{"id":148042,"date":"2019-12-02T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=148042"},"modified":"2019-11-21T06:00:06","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T06:00:06","slug":"imagine-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/12\/imagine-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Meditation on Education, History, and Tomorrow<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagine schools where the teaching and practice of empathy is combined with meditation, yoga, tai chi,\u00a0volleyball, gymnastics, music, dance, painting, drama, and all the creative arts.\u00a0 With gardening, cooking, and school lunches that include\u00a0what\u2019s grown\u00a0in school gardens (including herbs), and where the construction\u00a0and care of such gardens\u00a0is combined with math, geology, geometry, geography, meteorology, and the writing of essays (shared\u00a0in class!) about how all those lessons\u00a0and experiences have a holistic flavor, and how that flavor informs a holistic approach to the\u00a0body and its health and to the globe as a whole (both in terms of ecology and community).\u00a0 Imagine combining all that with accurate lessons in relevant recent history and the\u00a0virtues and dangers of democracy.<\/p>\n

John Dewey pretty much did all\u00a0that (without the Eastern touches, of course) as far back as 1894 (and on into the 1920s) with his \u201cexperimental schools.\u201d\u00a0 His students\u00a0were so creative, smart, well-informed, happy, cooperative, and astute that Chicago\u00a0deprived those schools of adequate funding until they were starved into non-existence\u00a0and the students were once again herded like sheep into America’s compulsory system of\u00a0miseducation so as to remain bored, quiescent, ignorant, threatened, and easily manipulated\u00a0by the barons of politics, wealth and industry whom Marx rightly called “blood-sucking vampires.”<\/p>\n

JFK, MLK, RFK, Janice, Jimmy, Joan, Ali, Dylan and The Beatles changed all that for a while; and then (as Mailer notes) the Democratic\u00a0Party betrayed the people’s movement and sold its soul to Wall Street at the 1968 Convention\u00a0(in Chicago!).<\/p>\n

Nixon got away with mass murder in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. \u00a0Ford shoved the lessons of The Vietnam War under\u00a0the carpet, and armed and approved Indonesia\u2019s genocidal assault on East Timor (partly so that Kissinger and Associates could maximize their profiteering plunder in south Asia).<\/p>\n

Carter allowed the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, and launched a terror campaign\u00a0against the newly elected social democratic government of Afghanistan, and he is therefore both directly and indirectly responsible for the catastrophic consequences which ensued and are still ensuing.<\/p>\n

Ronald Reagan was deified despite his multiple lies and crimes, and was rewarded with riches and fame for his passion for deregulation, deficit spending, enriching the rich, poisoning the environment, bloating the Pentagon, and transforming America from the largest creditor nation in the world to the largest debtor nation in the world.\u00a0 Bush the\u00a0Elder proposed, and Congress signed, a bill designed to do to Yugoslavia what Nixon and Kissinger did to Chile: \u201cmake the economy scream\u201d until the country fractured into civil war and totalitarian politics conducive to Euro-American economic hegemony; and, after America shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 291 men, women and children, Bush the Elder said: “I will never apologize for America, I don’t care what the facts are.”<\/p>\n

Clinton signed\u00a0the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby removing a major plank in FDR\u2019s New Deal for the American people and setting the stage for Cheney-Bush.\u00a0 President Cheney-Bush frightened America with false alarms about\u00a0a nuclear strike from Iraq and non-existent weapons of mass destruction, gave us the 2008 economic meltdown, and launched Vietnam Redux in the\u00a0Middle East with our continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Obama continued the government\u2019s policy of punishing and prosecuting whistle-blowers, and refused to stand up for Standing\u00a0Rock, while substantially increasing America\u2019s self-defeating drone warfare in the Middle East.\u00a0 And Trump the Triumphant now inhabits the oval orifice with a sophistry and pomposity\u00a0that mirrors Mussolini.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Statue of Liberty weeps, the earth is crucified,\u00a0economic apartheid rules the nation and the planet, and most Americans don’t\u00a0know who Newt Gingrich was and how his Orwellian pamphlet (the Bible of Republican politics) poisoned American political\u00a0discourse.\u00a0 And yet it really wasn’t all that long ago that James Joyce prayed daily to “awaken\u00a0from the nightmare of history,” and George Orwell said “history is now a race between education\u00a0and catastrophe.”<\/p>\n

So, thank god for Greta Thunberg and her youth movement, the Dalai Lama\u00a0and Socially Engaged Buddhism, Denmark’s redemptive and enlightened education system,\u00a0Bhutan’s pragmatic and wisdom-based commitment to environmental preservation, and all\u00a0the peace-and-justice-makers everywhere who, with courage and conscience, seek to create a world of safety, beauty and opportunity\u00a0worthy of bequeathing to our children and all future generations.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Stefan Schindler taught philosophy, psychology, education, and religion for 40 years at institutions of higher learning, including The University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Berkley College of Music, The Boston Conservatory of Music, Dance and Theater, and the Boston and Brookline Centers for Adult Education.\u00a0 Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha\u2019i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College (on Freud, Sartre, Hegel, and Jung). He wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.\u00a0 His books include <\/em>The Tao of Socrates and <\/em>America’s Indochina Holocaust.\u00a0 His forthcoming book is titled <\/em>Buddha’s Political Philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Meditation on Education, History, and Tomorrow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":137963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-148042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}