Tapsearch Com Editor

Cleveland, Ohio, UNITED STATES


Joined October 16th 2007

Number of Posts:
725

Number of Comments:
311

Karma:
10



Editor and Artist at Ray Tapajna Chronicles News, Issues mixed with Art that Talks at http:/tapsearch.com/tapartnews BIO at http://tapsearch.com/about-ray-tapajna Summary Sites at http://tapsearch.com/super-links or search under tapsearch.com ,ta

Tapsearcher takes you on a journey through the fields of broken dreams
Editor and Artist at Ray Tapajna Chronicles, advocacy, news and issues sites mixed with topical editorial art by Ray
BIO at http://tapsearch.com/about-ray-tapajna For all Tapseach Com sites, see http://tapsearch.com/super-links and note http://tapsearch.com/communications-by-rank

View Ray Tapajna 's artwork The Field of Broken Dreams at http://tapsearch.com/id12.html or http://arklineart.fotopages. or search under toonpool a
Moderator at http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/ http://www.therationale.com (Philosophy and Religion )
http://www.ethicsbox.com ( Personality, Character and Self Improvement )
http://www.theworldsnews.net - NEWS and issues

A mobile user friendly summary of articles at Tapart News and Art that Talks is at http://tapsearchnewsmobile.filetap.com and http://tapsmobile.filetap.com or see http://squid.me/R

As a courtesy of Tapsearch Com Dreamrenew sites enjoy unlimited free web services and items at http://tapsearch.com and http://tapsearch.com/arklinefreebies - pass on links and draw traffic to your sites. See also http://mutiurl.com/l/R for 12 Tapsearch Com free sites.

Ray Tapajna Chronicle sites
Ray Tapajna Chronicles, online since 1998, pursues human dignity in the workday and fair play in the global economic arena. Search under tapart news, tapsearch.com, tapsearcher, ray tapajna articles, tapsearch communications, twitter tapsearcher, arklineart, toonpool arkline art for thousands of resources and references.
Ray's most popular artwork is now part of millions results under the title of his artwork - Search under -Clinton Years American Dream Reversed - on Yahoo for millions of results and thousands on Google.
As a completely free courtesy, Ray Tapajna Chronicles has 12 Tapsearch Com sites full of total free web services, products. submit to top search engines, directories and pinging services, plus much more free for you. See above or start at main site http://tapsearch.com and follow Ray as tapsearcher on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tapsearcher.

Blogs

Tapsearch Com Editor's Blogs

11132 Vote(s)
77 Comment(s)
167 Post(s)
15802 Vote(s)
148 Comment(s)
250 Post(s)
31605 Vote(s)
197 Comment(s)
503 Post(s)
11282 Vote(s)
158 Comment(s)
183 Post(s)

Blogs I Follow

Friends

I have no friends :(

Recent Posts

Two Top Thomas Palaima Articles

May 22nd 2012 21:33
Education - The Way it Was and the Way it Is
Thomas Palaima, Top articles related to education. We recommend a deep reading of these articles when you get the time. It really gives you much more than being articles about just education.

This is a special double feature article (essentially two articles in
one) that explores the development of American higher education and
what it has meant for the families of early 20th-century American
immigrants and veterans of WW II and the Korean War and their
descendants.

It discusses the impact of the GI Bills of the 40's and 50's and the
current state of American education.

I give you here the link to the on-line version, but also an attached
pdf with the wonderful graphics the THE editors devised for the
piece. ( Note PDF version in comments below for you.)

This feature takes up a serious issue, as American education has
become less and less accessible and offers even those who can
participate in higher education fewer opportunities to become
educated in ways that conduce to the good of society. Admittedly this
is how I see it.

I would appreciate any and all comments.

Times Higher Education May 17 May 2012

Click here to go to full story Paths to education in the fields of dreams

Tom Palaima muses on the Greek ideal of reflective learning, his
immigrant grandparents' dreams of a better life, the GI Bill's impact
on America and the price of allowing universities - once places where
thinking was not bound by arbitrary deadlines - to be debased into
assembly lines

Tom Palaima is Dickson centennial professor of Classics at the
University of Texas at Austin.

PS:

This piece and my The Texas Observer piece on Willie Nelson's song
"Jimmy's Road"

Alive and singing the truth

are the most personally meaningful pieces among the hundreds of
commentaries, reviews and features I have written in the last 13
years.
28
Vote
   


A betrayal of workers

May 22nd 2012 16:40
By Ray Tapajna A journey in the global economic arena

The Way it Was and the Way it Is

The American Dream is Burning Away


I worked in several factories while going to college and found a vast void between the factory floors and the college class room. Something was missing. The communication wasn't there It seemed workers were outranked in a system of communication by rank. I had some of the very best professors in history, philosophy and sociology. Still, no one seemed able to jump over the crevice of knowledge between the class room and the real world. The same applied to the theology classrooms where the path ended on one side of worship. It did not cross over to the other side. The biblical adage of doing unto others as you would have them do to you was in parenthesis. It was ignored as it is now but still was far out in some distant place

Free trade came. The factories died. They were exported to other lands for the sake of cheaper labor. If the factory jobs I had in college were still available, millions across our land would be standing in line to get them including college graduates. All would be grasping at a chance for a middle class living.

