Stuff from TED

A talk about finding meaning and purpose in life by Viktor Frankl.

Dan Meyer on giving math class a makeover. His blog can be found here.

Esther Duflo (who's that?) on social experiments to fight poverty.

Depressing, but timely: Jeremy Jackson on how we wrecked the ocean.

Bjarke Ingels on architecture.

TED is a worthwhile site. Give it a try!

Blog Review: My Public Education

If you're an educator of elementary school students, I recommend you ignore the rest of this blog until you click here and read the contents of My Public Education. It's just...wow.

Okay, if you took the time to read the site, you'll understand what transfixed me. I have so many thoughts and questions. I hope Sabine won't mind if I post them here. First, I must compliment the writing style, which is elegant, clear, and self-effacing. Sabine does not stint in her criticisms of herself or others around her, but she does so in such matter-of-fact prose that the reader just has to sit back and say, "Okay, I guess that's just how it is."

But at the same time, being a spoiled, suburban middle-aged white guy, places like the Calliope Projects anger and disturb me. We don't like to admit or think about the fact that such places exist in America, but they do. These are American kids and adults struggling with an environment of poverty, crime, and violence. They're not "somebody else's problem." I've got customers, neighbors, and peers who are worried about trying to get kids to study STEM subjects when we have teachers and students elsewhere struggling for basic literacy. And so the question becomes, "How does an educator, however, dedicated, teach in such an environment?" Sabine has provided some tantalizing glimpses into her style, as well as others', and I expect she'll share more.

The video hosted by Ice-T (a personal favorite of mine for his acting, not his rapping) was particularly compelling because two of the people shown in it were killed by the time it aired. So again one must wonder what it's like to be a student or a teacher in the midst of this:

While I did have firm rules and consequences which I enforced, to be quite honest, my students weren't phased by them at all. They had lived through much harsher situations out in the world like witnessing drug deals and shootings, so by giving them my textbook punishment, I was really instead rewarding them with the one-on-one attention which they craved.

Where does education factor into all that? Self-discipline? Love? Or, in my self-interested world, space exploration? A lot of folks in white America like to comfort ourselves with movies like Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver--tales of heroic teachers turning minority kids in tough neighborhoods into mathematicians or Harvard-level orators--but the reality is more like what Sabine experienced: teachers of varying skill sets making do with substandard equipment, textbooks, and sometimes educations. Never mind space exploration...or STEM...what the hell do you do to fix school systems where a lot of the graduates end up dead from street violence in a few years? Would bringing space-related materials to these places help? They couldn't hurt. Calliope is more or less within the area Marshall Space Flight Center serves for education purposes...or Johnson Space Center. Is it being served? Are we so rich a society that we can afford luxuries like space exploration and "at risk" schools and students? For how long?

Again: how do we fix this? I want a society that can produce rocket scientists wherever, whenever. But also doctors, teachers, and the other skills. One thing I'd like to hear from Sabine are student outcomes--good and bad. She's no doubt been scrupulous about changing names to protect the innocent and the guilty, and I'd like to know the results of her teaching time in "CP3." At the rate some of our suburban schools are declining, the lessons she learned there might (alas) become very relevant to the rest of the country.

Eliminating Poverty Through Tax Incentives--A Thought Experiment



I was asked by a fellow space advocate about solutions to eliminate poverty in the world. He sees this as a primary means for reducing the threat of terrorism. I have no argument with the goal; however, I happen to believe that if we waved a magic wand and made all the poor in the world economically equal to a middle-class American today, people would still find reasons to fight. Be that as it may, I thought I'd offer my solution below.


Compassion for the poor, in my mind, is to give the poor some temporary relief until they can get themselves on their feet, support themselves, and get off the dole. However, America's "temporary" expedients of the mid 1960s are still in place, poverty still exists, and [the programs] show no signs of going away any time short of an asteroid strike.


Here's the capitalist solution to this (take it as you will): Reduce taxes AND the government dole. Provide tax incentives and penalties for companies that provide (or do not provide) programs that provide social relief, job training, and housing assistance. In short, provide more incentives for private, not government action. In the U.S. such measures will, in fact, become necessary for the following reasons:

• The current budget cannot be sustained forever.
• We are about to face a serious wave of retirements due to the aging of the Baby Boom generation; there will not be the bureaucratic staff on hand to administer our ever-growing programs.
• Businesses in the U.S. are going to need every productive citizen they can get in the coming 20 years. The favorite statistic bandied about these days is that China now has more honor students than we have students; and as much as some American parents would like to think otherwise, not all of our little darlings are going to become honor students.
• If businesses are paying for relief and retraining, you can damn well believe that they will have a strong financial incentive to produce results because that sort of training is expensive. And the results are easily measured: when the individuals on relief are able to support themselves, the aid is cut off. Businesses can turn off the spigot a lot more readily than governments.
• A major new social program would be incredibly unpopular and hard to sell, especially to the younger generations. While the Baby Boomers and their parents might have responded to calls for social justice and the like, Generation X and Gen Y are more likely to respond to financial incentives or penalties--ye olde carrot and stick.

I'm sure you rolled your eyes at least once and probably think I'm being a naive Yank for thinking that capitalism can do that much good. However, I'm telling you that yes, it can.


For instance, I worked for the Walt Disney World Resort for 12 years, and they had SEVERAL high-quality job training programs, including most especially English language training for our mostly-immigrant housekeeping staff. And while there might have been a PR motive, there was also a self-interested motive as well: Disney a) needs the labor and b) wants to maintain its reputation as a provider of quality services. And they can't do that without paying for the training. So yes, it can be done.


Secondly, environmentally safe products have caught on through a combination of government and market pressures. People feel better buying from companies that they know are doing some good--much better than when government comes in promising to do good. The standard joke line here is: "We're from the government and we're here to help you." This might not be as lofty or poetic as calls for social justice or compassion, but if it produces results, who the hell cares?