EDUTRUE: MAY THE TRUTH BE KNOWN BEFORE LOVE HAS FLOWN . . .


CONTINUING EDUCATION IS
EASIER DONE THAN NOT DONE

This site is dedicated to raising awareness of our
human interconnectedness in both our schools
and communities. It is strongly urged that we
rethink education from a more unified and
humanitarian learning-centered perspective.







THE SITE MANAGER'S GOAL?

My


EDUTRUE UPDATE

Where Do We Go from Here

Welcome to 2011 and beyond. I hope you are making your education all it can be, wisely self-mentoring the perennial student within (with a little help from your friends). Thereby we gain a greater perspective of what is included or excluded from formal education, including that conferred by the delivery systems and various media, as compared to more radically alternative, and wonderfully natural educational experiences. Insights into education alternatives can be gleaned from the Eduquotable sections of this website and my essays as well. (Click on relevant links below.)

Spring 2010 found me still attending SDCCD Continuing Education classes, but without the same zeal and commitment to improving the outer educational environment itself. My experience in this District, like perhaps your experience in your own, has shown me that faculty and staff are here essentially for the paycheck and so-called career advancement first and foremost. The progressive ideals surrounding a student-centered educational approach found in my essay series and documented correspondence with SDCCD officials are above the radar of those who I have encountered in this college district.

Even cyclic administrative pseudo-concern and lip service for student empowerment seems to be drying up in the scramble for continued funding and program survival in this era of the shrinking budgetary pie. School officials can see that economic concerns for survival and sufficient income keep the majority of students compliant to an educational environment based on employment from the outside in rather than from the inside out. Who talks about first finding an intrinsically meaningful job within that employs every human aspect to the point of co-fulfillment as social beings?



Because we are not sufficiently encouraged to tune into what suits us constructively on the inside when we are most sensitive as children, we end up suiting up for a life that enslaves us to others and the illusions of the day. Keeping an oppressive lid on the education of children and youth causes natural human evolution to be constrained by over-control ling and under-loving adults. Mistakenly, education is seen primarily as a highly controlled process that needs to maximize the current generations’ survival and material and ego-centric indulgences at the expense of all else.

By myopically endangering more distant prospects beyond our lifetimes, we shrink, if not preempt, any possible beneficial legacy we may have, and over generations we literally rob humanity of a future beyond ourselves. The numbing fear and foreboding that this collective disrespect and complicity causes is overwhelming psychologically. Thus, we generate devolving states of dystopia that produce desperate actions that terrorize us further. As co-educators, we must tap deeper realities consistent with living in harmony with the earth and each other . These known and many lesser realities must motivate us to sacrifice as necessary for those who come after us, and only then will we save ourselves. The unexamined self is not sustainable. We become our own worst enemy and are on the cosmic chopping block as useful only as a poison. Scientists, technocrats , and posturing politicians won’t be able to save us from our own acquiescence to the same fate. It’s a grave graduation in misdeed, happening fast enough that many of us can only anticipate some grand intervention to stop it.

If we stayed mentally and emotionally in school, we would show up for learning despite our horrible performance, and the seeming intractability of our own habits and continued missteps. Yet, without raising up the individual and collective veil of denial over all of this, we won’t turn the tide of conscious and largely unconscious betrayal. Too little, too late is the swan song of so many miseducated civilizations, whose histories are reincarnated in our own.

We dishonor both the past and future when we overindulge illusions and trendy follies of the moment. If we really want to have fun, get serious, courage plays a larger part than we have the guts to admit. It is the humanities that will save hard science not the other way around. Hard science likes to act like it has saved us from ancient superstitions and the foolish perpetuation of myths. Yet it is full of its own myths and they don’t direct us in a balanced direction. Only science run amuck can hold up the prospect of annihilation by global mass destruction by something as localized as a military computer error or single electronic miscommunication.



A truer educational feast is not a matter of more funds, but rather redirecting existing resources with the courage to confront entrenched denial and the ongoing self-serving enrichment of education managers and politics-as-usual. There is a chronic dystopia maintained by shaping people to fit jobs, instead of shaping jobs to fit people. No wonder our larger wonder WENT, and was replaced with acquisition and status anxiety surrounding a technology explosion with less and less love in the loop. Constant text messaging and superficial chattiness is a symptom of our loss of human depth. Experiential depth is not entirely gone, but rather we are less consciously connected to it, and it remains hidden in the Unconscious.