I followed the Catholic Workers for years and they found the factories were part of raw Capitalism. This is true if we lived in a better ideal setting even back then . Anyone who ever worked in a piecework fashion knows this. I tried piecework for a time and did quite well at it. However, if you ever want to have a meltdown with the countering factors of education and factory tasks, try doing piecework. Many workers would not even take a bathroom break until the clock struck noon. Trying to match wits with a super professor in literature or ethics and doing piecework in another part of the day did not come together.

However, all this being said, the factory jobs gave millions a chance at a middle class life. It was the factory foremen who did more than the college teacher to provide stepping stones to a better life. It was the factory foremen who took the young off the streets and taught them a skill which in turn gave workers an opportunity to get married, have a family and buy a home. On top of this, the factory workers were able to help their children get through college. A mother back then usually had the option of staying at home to raise the family. Free trade came and wiped this out of the picture. The small family farm which grew a value added economy , took the big hit earlier. Giant agricultural corporations took over taking advantage of the
government subsidies that were originally meant to be for the family farms.

Instead of courses in college about this happenings in society, the business schools ramped up the concept of globalization and free trade. The industrial revolution wasn't over, they just moved it to other countries. In the process a new working poor class was created replacing a production workers middle class. Just when the minorities were getting their chance to make it to the middle class through factory work, free trade came and shut down the momentum. Now about 50 percent of all workers are unemployed or underemployed with millions missing in action from any kind of reporting.

The Ivy League business schools keep touting the age of globalization and free trade coming. Many followed the concepts of people like Thomas Friedman who wrote the book The World is Flat. Even the Jesuit college where I went prompts more of this massive failure in people to people relationships. The old biblical adage of Do unto others as you would have them do to you is thrown in the waste basket.

We lost the way we were and now have something upside down in a bizarre political world.
10
Vote
   


Greenspan and money products

May 7th 2012 00:21
Ray Tapajna Tapsearcher Real World News

Greenspan Dancing in the Dark


Economic Ethics ignored as Globalist Free Traders tried to create money products out of nothing

Alan Greenspan says, I thought Equity Loans were a good money product.

Now our economies based on making money on money instead of making things are burning out. President Obama bailed out the failed system but in time, the bail out money and subsidies will fail too.

First of all Free Trade is not trade as historically practiced and defined. Secondly, the U.S. never had any long period of protectionism.
Free Trade is primarily about moving production and factories from place to place for the sake of cheaper labor. And when labor and workers values are deflated it affects the money products too. We took tariffs off products and put it on workers and now we are putting tariffs on our money products in a reverse manner. The bail out of big money by small money acts as a tariff on almost every transaction.
Workers were the real commodities being traded . They were put on a world trading block to compete with one another for the same jobs. Workers and labor are really tangible assets and acted as a money standard. The discounting of the value of labor has now spread into our economy that is based on making money on money instead of making things. The printed paper called money needs more backing than just manipulation of values. It needs something tangible.
Through the Lend Lease Program, President Roosevelt found a way to create value in workers and labor. This triggered the most awesome industrial power the world has ever known. Through the Marshall Plan we duplicated this success in Europe and Asia by restoring the local value added economies in balanced geopolitical settings.
With Globalization and Free Trade we chopped up all this success and sent all the parts around the world.
The U.S. Federal Government start doing this in 1956. They sponsored a temporary program that never ended. At first it went slowly with only about a hundred factories moved in about twenty years. Then the Maquiladora factory program came and the number jumped to 2,000 factories being moved to Mexico alone by 1992. After President Clinton, and a Democrat Controlled Congress passed NAFTA, this number quickly doubled to more than 4,000 factories moved to Mexico. Soon after that President Clinton and the Contract with American Republicans rushed 20 billion dollars to Mexico to save the peso and to bail out the Mexican economy. President Clinton said he was going to get more money to them through international money funds too. In exchange , the U.S. was flooded with products like the PT Cruiser automobile that was made by $1 an hour workers and our industrial complex was told to compete with this outrageous arrangement. Of course it did not work and none of this had much to do with either term - Free Trade or Protectionism. It was just a nasty way of making money on money instead of making things. For more info, see Tapsearch Globalization

Greenspan era

The U.S. economy drifted into an economy based on making money on money instead of making things. Many money products were added or enhanced.The free enterprise system was ignored. It is a simple process where someone makes or grows something and adds a margin to enjoy a decent living for themselves and for all they use to enjoy this profit. As far as I can tell, Alan Greenspan did not mention the free enterprise system in his book The Age of Turbulence nor was the term in the index of the book. He went into the money products and said Capitalism and so called Free Market economics accommodated the state of human nature the best.

