golden opportunity. Here is a program that is being cut because it is succeeding far beyond its initial expectations. The probes can't last forever, shouldn't have lasted for as long as they do, and shouldn't be abandoned just because we are short sighted and don't have the will to see this experiment out to the end.

The mounting crisis I fear the most is the degredation science education in schools. It started coming under deliberate and systematic attack because creationists objected to the teaching of evolution in schools. Elections of School Board officials in Kansas were based solely on the desire to turn back science education 140 years and derail progress in rational thought. When parents teach their children that science is attacking their religion and they shouldn't believe in what science tells them, they are no better than the Taliban or Iranian fundamentalists that sought to cram their people's increasingly free minds back into the box of religion inspired ignorance.

Science has also been under attack by Bush Administration, starting with the muzzling of any government scientist that spoke out about climate change and continuing with the restrictions on funding stem cell research.

Our trade agreements have resulted in a steady drain of manufacturing jobs, requiring less trained engineers in industry than in the past. Our software companies cannot find enough qualified programmers to develop the programs we need to function in society (witness the latest Windows launch of Vista, in addition to many other examples of glitchy, slow, and poor performing systems and software).

A recent Journal of Science podcast had an excellent discussion where the speaker talked about the long term benefits of primary research. He mentioned that some of the most important discoveries were originally just novelties and real breakthroughs took years to become developed, put into widespread use, and eventually become essential to life as we know it. The podcast listed railroads (almost 60 years from discovery to widespread use), computers (40 years), lasers (30 years), and transistors (30 years) as inventions that fit this description.

The mysteries we are probing now, such as the nature of Mars and Saturn, the search for dark matter, and understanding subatomic particals are basic fields of research that need to be explored. No one can predict where these searches will take us. The discoveries we are tapping into now have the promise of fueling industry and solving our problems for many years to come. Now is not the time to scrimp on science, now is the time to redouble our efforts.

Post Script: right after posting this, I heard a Scientific American story about the movie Expelled starring Ben Stein. This is a movie touting the merits of Intelligent Design and talking about how Evolution is flawed, but the scientific community is aggressively working to discredit anyone that opposes it. So my posting is timely, and the story goes beyond my premise to show that there are people actively working to discredit science.

Adversity Makes Strength 2

The Kansas City Business Journal had an article about how people in sales learn to live with, learn from, and sometimes ignore adversity. His point was that working through setbacks makes you resilient, prepared, and naturally optimistic.

I was discussing the article with a friend and told him that it reminded me of dating in High School. You humiliate yourself over and over again and get nowhere. It's not a great analogy, just a good joke line.

There was a citation for some study that said that younger soldiers have a harder time surviving conflict than older ones. I believe this was supposed to apply to Iraq, but I also remember hearing something about this said about WWII and even the Civil War. The theory here is that with a little experience under your belt, you learn that setbacks do not mean defeat and that demoralization isn't the best reaction to adversity.

People have often cited the string of failures of President Lincoln and General Grant as examples of people who eventually prevail through hardships by perseverance.

I think there is something to be said for this. Some of the rhetoric I hear by older adults when they try to explain why "these kids these days" can't hold a job or won't work hard or don't know how to succeed have a degree of merit in one important category. Anyone who grows up sheltered from criticism, not required to work hard for the things they acquire, and not exposed to hardship or deprivation is going to have a naturally easygoing view of the world. And while it is true some people are hugely successful with little effort and lots of luck, most people do have to work hard to achieve their goals. The younger you are, the less likely you are to have been challenged by any hard knocks. So, in general, younger people do have a higher probability of not being "battle tested".

So if you find someone saying all these things as a blanket condemnation and being somewhat derogatory of young people, just remember what are some of the other things that come with all this age and experience. Remember that age takes away many of the good and fun things of youth. Who doesn't look back on youth wistfully as a carefree time when you had little worries and it was easy to be enthusiastic and energetic. Many of the endeavors in life would not be undertaken if people had a clear understanding before starting out just how difficult and demoralizing they would be.

Much of schooling is designed to do just this. We talk about learning hard lessons in life, but difficult subject matters are something you have to struggle through to accomplish. The thing that most people that have worked hard have learned is that even with the setbacks and difficulties, there are the results. Only through struggles and strenuous efforts will you accomplish the things you want, getting the job, finishing the project, or cleaning up the mess you were handed. That glowing feeling of looking back at the mess you've put in order or the job you've accomplished makes all the sweat and toil worth it.

