Please Go to Preschool So I Can Die Happy

We’ve gone back to school at the Back Road Café, at least in the US branch.  Last week’s lesson: what is taught in high school US history classes?  This week: why are Americans so ambivalent about preschool?  

“Government should fund universal preschool!”  I must admit I was surprised to hear President Barack Obama and New York Mayor-Elect (probably) Bill De Blasio argue so passionately this year in favor of preschool as part of their platforms and budgets. 

I know this sounds Neanderthal to most European countries, with their family friendly policies and laws supporting parental leave, childcare and early childhood education.  But in the US, there is no government-supported maternity leave or childcare, and then you have to be five years old before you get free and mandatory public education.  Your education starts in Kindergarten. 

Preschool, or Pre-K as it is sometimes called, is for 4 year olds.  Very low-income kids in some places have Head Start, a pre-K program started in the 60’s by Lyndon Johnson, but it’s limited and controversial.  Otherwise parents pay themselves for private preschools,  and there is no national consensus on the need for or the best form of early childhood education. 

Why was I surprised to hear support of preschool from these guys?  Did I think only female politicians would advocate for family programs?  Or that these guys only think about military and police and jobs and crime and not little kids’ development?  They’re both married to smart working women and obviously have made their own kids’ educations a priority. (Side note – De Blasio’s interracial son’s commercial for his dad won him the election – nice to see more multiracial families in a positive light in the public arena, not just as crime statistics.)  Certainly, they’ll get some votes from women for advocating preschools. 

Obama, being our Educator in Chief, mostly makes the argument that preschools are simply the right thing to do, and that making preschool available to more low income families is the fair thing to do.   But the best argument is the financial one.  For me and my Baby Boomer generation, as we retire and live longer than previous generations, and start costing the government a lot in Social Security and Medicare, we need lots of younger productive workers paying into those programs.  Hence my title: Please go to preschool so I can get health care into my 90’s. 

Actually, who wouldn’t want preschools?  Studies are pretty clear that preschool is a good investment; little kids who spend more time with other kids and more prep for reading and math turn out to be better lifelong students and better earners and better citizens.  It’s quite dramatic; various studies show that for every dollar spent on a preschool kid, the public saves $7-$15 on government spending when that kid grows up.  Preschool alums get better jobs, don’t need government assistance, buy more things, commit, fewer crimes, don’t fill our jails, much lower drug abuse.  What’s not to like?  Who would vote against preschool? 

Guess who’s standing in the way?  The powerful American religious right.  Preschool threatens their traditional and unrealistic view of the family, mothers not working, kids limited and controlled.  For them, any government program intrudes in their world view. If they had their way there’d be no publicly funded education at all.  Their preachers promote patriarchy, no help for working parents, especially women.  This attitude, and activism, goes back more than 40 years. 

That was 1971, when we almost got a very good universal preschool system as well as a comprehensive child development program, from birth to school.  President Johnson had started a series of broad public benefit programs under the vision of “The Great Society.”  Head Start was part of that.  Even to the moderate Republican Richard Nixon this seemed an appropriate role for government.  Congress voted for overwhelmingly for preschool and more. 

But for the first time, religious right leaders organized against a government program.  It’s hard to remember a time when they didn’t control the purse strings of Congress.   But apparently they surprised even themselves in their success.  Building on the Cold War fear of communism, they predicted that preschool would produce “communal approach to child rearing,” and would “weaken families.”  Nixon changed his mind and vetoed the bill. 

I only learned this recently, when Obama featured universal preschool in his State of the Union Address.  Conservatives immediately pushed back strongly.  Why, I wondered?  Turns out it reminded conservative Christian groups of their first big victory, their first taste of the power they could have.  It was all about “family values” and keeping those women at home and out of the workplace and making sure we didn’t become like “Mother Russia” indoctrinating our babies. 

Why is Obama promoting preschools now?   It is only so we do the right thing?  It is just so we have better educated citizens and harder workers?   Maybe he’s picking a fight with the religious right?  Since he gave that speech he has freed up money for preschools that doesn’t need Congressional approval.  More kids are getting better education.  But there’s a long way to go.  Most conservative politicians want to eliminate the Department of Education entirely.  

Thomas Jefferson famously said you can’t have democracy without an educated populace.  Ours is in trouble…

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Don’t Know Much About History…..

80 million Americans went back to school this week.  My husband and I were among those eager learners.  As was our 26 year old daughter.  We all sat in desks, listened to teachers, tried out new ideas and skills.  In the US, September is back to school month.

My husband and I are taking advantage of our local Adult School’s offerings; Wednesday nights he goes to Woodcarving and I go to Intermediate French.  He came home with a little piece of wood and new tools.  I came home with a CD of French songs and some exercises on silent sounds at the ends of words.  ( Eg: tabac, oeufs.)