In his book, The Age of Turbulence he spent a surprising amount of time on the New Harmony communitarian economic experiment and rejected it as a real system. I was also surprised that he belittled the Marshall Plan and did not even mention the Lend Lease program which was actually real free trade. The Marshall Plan was a good example how successful economies could be duplicated an local value added economies where values could be added from raw products up through several levels to the retail or end user stage in balanced with the particular geopolitical setting and the entitlements that augmented these economies. The only real variable in these economies were the cost of labor. Instead of duplicating success, the free market attacked the cost of labor and workers. Free trade became a tool where factories and production were moved from place to place for the sake of cheaper and cheaper labor. This proved to be an anti-thesis for the free market system. Labor and workers value was deflated. This is a real tangible value and asset which acts as a money standard backing up printer paper money. Instead of duplicating a successful economy, the U.S. economy was chopped up into pieces and sent around the globe to take advantage of cheaper labor. In the end the value of workers and labor were degraded to a point of no return. The new working poor class in the USA, found it difficult to afford even the cheaper imports at places like Wal-mart and in essence shopped their way out of their jobs. The impoverished workers outside the USA, found it impossible to buy the things they made and worst of all could not afford to buy anything the USA had left to sell. President Roosevelt, established the Lend Lease program to support nations who had no money left to buy the goods they needed for fighting the war against Germany. He said he was not going to let the lack of dollars stand in his way. His actions confirmed the real reason for the Great Depression was about money and not protectionism. Simply, nations did not have any money to back up trade. In essence, he said, you can not do business with someone who does not have any money. You first have to find a way to finance their efforts. Lend Lease exploded U.S. industry into the most awesome power in history. Free Trade came and chopped this power up into parts that were not integrated in any form of growing value. It was just the opposite. For a time, making money on money hid this terminal weakness but not it has hit the wall and we now have Socialist Capitalists trying to find ways to create new internal Lend Lease programs. If are successful as we were with the Lend Lease program, we have to learn how to protect these new values in local value added economies in balanced geopolitical settings. This is the only system that works. After that, we need to duplicate these successes and not break them apart as we have through the free market and free trade that is not really based on trading products. For more see Tapart News online since 1998

http://tapsearch.com/flatworld Greenspan dancing in the dark

Ben Bernanke tells Congress buy "domestically produced goods."

Recommended
58
at Economist.Com


20
Vote
   


Economic Sins of Omission

May 6th 2012 00:14
Ray Tapajna news and issues networks Flat World of Globalism running on flat tires

The end must correspond with the means
[ Click here to read more ]
19
Vote
   


Workers are missing in action

May 5th 2012 00:45
New York Times report says Workforce shrinks

An estimated 342,000 Americans dropped out of the job market altogether in April. That is why the unemployment rate fell to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent — not because more workers found jobs, but because so many people left the work force


[ Click here to read more ]
28
Vote
   


Tapsearch Information World

May 3rd 2012 21:05
20
Vote
   


Shared Sacrifice and the budget

April 30th 2012 15:52
19
Vote
   


Economy prompts cheating

April 30th 2012 14:45
Ray Tapajna Today Super Links Network

" Incentives to cheat are many, but that's no excuse "
[ Click here to read more ]
28
Vote
   


Blackwater White Washed

April 26th 2012 00:03
Ray Tapajna Today Issues and News Network

How to White Wash the Blackwater Mercenaries - Just change their name to Academi and name some prominent person as Chairman of the Board for an "Academy."
[ Click here to read more ]
29
Vote
   


Re-directing the thought process

April 25th 2012 17:16
Ray Tapajna Real World News

Our major newspaper in Ohio USA, provides a service rating the facts in given issues as presented by a political leader or some other major person or reporting agency


[ Click here to read more ]
21
Vote
   


 

Recent Comments

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on Two Top Thomas Palaima Articles

May 22nd 2012 21:41
Alive and Singing the Truth
by Tom Palaima
( For the graphics with this article, click on link above )


published on: Thursday, January 10, 2008

This is Jimmy's road where Jimmy liked to play. This is Jimmy's grass where Jimmy liked to lay around.

This is Jimmy's tree where Jimmy liked to climb, But Jimmy went to war and something changed his mind around.

This is the battleground where Jimmy learned to kill. Now Jimmy has a trade and Jimmy knows it well too well.