Kids these days

I'm 45. Age is weird when you experience it from within. In some respects, I can feel everyone of my years. In others, I still think like a 20 year old.

For some reason, lately I keep hearing people really getting down on young people. I hear many common complaints, like: Kids today don't understand the value of hard work, their music is terrible, all they want to do is play video games. They said the same thing about us when I was that age, and I'm not going to bother looking up the ancient Greek quote by some philosopher or king or other important person where they are saying virtually the same complaints about 2500 years ago.

Old people always bag on young people. To be fair, it's quite clear that young people have plenty of complaints and jokes about older people. And many of the complaints, going both ways, are true when applied to particular people. Blanket stereotyping of any group of people is usually inaccurate and often insulting.

I keep thinking that "these kids these days" are going to be the ones taking care of these crotchety old people when they are drooling in their hospital gowns and have long since forgotten about all their complaints. They are going to be the few that are working to add to the Social Security pool when the many of the baby boom will be insisting that none of the benefits they were promised their whole life be cut. So let's be clear, the aged naggers better be mostly wrong about their complaints, and they better hope that there is no youth movement, rebelling against the almost certain high taxes that will be required to secure their benefits. I think of that when I listen to people complaining about youth.

I believe that young people today will have a better chance of playing catchup in the information age than any other generation previously. I've noticed myself that learning something new is easier, more convenient, and less expensive than ever before. I'm talking about the massive amount of courses and information that can be found online. Younger people are more comfortable with information technology than old people, a phenomenon that some call the digital divide. This is probably only going to accelerate. Current experiments with neural/computer interfaces center around allowing paralyzed people to move or communicate. While I can think of many reasons why it would be a bad idea to have a computer connection right in your brain, I can also see many advantages. Assuming that it won't be made illegal, who do you think is most likely to use this technology? Young people would embrace it while older people would reject it. If this computer access could be done inexpensively and without any serious problems, it would provide a huge advantage. Imagine being in a business negotiation with someone that could be checking records, compiling spreadsheets, and contacting your competitors while you are introducing yourself. The digital Grand Canyon. It would be the same as being confined to a wheelchair and getting in a foot race with a teen track star.

I was trying to explain that people usually recognize the value of knowledge later when they are away from school and out in the world. For some reason, this idea has usually been scoffed at when I bring it up. I don't know. The idea really can't be compiled as an overall statistic. It only matters on an individual basis. It doesn't take a large percentage of people to figure out the next cure for cancer, only a few. So only a few people need to "get it" to move science and society forward. I still believe if everyone cranked it up just a notch or two, that society overall would improve drastically. I've seen the movie Idiocracy, where people just keep getting dumber and dumber until society starts to fall apart. While it's easy to think and believe that this is the way things are going, I can't help but believe that we are heading in the opposite direction.

Who's in Control

I realize that inspiration for some ideas don't always seem related, so bear with me here. I was listening to the Savage Love podcast, an online broadcast of a sex advice column by Dan Savage. Savage Love is the name of his popular newspaper based advice column that has been around for years, usually in some little local newspaper you find in a rack next to the gum machines in your favorite Bar & Grill.

What I heard in passing in the middle of a explanation was a bit of a revelation. The idea resonated with me and later evolved into a different train of thought. Dan was saying, "This is about control and dominance, so much of sex really is, isn't it? ...humans are all about domination and control. Human society is all about domination and control, why shouldn't human sexuality [also be about domination and control]...." He mentioned marking your territory, taking possession, submitting to someone else's authority, and demonstrating control over others. The context here was sexuality, and Dan Savage didn't dive into the way that this mirrors society as a whole or human traits in non-sexual situations, but you could immediately see the connection.

Later, on a long road trip, my wife and I were talking about how parents try to control their children. I told her that I thought that parental control was only an illusion. You can try to shape your children's behavior, but you can't control their thoughts and desires. You can exert influence, and you can modify behavior through punishments and rewards, but you can't change what they think or what they want to do. We acknowledge that people grow up and are given their own freedom and independence gradually over time, but what many parents don't recognize is that their children have already developed their own way of doing things and thinking long before the parent finally realizes this. We also discussed abuse (parental and spousal), which is a sick twist on control, but that is another subject.

