There’s been much angst expressed by parents of America’s children and youth, of late, about the rapid erosion of funds and services, to provide education needed to prepare them for appropriate and gainfully competitive adulthood. There’s also been a mounting volume of critical carping and castigation by those in government, responsible for providing the funds necessary to achieve adequate levels of education and warnings of dire consequence, from those invested with the onus to plan and produce educational services at superior levels of educational accomplishment, from the President and throughout his executive departments.
While parents, political exhorters and Presidential paladins all prod and parry for positions of utmost leverage, here are some vital things to keep in mind: There’s more to life than a dull routine of meaningless motions multiplied times so-much-an-hour. Sometime around the year, 1800, the great English engraver and poet William Blake wrote: “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade.” Otto Von Bismarck, who united Germany in the eighteen-sixties and was an inspiration for Adolph Hitler, told the Reichstag: “All we need is to put the right people in the right jobs.”
Vadim Medvedev, Director of Communications for Mikhail Gorbachev, the President who put Soviet Russia on the path to Democracy, put it this way: Science and technology and the various forms of art, all unite humanity in a single and interconnected system--- in place of antagonism, there is a mutually advantageous sharing of work.”
This one-time-musician-turned-paladin-poet and pundit would urge his listeners to pause and deliberate all of the foregoing. Then go and share your thoughts with a few others… much younger than yourselves.
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