Well, my posts have usually been about philosophy, politics, or simply human emotion and experiences... and I haven’t even posted that much.  Today, here is something different.  Yesterday was fun, so I decided to share it with you.  Brian, Zach, Jazzi, and I couldn’t decide what we could do, someone suggested, “Let’s go to San Francisco!,” and well, yesterday at 6:00 we left for the Amtrak station.  I have driven to S.F. in the past, and Amtrak’s “Capitol Corridor” was so relaxing.  I didn’t have to deal with parking, traffic, or those dreaded one-way streets or those disturbingly steep hills.  I also don’t think I have ridden so much public transportation in one day.  Once we reached Richmond, we rode BART into the city.  Throughout the day we ended up walking all the way from the bottom of the Embarcadero halfway to Golden Gate Park, we strolled through China Town, nearly got lost around Powell Street, and by accident found the Cable Car Museum and the Goethe Institute.  We then ended up at the airport, yes, the airport.  We figured, what do groups of friends our age do in San Francisco... they go to SFO!  WE took BART to the airport and ended up walking through all the international terminals, the parking garages, and we rode the Air Train more than I think anyone else has in a single day.  Good to know that if I ever go to SFO I know my way around.  ON the ride back on Amtrak we tried playing cards, but couldn’t do much due to the fact we were all so tired from a day of walking.  Overall, the trip was random, but enjoyable. 

I know I haven’t exactly updated in a while; however, I plan on to become more active, not only due to my desire to express myself, but by request from many of my friends.  Well, I graduated from high school.  Graduation day should have been a day of joy and happiness.  My reflection upon my high school career only brought feelings of regret, distress, and stress.  I look at myself and think that I am nearly 20 years old, and I feel that I have wasted so much, but I do admit that it is only the beginning.  I feel sad that there were some people that I never had a chance to tell them how much I respected them, how much I learned from them, or how much they meant to me during my high school years, and now I realize I most likely won’t see them again.  Combined with my usual feelings of frustration fully knowing that had I put some effort forward I could have easily done better in high school, I could have better prepared myself for the future, for my time of tomorrow.  I don’t think words could easily explain the spectrum of emotions I feel right now.  I think I will leave it here, I still feel tired from Sober Grad., and I need to drop by work and fill out my schedule.  Anyways, I end with a promise to continue updating. 

While reading Doctor Zhivago I have come across a few notable lines.

“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”

-In one sentence Pasternak has answered one of the most discussed questions in metaphysics.  Do I think he is correct?  As a skeptic, I acknowledge that philosophy is a science where thought can not be linked to fact.  I do; however, see much truth and validity to his statement.  Man, capable of rational and logical thought, is also capable of introspection.  Through one’s introspection arises ideas and foresight.  Man does not work to obtain glory and popularity, for they will die long before the man is dead.  Man works to leave a lasting impression, in a valiant attempt at immortality man works to achieve success in his life.  Man is not merely a tool of existence, man uses existence as his tool to achieve his goals.  This brings me to the next quote.

“Man is born to life, not to prepare for life.”

-Whilst I agree somewhat to the above statement, I tend to believe more in the combination of vision and action.  He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life; however, where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.  Vision without action is merely a dream.  Actions without vision just pass the time.  Vision with action can change the world.     

“Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.”

-This final quote deals with a subject that I know I have addressed in recent posts… the nature of man.  I want to know others opinions.  I have stated numerous times my disagreement with the cliché of good vs. evil and that man in many ways is neutral at least when it comes to inherent nature.  The preceding quote states that the environment humanity shares is merely a façade to the true nature of man, and that once this wall is erected it can only be removed by the factors that caused its creation.  This wall, once removed releases the reality of life, that man has always been a cold distant figure in life and always will be.  

Currently Reading Doctor Zhivago By BORIS PASTERNAK see related

Well, I wrote this a few weeks ago for my English class.  We were asked to address the failings of our school system.  Some of my friends said I should post it here.
   
    The increasing requirements for professional and technical personnel and the shortages that exist in many fields represent in part a discrepancy between the potential of adolescents and their realization of educational opportunities.  The issue of underachievement is not limited to one social group but, at different levels, operates among youth of all economic classes.  It represents a persistent deficiency in our national life and constitutes an important difference with respect to the community’s requirements.  Furthermore, we are confronted with a situation in which the popular culture demands some college or university education, and virtually stigmatizes the person who has not at least enrolled in some type of institution of high learning.  Due to the inability of a community to maximize the learning experience during adolescence, many of the programs undertaken by students in college consist of efforts to provide skills and technical training that they should and could have obtained earlier in their educational careers.  The consequences of inadequate high school achievement represent an important force that limits the upgrading of university education.  The causes of this predicament are not rooted in a single location nor do they stem from a single location.  The grounds for why this problem exists and continues to exist is based upon the judgments prevailing in differing American communities of which have common principles, the suppression of the American school system, and the distractions of popular culture.

