Education vs. Indoctrination

I'm starting to think we have lost our collective minds. Where else but in modern American can what is sure to be an innocuous Presidential message to students get blown up all out of proportion?

Glenn Beck echoed many critics calling it an "indoctrination of your children." "This is something you'd see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq," complained Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.

Ah, no it's not. You see, State Senator Russell, there's an important difference between the United States and those other countries you mentioned. The United States is a democracy, where people have the right to free speech and where there's a vigorous public debate. In our country, the President speaks and then the rest of us have the opportunity to agree or disagree and discuss or argue about it publicly. It is not at all like a country with a state-run media where The Leader speaks and everyone else is required to parrot the government line.

That is a huge distinction. In an enlightened place of learning, students are given all the information and viewpoints they need and we let them make up their own minds, even if we don't agree with them. If we are truly "indoctrinating" them, we only give them one side of the argument and insist that it's the only that deserves to be listened to. It makes one wonder who's really doing the indoctrinating here.

The funny thing is I don't expect President Obama to say anything remotely controversial. I expect him to welcome students back to school and stress the importance of education and studying hard. As an example, he's probably going to point to his own life to show how a quality education enabled a African-American of modest means and a broken family like himself to eventually become president. If you stay in school and work hard, you can be anything you want to be, too.

Okay, so it's probably not going to be anything historic, but I think it's going to be a positive message for students to hear. If not, we can all start arguing about it when he's done and make up our own minds.

The Beatles: Don't Let Me Down

When I was younger, I had a fascination with the Sixties. It seemed like a much more hopeful, idealistic time, when people believed they could make the world a better place instead of accepting it as it is. Later, as I read about the history of the period, I learned it was not as bright and sunny as I had thought. Vietnam, race riots and assassinations were moments as dark as any other decade had.

Yet other decades didn't have the Beatles. It's hard to think of another musical group that defined their decade as much as they did. It couldn't have gotten a better representative. Their music and images are still symbols of youthful energy, optimism and inventiveness.

An important key to their influence is that they democratized music. They made it look easy, that anybody could do it. You didn’t need to hire a big-time producer and a studio full of professional musicians, you didn’t need to commission a song from Tin Pan Alley. If you had a guitar and something to say, you too could make music. After Lennon and McCartney knocked out a song for the fledging Rolling Stones in about 15 minutes, Jagger and Richards took notice and started writing their own songs. Many more got the same idea just by listening to the music. The Beatles were the Pied Pipers of the era, convincing a generation that they could rewrite the world with their words, their music, and their ideals.

Sadly, the story didn't end well. The Beatles broke up in 1970 after several years of bickering and growing musical divisions. I guess that should have taught us something. But often the illusions and the dreams are more powerful than the reality. They were for me.

Intelligent Republicans, Take Back Your Party!

At some level, it's been satisfying to watch the Republican party becoming increasingly paranoid and extremist during recent years. Surely, they're not going to win any national elections anytime soon running like that. Why not let them consign themselves to political irrelevance, if that's what they want?

But then comes along an important issue like the health care debate, and you realize how much we need contrary voices. We need people out there searching for flaws in the current proposals and calling attention to them. We need to hear alternate points of view. The Republicans are right about one thing: This is a huge industry we're messing with and we need to be as sure as possible that we're making positive reforms.

Unfortunately Republicans are not playing a constructive role in the current debate. They're proposing no alternative, they're not being honest about the gaping holes in the current system and they're criticizing a plan that nobody is proposing. Their only goal seems to be to shut down any reform effort.

Sure, that's politics as usual. It's hardly a new tactic. But these are not usual times. And here's where the President is right: The current health care system is not sustainable. It places too high a burden on businesses, too many people are left out, and it's too expensive and getting more so. We need to fix this. We need a competing party not trying to shut down the reform effort but trying to make it better. That would be the patriotic thing to do.

So, Republicans, I'm not sure I'm going to agree with you completely, but I want to hear your constructive arguments and proposals. Stop calling names. Stay away from the Nazi allusions. Give up the death-panels-for-grandpa nonsense. Stop trying to drown out the debate and instead join it. Present your arguments rationally and trust the American people to decide.

