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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.
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.
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
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 ]
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Comment by Tapsearch Com Editor
on Two Top Thomas Palaima Articles
Ethics Box
Stories behind News in Global Economic Arena
The Rationale Quest
The World's News
Tapsearch explores untold stories
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.