This is Jimmy's grave where Jimmy's body lies When a soldier falls Jimmy's body dies and dies.

Well this is Jimmy's road where Jimmy likes to play. This is Jimmy's grass where Jimmy likes to lay around.

—Willie Nelson, "Jimmy's Road" (July 24, 1968)

For America, 1968 was a violent and terrible year. Our troop levels in Vietnam were just below their peak of 543,400. Operation Rolling Thunder had already dropped 864,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam. The January Tet offensive brought the war to the American Embassy in Saigon, and from there into our living rooms. The My Lai Massacre took place on March 16. Eighteen months later, we would begin to learn the horrible things ordinary young American men, turned soldiers, could do under the stress of combat.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Race riots, looting, shooting, and arson, broke out in dozens of major cities. On June 5, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel.

Around this time in Austin, David Zettner, a young bass player in Willie Nelson's band, received his draft notice and was inducted into the Army at Ft. Bliss near El Paso. On June 20, Willie wrote one of the greatest poems in the long and sorrowful history of war literature. His song poem is called "Jimmy's Road." Willie would call it a peace poem. It lasts 2 minutes and 39 seconds.

What did the then-35-year-old songster from Abbott think he was doing?

Willie had moved to Austin after years of trying to accommodate his idiosyncratic, jazz-inflected melody structure and singing style to the Nashville scene. He was still trying to make it as a singer. He had a recording contract with RCA. Through six years, only two of the songs he released as a performer made Billboard's country Top 20. His biggest success, the mundane "Bring Me Sunshine," reached number 13. As Willie biographer Joe Nick Patoski put it to me, it sounds more like Bobby Darin than like Willie Nelson.

"Jimmy's Road" was produced by Chet Atkins and Felton Jarvis, then Elvis Presley's producer, in Nashville in July 1968. It was released as a 45 much later, in May 1969, as the B-side to Willie's version of John Hartford's "Natural to Be Gone." The delay in release may reflect concern about how the mournful message and haunting solo guitar melody of "Jimmy's Road" might play with the audience Willie was trying so hard to win over.

Country music had heard nothing like "Jimmy's Road." More representative, among even thoughtful country songs about the war in Vietnam, was Brownsville native and U.S. Army veteran Kris Kristofferson's "Viet Nam Blues," which played well on the country charts for singer Dave Dudley in 1966. In the song, a soldier on leave in Washington confronts a civilian protester who is busy getting signatures on a telegram of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh.

Learning this, the soldier thinks "of another telegram that I've just read/Tellin' my buddy's wife that her husband was dead." Turning to the protester, "I said it's a shame that every man who ever died up there that far off land/Was dyin' for that you wouldn't have to wake up dead." Seven months after "Jimmy's Road" was released, Merle Haggard wrote his classic, red-white-and-blue country standard, "Okie from Muskogee." Willie was navigating uncharted waters, and his single did not chart.

Why did he take such a risk?

Willie had grown up during World War II and had enlisted in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. Still, he told me that when Zettner was inducted, it struck him as "some sort of strange thing" that a gentle soul of artistic temperament could grow up climbing trees and playing in fields, and suddenly be learning how to kill people. Willie took the name Jimmy in the song from his steel guitar player, Jimmy Day, because "it was more euphonic." It also sounds more childlike.

For parents who have nurtured a child to young manhood, the gentleness of Willie's guitar opening and the first image of a boy playing in trees and grass have the same effect as the traditional themes of rural peace and beauty that British soldier-poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen use to convey the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. Willie's words are plain and simple like theirs, the hallmark of our greatest war writers. Think of Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" or Walt Whitman's "I Saw the Vision of Armies."

Even in 1969, many American families were aware of what used to be called "shell shock" or "combat fatigue," and would soon be known as "post traumatic stress disorder." Many soldiers from World War II, like my own Uncle Joey, who fought as a Marine on Iwo Jima, came home as missing persons. We had their bodies, but the war kept their minds and souls. Willie's simple phrase, "something changed his mind around," captures this awful disappearance of the people we once knew.

In the fourth stanza, Jimmy's buried body reacts in sympathy when other soldiers die in combat. As Willie explained to me, "It's like his death is in vain. Whatever he thought would happen, didn't." Soldiers die. War lives on.

The song then cycles back to the innocence all our Jimmy's have when they are kids.

Delete ] [ Ignore ]

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on Two Top Thomas Palaima Articles

May 22nd 2012 21:38
First Article as noted above by Tom Palaima....(.For graphics click on first link above ... Paths to Education in the fields of dreams.... I like the way this starts being somewhat of an anti-intellectual myself and having a father who left his homeland at age 17 to come to America. Ray T.