Human society is all about control.

My wife recently graduated from nursing school and started working at a university (teaching) hospital. Before graduation, she was required to shadow a working nurse. She was assigned to a hospital in a system in our city has struggled to maintain profitability. Their hospitals have a reputation as horrible places to work. The atmosphere is bullying, and management never offers the carrot, but is always quick to use the stick - or maybe the sledge hammer. This was a health care system being run primarily as a business, and failing miserably.

While there, basically as an unpaid intern, they started bullying her to come to work for them. This period, just prior to graduation, is when most of my wife's class was busy searching for a job, sharing their experiences with each other. My wife was certain of one thing, she did not want to work for this hospital. It wasn't just that the atmosphere was dismal, it was also that the pay and benefits were nowhere near as good as other hospitals, and the workload was higher. Things kept getting creepier. Managers would "announce" to groups in front of my wife that she was going to work for them, when she wasn't. She finally had it out with the HR manager, when he wouldn't leave her alone. She listed all the better benefits with the hospital she was going to work for. He remained unconvinced, which was his own fatal flaw. If he couldn't see the problem, how could he hope to correct it?

I told her that it was all about control. They mistook the temporary control they had over her during the intership as the same complete control they thought they had over their own employees. They thought that they could just dictate to her to take a job with them because she was assigned to go there like she was working for them. That's the way they treat their employees, so why should they treat her any differently? They were so lost in their warped mindset of controlling others that they didn't understand why she didn't do what they told her to do with her life.

Although she is working for an educational hospital now, and she doesn't get bullied, it is still all about control. This is a different type of control. The school/hospital tries to teach their nurses everything that they will need to know, so that they will understand the best way to do things. This is a more subtle kind of control. They seek to control the way people think through their influence. Given enough free access to information, they trust that people will learn the truth. Understanding should make employees do what is right without being told every step and it will also make them better employees. This is a better type of control, one that recognizes that the person being controlled must ultimately come to the same conclusions themselves and agree that their duties are the best course of action.

And I think this speaks to the great divide in our country right now. I believe the blue/red, republican/democrat, or conservative/liberal debate is also one of freedom versus control. Look at what conservatives attack nowadays. "Liberal" professors on campuses trying to subvert young people's minds. "Liberal" media trying to bring down the conservatives. Attack conservatives are people that are trying desperately to maintain the control of the worst aspects of capitalism in our society.

Capitalism in it's pure form means everyone is voting with their pocketbooks, and only economically viable ideas survive the Darwinism of the marketplace. But excesses and breakdowns in our form of capitalism make it easy for people with lots of money to exert too much control over government and society. In an overly controlled workplace, you see this with a tough profit minded boss trying to dictate what all the employees say and how they act. In our society, you see big companies trying to bend government to their will, restricting regulation and lowering taxes. They don't want any government control of business's behavior. All the while they demand government supports them handsomely with tax breaks and subsidies. We have anything but a pure form of capitalism when you consider that everything goes easily in favor of those that already have the overwhelming majority of the capital. They usually get the best government money can buy.

So the people that support this system (most notably those that benefit handsomely from it) would like everyone to believe that taxes are always bad, regulation is crippling society, our education system is trying to imprint a liberal way of thinking on our youth, and the media is actively against everything they stand for. It's all about control. If you try to impose any kind of control over them, taxes or regulations, for example, they scream bloody murder. If you try to let people explore the truth about the world, and they read up or educate themselves and then learn that things aren't that great, they get really angry. They feel themselves losing the control that they are seeking to impose on society.

My wife summed this up quite simply: one seeks to keep you down, the other seeks to lift you up.

This reminds me of several parallels. Remember how the Soviet Union sought to control their population through oppression, fear, misinformation, and propaganda? In the end it didn't work. Religions don't want you to think too hard about or question what they say, they want you to blindly believe in their gospel so they will continue to have control over you. And look at the way that the interpretation of Islam is used control women in Muslim countries. The common thread here is that people with free will are able to learn the truth. They will then act from the lessons learned and take control of their own lives. This will remove the illusion of control from oppressive governmental, business, and religious leaders. Those that think they are in control now stand to lose everything they care about. Desperate people will say anything to stop from losing that control.

