a thousand paths to happiness…including one little book

“There are thousands of paths that lead to happiness, but you have accepted only one. You have not considered other paths because you think that yours is the only one that leads to happiness. You have followed this path with all your might, and so the other paths, the thousands of others, have remained closed to you.” Thich Nhat Hanh’s new book, you are here: Discovering the magic of the present moment, is such a delightful treat to read and consider and I am enjoying myself immensely each day when I settle in and drink another paragraph of wisdom.

A thousand paths to happiness has me really thinking though, and I couldn’t resist jumping on the computer and pounding out a few lines (one thing that often makes me happy) about this notion and what it might mean to me – at least in this moment.

If there are, indeed, thousands of paths to happiness, then all of those thousands of paths should be encouraged and valued and celebrated and shared. In other words, diversity wins again, and not only should we encourage and celebrate diversity, but we should do everything possible to prevent any kind of restrictive ideas that limit possibilities and promote standardization of human beings and life in any way.

If there are, indeed, thousands of paths to happiness, then why aren’t we actively teaching children and youth to seek happiness, or better yet to “be free to experience the happiness that just comes to us without our having to seek it” (Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 75). This could move us a long way beyond the false promise of a “good job” so well-advertised throughout every level of education.

If school isn’t about promoting thousands of paths toward happiness, then what is it and why would we want to do something other than teach toward happiness?

Some readers are blowing me off now, huffing and puffing at their screen because they think it’s all fluff to teach happiness – so without going into excessive detail here, I’ll add that working with passion and engaging in intellectual journeys around academic content or in a workplace can be a path to happiness. Don’t worry reader – we’re not going to end up with a society of non- “workers” because everyone is sitting lotus-style in a forest seeking happiness. We might, however, end up with lots of people who refuse to sell their soul and time/life to corporations doing meaningless “work.” Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Has anyone out there ever read a school vision statement that included the words “happy” or “happiness”? I’d love to hear if you have.

And this ‘thousands of paths’ has me thinking of other things regarding “diversity” – we humans are all just different and somehow we keep trying to shove us all into the same-sized box. Just like ecological diversity is imperative to the survival of earth, human diversity is also imperative to the (healthy) survival of the species. While this is not only about the “size” of us humans (it’s also about our lifestyles, family and community structures, livelihoods, homes, interactions, relationships, physical looks, tastes, etc. etc.), diversity in size and shape should also be a consideration. I’m stuck on this a bit because of the recent onslaught of the “Obesity Epidemic” across the country and the fetish we seem to currently have around body measurements, plastic surgery, and the persistent metaphorical and literal chiseling away at natural diversity among bodies.

Just one example -

Body Mass Index (BMI)  and the push for schools to include children’s BMI on report cards even though CDC reports there is no evidence that such actions would change anything about childhood health and/or obesity.

Folks have – and will continue – to debate me that “there is a real obesity epidemic – parents need to know their children’s BMI and what those numbers mean and get control over what their children are eating.” Okay – and what role has school and Corporate America played in this heavy-ing of America’s children? Do we slap some numbers onto a child’s report card and insist that parents do something to change those numbers when kids are at school 7-8 hours a day and have to complete 2 hours of homework between 4pm and the 8pm bedtime? I might be exaggerating a bit in some contexts, and underestimating in others – but this is yet another way to tell parents how they are the individuals to blame for a societal problem that is only exacerbated in schools: over-processed foods are served for breakfast and lunch in cafeterias and recess is non-existent for most children above the age 8 and limited to only 10 minutes for children up to 8 in public schools.

Hmmmmm….schools work harder and harder to get kids to sit still and be quiet for 7 hours at a time preparing for tests and covering standards while only breaking to eat over-processed foods that are high in fat and sodium, then expect the kids to sit at home for 2 more hours at night to do homework and schools are going to “report” children’s BMI to parents so the parents can fix it?

I’m against the use of numbers for nearly everything and BMI is included – I always believe a holistic perspective on a person’s health and lifestyle is much more important than a single number that may be used to determine categories that label and blame and shame people. But let’s pretend for a moment that I accept BMI as some good indicator of a child’s health (even though CDC might argue against that). Perhaps we might allow schools to include the BMI on the report card and demand they also include a specific plan the school will take to ensure the child has access to healthy foods and sufficient exercise and physical play during the day. In other words – the BMI becomes a reflection of the way an institution operates rather than good or poor parenting.

So back to a thousand paths to happiness…

Maybe if we taught children to feel happiness, to see the infinite possibilities for happiness, to see happiness in unexpected places, and to cultivate happiness through mindful practice (including mindful practices of eating), we might find ourselves educating the most diverse, happy, healthy children on earth. What if school’s purpose was to cultivate happiness, peacefulness, contentedness, connectedness? Of course some private schools and home schoolers have been doing this for a long time, but what if public schools put these purposes first and foremost in their work? The possibilities make me smile – and happy.