The great ambition professed by the school system is, of course, education for citizenship and self-government, which links to Jefferson’s historic call for “general education to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger freedom.”  What the public schools practice with remorseless proficiency, however, is the prevention of citizenship and the stifling of self-government.  When 68 percent of the thirteen-year-olds tested by the National Assessment for Educational Progress think it is against the law to start a third party in America, we are dealing with a sad educational failure. America’s future citizens are trained not to judge for themselves about anything.  From the first grade to the twelfth instruction in America’s classrooms is almost entirely dogmatic.  Answers are “right” and answers are “wrong,” but mostly answers are short.  At all levels, tests call exclusively for short answers and recall of information.  Rarely does instruction go beyond a mere possession of information to a level of understanding its implications.  The intellectual terrain is laid out by the teacher, and in most situations the paths for walking through it are predetermined by the teachers.  The characteristics of genuine discussion are absent, and thus the prevailing attitude of student passivity stands out.  Without proper motivation those perfectly capable of progress do not work at levels fitting their abilities, and those who require help do not receive it.

The American high school student is all too often docile, compliant, and without initiative.  There is good reason for this.  There are too few awards for being inquisitive.  In addition, the heavy emphasis on the right answer smothers the student’s efforts to become an effective intuitive thinker.  Yet smothers minds are looked on with the utmost complacency by the educational establishment.  Teachers are neither urged to combat the tyranny of the short right answer nor trained to do so.  Most teachers simply do not know how to teach for higher levels of thinking, or they are discouraged from trying to do so.

Consider the current cry for greater use of standardized student tests to judge the merit of teachers and raise academic standards. If this so-called “reform” is foisted on the schools, dogma and docility will become even more prevalent.  Where important decisions are based on test scores teachers are more likely to teach to the tests and less likely to bother with non-tested activities such as writing, speaking, problem-solving, or real reading of real books.  The most influential promoter of standardized tests is the “excellence” brigade in the Department of Education.  Apparently, the one important meaning of “educational excellence” is greater proficiency in smothering student’s efforts to think for themselves.

Perhaps the greatest single discouragement to better instruction is the overcrowded classroom.  It is not possible for teachers to teach their students how to write when they must read and criticize the papers of as many 175 students.  Genuine discussion is possible only in small seminars.  In crowded classrooms, teachers have difficulty imparting even the most basic intellectual skills, since they have no time to give students personal attention.  The overcrowded classroom inevitably debases instruction, yet it is the rule in America’s schools. 

The truth is that the nation’s educators simply do not want to teach students how to think critically and how to judge for themselves.  The educational establishment is not even content to produce passive minds.  It seeks passive spirits as well.  One effective agency for producing these is the overly populous schools.  The larger schools are, the more prison-like they tend to be.  In such schools, guards wearing “Security” jackets are stationed at stairwells and exits.  Identification cards and passes are examined at checkpoints.  Bells set off spasms of anarchy and bells quell the student mob.  Public announcement systems interrupt regularly with trivial fiats and frivolous announcements.  The PA system is actually an educational tool.  It teaches the huge student mass to respect the authority of disembodied voices and the rule of remote and invisible agencies.  A myriad of students attend schools with high enrollments.  The common excuse for these mobbed schools is economy, but in fact they cannot be shown to save taxpayers a penny.  Large schools tend to create passive and compliant students.  Larger schools provide larger student pools and thus create a greater chance of having more competitive sport teams. It is indisputable that the interscholastic sports function to give the school and the community a collective identity.  Few principles would seriously consider ridding their schools with these games.  Yet, it is also indisputable that athletic contests create serious problems for schools.  Perhaps the most serious problem is the change they engender in the institution itself.  Their very importance to the life of the school transformation forms the school from an institution devoted to learning into an institution focused, at least partly, on athletics. These are their chief reasons for being.

The depressing fact of the matter is that current educational policies were not designed to prepare student to participate in society as active and questioning citizens.  The hidden curriculum of passivity achieves the greatest amount of harmony and satisfies parties involved.  Schools introduce future adults to the public worlds, but no introduction could be more disheartening. 