My thinking about how time is used - or wasted - in higher education began with a photograph of my paternal grandparents taken in 1944 in the backyard of the three-family house they worked so hard for and eventually owned in the working-class Lithuanian ethnic area of Cleveland, Ohio. If education is a tree, my uneducated immigrant grandparents are strong roots dug into a forbidding soil. I think of old olive trees growing, impossibly, on Greek hillside terraces. The retaining walls for those terraces are built of heavy field stones hauled and placed by different generations of families of farmers. The ancient Greeks called such wearying hard labour ponos.

For ancient Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, being a physical labourer, a creature of ponos, even a working farmer or skilled craftsperson, precluded becoming educated. Education, as high-minded and high-born aristocrats conceived of it, required skhol. This term is generally translated as "leisure", but it is a much trickier concept to understand and translate in ways that convey its fuller sense to us. For now, we can drive home the power of this concept in the ancient Greek value system by pointing out that the basic word in ancient Greek for "being busy" or "being at work" was askholia, a negative abstract, literally "the state of not having skholē".

Ironies abound, given that modern American, British and European systems of higher education open to the many (hoi polloi) are based on Renaissance values derived from ancient Greek and Roman culture where education was designed for the state of living of the very few (hoi oligoi). The Latin language, too, shows the same privileging of elite attitudes as in Greek. To be freed of the cares of working was a state called otium. To be weighed down by the concerns of making a living was literally its negated form, negotium.

My grandparents and their children never knew what the ancients called otium or skholē. Nor do their grandchildren, including me.

Their photograph is in black and white and plays tricks on the eyes. What season is it? There are no leaves on the trees. But are there buds on the branches? My beloved grandmother Sophie and my grandfather Michael, of whom I have what I think are constructed memories - he died when I was five - are dressed in heavy clothing. It looks as if there might be a light dusting of snow on some parts of the grass. Is late winter turning into spring in Cleveland?

They sit on a simple wooden bench, most likely home-built, in the sun. Their dog, named Baby Dog, moves past in front of them. My grandfather smokes a pipe. My father told me once that my grandfather went around his house gathering up from ashtrays the butts of cigarettes his sons smoked. He crushed them into a mix that he then packed into the bowl of his own pipe. I can still feel, from my father's anecdote, the strong-willed frugality my grandfather shared with my grandmother. Their Hesiodic habits of household economy and hard work gave my father and his brothers and their children, including my brother and me, the chances we have had in our lives.

In the photograph, both my grandparents wear glasses. My grandmother is eating what looks like a thick slice of bread or a rectangular piece of her simple home-baked pastry. If her image were transported to the present day, she could be using an iPhone. But she and her husband never had their lives opened up, or intruded upon, by the modern communication and information devices to which most of us have surrendered the little time that we have that resembles skholē.

When this photograph was taken, my grandfather was 69 years old. He had worked his first three years in the US as a coal miner in western Pennsylvania. Shrapnel-like bits of coal were embedded in his face, a permanent reminder of the accidental explosion of a stick of dynamite with too short a fuse. In 1944, my grandfather was still working as a labourer or chipper in the steel mills in Cleveland. I have some tools that he used in his work and brought home. I can imagine him making the bench in the photograph with them.

He was born near Kaunas, Lithuania, on 10 October 1874. He came to the US in 1908 and made it to Cleveland in 1911. A First World War draft registration record for Mikolas Palaima indicates that he did some kind of military service in 1917-18.

My grandmother Sophia Bereckiute came to Cleveland from Lublin, Poland, in 1913, at the age of 26. Her ship, the SS George Washington, left Europe from Bremen. How she got to Bremen, or even saved the money for her passage, and why she was heading to Cleveland, Ohio, I will never know. My grandfather boarded the SS Philadelphia in Liverpool. He travelled to England from Romania.

My father told me that grandpa used to say he got his wife off a turnip truck. Sophie, without knowing any English, reached Cleveland from her entry point of Ellis Island in New York. The story goes that she had a note pinned to her clothes indicating where she was to go. The driver of a vegetable truck, who could read a note in Polish, or could understand what she knew to say, brought her from the train or bus station to the Lithuanian-Polish districts on the near east side of Cleveland. My grandfather was the lucky man who helped her off that truck and to wherever she or the vegetable truck driver told him she should go. He himself could not read the note. Nor could she.

She married my grandfather on 7 September 1914. I have her Austro-Hungarian Arbeitsbuch that kept track of where she had been employed as a Hausdienerin, the virtually enslaved life she was escaping. In Cleveland, she worked as a cleaning lady in office buildings and raised four boys. Even in her seventies, she split kindling wood for and shovelled coal into the furnace that heated their house.