Fabulous TED Talk about Choice…

GO SEE ‘RACE TO NOWHERE’ !!

“Race to Nowhere” is a film made by a mother who became increasingly concerned about her children’s and family’s emotional well-being resulting from pressures at school, loads of homework, and family time that was decimated by requirements from school.

This concern intensified and catapulted the making of the film when a 13-year old “perfect” child killed herself in the community over a bad math grade.

A 13 year old killing herself over a grade in school?

What do we expect?

We are guilty of allowing school’s competitive nature to infiltrate the bodies and psyches of our children (and even parents).

We are guilty of abusing children who are pushed to stay up late at night finishing  homework and who cry and complain of headaches, stomach aches, dizziness, and depression all related to school.

We are guilty.

Who is we?

Educators, parents, citizens.

All of us.

Can we finally come together around protecting children’s right to a human existence inside and outside school?

Can we finally coalesce around a fundamental belief that children are human beings who do not exist in the world to “produce” for adults?

Go see this film – and then find a way to order it – and then find a way to get as many people as possible to watch it.

Then change how our children are experiencing the world.

Race to Nowhere Website,  Film Trailer, and Organizing Ideas

Million Teacher March

Check out the SOS Million Teacher March blog where lots of local activities are being organized as well as a national Million Teacher March in D.C. planned for July 30, 2011. Here’s a great press release from the group.

Rolling over is not an option!!!

A terrific short piece on the purpose of the university…

Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, had a great piece in the New York Times Book Review Sunday – The University’s Crisis of Purpose

She writes “Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices.” I love this characterization of universities, and these are the very reasons why I love my job, and why I wanted my job in the first place. But it also creates a bit of a conundrum when I work collaboratively with people who are not in universities, but working in institutions where a polyphony of voices is not seen as creative and generative but dangerous. “Unruly” for many institutions (including K-12 schools) is often read as uncooperative, not a team player, and thus, not a practice that is rewarded. So when I’m sitting with a group of folks in various settings and begin to feel uneasy about the intense focus on the here-and-now or the “truths” of such-and-such practice, I live the impossibilities of the work we do in universities, “…to be practical as well as transcendent; to assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own sake; to both add value and question values,” as Faust puts it.

Faust argues that perhaps the university has become too intertwined with the market world and the immediate demands of society and has forgotten about our work as “critic” and “conscience” for society. She refers specifically to the economic crisis and her wondering if “universities – in their research, teaching, and writing – have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?”

I wonder myself, and I also draw parallels with education.

Universities find themselves accepting contracts to write test materials, score tests, and engage with school policies that continue to narrow the nation’s public education curricula and “purpose.” We (broadly defined) are perhaps “too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes” of education and will droves of writers in ten, twenty, thirty years be wondering where we were and what we were doing while this crisis crippled our public school systems?

It’s very hard, at least for me, to figure out both how to be friends and colleagues with folks in the K-12 system, be supportive of public education as a parent and professor, and still do the “job” that I truly believe in, which includes intelligent, informed, and public research and criticism of a system that continues to fail droves of kids and families.

Sometimes I find myself acquiescing to expectations of the system that is broken – and I hate it. Sometimes I find myself engaging deeply with the kind of critique and critical consciousness work that is my passion, and someone else hates it (and sometimes this includes a friend or colleague who is deeply committed to and embedded within k-12 education) – and I hate that too.

Faust’s brief piece reminded me of why I love what I do. Even when my actions may seem and feel contradictory as I weave between and stumble among the important purposes of a university at large, and one faculty member finding her way.

to go on

tears well

muscles ache

lips quiver

voices crack

minds wonder

how it will be done.

shoulders droop

arms wrap

chests heave

knees buckle

under the pressure.

and yet

mouths smile

hands wave

heads nod

feet move

to go on

as tears well.

Beautiful Pedagogy…Foxfire Style

A bit of inspiration for all of us trying to stay grounded in our big fight over public school education and working toward a better society for everyone.

Click here for information on Foxfire

And here for the Foxfire magazine

Thanks to Lew and JoBeth for telling me about the NY Times piece…

Jails, Prisons, Incarceration Rates, and Public Cost

I wrote this in response to a story in our local paper about a proposed new jail that would cost approximately $100 million when all is said and done. But the issue is a significant one for everyone in our country – I’ll try to add some hot links to this later so you can access the reports I used to gather information.

