A Little Knowledge

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

One would think that in 70 years we might have progressed from John Steinbeck’s fictional travails of the Joad family who left the sand and dust-bowl of the Oklahoma panhandle to work in the orange groves and lettuce fields of Southern California. His novel covered the poverty, despair and hopelessness of the Great Depression. He was denounced as a liar and communist on both floors of Congress. Representative Lyle Boren of Oklahoma, whose son and grandson followed him to Congress, called Steinbeck’s description of the living conditions in Western migrant labor camps a “vulgar lie.” “The Grapes Of Wrath” was published on March 14, 1939, and by May was selling 10,000 copies a week. By the end of 1939, a half million copies were sold. Steinbeck, defended and recommended by First Lady Eleanore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1940. No one really wanted to take on Eleanore. The book has sold over 15 million copies since then. If you have not read “The Grapes of Wrath” yet, you are not really an American. Written before TV, the interstate highway system, sports utility vehicles and the Internet, one would think the migrant labor camps and those deplorable conditions would have disappeared after three generations. Not so.
I was struck by a March 12, 2011 article by Patricia Leigh Brown in The New York Times about the education of the children of migrant farm workers in the Salinas valley—where 70 years ago “The Grapes of Wrath” was banned. The writer concentrates on the students in Oscar Ramos’s third grade class. Ramos is one of eight children of a migrant worker himself, and he lived in one of the shacks some of his students live in today. His undergraduate thesis at the University of California at Berkeley was based on Steinbeck and “The Grapes of Wrath.”  As Brown says: “Steinbeck glimpses life beneath the dust.”

13 Heads A Minute, 768 Heads An Hour, 10 Hours A Day
Many of the parents work in the fields for ten hours a day, harvesting spinach, broccoli and cutting lettuce heads at the rate of 13 heads a minute, 768 heads an hour. They often start at 5 a.m., wearing protective gear to protect them from the chlorine used to sanitize lettuce. Almost 100 percent of Ramos’s students live in families near the poverty line. Statewide the poverty average is 56 percent. Almost 80 percent have limited English and most do not speak Spanish well. Only six percent of the parents have attended college compared to the state average of 55 percent.
The lettuce fields extend from California to Arizona so the parents move with the harvest.  The school life of children is disrupted constantly because of family mobility, violence, and low academic expectations.
One girl lives in a rusty trailer with ten relatives. There is no private space for her to study or to think. A boy has worn his black and white school uniform to school for two weeks because the family can afford only one–and they do not have washing facilities. The children can’t wear anything with blue or red because those are local gang colors. In Arizona the children often do not attend school, although they are citizens, because their parents are undocumented. The Supreme Court has ruled that every child regardless of citizenship is entitled to a public education, but that doesn’t make any difference to Arizona authorities or politicians.

Quality Of Education Equals Wealth Of Zip Code

Out of 308 million souls, 14 percent, over 44 million, are living below the poverty level. There would be millions more except they are receiving temporary unemployment compensation. One in five children live below the poverty level. Every legitimate critic of public education will tell you that the quality of education directly correlates with the wealth of the Zip Code the student lives in. Schools should be the mighty engines that drive individual achievement and upward mobility regardless of wealth. But with the middle-class imploding from 30 years of static incomes and political neglect, there will be a tremendous increase in broken homes, street gangs, class violence and increasing indifference to education by the parents. A strong predictor of school success by children is the educational attainment of their parents. The U.S. used to be first in the ratio of college graduates to population. Now we are tenth, garnering that dubious distinction in just one decade in the age of Bush. College tuition increases are keeping millions of great high school students from going to college because they don’t want to have $35,000 to $120,000 in student loans to pay off after graduating into a declining economy.
A few lines about the poor from Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written In A Country Church Yard” are as alive today as they were back in the 18th century:

  Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
  Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile the short and simple annals of the poor…
  Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
  Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:...
  But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er enroll;
  Chill penury (poverty) repress’d their noble rage, and froze the genial current of the soul.
 
Are We Living In An Age Where It Is OK To Leave Millions Of Children Behind?