Neither my grandfather nor my grandmother ever spoke more than broken English. In early documents we still have, my grandfather signed his name with an "x". On later forms, after he obtained his naturalisation in 1923, my grandfather wrote our family name in whatever variant the authority figures who required his signature had contrived to spell it on their forms: Palaima, Palajmo, Palayma, Palima, Palino, Polajman. They had the power to grant or deny him what he needed. So he gave them what they wanted. I believe he had barely more than what is known as "name literacy". My grandmother never learned how to write.

In early 1944, they had been married almost 30 years. They had four adult boys. Two were married and working in war-related industries in Cleveland. Two were serving in armed forces in the Pacific Theater. My father, 27 years old and named Michael after my grandfather, was with the First Cavalry. His youngest brother Joey, just 20 years old, was a corporal with the 14th Regiment of the 4th Division of the United States Marine Corps.

Both had public high school educations. Both wrote letters to my mother. My father wrote her earnest and stylised love letters in an elegant script. My uncle wrote her letters with misspelled words, broken syntax and cruder handwriting, from different islands where the Marines fought. Their letters conveyed their love to my grandparents in words that my mother could read aloud to them. An only child, she thought of Joey as the kid brother she had never had. Joey's letters also expressed a desperate need for contact with my mother and his two married brothers back home.

Right after Joey fought in the hellish battle of Iwo Jima, the only engagement in the Pacific in which US casualties outnumbered Japanese, he writes that he cannot understand why his two brothers, from the comfort of their homes, write so few letters to him. He explains to my mother that he lost my father's military postal address while fighting on Iwo Jima and asks her for it. He also says that he never understood before why his mother, my grandmother, would cry whenever she talked to him about leaving her own parents in Poland, but now he does. The great distance that separated him from home and his proximity to so much death made him feel what she felt in her heart, that she would never see her parents again. He had come to feel the same anguish. He beat the odds. He made it home.

Sitting on their bench in the late-winter daylight, what thoughts were Sophie and Michael having? What kinds of thoughts did they ever have? What words did they say to one another as they clawed their way successfully through the Depression, while my mother's alcoholic father, a harness maker by trade back in Lithuania, lost their house and drank up their little money? My grandfather's registration card for the Works Progress Administration, a federal programme to put the unemployed on public works projects, explains how he kept his wife and child from utter poverty. What kept Sophie and Michael together and going?

How did they view the larger world that their children, literate and becoming assimilated into a multi-ethnic American culture, were getting to know? What had my mother read to them of Joey's Marine division fighting in the Marshall Islands in late January and early February, 1944? What would she read to them about later brutal battles at Saipan and Tinian and Iwo Jima? How did my grandmother react when my mother read to her Joey's words about her deep nostalgia (literally a wounding grief for homecoming) for her own parents? How would my grandparents take in the newspaper accounts she read to them about the war being fought by their far-off sons? How did they feel for and act around Joey when he returned home, a broken and physically sick man, a clear victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, who lived just three restless years before dying of tuberculosis? Joey's last address was a rented room attached to a coffee house.

About the time their photograph was taken, the federal government, foreseeing the end of the war, was transforming higher education in the US. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act - popularly known as the GI Bill - was passed in January 1944. Later acts of Congress in 1952, 1966 and 1972 made it possible for large numbers of veterans to pursue higher education or job training programmes (by 1960, 18 per cent of the total number of American college-educated males had been subsidised by the GI Bill).

The impact of public education and the Second World War on US society and the extended post-war economic boom, a period when the US was the only developed industrial power undamaged by the war, brought the children of immigrant families out of the kinds of lives illiterate foreign labourers could carve out.

As John Bound and Sarah Turner statistically document in a 2002 paper in the Journal of Labor Economics "the G.I. Bill led to 'what may have been the most important educational and social transformation in American history'". In the years following the end of the war, veterans made up about 70 per cent of all male enrolment in colleges and universities. Overall enrolment, Bound and Turner inform us, increased from 1.3 million in 1939 to over 2 million in 1946. Eventually about one out of eight Second World War veterans, over 2.2 million in total, attended colleges or universities. More significantly, Bound and Turner show that the combination of military experience and the GI Bill increased college completion rates by almost 50 per cent. Veterans were highly disciplined, mature students who had seen how precarious life could be, and the federal government supported their education. The GI Bill also offered affordable home mortgages that gave veterans an added incentive to work hard at bettering their lives.

In less than a decade, the essentially 19th-century European lives that my grandparents still lived would truly seem like lives out of the distant past. These transformations also made higher education an imaginable goal for the grandchildren of ponos, like myself.

GI Bills enacted in 1944 and 1952 opened up higher education to veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War. They also transformed it. As Marcus Stanley puts it (in a 2003 paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics), "The reputation of this legislation is justified by its scale. Almost 70 per cent of all men who turned 21 between 1940 and 1955 were guaranteed an essentially free college education plus a substantial stipend under one of the two GI bills." Stanley cautiously calls these effects "evolutionary rather than revolutionary". He points out that "the GI bills may have made college more accessible for the children of the middle and upper-middle class, but apparently they had little effect among those of the working class". His astute observations encourage us to look at how higher education has continued to evolve.