New jail “critical”? Let’s look at some facts…

International and national rates of incarceration
Bear with me readers, it might not seem immediately clear why a new jail in Athens-Clarke County (or any other place) is not necessarily what’s critical for our community, but at least by the end of these comments we will have more to consider as public citizens than we do with a narrow-visioned and short-sighted argument for a bigger facility to house those who have become enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

The United States incarcerates more people – and the highest percentage of its population – than any other country in the world. At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. had 2,319,258 people in federal, state, or local jails/prisons; China was a distant second in the world with 1.5 million people incarcerated; Russia in a distant third place at 870,000 people incarcerated. In a surprising twist, countries our government and public often points fingers at for human rights violations are far behind the U.S. in incarceration rates. According to statistics in 2007 and 2008, the U.S. was incarcerating a stunning 760 people per 100,000, Iran was at 222 per 100,000 people, South Africa was at 329 per 100,000 people, Russia – 626 per 100,000 people, Saudi Arabia – 178 per 100,000, and China – 119 per 100,000. What about countries we consider allies and comparable regarding human rights policies? In 2008, Canada incarcerated 116 people per 100,000 and France was at 222 per 100,000 people. Sweden, perhaps not surprisingly, was at a very low 74 people incarcerated per 100,000 people in its population.

The U.S. hit a startling figure in 2008 with 1 in 100, or more precisely, more than 1 in 99.1 people in the country incarcerated with the state of Georgia consistently ranking near the top for incarceration rates in the United States. In 2005, Georgia was ranked 2nd highest when 1,021 people per 100,000 were incarcerated, and according to 2007 data, Georgia had a rate 21% higher than the national average of incarcerated adults per 100,000. Just for those of you wondering, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Oklahoma are always among the top of the incarceration list as well.

Even more shocking than the high percentage of our country’s incarcerated population is the racial and ethnic differences within those numbers. At mid-year, 2008:
a. 727 White males were incarcerated per 100,000 White males
b. 1,760 Hispanic males were incarcerated per 100,000 Hispanic males
c. 4,777 Black males were incarcerated per 100,000 Black males
d. 1 in 355 White women aged 35-39
e. 1 in 297 Hispanic women aged 35-39
f. 1 in 100 Black women aged 35-39

In 2008, a shocking 1 in 9 Black men aged 20-34 were behind bars, and 1 in 15 Black men over the age of 18 were behind bars. This evidence points to serious racism in our country’s incarceration rates, intersecting with classism given that approximately 90% of all people of all races being arrested are living below the poverty level at the time of their arrest.

At what cost?
Readers can ascertain the human, familial, and social costs of the above facts themselves. Here I will focus a bit on the financial costs that have skyrocketed. Between 1987 and 2007, for example, states’ increase in spending on higher education was 21% while the increase in spending on corrections was 127%. In 2008, $1 in every $15.00 of states’ budgets of discretionary money was being used for corrections, and in the state of Georgia, every dollar spent on higher education equaled 50 cents spent on corrections. There is no doubt that in the nearing $100 billion industry of corrections, public priorities such as education, healthcare, parks and recreation, transportation, infrastructure, and so on have suffered.

Studies have also found that child support and restitution payments become almost nonexistent when someone responsible for such payments is incarcerated. So, it seems that we put people behind bars, take away their ability to work and earn money to be responsible for their debts, take away their ability to work and earn money and pay taxes into an increasingly small pool of money, and make it harder for them to find work after they are released because of the stigma of having served time in jail or prison. Even for those people less inclined to concern themselves with the social and moral ramifications of incarceration, everyone can certainly see the extreme economic cost to every single taxpayer and person in our country.

Our local tax dollars

For SPLOST 2011, voters will be asked to approve an $80 million bond sale to pay for the jail expansion and the following November they will be asked whether to pay back the debt with future sales tax revenue (about $20 million in interest). That’s approximately $100 million to make room for even more than Georgia’s already high numbers of people incarcerated.

On the other hand, a mere $40 million will be requested for an expansion of the Classic Center – an investment that would reportedly create “700 construction jobs and 200 permanent jobs, and bring $6.6 million into the community annually.” Wow – what could $100 million do for Athens-Clarke County? Surely there are other “big-ticket” items that could generate jobs for our neighbors and community friends who don’t have any prospects right now. Could another big project mean 1,400 construction jobs and at least 400 more permanent jobs?