Mental Mashup

I like a phrase in the latest HP commercial with Gwen Stefani in it.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhiIV6srJ0

She says that creativity is a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. She also says that creativity can't be turned on and off, it just sort of comes out.

I've often wondered about where ideas come from. I used to find that I would come up with revelations at odd times. For a few years there, they always came during gardening, but I've also had bouts of driving and running inspired creative thought.

I like to absorb as much information as I can. I admit, I'm an information junkie. When I was younger, I read books, magazines, and newspapers. Now I also browse the internet and listen to podcasts. Notice I don't list television as a source there. That's probably not entirely justified, but I just don't feel like it has much to offer in feeding the mind. It's more for turning the mind off and relaxing. I listen to so many podcasts now that I can't keep up with the rate they are generated. I find it very odd and gratifying from time to time when two or more podcasts, sometimes of very different genre, discuss similar ideas. Sometimes it's obvious, it's actually the same subject, but often, it's just analogous, which is more interesting.

I was inspired by the movie Good Will Hunting, of all things, when it came to education later in life. This guy is brilliant, and he taunts a Harvard or MIT student that what the student got for $100,000, he got for $1.65 in late fees from the public library. The movie Phenomenon also has a character that expands his mind simply by going to the public library. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had a great love for books, and was a voracious collector. He had a large collection of books that was amassed over his life which he donated to the government and started the Library of Congress. American founding fathers were well read, and wanted others in their nation to enjoy that same privilege. What inspired me about these examples is that the knowledge of the world is available to anyone with the time, desire, and devotion to simply pick up the books and start reading them.

How much information can we hold in the human mind? I've often wondered if the mind can actually get full. I know when my computer hard drive fills up, I have to start saving the stuff I need on other storage mediums and start deleting as much as I can so I'll have room for more. Does your brain work that way in some respect? If it does, I hope it's only deleting the stuff that is least used, and not anything important. I know if it does, it's not a process I'm in control of. I wonder if you do indeed have all the memories that you've ever accumulated locked away in your brain. If this is so, think of what happens if you die, how much knowledge dies with you.

Until that time, I plan on continuing to feed more information into the pile to see what grows out of it.

Continuing Education

They say your mind is like a muscle. If you exercise it, it will get stronger. I believe this is true. We have all heard claims that doing crossword puzzles is good for older people, and may even forestall Alzheimer's.

I heard about a study recently where they determined that lead miners that read every day were less affected by the mentally debilitating effects of lead exposure. The theory was that people that kept mentally active had more neural connections and were able to "work around" the lost functions from damaged areas in the brain.

So there is growing evidence that you can physically improve your mind through mental exercise. It's not hard to believe, and it's not so easy to act on.

I listen to between 1 to 4 hours of podcasting each day. A lot of it is current events, and much of it is science, but I'm also improving my Spanish. I also listen to some college classes and books on tape. It's easier to listen to material than read it. You can exercise or work around the house when you listen to something. It also helps fill driving time rather than listening to the mindless drivel that the airwaves have become.

My grandfather used to talk about the most important thing you can acquire being knowledge. Authorities could always take away your possessions, but no one can take away what is inside your head. The same is true with a job. You can't guarantee that the job will be there next year or even next week, so you owe it to yourself to learn everything you can while on the job, knowing that you'll arrive at your next job more experienced and better prepared.

Why do we go to school, read books, learn subjects, struggle mightily and then just stop when summer comes or when we graduate? That's it? That's all you'll ever learn in life? What do you do from that point, just coast down until you die? I hate to think of 18 or 22 as a mental high water mark.

Two of my favorite movies are Good Will Hunting and Phenomenon. John Travolta's character in Phenomenon suddenly has the capacity to understand everything quickly and easily. What does he do? He reads most of the books in the public library. As a result, he starts figuring out deep secrets of many dissimilar subjects like plant fertilizer and earthquakes. Matt Damon's character is poor and lacked a good home. There wasn't much in the way of opportunity for him, given his upbringing. He was born with intelligence and a thirst for knowledge, and he educated himself simply by reading books on his own. The best line in the movie is when he scoffs at the pretentious Harvard student, saying "You got for $100,000 what I got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

No one was blocking these people from greater knowledge and understanding of the world. Oftentimes, what blocks a person is their own preconceptions. If you believe a subject is too hard for you, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't try and therefore there is 0% chance that you will ever learn the subject. You were right about not being able to understand, but only by choice. The difference between a genius and anyone else is simply the amount of time and effort you are willing to put into something. School simply concentrates the effort and forces you to progress at a rapid pace.

