Teach them well

Almost 60 years ago, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to the song “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” from South Pacific, and they almost made it to the monkey house with the social issues in the lyrics, for in the anti-Red fever of the time, they were suspected of being communists!

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

As children are taught to love, so are they taught to hate. With Obama’s alleged push for consensus politics, I expected the DNC to have less beat on accentuating differences and more focused on where candidates stood. Media frenzy would not let that be, and VP candidate Joe Biden was immediately dubbed as Obama’s attack dog, and regrettably, the Senator seem to have fallen into a stereotype role. McCain’s maverick image held the promise that he might be more conciliatory on differences, and more assertive of his track record of bipartisanship, but with the ascension of the Alaskan “bull with lipstick” (Sarah does know how to read a teleprompter well!) and with Karl Rove’s camp ascending to a more prominent role in the GOP campaign, we’ve already seen TV ads getting vicious. As we write, the Democrats are prodding Obama to be more ferocious.

Today begins the Public School System’s academic year 2008-09, and nowhere in the history of the United States has there been an institution that has more influence in molding the mindset of its young than that of the public schools.

I have four parameters in my teaching by which I hold myself accountable, and assess the performance of others. The same parameters apply to my living a life and thereby, they are pertinent to getting a life education. They are: a) Time and how it is managed, b) Space and how it is organized, c) Roles and how they are defined, d) Story and how it is articulated. In these pages last week, I wrote a series of five articles that was basically about telling the global human story.

Now, I wish to deal with the parameter on time, since one of the first things we teachers will do today is to present our daily, weekly and the year’s schedule. But let us, for now, reflect on the word ‘Now.’

At the old Fort Mason compound near the wharf in San Francisco is an office in one of the refurbished warehouse rooms called the Long Now Foundation. It is promoting a Millennium clock, and they do not mean just a thousand years; they propose to train the human mind to think in terms of 10,000 years, and if 2000 BCE be the apogee, then one would sail the previous oceans of time from 8,000 CE to the present, and navigate with one look into the horizon to 12,000 BCE. Today’s year designation would be 02008, to indicate that we are dealing with five figures rather than the currently used four. The Foundation is trying to locate a mountain peak where they intend to build a clock to be seen from a distance that will be precise to the second for 20,000 years! Their ‘now,’ indeed, is very long!

“Now” in common usage, at best, means today, yesterday and tomorrow. At a day apiece, that would be the length of three days. I show in my class this picture of the stick person at the confluence of the infinity symbol (horizontal eight), and say to students that the length of time one can see to where one had come from is the same distance where one can see where one is going. One of my Asian heroes is oft quoted: “S/he who cannot see where s/he came from, would not know where s/he is going.”

A few Jewish writers have alluded to the strength and resiliency of the race as coming from the story that they may be in diaspora but theirs is a journey of a ‘thousand years,’ a motif established by the elderly wandering nomad Abrams from Ur of Chaldea (that would be between the Tigris and the Euphrates for the geography-challenged) who moved to the Levant, and held a people together with a cosmic covenant for a Promise land. So now, when the faithful intone annually, “Next year in Jerusalem,” there is not a sense of failure with the vow should the event not happen within 365 days. Theirs is a journey of a thousand years.

“Nowadays” is another timeframe, popularly used though less precise in length and duration. Common usage seem to indicate the distance between generations, which used to be a score as mirrored by our designation of twenty as the unofficial magic number into full adulthood. With the rapid maturity of the young, it has since shrunk to a decade, so “nowadays” often refers to the fashion and mode of the decade.

Olympiad athletes remember the song popularized during the Los Angeles Olympics titled “One Moment in Time.” It began as the phrase of that one moment in time when the athlete receives an award on a podium. But I also heard someone elucidate later on a four-year cycle when an Olympian trains for an Olympiad, gets a medal, and reign four-years afterward until the establish record gets bested by new efforts.

Theologians have used the term “here and now,” attributed to Paul of Tarsus in the Christina New Testament, to designate a lifetime so that one’s covenant with life in the here and now means being responsible and accountable for one’s own lifetime.

Already, one can sense the pedagogical contradiction for today’s teachers. For if our radio and television practices are any indication, our young are trained to 15 minutes of commercials per one hour of radio broadcast, and 20 minutes per one hour on TV. That means that we are dealing with minds with, at best, an attention span of 4 minutes before it requires the discontinuity of a commercial. “’I want it, and I want it now,” a dear friend from Shanghai used to say, acting out the ethos of her generation around the world.

So every classroom in the public school system of the Commonwealth, in some fashion or another, have to deal with the management of time. The teacher takes the lead in demonstrating what timeframe and what timeline will abide. What students sense is the teacher’s management of time pretty much will set the class cadence and the homeroom rhythm the rest of year.

HQTs and HETs, let’s go teach!