Experts have said that rather than asking for taxpayer dollars to pay for corrections, it would be better public policy to invest taxpayer dollars into things that are going to transform the economy, such as education and diversifying the economy. In Clarke County we are furloughing teachers and asking families to foot the bill for long and expensive school supply lists. Other counties are cutting field trips altogether and anything else that seems non-essential. If we want to keep kids in school and prepare them to be the innovative leaders we need tomorrow in Athens and far beyond, it is absolutely essential that we not consider a $100 million project to incarcerate more of their family members now and more of them in the future. We could use that money to stimulate our local and regional economy, ensuring there is work for all of us in the community now and in the future. Ensuring work and legitimate economic opportunity will surely result in a decrease of need for a new jail. And we could use the saved money to engage our youth in powerful ways – helping them see education beyond the four walls of school and inspiring them to see how they can be positive change agents in our society. That will take field trips, of course, and lots of other innovative practices that schools don’t have money for now.

Tough questions for Clarke County and others around the country

Given that the increased number of people being incarcerated is not correlated to an increase in crime, but rather change in policies governing admissions and lengths of stay in jails/prisons; Given the horrific differences between the rates of incarceration depending on race and socioeconomic status; And given the evidence of a skyrocketing jail/prison population and an exponentially increasing bill for housing and caring for incarcerated people, it is absolutely critical that taxpayers ask local, state, and national governments some tough questions:
1. What are the county/state statistics on race/ethnicity and incarceration?
2. What are the county/state statistics on socioeconomic status and incarceration?
3. If those statistics are alarming, how does the county/state explain such differences in incarceration across races?
4. If those statistics are alarming, what is the county/state actively doing to prevent the incarceration of Blacks and Hispanics at such high rates?
5. How are zero-tolerance and three-strikes policies impacting the admissions and lengths of stay in jails/prisons?
6. What is the loss in potential local and state tax income for every person incarcerated?
7. What is the cost in relation to child support and retribution payments for every person incarcerated?
8. What are the statistics regarding recidivism and an overall decrease in crime for every person incarcerated?

A new jail, housing more people, will cost Athens-Clarke County far more than the $100 million dollars that will simply get a physical building. The real cost in dollars and cents, as well as the cost to our local public priorities, has surely not yet been calculated.

*Statistics and other information gathered from The National Institute of Corrections, The International Centre for Prison Studies, The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, and The Pew Center on the States.

Blessed Unrest Review by Paul B. Scudder

Paul Scudder is a fine arts, commercial, and portrait photographer, master naturalist, and long-time friend of mine. Here’s his review of Blessed Unrest.

Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World by Paul Hawken

“Teach your children what we have taught ours, that the earth is our mother.  Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons [and daughters] of the earth.  The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.  Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.  We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”                                                ~ Chief Seattle, Suquamish Tribe

Author Paul Hawken develops a theory in this inspiring New York Times Bestseller that the world’s citizens are in the throes of a movement.  A movement that many of them are unaware exists outside of their own circumstances.  Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) ranging from one-person internet bloggers to large non-profits throughout the world are busy each day trying to create awareness for a cause they hold dear and trying and change the minds of individuals, governments, and corporations that are working against them.  Millions of these NGOs throughout the world are part of a larger “movement” that is working from the ground up to change the planet on which we live.

Hawken draws a correlation between the need for social justice, restoration of the environment, and protection of indigenous cultures.  He believes that an individual or NGO must care about all of these issues to be successful in their own cause.   You can not have one without the others.  All three of these issues are the result of runaway abuses of the “free market” economy that is currently enveloping the globe by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the multi-national corporations that are its members.

Blessed Unrest’s contention is that we must demand that governments and multi-national corporations provide a fair and decent wage to their employees, protect and preserve the indigenous cultures in the areas they are using, and do it all in a way that does not harm the environment.  Corporations can no longer be allowed to acquire land, displace peoples, and impoverish local workers all in the name of the “free market” system.

The text of this 325 page book is less than 190 pages. The remaining pages include a 105 page taxonomy of over 1 million types of non-profit groups that exist throughout the globe that are involved in the “movement”.  Additionally, Hawken backs the claims he makes in his thesis with 25 pages of footnotes and bibliography.

This book is a must read for anyone who cares about true democracy and freedom, cultural preservation, the environment, or the world that we will leave to our children.

“Blessed Unrest is exciting, compelling and very important. . . It will Inspire and encourage millions more to take action.”
~ Jane Goodall

Fabulous new film

La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon This fabulous new film in independent theaters portrays the life of a young boy in Mexico living without his mother who has illegally immigrated to the U.S. I won’t give away any details, but bring your tissues and rally signs. It could make even the most conservative anti-immigration person reconsider dehumanizing laws that break the hearts and spirits of tenacious, driven, hard-working Mexicans. I haven’t yet used it with any of my courses but I will – and I will ask students to pay close attention to issues of language, literacies, and power within the intricate complexities of U.S.-Mexico relations. I will also ask students to consider the broader context of contemporary immigration around the globe and how capitalist economies and globalism is impacting social class relations beyond national borders.