Greater quantity and frequency of communication serves technology corporations not those of us who treasure depth and quality of communication. The co-opting of our remaining uncommon sense and what remains of our natural environment goes unabated as the moronosphere (my term for it) streams over all in its grip. Media is sped-up and chopped into an assault of over-stimulation — so we notice less how we are being prodded, bent, and dumbed down.

So we look for ways to become de-iced and de-gripped. Staying mindfully free and inspirationally co-re-creative ensures that there will be little threat of attraction to virtual worlds. Material and virtual substitutions for a loving humanity can only be successfully marketed to those who lack self-validation presence, vibrational integrity, and human direction. High tech is most easily marketed to those who are not actively exploring the simplest and healthiest way to fulfill life. The lure of speed and a short-cut is further feeds continued short-circuiting of love evolution, without which technological evolution is a misappropriation of human resources and not in meaningful synch with optimum survival.

As always, and more importantly, we need to be the first to change ourselves. Communicating self change can be low-tech or high tech, and one can find synergistic inspiration in their progressive integration. Personally, I'm stretching myself best by growing in both directions and revamping the bridges between. What about you?

I hope this website will continue to inspire a student-driven educational evolution, even if I'm busy re-creating myself in ways other than checking the Edutrue mail inbox very often. Over the years, few readers bother to write me anyway, yet the visitor count keeps growing, and that alone gives me a measure of fulfillment, if not the sweetness of true collaboration.

Hopefully, this website will continue to be a valuable resource for those with front-line enthusiasm for progressive educational reform. Please share this site with others who are enrolled or employed in an educational environment for the foreseeable future. The reform issues I have raised are likely to remain as long as there is such deep institutional resistance and denial. I will keep my school correspondence and grievance documentation available (page links provided below) as a reference that may serve your own activist activities. Elements of my past struggle may echo in your own struggle today, even though the documented dates (within my correspondence) will of course be much different.

If you want to picture what I am currently doing, picture me in a digital media class, looking for ways to create images to further illustrate the ideas I have articulated here on the EDUTRUE website. But I might also have my hands in finger paint, performing on some percussion instrument, or shooting video of rope walking or ocean waves shape-shifting against sandstone cliffs being resculpted again and again. I remain a student in the School of Life (even on a prison planet) and try to turn every moment into a learning experience. The elusive door to the education we most need is neither in the free class nor the high-tuition one; it is in the class we do not realize we are in. Who we don't love bites us in the edu-behind.

The elusive door to the education we most need is neither in the free class
nor the high-tuition one; it is in the class we do not realize we are in.

(Thomas James Darling)

We are all in the process of recovery from multiple wounds wrapped in multiple lessons. We have people setting standards for education, developing curricula, and creating lesson plans that leave out higher vibrational connectedness for less essential performance objectives. Priorities based on skewy agendas set us up for compeitive dysconnection and problematic conformities inside and outside the classroom. Mmanaged info consumption can make us drop a class no matter how intrinsically interesting we find it. Teachers can wound students by ignoring more important human values that the students may actually fear presenting in the typical classroom.

We dehumanize ourselves when we enforce dehumanization in the classroom. Cooperative relationships are more empowering than competitive information acquisition. When we instill numbness and powerlessness for the purpose of education, it is counter-productive. We reseed the same societal problems via those that suffer long enough to graduate. Those that don't suffer from typical schooling have already shed the sensitivity and compassion for one another that makes them ready to repeat the same mistakes while advancing in their area of expertise. We are awash in wounded and rewounders, but wounds have messages that need to be understood.

Wounds are not to defeat us or the learning process, but to invigorate us to make changes due. The challenges we don't meet, tend to get our attention one way or another. Our disconnectedness will be a source of hurt for as long as it takes to develop full-spectrum connection.

The more we distill meaning and renewed focus from seeming tragedies and missed opportunities as well, the more momentum we will gain toward educational health, and spiritual wealth. Unpack what you are, and you will be amazed at the education that unfolds around you.

Raising Expectations: The atmosphere of formal schooling supports the idea of raising expectations, despite challenges. That was only the beginning I found out. But a lot of us have allowed our dreaming to be cut short, and we force our lower expectations on others to maintain a lower playing field that seems to work in our temporary favor. We become lords of a fallen world, rather than servants to greater good that keeps us ever alive--and true to both our self and others.

Life is no idle gift.

Tom Darling

Email: class_artist@yahoo.com, replies only if time available.



Original Aphorism: The best Students . . .






Students are ailing
With site managers failing;
Instructors consider bailing
With reforms still trailing.