President Barack Obama, once a poor person who is now “swaying the rod of empire,” is calling for a rewrite of George W. Bush’s disastrous Leave No Child Behind law. LNCB outlined an educational program suited for assembling the Model T of Henry Ford instead of emphasizing creativity and critical thinking to help every child to get ahead. The politicians and other Know-Nothings brought “Little House On The Prairie” rote learning and memorization which doused any “celestial fires” or ecstasies aroused by the “living Lyres” of the soul and mind. Schools were forced to drop art, music, physical education, recess, field trips and educational lyceums so students could be taught how to take and pass multiple-guess standardized tests. We changed schools to assembly-line factories putting out widgets according to “Brave New World” hatcheries. Even our days of assembling Chevy Volts are numbered. Bangladesh will be doing that soon.

When LNCB was implemented in 2002, thinking educators looked at the plan and its contents and said: “All public schools will be listed as failures by 2014 because unrealistic goals have been set.”  I think Republicans designed it to destroy the public schools. The public schools have 19-year-old “students” who still need their diapers changed during the day. The public schools have autistic and mentally handicapped students who need a full-time caretaker-aide with them at all times. The public schools have deaf, blind and bipolar who need unique programs and medical attention at the same time.
LNCB is dedicated to preparing all students for jobs in the corporate global economy. There is more to life than a job. Education should open students to experiences and emotions that explode the mind. You don’t do that memorizing chemical tables or math equations to take another test. We all need to sing Handel’s “Messiah,” Presley’s “You’re Nothin’ But A Hound Dog,” and Bizet’s “Toreador Song” from the opera “Carmen.” We all need to examine Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Picasso’s “Guernica,” the Campbell soup cans of Andy Warhol, and the country scenes of Andrew Wyeth. We need to hear Mozart and Jerry Lee Lewis, Yoko Ono and Al Hirt, Placido Domingo and (My God!) Bieber.  And Johnny Cash.

Does Anyone Really Know….....................

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in his tsunami of ignorance about Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, dropped this load at one of his “I-told-you-so” press conferences: “Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”  Got that?
Perhaps unknown to Rumsfeld, this complex set of knowns and unknowns actually comes from old Arab literature describing four types of men (spelling is from the translation):

Type 1: One who know, and know that he know…this is a man of knowledge, get to know             him.
Type 2: One who know, but don’t know that he know…this is a man who’s unaware, so               bring it to his attention.
Type 3: One who don’t know, but know that he don’t know…this is an illiterate man, teach           him!
Type 4: One who don’t know, and don’t know that they don’t know….this is a dumb man,            stay away from him.
From his planning and handling of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I have to put Rumsfeld down as a Type 4. But he has a lot of company in the Bush and Obama administrations and The Best Congress Money Can Buy regarding the wars.

Some Summa Cum Frauds Seem To Think Because They Attended School…

When people involved with education are checked out against the four types, I think people who have taught in the classroom for years are the only ones who fit Type 1. A good Type 2 person might be an administrator of an education setting and a governor who has made the effort to learn before popping off inanities to legislators and the public. Having worked with Board of Education members (and been one) almost all start in Type 3, slowly progress to Type 2, and in extremely rare cases brush shoulders with Type 1. A few members have remained solidly entrenched in Type 4.
Former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson is one rare governor who started in Type 2 and eventually crossed the steep threshold to Type 1. Just last week he lobbied the Minnesota Legislature to put $400 million into early childhood education. He wrote: “That should be a top priority in any budget regardless of the deficit. Faulty outcomes are where the costs are, and they come about from inadequate approaches to prevention. We owe this commitment not just to the children, but also to ourselves, because there can be only a very limited future if we continue to undervalue the potential of the young.”
Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have amply demonstrated to me they are both Type 3s, but if they continue to praise parts of LNCB they will slide into Type 4 quickly alongside the creator George W. Bush. Obama’s treatment of the Providence, Rhode Island, teachers when they were all fired almost equaled the water-boarding of Bush prisoners at Gitmo.

Just Because Bill Gates Is Worth $56 Billion He Thinks He Knows About Education

College dropout Bill Gates has been dabbling in educational policy for years. He started out by putting bucks into making small high schools out of big ones. When that didn’t work very well he started to work on teacher development and all those esoteric things. He got in way over his pointy head. Bill recently had an op-ed in the New York Times that would not have passed in Econ 101. He opened it with this statement: “Over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat.” Bill, inflation has doubled in the last forty years, but 4X4=16 or H20 has not changed. I suppose “achievement” would double if the student learned 4X4=16 in half the time. That doesn’t make math or common sense. Another Type 4 statement from Bill: “When you need more achievement for less money, you have to change the way you spend.” What the hell does that mean? Frankly, it means he is firmly cemented in Type 4. I think he had better stick to eliminating malaria in the world.

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