[Terry's Tale] As the Twig is Bent

On Tuesday of this week, Han, Hye-rhim’s school held a brief open house which I attended.  And as I watched the class in session it took me back, back to my own time in school when I was of that age.  Like the school I attended then, the air conditioning was supplied by means of opened windows and the efforts of a fan to push the incoming air around.  In witnessing the teacher proceed with her pedagogy on use of language (albeit Korean) I reflected on how, at one time education was seen to be of significant importance in the US.  Just after the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik in 1959 the US invested enormously into its educational system because people feared that the US had fallen behind the Soviets in this vital area. 

Education was expected to be a vital key to the future.  But unfortunately the US was still, to a large degree, in the grip of those forces that brought McCarthyism, the KKK, and the John Birch Society into being.  As the colleges and universities were graduating young people who not only were well developed in their critical thinking skills, but also imbued with altruism and endowed with empathy, these young people began attempting to address the ills they saw in society.  Their intended goal was to create a better society, but they quickly began running afoul of these conservative forces, especially in the area of civil rights and later, Vietnam.

 The push back that these young, well educated people got as they began their efforts only inspired them to try harder.  In this they were following the lead of many black people who were so very disappointed in the incredibly slow pace of civil rights achievement in the US despite the significant roles they had played in the two huge wars of the first half of the century.  These people had not given up, even at the cost of their lives.  Instead, they pressed on, more determined than ever.  And then, the young, white people began joining their efforts, creating a momentum that helped lead to new civil rights and voting laws before the middle of the decade of the sixties.  For the conservatives, this became a huge burr ‘under their saddle’ (western movies and television programs were very popular at that time).

That the new legislation did not quite achieve the goals that many black people had hoped for resulted in major riots in many major cities around the US.  For over three years the US worked to quell riots around the country as the nation was ‘sitting on a powder keg’.  In the end, the achievement of the new legislation and the institution of President Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty programs helped in many ways, but they did not end societal racism, especially among the conservative elements.  These elements simply considered the efforts to address poverty and racism to be a waste of money, and they wanted none of it.

When activism began to spring up against the war in Vietnam, especially when it was manifest in college and university graduates who then entered the military, fought in Vietnam, became disillusioned because it never had been a war about ideology, but instead, profits – as Daniel Ellsburg’s, Pentagon Papers revealed in the early 1970’s, and then participated in bitter protests against the war, this seemed to conservatives to be like having a stick pushed down their throat. 

Now they truly began to fight back.  One of the first victims of this was the President of the University of California, Clark Kerr, who was fired by Ronald Reagan when he became Governor of California.  As an aside, Reagan then went on to work closely with the FBI to conduct illegal surveillance on many students and faculty in that state during his term in office.  The conservatives did not want the societal changes they saw coming and would pick and choose their fights.  The assassin of Martin Luther King would vow to his dying breath that he had been acting in consort with others, and I doubt that the real story behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy will ever be told.

Yet, in 1968, when news reporter Walter Cronkite, considered at that time “the most trusted man in America”, went on national television to tell the American public that the official version of Vietnam War story was false and misleading, that became the conservatives breaking point.  They began to devise plans to counter these societal moves they did not like.

The first thing they did was to strike out to attack and disparage media outlets as being ‘liberal media’ and they attacked them (with what would become their standard pattern due to its continued success) lies, distortions, misleading information, and so on.  The success of these attacks was demonstrated by changes in the way journalism was, and is conducted.

Since the conservatives were so disparaging of university scientists, and university academics they did not want them to be used as means of adding veracity to news reporters stories.  To this end they set up ‘think tanks’, institutes whose personnel were beholden to the bottom line as decided by those who ran these places.  I believe the first was the ‘Cato Institute’.  In this way they were able to create a powerful propaganda machine that manipulated the ant-intellectual, anti-science, and ant-‘anything that does not fit our way of thinking’ bias that is ingrained in American culture that became the paradigm for similar conservative businesses today.  Balanced, accurate information from US journalists was now to become a thing of the past.  As I write this the top news media for accuracy do not include any of the best known US news organizations such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN.  Sadly enough, the conservatives were so successful that recent polls demonstrate the best informed members of the public are regular viewers of Comedy Central’s - The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (which is soon to cease).  Here the conservatives succeeded beyond their wildest imagination and created a public that is both misinformed and dis-informed.  The founding fathers knew that such a situation would not make for a stable state and tried to warn against it, but the citizenry was too busy looking elsewhere.

