It's A Wonder We Ever Survived!

To Those of Us Born Between 1930 – 1979…

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate bleu cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren't overweight… WHY?

Because we were always outside playing...that's why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on…

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them down the hill; only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem

We did not have Play stations, Nintendo's and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We would get spankings with wooden spoons, switches, ping pong paddles, or just a bare hand and no one would call child services to report abuse.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

If YOU are one of them, CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives… for our own good.

While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave and lucky their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

...And Then They Came for the Mormons...

Is anyone else bothered by this?

I mean, where's the outrage?

If I understand the story right, a 16 year old girl at a Mormon ranch makes a single phone call alleging abuse (she was forced into a marriage with a man in his 40's) and the government comes to the ranch and takes 413 kids away from their parents.

Based on one phone call.

From a girl no one has actually ever interviewed and whose whereabouts are unknown.

Now don't get me wrong...

1) I have no doubt that this girl was telling the truth and is an absolute victim. She needs justice.

2) Child abuse is horrific. I feel no mercy towards its perpetrators.

3) I consider Mormonism a cult religion. Its doctrines are harmful, bizarre, and I would argue Satanic.

4) I consider polygamy a travesty. Just another mockery of God's design for human sexuality.

5) In the final analysis, it may even end up that the taking of these kids was justified.

But none of this is my point.

My point is that it cannot be right, just, or good in any way that the government can take kids away from their parents, subject them to cross-examination by biased social workers and invasive probings by gynecologists, traumatize and scar them for life, and destroy their families based on the allegations of a single teenage girl in a single phone call.

But of course these are those freak fundamentalist Mormons, right? I mean, they aren't doing this to Baptists, right? It isn't like they're targeting Black people or Muslims or homosexuals, right?

Just fundamentalists. Those people are dangerous even without the possibility of child abuse, right?

RIGHT?

So nobody says anything. Nobody expresses outrage over the fact that families are being destroyed over a phone call and no live witnesses.

But surely they are guilty of incest and polygamy and child abuse! That's how all those fundamentalists are. So we shouldn't wait for evidence. We shouldn't presume "innocent until proven guilty". We shouldn't give these families due process.

Should we?

The Collapse of the American Mind

The following article by Mark Morford on the state of American education appeared late last year in the San Francisco Chronicle. Its conclusions are terrifying...

Mark Morford: Kids these days ...

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and family and beloved teaching career.

He often writes in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything in which I comment on the nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step further. It is not only a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

As far as urban public education is concerned, we are essentially at rock bottom. We are at a point where we are churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults, and society will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is seriously considering moving out of the country to escape what he perceives will be the collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain.Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago.

Not true.

Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before age 6 and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."
But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple of recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught during the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student knew how to use a ruler.

In short, it is, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're only the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws dictating that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules.

Some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the population?

As for the rest, the evidence seems overwhelming, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but people far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

Too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will even know what the word means.

Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.
Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on SFGate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle


…Is it really that bad?

How much of our kids' ability to think or play or reason is the responsibility of the government?

How much should we blame 'the system'?

What really is the parents' job?

What do you think?