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Blog: FCAR
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From classroom to tar pits?
Marion Brady
*February 4, 2006
I drive a 17-year-old pickup truck. It's ugly, but dependable. Unless someone
comes along with a really good deal on a better one, I intend to drive it until
the rust refuses to hold it together.
Why I'll probably be able to keep my truck for several more years is no mystery:
monitoring. Like most people who hang on to old vehicles, I pay attention to
gauges, noises, vibrations, smells and other indicators of possible problems
that, if ignored, could mean trouble.
Monitoring keeps vehicles running. It also keeps bodies healthy, restaurants
clean, traffic moving, store shelves stocked, budgets manageable, and much else.
In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that monitoring is essential to human
survival. Societies that don't adequately monitor themselves and their
situations end up on history's junk pile.
So, is America monitoring conditions and problems that, left unattended, might
do us in?
The answer might seem to be "Yes." Science provides us with mountains of
feedback on just about everything under (and beyond) the sun that might affect
our way of life.
For example, an Internet search of "fish stocks" tells me that the number of
tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, and flounder off America's coasts has
decreased more than 90 percent in the years since I graduated from college.
Googling "groundwater" links me to some pretty scary stuff about the coming
collision of water resources and urban development. Many scientists think the
buildup of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is a far more serious threat
than terrorism.
It's all there in the numbers -- trends in resource depletion, infant mortality,
species extinction, life expectancy, wealth distribution, topsoil loss, arms
expenditures, desert growth, population movement, trade imbalances, levels of
harmful chemicals in newborn babies, polar ice-cap melt -- on and on and on.
But having access to important information affecting our future doesn't mean
we're actually monitoring it. That requires paying attention. And paying
attention, in turn, is a waste of time if appropriate action isn't taken.
James McGregor, an American businessman who has lived in China for 15 years,
says Chinese leaders monitor the United States. It has led them, he says, to
"admire, fear and pity" us, the "pity"" coming from their belief that America is
a country in decline. They think we're "ill-disciplined, distracted and
dissolute." They see us drowning in debt, ignoring our deteriorating
infrastructure, underfunding our schools and generally behaving in other
short-sighted, socially irresponsible ways.
Why, they wonder, when we're digging ever deeper the hole they think we're in,
are we so caught up in what they see as trivia -- arguing about where to hang
the Ten Commandments, preoccupied by homosexuality, fixating on news about
murdered or missing pretty white females, legislating steroid use in sports,
punishing flag burners -- getting all emotional about issues they see as only
marginally or not at all related to what they believe is America's long-term
well-being and continued power?
We may not agree with the Chinese leaders, or may think they should be putting
their own house in order rather than inspecting ours, but they raise some
important questions for Americans in general and educators in particular. If our
collective survival depends on our knowing and caring about creeping trends and
problems that could leave us cold or hungry or at war with each other, if it
depends on our electing public officials who pay attention to those trends and
problems rather than pushing our hot buttons or channeling the demands of big
campaign contributors, then enormous educational challenges lie ahead.
I doubt we'll meet those challenges. However, if there's hope, it probably lies
with the kids. In a Time magazine poll, 46 percent of 13-year-olds said that
when they are their parents' age, they expect the world will be a worse place to
live than it now is.
That's a sad burden for the young to carry, but it's consistent with the view of
many experts, including Jan Lundberg, energy analyst and publisher of the
Lundberg Letter on oil trends. He thinks the fossil-fuel based phase of human
history we're now in won't wind down gradually but will end abruptly, that it
will do so sooner rather than later, and that changes in our way of life are
likely to be drastic.
Knowing there's a problem is the first step in addressing it, which probably
puts those 13-year-olds ahead of many adults. How sad, then, that the current
narrow, Washington-engineered, teach-to-the-test education "reform" program will
send them into the future with less creativity than their parents and
grandparents brought to the challenge of survival.
*First published in the Orlando Sentinel. Posted here with permission of the
author.
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