Social problems that I believe need to be addressed and changed?

I could probably write a dissertation on that topic. However, I’ll focus on one aspect or “attribute” of our “variable” society that deserves immediate attention.

Public education, or lack there of, is a major social dilemma that is constantly swept under the rug, so to speak, when it comes to reform. It’s as if the Baby Boomers were too busy working to realize that their kids were getting the short end of the stick…

Hold on, let me explain.

A professional athlete (Steve Francis of the Houston Rockets) can sign a contract for 85 million dollars over 6 years (Riper, Forbes.com). As a society we’re willing to invest billions in an ultimately meaningless game. Heaven forbid the masses aren’t entertained! And entertained by what!? By men in tights, whacking a ball around with a wooden stick? People making millions because they can put a ball through a metal ring? To think all this time I thought that was just a carnival game.

Still I see people, stuffing their faces, eagerly waiting for their favorite player to have a steroid induced psychotic episode. Yeah… those are the guys that need to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

Public school teachers, meanwhile, who are in loco parentis to the nations’ children, and also responsible for shaping their young minds; they are lucky to get 40 grand a year. This lack of funding for public education has lead to a shortage of teachers in this country (go figure). So, instead of giving teachers more money, and offering incentive to the people who really want to teach; our nation thought it would be smarter to just lower the standards and requirements associated with becoming a teacher.

Earl Babbie writes, “Bigotry here is spoken of as a variable because it varies. Some people are more bigoted than others” (Babbie, 16).

I’m speaking of education as a variable, because it does seem to vary. Some people are less educated than others… Unfortunately, the majority of those less educated people seem to be in the positions of power that could actually implement educational reform.

So where have we ended up with education? Well, now there are teachers who are just at the school to get a pay check; coasting along, more anxious for Friday to arrive than the students. The saddest part of it all, is that those kids don’t even know that they are being cheated out of an opportunity. An opportunity to grow, learn, and achieve. Teachers used to be role models. Now that we as a society endorse sub-par applicants we’ve left kids nothing but tabloids to idolize.

Wait!

Suddenly… the parents are unhappy! I wonder why?

When their child was in grade school they didn’t really notice anything was amiss. Now, their kid has made it into middle school, and adolescents isn’t exactly a peaceful transition. So now these kids who have been choking down SOL’s and government cheese their whole lives are bored out of their minds. That can be irritating for working parents.

But it can’t be there kid’s fault, and it’s definitely not the establishment’s fault! So the folks pump the kids full of prescription amphetamines because that gosh darn ADD is contagious.

Then Mom and Dad go to see the Principal to give him a piece of their mind. All the while, these administrators are just trying to figure out who they can scapegoat, to appease the angry parents so they can get back to playing solitaire on the computer.

Don’t take my word for it; Public Agenda, a nonpartisan opinion research and civic engagement organization posted an article in their press room on July of 2003 regarding the sentiment of public school teachers in New York.

“Feeling they have become "scapegoats for all the problems facing education" (76%) and sensing little support from administrators or parents, America’s teachers see unions and tenure as necessary protectors against school system politics and unfounded accusations by parents and students. Even so, 78% say their school has at least a few teachers who are "simply going through the motions," and just 14% say it is easy to remove incompetent teachers”

We’re pumping baby sitters into the school systems and crucifying the real teachers for allowing high school students to read Graham Greene’s The Destructors. All that a side, my favorite part about the whole situation is that the same people facilitating the public school teacher witch hunts, turns around and complains about how awful public education has gotten in this country.

Which, only uncovers the ugly truth that… no one… no one really wants to fix the problem. People just want to be able to point the finger and place the blame. Nobody has the kids best interest at heart (save maybe the handful of teachers left fighting to actually educate). Constantly, I’m met with resentment for saying such a thing. Mostly because everyone wants to believe that parents have their children’s best interest at heart.

Reading further into Babbie’s text I discovered a phenomenal quotation; “Of course, medical researchers care about real people, but in actual research, patients are directly relevant only for what they reveal about the disease under study” (Babbie, 16).

I hate to be the one to bring to light the idea that children are nothing more than their parent’s guinea pigs. It sounds harsh, but life is an experiment in and of itself and the people who lived and died before us are only valuable because of what we have learned from their time on the planet before us.

Which brings me to my close on education. The legacy we leave in our wake should further the asymptote reaching skywards towards greater understanding. However, in placing emphasis on corporate conglomerates, wars for oil, and mass media we’re neglecting what is really important. Further more, we are crippling children; depriving them of intellectual stimulus because civil liberties need to be sacrificed in order to ensure a docile batch of humans to afraid to breathe?

Either that, or, we as a country… really just don’t care enough to worry about anything but our own self interest.

Earl Babbie wrote, “variables, on the other hand, are logical groupings of attributes” (Babbie, 16).

I feel like “logical” is the only word that bothers me in that statement. He discusses reality in the early pages of the chapter; but every individual has a reality that is unique to them. What is logical to one person might make no sense to you or me. I’d prefer to look at variables as random groupings of attributes.

If we consider my social dilemma, (the educational system) I think it’s relatively impossible to discern a dependent variable from an independent variable. The world humans have shaped is far too interconnected with the wicked webs woven of the years to be able to succinctly say manipulating one variable has an exact effect on another variable.

Qualitatively, we can state the variables that would be most integral in promoting an educational revolution. The first thing that usually comes to mind when humans are being rational and pragmatic is money. However, money is such a broad variable in itself that it would have to be broken down into several more specific money variables. There are stocks, bonds, nonprofit organizations, loans, grants, the IMF, the World Bank… and that’s just focusing on the United States.

Immediately, you want to jump to the conclusion that money would be an independent variable because money controls so much of our capitalist society. However, upon closer inspection money is dependent upon so many other variables: agriculture, natural resources, technology, arms and munitions. The list goes on.

However, in the case of educational reform, one could argue that educational reform would be a variable dependent on money. True, but we’ve just shown money is dependent on a much larger list of variables that are then dependent on a list of other variables. Like a big cycle…

Maybe… hold on! I’m having an epiphany… maybe that’s why almost every science field is gravitating towards a systems approach of learning and developing. Because, everything is interconnected! Just a planet full of dependent variables tending towards the greatest disorder.

So, I know I didn’t write an easy and clean, 3 part answer to this discussion forum. However, I hit my social issue that needs to be addressed and I most certainly addressed variables. As far as a solution is concerned…

I’ll just say that I think it is obvious, no matter what social injustice or tragic event you look at. Humans as a whole (meaning this entire world) need to change so many attributes in order to even address the variables that may make a difference. The only “logical” solution I see… is revolution.




Sources if you are interested

Public Agenda

For More Information Contact:
Michael Hamill Remaley or Shaheen Hasan at 212-686-6610, ext. 13

http://www.publicagenda.org/press/press_release_detail.cfm?report_title=Stand%20by%20Me


The Destructors is a 1954 short story by Graham Greene.


Earl Babbie, Wadsworth. The Basics of Social Research. Fourth Edition, 2008.


By The Numbers
America's Most Overpaid Athletes
Tom Van Riper, 05.07.08, 3:00 PM ET

http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/05/07/nhl-nba-nfl-biz-sports-cx_tvr_0507overpaidathletes.html

Want to comment on this Blogs? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Blogs and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...