Day 3 - Elva Card
I was very impressed by Stanford Thompson, the young man who is bringing music to the students at one of the paroachial schools in Phildelphia. How wonderful it would be if we could enrich the lives of those young people so that they could grow up to be gainful and happy citizens! Unfortunaely the economic incentive is tilted toward building and staffing prisons rather than preventing young people from filling them. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I saw that quote of Benjamin Franklin written in stone someplace around this campus. But right now the cure creates jobs. How can we convince society to invest in prevention?
Janet and I went down to Independence Hall this afternoon. I had never been there. It's so impressive to think of those men in funny clothers and powdered hair coming up with a document that created this wonderful country of ours. Surely we of the internet go, who dress so much better!, can come up more intelligent ways to manage our priorities!
I think you pose a powerful and important question. But what I'm thinking is that as educators, if we do our parts in educating our young people the right ways now, then we will prepare a generation that will be able to invest in prevention. They will be part of the generation who will become the new/rising 'society'. They will be the adults with the powerful positions/jobs, creating the different rules/regulations. We can either educate them to be a solution to the problem or to be part of the problem. We as teachers have more power to influence what happens in 'society' than we think. I think it's time for us to stand up and make that change. The change starts with each of us individually.
ReplyDelete