Adonis Diaries

The prime enemies to Capitalist America are well-adjusted and well-fed minority and working class kids.  Parents in the US are witnessing a reduction of 40% of their quality time to caring for their kids.  Kids return home alone, eat frozen food, watch TV, play video games, and isolated from their environment. Parents have to work twice harder for longer duration for less than what they earned three decades ago. Even national health care coverage for the downtrodden has barely passed Congress with drastic restrictions.  Kids are getting hooked to alcohol and drugs and are seeking gang-type protection against their loneliness and disorientation.  Fact is, most States considered satellites to the USA lack national health coverage and the schooling system is mostly privatized.

Why IQ is dropping dangerously?  James Coleman reached this conclusion: “Kids competence in school depend largely on the total effect of the environment (family, community…)  The total effect of school programs and system are secondary factors.  It is basically the lack of environmental support and care that is driving kids stupid and dropping from schools:  Kids are being herded to the job market earlier than expected and working in minimum wage jobs with no prospect for advance for lack of adequate education.

For example, Bush Junior has started this program “No Child Left Behind” and is continued by Obama with a nastier restriction.  This program is meant to just teaching kids to the test.  Kids are tested every couple of years and so are the teachers tested in “performance” of teaching to the test program.  Not only kids are not learning but teachers have been robbed of their educational rights to forming good minds, reflecting brains, offering various perspectives and point of views.  Students are to answer according to preset ideological programs.  Obama wants that teachers be evaluated by students!  Ignorant kids evaluating how well the teacher is preparing him to pass a stupid test. Teachers have to play kid among kids to earning his salary:  kids are not learning anything in deep; the educational system does not want to produce competent and creative kids:  Just kids proficient in passing tests.  Later on, proficient in scalping institutions and bypassing regulations by learning how the system works.

John Dewey (1859-1952), social reformer and influential in educational methods, was a prime US principal sources of inspiration to a progressive educational movement.  Dewey wrote: “The ultimate goal of education is not consumerism goods but producing free men, associated as equals.”  Dewey stated in 1920: “Power resides in the control of means of production, of exchange, of publicity, of transport, and of communication.  Those running these facilities are governing the society. The quest for profit is managed and controlled by banks, landowners, and barons of industries. This quest for profit is reinforced by the press, journalists, and the other vectors in publicity and propaganda.”

The British mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell stated: “Education has for objective to extending values contrary to domination; it must be forming well-advised citizens, in a free society; to conciliate patriotism and liberty with individual creativity.  This pre-suppose treating children as we treat a young shoot endowed with proper nature:  Requiring the right soil, air, light, and water.

The current educational ideology can be summarized as follows: “Each individual, in an ideal configuration, seeks to a position of master among slaves.”  Relentless competition and the lure for quick gain are sure ways to destroying a sense of community.  Normal people are feeling insecure, afraid, and uneasy in their environment.  People are claiming to be “apolitical” (in a bad connotation) because they feel helpless to performing any social changes:  They simply blame the political structure, government, and official.

People are sensing after frequent crisis (preemptive wars, financial crashes, and reduction in opportunities and salaries) that governments are but shadows to the capitalist structure favoring private multinationals.  Capitalist enterprises impress upon governments the policies and laws that suit their monopoly over reducing common people to serfdom.

The media is not doing an honest job:  They are not pointing the finger to the proper sources of people’s insecurity and inequality in opportunity and wealth.

For example, David Moss of Harvard Business School compared two graphs extending for a century.  The first graph showed statistics of the gap between the rich and the poor in America over the years.  The second graph showed the tightening of financial regulations and financial crisis.  The two graphs matched completely.  In 1929, 10% of Americans hoarded 50% of the wealth (the 1% of the richest Americans disposed of 24% of the total wealth). In 2007, exactly the same gap between the classes were observed.  In Europe, more factors inter in times of crisis because the States are involved in supporting the downtrodden in matters of health, schooling, and subsidies to the less fortunates.  While in 1930 the gap shrank between the classes, this gap has not changed since 2007.  Most probably, the crisis is not over until the Federal government support the less fortunate in work opportunities and better salaries.

Note:  You are encouraged to read Noam Chomsky’s “For a humanist education”