We need you.

(500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer is one of the better films of the summer. It takes all the predictable elements of the romantic comedy and adds just enough spin and verve to make it all seem fresh again.

The basic storyline is nothing out-of-the-ordinary. What makes it special is the likability of the two leads (played with great charm by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel) and the respect and goodness with which they treat each other, even when they break up. There's none of the calculated gamesmanship that dominates so many movies of the genre. Add to that a great score, a clever way of splitting the story up so it's told through slightly jumbled snapshots and a wonderfully exuberant dance scene set to Hall & Oates's "You Make My Dreams Come True."

Although it seduces you with the way the two main characters fall in love, the movie has some interesting twists as it works itself toward its knowing and somewhat surprising conclusion. The result is an extremely smart, inventive, funny film that wins your heart even as it plays with your head.

How Soon Do You Get Online in the Morning?

The NY Times ran an interesting article a couple of days ago about how technology is changing our daily lives, starting with our very first waking moments.

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

This is true for me, except in my case it's an iPod Touch. It's the last thing I check before I go to sleep and the first thing I check when I get up in the morning. Why, I'm not sure. There's hardly ever anything important that I'm finding out that can't wait, but I like keeping up on what everyone is saying.

Fortunately I'm not faced with the responsibility of trying to manage the technology use of children like many of those cited in the article. If I were, I don't think I would begrudge them keeping in touch with their friends through their gadgets, though I think there are certain times to put the devices away and get some work done or communicate with the people around them.

I think this would be a fascinating topic to explore with students. I wonder how early they begin to be to connect - both in age and time of the morning.

Is Today Any Different?

Roger Ebert has never struck me as a public scold, so it surprised me to see a recent blog post of his where he bemoaned the fact that young people don't read film critics anymore, which, to him, is a sign that they're getting dumber.

If I mention the cliché "the dumbing-down of America," it's only because there's no way around it. And this dumbing-down seems more pronounced among younger Americans. It has nothing to do with higher educational or income levels. It proceeds from a lack of curiosity and, in many cases, a criminally useless system of primary and secondary education. Until a few decades ago, almost all high school graduates could read a daily newspaper. The issue today is not whether they read a daily paper, but whether they can.

Obviously Ebert is stretching his conclusion to include far more than movies, although that's still the focus of his post. His main evidence is the lack of success of The Hurt Locker, the Iraq War movie that came out this summer. Young people are not going to see this film, Ebert complains. Most of them don't want to try anything out of the ordinary.

Of course there are countless teenagers who seek and value good films. I hear from them all the time in the comment threads on this blog. They're frank about their contemporaries. If they express a nonconformist taste, they're looked at as outsiders, weirdoes, nerds. Their dates have no interest in making unconventional movie choices. They're looked at strangely if they express no desire to see that weekend's box office blockbuster. Even some of their teachers, they write, are unfriendly to them "always bringing up movies nobody has ever heard of." If you hang around on these threads, you know the readers I'm referring to, including "A Kid," who writes so well that if she hadn't revealed her age (just turned 13) we would have taken her for a literate, articulate adult.

My question: Has it ever been any different? That last excerpt could've been written about me when I was growing up. Have teenagers ever taken film criticism seriously or flocked to the more offbeat movies? Face it, moviegoers have been flocking to mindless action movies for as long as I can recall, and it's not just young people.

Yes, I saw The Hurt Locker, and it's a great movie. I wish more people would had seen it -- young and old alike. It gave me a vivid look at the thankless, life-risking work that our soldiers are doing. Why do so many more people want to see the escapism of Harry Potter or The Transformers or G.I. Joe instead? I don't know. Maybe they don't want to face reality. Maybe The Hurt Locker was badly marketed. Probably there is a lot of groupthink at work. But it's hardly the first time that a superior movie was ignored.

There's a lot of change happening and there's always the temptation to predict the end of civilization. There's plenty of supporting evidence for such a hypothesis and always has been. I'm just going to need something a little more definitive before I believe it.