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?
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.
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.
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.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 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.
Email: class_artist@yahoo.com, replies only if time available.
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.
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
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)
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.
Thanks for visitng!
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