The next thing they did was to begin working politically to change the system.  Money, liberally applied to politicians on both sides of the aisle, not only helped to change the tax laws to cut the tax rates for the wealthiest, but in an effort to break and destroy unions, also allowed businesses to be more profitable if they moved offshore.  Again, conservatives succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  In fact, they were so successful that the wealthiest people in the country pay a smaller percentage of tax on their incomes than the average working man who may earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.  Consider that when the income tax was first instituted, it was geared towards the people acquiring levels of income that put them into the upper brackets.  Now, if your income is just below the level of poverty for someone in your classification, you pay an income tax.  Worse still, a great many of these very wealthy people hide income (as does Mitt Romney, though this was something I do not think his father taught him, instead he declared that this was something that his financial administrator handled for him) so what little they may pay in the way of taxes is an even more diminished amount relative to their incomes.

The next thing the conservatives did was to attack the public schooling system.  These attacks became increasingly louder and bolder beginning with the Reagan presidential administration.  The purpose was twofold.  First, the teachers were teaching children good information and critical thinking.  People graduating from colleges and universities in the 1960’s gave the conservatives headaches because to argue for their positions on ideas they would put forward the conservatives had to argue real positions with real information supported by provable fact-based content.  To win such debates the conservative ideas had to demonstrate positive merit which they often did not. 

At any rate, the result of the continuous attacks over the years the level of respect for teachers have in their communities now is nothing as compared to the levels of the early 1960’s.  Worse still, conservatives have been politically able to steer more and more funding away from the public schools towards charter schools.  Polls have consistently indicated that the majority of charter schools educate their students less well than even today’s public schools.  And, this is despite the fact that charter schools do not have the mandates that the public schools have requiring them to educate all children.  Therefore, charter schools get to pick and choose their students, yet they generally still perform poorly.  Perhaps it is because they, as a general rule, do not pay their teachers well.  Perhaps, there are other reasons, though money should certainly not be one of them considering the per pupil cost of the average charter school. 

And this problem is not unique to the US.  The conservative Canadian government of Stephen Harper has been successfully working to defund literacy programs in that country.  The worst case situation, by far, is what occurred in Chile when a US backed coup ousted the legally elected government of Salvador Allende and replaced it with the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet on 9/11/1973.  This US sponsored government not only murdered many thousands of innocent people – men, women, even children – but it set about the task of conservative reform of the country.  As part of that reform the educational system was privatized along the same lines that conservatives in this country are currently pushing for.  The result was an abominable educational program that not only was incapable of educating its citizenry, but, being a private as opposed to a public system, left its graduates mired in incredible loads of debt.  If conservatives succeed in establishing such a system in the US, then we only need look to the outcome in Chile to understand the grim future outlook.

Interestingly enough, comedian George Carlin saw this situation coming long ago.  His comments which can be found on YouTube are pithy and are even more appropriate now than when he made them.

The School. 

The proud parents Han, Wan-hui, his wife, Yoon, Mi-yeon, and their youngest daughter Han, Cho-ah arriving at the school of the oldest daughter, Han, Hye-rhim. 

Han, Hye-rhim in the pink shirt sporting the white collar. 

Korean language lessons. 

Every aspect of the class from the time required per lesson to the desk arrangements is meticulously planned.  (Note the semicircular floor cut at the desk's foot to indicate the desk's particular floor placement.) 

The entranceway garden. 

As in many Asian countries, shoes are not worn inside.  Instead, the shoes are left in the entranceway and slippers or socks are the required footwear. 

Below: The outside physical facilities.

Above: The cafeteria.

So, now I have come full circle.  Korea respects teachers because they know that teachers will have a major impact on the future of the country.  Unfortunately, an educated populace is not what the people of money want in the US, and this is now beginning to manifest itself in the many measures used to compare the livability values of countries around the world.  For example, the livability index for the US is around 71, the internet capability ranking just dropped to 31 (just below Estonia!), the US ranks just above the Czech Republic in public health and medical care.  In many ways the US has become another third world country.  The citizenry in general has failed to properly educate itself as to what is going on and thus can only blame itself.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance! as our founding fathers told us.

Sadly, this country is a far cry from that in which I grew up.