In one of my favorite books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, the boy genius Ender shows a natural and immediate aptitude for a competitive game that the children in his school are made to play. When he makes a particularly good move, one of his teammates says, "Packed head, Ender". The characters in the school had their own slang, and some of it was ok, but this phrase in particular resonated with me. Packed head. As in "your head is just packed full of knowledge".

It's what I try to do. I listen to scientists that are trying to understand the human mind, which is fascinating. How does it store knowledge? What happens when part of the brain gets damaged? How do you retrieve information from the brain? What kinds of electrical activity signify what kinds of thoughts or emotions? How much of the brain do we actually use? How much information can we store in the brain? Is there a limit? We try to emulate the human brain with computers. We create storage devices, each year holding more information. Each year our processors are faster. We try to program computers to use artificial intelligence to come up with thoughts independently, or at least recognize patterns and respond to them. But we have no idea what the human brain is capable of.

When I was about 10 or 12, I read an article in the paper about dreams. The article said that we only use 10% of our brains. (Recently, scientists have said this is probably not true.) The subconscious mind supposedly comprises the other 90%. This is supposed to be a part of your own brain that you do not control and do not have easy access to. The article was about dreams. It speculated that the subconscious mind could only communicate with the conscious mind during sleep through dreams. They also said that the subconscious mind did not think in words like the conscious mind, it was almost like an alien within. It communicated using symbolism, and what it communicated was all the things that you were not putting together from the daily activities. The subconscious watched everything you did, and figured out much of the "rest of the story" connections and missed interpretations, as well as clues about things going on around you that you may or may not have noticed. The article's main theme was that your subconscious mind had it all figured out and was trying to tell you all about it through your dreams. So for a few years, I kept a dream journal and interpreted my dreams. I learned many interested things and felt very in charge of my life and connected to my surroundings. That faded over the years, because it takes a lot of time to pay attention to your dreams, but the sense that you can figure it all out never did.

So I consume information as much as I can stand. Television doesn't count. Well, there is some that does, but watching television is a trap because the sexy flashing titillating content will always lure you away from the substance. Movies don't usually count, but some are very good. I'm not saying you should stay away from all the fluff and simplistic stuff, sometimes it's fun to relax and laugh at the simple things in life. I'm suggesting a balanced diet, rich in mental nutrients, protein, and vitamins.

I find that much of what you learn spills over the field you're looking at and crosses over to apply to other fields. Strange principles resonate. Like the fact that we use the word turbulence in fluid mechanics to mean highly disturbed flow, and in psychology to mean a highly disturbed mental state. In fluids, turbulence actually cuts resistance and helps move objects along, and the same is true with your mind. Often times, the things that bother you the most, that get you agitated, are the things you are struggling to figure out and learn. If you learn to ride out the mental turbulence, and not shrink from experiencing it, you will find that you have benefited from it. Often the things in life worth learning, worth doing, are hard. We need to teach that in school. We need to tell students that the horrible feeling they are experiencing is the limiting walls of their mind crumbling. Maybe then they will not fear continuing education.

The path

I am a science geek. I love it, I think about it all the time, and I try to consume as much information about current scientific efforts as I can.

I was listening to one of my favorite Podcasts, Brain Food by Kyle Butler, and I wondered what this young college student was going to do with his life after university. I was impressed by the way he explains things, speaking to people with no scientific background in a way to keep them interested. I wrote him a letter telling him that I thought he could be the next Carl Sagan.

It reminded me of my Thermodynamics instructor in college. He was 23 and a graduate student, surely taking the teaching job in order to help pay for grad school. Possibly destined to be a professor and teach, or maybe he was headed into industry. I can't remember his name and it never occurred to me back then to go ask him, but I wish I had. He taught beautifully. He made what was supposed to be a "weed out" course, that you should be happy to limp away from with a C be a fascinating and engrossing course that seemed to open up the world to new understandings and possibilities. His strength was that he had just learned the stuff himself. He remembered what it was like to struggle through the thick wooded undergrowth from ignorance to knowledge in this subject. He had the road map. He was an excellent guide. Often, a person that is so far along in a subject has no idea how to explain it to a novice. That is frustrating.