Schools stamp out freethinking sentiment by habituating their students to unfairness, inequality, and special privilege.  These arise inevitable from the educational establishment’s longstanding policy of maintaining the correlation between social class and educational achievement.  In order to preserve the factitious correlation, public schooling is rigged to favor middle-class suburban students and to ensure that working-class students do poorly enough to convince them that they fully merit the lowly station that will one day be theirs.  With out national standards of funding or education, the disparity is surely to continue.

    Reading is the key to everything else in school.  Children who struggle with it in the first grade will be grouped with the slow readers in the second grade and will fall hopelessly behind in all subjects by the sixth.  The schools hasten this process of falling behind by giving the best students the best teachers and struggling students the worst ones.  It is ironic that those who need the most help get the least.  Such students are commonly diagnosed as “culturally deprived” and so are blamed for the failures inflicted on them.  Thus, they are taught to despise themselves even as they are inured to their inferior station.

The whole system of unfairness, inequality and privilege comes to fruition in high school.  There youngsters are divided into the favored few and the ill-favored many by the practice of tracking.  Some students are subdivided into gifted and non-gifted tracks.  Thus students are exposed to academic programs while others are relegated to some variety of non-academic schooling.  It is merely the final hoax that the school bureaucracy plays on the neediest, one that the federal government, state governments, parent and teacher organizations, and the general public has been promoting for nearly a century.

The tracking system makes privilege and inequality blatantly visible to everyone.  It creates under one roof two worlds of schooling.  Students in academic programs read British plays, analyze American classics, and examine Greek epics.  Most are allowed virtually no contact with serious literature, or when encountering such are not expected to obtain anything beyond a mere understanding of plot.  In their English classes they practice filling out job applications, preparing for interviews, and listen to paid college speakers.  “Gifted” students alone are encouraged to think for themselves.  The rest are subjected to sanctimonious wind, chiefly about work habits and career opportunities.

This wretched arrangement expresses the true spirit of education in America and discloses the real aim of its hidden curriculum.  A favored few, pampered and smiled upon, are taught to cherish privilege and despise the disfavored.  The ill-favored many, having majored in failure for years, are taught to think ill of themselves.  Youthful spirits are broken to the world and every impulse of citizenship is effectively stifled.  There is in the gap between our highly idealistic goals for schooling in our society and the differentiated opportunities condoned and supported in schools in a monstrous hypocrisy.

The American school system also includes the failure of the teacheing profession to attract top quality personnel because of the relatively low salary in relation to the years of required training, the low social status of the profession within American communities, and the lack of signifigant opportunities for advancement, increased income, and gratification in comparison with other professions.  In addition, the education of teachers is relegated to separate schools.  There are exceptions, but in general, the majority of high school teachers are trained not by scholars and researchers, but by educational technicians who abridge the information.  The chemistry teacher does not learn how to be chemist but how to be a teacher who know something about chemistry, and courses in Freudian psychology and the development of lesson plans are given parallel status with one that focus on substantive knowledge in the field of chemistry.

    The school system is the student’s first place from which to view the world in order to better manage and judge his own life.  If this institution fails, the student then moves on to the life at home.  In low-income areas there exists no motivation for work and in high-income areas the prevailing value of simple class warranting their success fails to succeed either.  If the home fails to motivate students then they must turn to popular culture.  And if popular culture fails the student must motivate himself under his own terms.  If the school system could be repaired the need to repair the other destructive factors in American society would be easily fixed alongside.  I as a citizen of the United States will continue to push for reallocation of control at the local level with Federal revenue sharing and Federal education mandates.  I also will continue to push for free university education for any who wish to attend. Only when the needs of the society are considered and the danger to freedom is feared will America finally be able to think for themselves and thus learn effectively.  With the guarantee of education to all, through working means, it is not possible to fail.

Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.  I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon known as death, this side where we live, and the other side where we shall continue to live. Eternity does not start with death. We are in eternity now.  We are infinite.  

 Am I to be happy?
I dwell so deep within myself
that I have never seen the light of day.

The past never happened,
the future will never come,
and the present isn't real.

Depression is a part of everyday life.
The birds chirp for someone else,
The day warms the lives of everyone,
but me.

Happiness lies near,
but my mind won't let my heart reach for it,
and happiness never knew.

I live in a prison,
solitary confinement.
Fear is my guard.

I live in a realm,
Everyday I walk,
Through what others would consider hell

Nothing stops happiness from reaching me,
only me from it.
I am sure that if I can ever grasp it
that the barrier will be forever shattered.

How do you break through invisible bars?
What is it like to touch something you've never had?

I am confined to myself,
One day I shall be reborn, for today I do not live.