My father did not take advantage of the educational benefits of the GI Bill. He was typical of veterans who were well above 20 years of age when inducted and below middle class. He did use its home mortgage provision. From the age of six, I grew up in a suburban socio-economic melting pot of families headed by blue-collar and white-collar workers.

My mother worked in school cafeterias and my father in the United States Postal Service. The childless couple next door were a chemist researcher with a PhD and a school psychologist. They were like an uncle and aunt to me. I absorbed from them patterns of thinking, thoughtful conversation and polite behaviour that I did not find in my home environment. My going to a Roman Catholic grade school with children from white-collar families surely influenced my parents to let me compete for a scholarship at the private Jesuit high school, something I might not have done had we lived in the working-class ethnic neighbourhoods in Cleveland, where public high schools were not "college preparatory".

I went to Boston College in 1969. Just like the veterans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we baby boomers entered institutions where education was still viewed as a process requiring something like skholē, an attitude of "leisure" that suspended the worries of everyday life so that we might have and share thoughts, some of which, in retrospect, might merit the adjective "higher". We were nurtured in courses with small enrolments. We interacted with concerned faculty, sometimes one to one. We were not distracted by sports events that now consume so much time, money and cultural energy on US college and university campuses. The syllabuses of most of our courses were focused on student needs, not on displaying faculty erudition and contemporary scholarly trends. I eventually learned how to think for myself while absorbing the views and ideas of true scholars, writers, artists and thinkers. My peers did likewise.

By my fifth year of graduate school, I began to have original thoughts that were worth putting together and sharing with others in my field. This came after many term papers, class presentations and discussions, seminar meetings, comprehensive examinations, conference courses and a master's thesis. My peers and I never organised or presented papers at anything like the graduate student research conferences that are now commonplace.

I remember my healthy doubts that I could have thoughts. I remember my Jesuit-trained respect for those before me who had done original thinking of sufficient value to be preserved in books and in the scholarly journals that I began to read as an undergraduate. What if I had attended an institution with the values and large class sizes of the University of Texas at Austin? What if I had been made to focus on the here and now and had felt the pressure to fill the many slots that did not even exist in undergraduate CVs 40 years ago? Would I ever have developed my capacities to think broadly, deeply, clearly, independently and respectfully?

I share the anxieties felt by university leaders as the first wave of veterans was pouring on to their campuses after the Second World War, the concerns the veterans themselves had about the very ways they were changing the nature of education within the institutions they attended, and the dismay of colleagues my age and older at how the precious time that should be available to faculty and students is now consumed.

Leaders like Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago were worried, as Keith W. Olson tells us in a 1973 paper in American Quarterly, that "the vocational orientation of higher education" in the GI Bill would "demoralize education and defraud the veteran". Veterans themselves meanwhile complained of overcrowding of the classrooms and of education that felt like a Detroit assembly line. Statistics show, in fact, that many veterans wanted anything but job-oriented educations. Olson reports how Time magazine summed up their mindset: "Why go to Podunk College when the Government will send you to Yale?" Veterans on the GI Bill had lived through battles such as Peleliu and Hurtgen Forest or had supported others who had. They needed time to figure out their thoughts about their past and future lives.

What do such anxieties, concerns and dismay felt and expressed now for more than 60 years have in common? In my view, they are all grounded in a belief that for both the individual and the collective good, students in the course of higher education and the professors with whom they learn have to have skholē.

In a fundamental study of the philosophical implications of the term 75 years ago, J.L. Stocks emphasised its distinctive qualities for Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle: "free time, absence of pressing duties and external calls"; time in which to cultivate habits of "autonomous self-directing activity"; and, negatively defined, the opposite of how time is used in periods of war and in law courts, when the necessity to ward off serious threats to life itself and an atmosphere of "time limits and strict rules of relevance" make skholē impossible.

Responding to social changes after the Second World War, the Twentieth Century Fund commissioned a comprehensive study, published in 1962, of how time was used in the contemporary US (Of Time, Work, and Leisure, 1962). Its humanist editor Sebastian de Grazia argued that the concept of leisure had already been so altered in US society by materialism and industrialism and their emphasis on doing, acting and producing that free time in our busy lives, ie, our time off, was mistaken for what the ancient Greeks called skholē or "leisure".

The contrast with the law courts points to a fatal public-relations flaw in education based on skholē that has led to its demise at most US institutions of higher education: its lack of definable relevance and its failure to account pragmatically for the use of time by students and faculty look to critics, now even among the new class of full-time professional university administrators, too much like frivolity and as if our hard-earned something is being used to do or get nothing.