Also, instructors of all courses at all levels fail to explain why you need to learn something. They don't tell you where you're going and why you want to be there. This is essential.

The path of knowledge is not an easy one. It is a struggle to cram new thoughts and ideas into your head (least of which is tossing out the old ideas that were wrong). If you don't know where you're going, why would you want to even make the effort?

Would you get in a car and drive for hours and hours with no destination in mind? Just hope when you get there that there was something worth getting to? That's crazy. You'd be the fidgeting kid constantly asking: "are we there yet?"

It's easy to see how expectation mapping helps. When I was a kid, I watched the first moon landing on TV. I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to learn all about science, because science was this magical vehicle that took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon on Apollo 11 (poor Michael Collins, watching it from just a few miles away in his Command Module). This is a classic example of being shown where you're heading and gladly packing up and making the arduous trek to get there. Millions of people went into science and engineering. Everybody was excited. We could do anything we put our minds to.

It still gives me goosebumps and sends a thrill up my spine to think of it.

We CAN do anything we put our minds to.

You just have to know where you're headed before you set out.

I was lucky in school. When I didn't understand why we were learning something, I just ate it all up on faith, figuring it was going somewhere good. I was like the kid in the back seat that just knows Dad wouldn't take me on vacation to somewhere bogus, there must be something cool at the end of the long drive. I was lucky to feel that way. In the end, almost everything I've ever learned was for the betterment of my general knowledge, direction, or motivation.

I've often dreamed about being a teacher and making my students feel that way. Maybe I will do that one day. Life is long enough to do many things before the final destination.

Race Relations

I was thinking about the path people take in life.

In particular, I was thinking about a black cultural phenomenon of black people getting down on other blacks that try to do well in school, are interested in learning, and want to improve themselves and their chances in life. They are harassed and the popular black culture is to work to prevent anyone from bettering themselves through education.

How ironic.

When the Civil War ended and the Klu Klux Klan arose in the South in response to the blacks being given the vote, the goal was to keep the blacks ignorant and fearful. Many early Klansmen would pull pranks on the terrified freed slaves, pretending to be ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. That's where the uniform came from, it's a glorified version of the ghost cape children wear on Halloween. I remember one story I heard, the Klansman had rigged a bladder device under his robe and when he made his appearance, he poured a whole bucket of water into it, in a way that looked like he drank down the whole bucket as fast as he could pour it in. Then he exclaimed, "Damn, it's hot in hell! Sure makes me thirsty!" Before the Civil War, it was a crime to teach a black person to read. Those unrepentant Confederates would sure be proud of the black youth of today, continuing their efforts to keep blacks ignorant and therefore at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Education is free. It's not a trick. Education does not mean that blacks will be automatically accepted or that they will not still run into prejudice and resistance by bigots. It does mean that if someone works hard in school, earns degrees or a degree, and then persists in looking around in the workplace, they will eventually find something better than they could ever hope for than if they remained willfully ignorant. It would be nice if those that do not buy into this idea would at least get the hell out of the way of those that do.

I'm not black, so I have no idea what it's like. It's easy for me to sit in my comfortable existence and make lofty pronouncements about how things should be. I tried tutoring inner city middle school students for a while, and I left feeling it was hopeless.

I assume that most blacks see my white face and assume that I like things the way they are, with blacks still the "bottom rail" as they used to say back in Lincoln's time. I don't. I don't like it when someone is bright and hard working and can't get a break, just as much as I don't like it when someone white and privileged and utterly ignorant gets to be President of the United States. But you can't tell that from looking at my face. Our black/white dialog is so constricted, restricted, and bitter today. What this means is if I have something encouraging to say, I am just as unlikely to say it as if I had something degrading or racist to say. I think that what happens because we self-segregate according to race and because we can't talk about these things, is that we do become a little more racist as we grow older. We can't understand or tolerate the various conflicts that periodically erupt over the world over long past events (Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda), yet we're guilty of it ourselves here in this country.

How the hell do we evolve past this point?