November 18, 2005
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Topic: Green Money Journal
This magazine Green Money Journal arrived at my office today. A magazine largely dedicated to socially responsible investing. While I’m still just figuring out the basics of investing, I was excited to see that this issue was entirely dedicated to education.
EDUCATION: THE REAL SOCIAL INVESTMENT
If you click on the link above, you’ll have access to all twelve articles. My hopes in my continued learning and sharing about progressive education is to hopefully help others to make good decisions about their children’s education, or their children’s children’s education, or your own education.
For a while, I was passionate about a massive change in maintstream education. However, the definition of passoin reveals the flaw that I suffered, “emotion distinguished from reason.” I wasn’t very reasonable. That was my flaw.
My passion (also defined as love) for education, however, remains. Only now I am attempting to couple that passion with reason. I am tempering emotions, and adding research and drawing on the big picture to do this.
Part of this rationality involves accepting that change does not happen overnight. This is not mere cycnicism, rather it is due to the fact that change requires people to change, and that, as we all have likely come across, is true. From my grandparents generation, where the man handled all the finances and the wife was solely responsible for maintaining the home and raising a child, we have come quite a ways. From pure fear and racism towards blacks, towards communists, towards foreigners, we have moved to a time where we at least have organizations and countless speakers addressing the complexity of these things. The amount of change that occurred in the 20th century alone in terms of the mindset of the human race was enormous, and yet, we are still generations away from eliminating the numerous social ills that plague our society.
However…trying to improve society, or at least thinking about these important issues, can have a very practical affect on all of us today. We can at least strive to improve our own lives, and those of our friends, family, and communities. That is why I am still passionate about progressive education, not because I believe we will reach a tipping point in the maintstream within my lifetime, but because I believe it will result in an enriched life for myself and those whose lives bump into my own.
I need some time to digest my thoughts…stay tuned.
Comments (3)
Hi - I’m relatively new to this site, please forgive the screen name. I thought since you’re interested in education you might find value in Plato’s Republic. Also, Tolstoy’s hero asks a lot of the questions you ask in Anna Karenina.
Interestingly, I just went to ETS (Educational Testing Service) last Friday. In case you never heard of it, one of its products is SAT. A lot of information. Like you, I need some time to digest. However, one thing that struck me is that how standardized testing has become such an indispensible part of our lives. You meet it everywhere, school, work, hospital…
yeah…will definately look into reading some Plato and Tolstoy.
re: standardized testing, it’s everywhere in part because it’s been legislated that it be everywhere by out federal govt policy of No Child Left Behind. It’s the only way many people know to hold people accountable for how tax money is spent on education, but there are developments in portfolios that i’ll write more about in the future, which allow schools to measure student’s learning in other ways.