Schools under Attack

Found this story on Twitter: an opinion piece from Aj-Jazeera about the attack on American schools by private corporations: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

This is the looting of the American school system, and the local treasuries of states and municipalities. Already well under way in Philadelphia, as this article describes, it’s coming soon to a state or town near you. It’s one of the side effects of rampant capitalism that any wealth center that exists, public or private, must sooner or later come into someone’s eye as a source of potential profit. The only difficulty is, though, that education is inherently unprofitable: it involves wasted paper, wasted pens, wasted markers, wasted books, wasted building materials, wasted computers, wasted time, wasted equipment…

Some of my readers may object that education isn’t inherently wasteful — that it’s about turning kids into productive members of society and engaged citizens and… Blah, blah, blah.

From a capitalist perspective, though, none of that matters:

There’s a computer lab at my school that sits empty a lot of the time. Those computers are being wasted — they’re on, and they’re depreciating in value right this very minute, and we’re not getting any use out of them! Think about all the books in that library down the hall: how many of them will not be taken out of the library this year? And what about that librarian who has to manage and care for all those books, and who sits idle whenever there isn’t a class in that library? And she wants the heat on? Outrageous! What about that kid who needs extra support and tutoring? Get rid of him quick — it’s wasteful to give him one-on-one support. What about art, and music? Inherently unproductive and wasteful. That art room requires expensive supplies and tools and materials. That music teacher needs expensive equipment that none of the kids will learn how to use properly or completely in the three, four or five years that they’re in this school — so parents should pay for that kind of service, and pay for the equipment, so that it becomes an externalized expense, not one intrinsic to our business model…

Outrageous.

There is no model of education at all anywhere, ever, which will allow profits to be sucked out of a school system and permit the education of the next generation. Whether it be my recent learning experiments with spagyrics or my painting work, or my students’ papers, none of these activities are wealth-producing in a way that allows a capitalist to extract wealth. Not without impoverishing the kids, or the parents, or the teachers.

More likely, all three.

Lo and behold, the “job creators” are not job creators at all, nor white knights: they are horse thieves and villains, black knights of the worst kind.

Taiji Day 85: body changes

Today I got up early and did taiji: five golden coins, eight pieces of silk, and the form. I’m interested in learning a fourth form — I was reminded of the diagram this morning, and the fact that it’s in my commonplace book.

Afterwards, while I was in the bathroom, I stepped on the scale. I hate the scale, because it tells me one thing — my weight. But it doesn’t tell me a host of other things, like my muscular density or my endurance level or my … Anyway, you get the idea.

All spring, I’ve been watching my weight inch up. No matter how I ate or what I ate, or even if I ate nothing at all, I seemed to gain weight. Two eighty, two eighty three, two eighty five, two ninety, tow ninety five, two ninety seven. Ok yes, it was bad on days when there were cupcakes from an appreciative family in the teachers’ lounge. But my weight stayed up even when I ate salads four days in a row.

And yet. There’s been a rapid decline in my weight this week. Three hundred became two ninety-seven, then two ninety-five, then two ninety-two, then two eighty-seven, then two eighty-two this morning. I haven’t eaten substantially different this week. In fact, I’ve had several meals out that should have qualified as bloating and fattening…

And yet. It can’t be denied that I fill out my shirts and pants differently now than I did last fall, or even three months ago. If I had the body of a god, it is only Hotei, the balding god of prosperity from China (or maybe just Chinese restaurants). And I’m not saying I’m about to become Matreya or Marduk or Mars, one of the muscular war-deities made of muscle and fire.

But there are muscles here. I walk differently now, too. And I move differently, and I sit differently. There are still changes to be made, of course — diet, more walking or biking, more hiking, more time in nature, more internal energy work. But something shifted this week in my body, and the muscles I’ve taiji’ed into existence started burning calories in a new way.

This is the way slow burn exercise programs work: first you learn the forms, then the body becomes used to the exercise, then the exercise starts working deep in the cells. And you gradually become someone new.

Maybe. I’ll tell you if I’m ever done changing.