Thomas James Darling





Treating students — or faculty as an underclass
does not elevate administrative power — it diminishes it.
Only when administrators work closely with students and faculty
can the benefits of organizational unity be realized.



EDUTRUE ESSAY SERIES




Keeping Love in the Information Technology Loop

Neighborly Reconnection: Nurturing Intangibles in the Learning Environment

Doing No Harm: Taking Care of Number One Revisited

Proactive Administration: Closing the Credibility Gap

A Student's Eye-View of Education's Decline and Fall

School Policy and Practice as It Affects the Student Underclass

Essay Collection-1









EduQuotables and Visions

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice. (Robert F. Kennedy)

Inspiring Quotations (Collection-1)
Inspirational "EduQuotables" gathered for this website
Inspiring Quotations (Collection-2)
More "EduQuotables" gathered for this website
Visions for Continuing Education
Visions for Education (including interviews)













BE AWARE

Excellence has no fear of observation,
but neither does mediocrity
so long as it can present a
"credible" facade.



When administrators act with impunity
student well-being takes a dive.



THE SPECTRUM OF CONTINUING EDUCATION

Computer technology itself clearly demonstrates that there are many different means and diverse applications which may be tapped to reach agreed upon goals. Our own human diversity is enhanced by exploring technological options with our uniqueness as individuals in mind.

KEEPING LOVE IN THE
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LOOP

Musings on Information Technology Use

HOMESCHOOLING OUR HEART ensures that love guides information technology use decisions. When our choices originate from below the heart — institutions are hard-pressed to ensure a degree of civil sanity and become "stressed out" themselves — administrating between and among inevitable conflicts.

Without education occurring at the heart — and higher levels — educational advancement becomes less intuitive and more formulaic — often closely tied to simply where the money is. This contributes to the politicizing of educational trends — leaving love and higher intuition increasingly "out of the loop." With the truest education increasingly co-opted, subverted or marginalized — education as an industry can expand while deeper truths are ignored and real educational community is imperiled.

Does resistance to heartfelt innovation within our institutions persist from our having unlearned love to the point of no return? Too often our hearts are the lonliest educators of all. Our hearts "all-ways" belong in the information technology loop, for in following our heartsong we are more likely to make earth-friendly decisions as well.

We must learn to live life so that our heart maintains a very bright core in it. Through love we can all have a starring role in humanity's continuing education. Information technology (IT), alone, will leave our heart hungry, and our humanity imperiled.

Our hearts do not have a monopoly on love — but they can let us know whether love is in our communication or left out of IT! What IT serves is up to each of us . . . down to the last mouse-click.





"Action is the anecdote for despair —
especially action we all can live with."



DAVID AND GOLIATH


Can a chancellor of a large community college district be responsive to
individual students who address issues and refuse to be brushed off or ignored?

Refer to SDCCD Educational Master Plan (May 2000 update) NOTE: Public web viewability of this Master Plan disappeared from the SDCCD site one day with no redirection to a different URL. SDCCD officials got upset when I pointed out they were not following there own Master Plan. Removing such an important document from the SDCCD website serves only to duck immediate accountability and greater scrutiny of current policies and practices. What remains visible on the SDCCD website in terms of promises lacks the more (in my opinion) inspirational language found in these previously disclosed (if you dug for them) Master Plans. I wonder if the institutions you are involved with have a similar history of disappearing standards or guidelines due to the challenge they created to live up to.







All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2000-2015







WASC Standards for Accreditation
Western Association of Schools and Colleges — Standards for Accreditation
All About WASC
All About the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC)
WASC Home Page
Western Association of Schools and Colleges (Primary School through University Level)
The Senior College Commission
The Senior College Commission (Accredits Senior Colleges and Universities)
WASC Policy on Complaints
WASC Policy on Complaints (College/Univ. Level)
Accreditation for Community and Junior Colleges
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC)
Policy Outline for Submitting Complaints
Student and Public Complaints Against Institutions
Accreditation for High Schools, Elementary Schools, etc.
The Accrediting Commission for Schools (below the college level)
Looking Ahead with the ACCJC
Project Renewel: Evaluation Plan for the ACCJC
Links to Online Educational Information Resources
WASC's Recommended Educational Information Links



These pages were updated 10_JAN_2017.

Tom Darling

Email: class_artist@yahoo.com. I check this email infrequently. I hope you are benefiting from EDUTRUE, I am pursuing other media projects.

Please remember to bookmark this web page.



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