This is a rather common, even hackneyed complaint, but its implications are not commonly observed and have always struck me as mean-spirited and short-sighted, although, given human nature, inevitable. Fundamentally, Americans cannot tolerate the fact that our own children, or worse yet, someone else's, should have public or private support to spend four years learning about themselves and the history and scientific nature of our wide world and its many different cultures without constantly being held accountable for their time and for what they will look like as finished products. The positive gains in how graduates educated with skholē conceive of their future lives and their responsibilities to others in our society are not measurable.

The pity is that most students now come to our campuses already programmed not to question that in order to pay for their tuition and books, they should work many hours per week at part-time jobs that rob them of time to study and think. We are even led to think we are failing as teachers if we do not "get them through" in four years with the assembly-line efficiency that Second World War veterans decried.

The president of UT Austin has formed a large task force to fix this big problem. Only half of the students who graduate from our university do so in four years. But there is one elephant so big it cannot even fit into the room with this task force so as to go unnoticed. One of the main reasons for the high graduation rates in American higher education during the post-war years was that "the financial provisions of the (GI) bills were generous. The WWII bill provided full payment for tuition, books, and supplies at essentially any higher education institution in the country, as well as a substantial living stipend that varied based on the family size of the veteran," as Stanley writes.

This wise public generosity was largely driven by an active veterans' lobby and memories of the Bonus March of 17,000 First World War veterans on Washington DC in 1932. But if we funded public education as we once did for veterans in a way that gave students time to concentrate on attending classes, reading, thinking, studying and writing, rates of graduation would surely go up and the number of years spent at colleges and universities would go down.

High tuition costs and federal student loans pressure students into choosing areas of concentration that they think will provide them with job security and enough income to repay the loans. The students themselves think the sooner they finish the better. They focus on financial concerns rather than on contemplating how their educations will best conduce to their future personal happiness and address the needs of society at large.

On the faculty side, careful work that takes many years literally "doesn't pay" in annual merit reviews. Time-consuming engagement with the history of scholarship is antiquated. As a normally non-acerbic colleague puts it, with a nod to Andy Warhol, "New faculty hires in my department publish a book every 15 minutes on what they themselves were thinking or feeling during the past 15 minutes." Is it any wonder then that students think browsing the first Google hit or Wikipedia entry is doing enough research on a topic?

More than ever, even the brightest students need time to learn how to think. This is not just a matter of socio-economic class and the quality of prior educational opportunity. Information technology and electronic media have robbed us of the sense that thinking about anything long and hard is important.

Required syllabuses are now viewed as formal contracts for information delivery, leaving no room for deviation to address the needs and interests of the students who are actually taking to the courses. I recall taking superb graduate courses that had no syllabuses at all.

Undergraduates now have "research weeks", research assistantships and research prize competitions. These need to be rethought. I say this having co-advised a student who a few years ago won the grand prize of $25,000 (£15,542) for undergraduate research excellence at UT Austin.

Exceptional students might profit from such programmes, but such research achievement mostly comes from gaining a blinkered mastery of a few facets of a problem in a given sub-field of scholarship. Graduate research conferences, as I have already mentioned, are pandemic. But most graduate students would be better off spending time in their first three years of graduate school mastering the substance of being scholars before trying on the form.

American higher education now emphasises ponos and has forgotten about skholē, a mistake that surviving veterans of our greatest generation would tell us will have serious consequences.

The ancient Greeks said, "Time is a healer of necessary evils." It might also be the key concept for getting US higher education back on track.
Postscript :

Tom Palaima is Dickson centennial professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Delete ] [ Ignore ]

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on A betrayal of workers

May 22nd 2012 17:08
Our economies based on making money on money instead of making or growing things are burning out.

Delete ] [ Ignore ]

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on A betrayal of workers

May 22nd 2012 17:08
Our economies based on making money on money instead of making or growing things are burning out.

Delete ] [ Ignore ]

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on A betrayal of workers

May 22nd 2012 17:06
Who will tell our grandchildren and future generations why we let this happen.

We now face another election with all major candidates being globalist free traders.

Many governors are the same while they put on pretense of creating jobs. Many helped in passing the the trade agreements that shipped our jobs out of our country.

Delete ] [ Ignore ]

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on Leap of Reason

March 2nd 2012 18:52

Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on Leap of Reason

February 24th 2012 02:38
Follow Ray Tapajna's The Rationale about the latent response of religion and philosophy to the global economic arena. Subscribe at
The Rationale Quest

Delete ] [ Ignore ]
It would be great if someone like Ron Paul and Marcy Kaptur could be Presidential and Vice President candidates running together on a coalition platform. They both have the same goals as far as restoring the American Dream and workers dignity .

Delete ] [ Ignore ]