Our daughter is a new graduate student at the University of California at Davis: in 15 months she will receive a Master’s Degree in Education and her Teaching Credential to be a high school social studies teacher – history, government, economics, etc.  They’ve already placed her as a teaching assistant in a US History class at Vanden High School in Travis, CA.

So I thought we might spend some time this fall here at the Back Road Café’s American branch thinking about education, and in particular American history.  How it is taught?  What do US History textbooks say and omit about our history?  What new methods and subjects are being taught to prospective history teachers?

My daughter was assigned to read this summer Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James Loewen.  Loewen analyzes and critiques 12 commonly used high school US history textbooks.

You get the idea from his Table of Contents:

1) Handicapped by History; The Process of Hero-making.  The truth about Helen
     Keller - Socialist, Woodrow Wilson - Racist, etc.

2) 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus, the Indians, etc.

3) The Truth about the First Thanksgiving, European diseases, etc.

4) The Truth about Native slaves, the French and Indian Wars, the Louisiana
     Purchase and much more.

5) The Invisibility of Racism in American Textbooks.

6) John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Anti-Racism in American History Textbooks.

7) The Land of Opportunity: The Absence of Social Class in Textbooks.

8) What Textbooks teach and omit about the federal government.

9) See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam.

10) Conclusion: What’s the Result of Teaching History Like this?  Minority
       Students End Up Alienated, All Students End Up Bored and No One Can
       Use the Past to Think Cogently About the Future.

Why do we teach 16 year olds US history?  What’s the goal?  To form obedient citizens?  Critical thinkers?  Researchers?  Social activists?  Voters?  (A pathetically small percentage of US citizens even bother voting.  By studying US history do we become more interested in participating in government or more apathetic or cynical?)  The US Council for Social Studies says their goal is “to promote civic competence.”

I skimmed Lies My Teacher Taught Me while my daughter was home and was struck with two points, probably because they remind me of biases I seem to have picked up; hero making and too much attention to the executive branch.

(We may return to this topic, the teaching of US history and the teaching of teachers, as the school year progresses.)

Hero Making:  That’s his first chapter.  We could call it the “People Magazine approach to history.”  Focus on the people, use stories of people to address the issues.  Not a bad teaching method.  But, like People mag, portraits can be simplistic, airbrushed, too emotional.  As an example, Loewen fills out the picture of American icon Helen Keller.  She’s important not just for her triumph over being blind, deaf and mute, but for her active Socialism; she learned that most folks with her same disabilities were victims of industrial accidents or poor health care, and she wrote and publicly protested on behalf of Socialism.  I never knew the great Helen Keller was a Socialist.  What other myths have I been sold?

US = Presidents:  Because we love stories about people, we focus too much on the stories of Presidents, not enough on the other two government branches, legislative and judicial.  My daughter says she’s already been encouraged to have students act out key court rulings, like Marbury vs. Madison, 1803.  I had to ask her to remind me what that case was about.  And it’s not all about President Madison.  Without Marbury we would not have had the recent Supreme Court ruling in support of gay marriage.  I invite you to look it up – good teacher that I am I am not going to do the work for you!

We’ll return to the classroom from time to time this fall.  And I’ll also let you know how Woodcarving and French are going.  A bientot!

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Walking for Freedom: John Lewis

Our 3-month summer road trip ends today in our nation’s capitol, where tens of thousands of folks are marching in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  One marcher is Rep. John Lewis, for over 25 years a Congressional Representative from Georgia.  In 1963, at age 23, he was the younges of the six key civil rights organizers of the historic march and today he is the only still living. 

On these last two weeks of our road trip we’ve finally gotten out of our cars and off the road to honor two great American long distance walkers named John. Last week was Johnny Appleseed.  This week we could call our walker John Freedomseed.

John LewisAlabama state troopers bashed in John Lewis’s skull on March 7, 1965.  They had ordered him and hundreds others to stop their civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.  The marchers, trained in non-violence by Martin Luther King, Jr., responded by kneeling in prayer.  The march was halted by the bloody standoff.

John Lewis was then 25 years old.  He’d already been walking and working for freedom for half his life.  Child of sharecroppers in a small segregated Alabama town, he first became aware of the civil rights movement at age 16 when he read a comic book about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and nonviolent protest. 

A comic book?  Yes, “Martin Luther King and the Road to Montgomery: How 50,000 Negroes found a new way to end racial discrimination,” 10 cents.  Published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1956, it was a comic book for adults.  Easy to read but illegal to own, it was surreptitiously spread around the South, telling the story of the then also young (then 27) civil rights organizer’s lunch counter sit-ins.

John Lewis in the Foreground Being AttractedA few years later Lewis was in college, where he joined the interracial Freedom Riders to travel the South protesting segregation and registering voters.  He was jailed 24 times.  Eventually he became president of the national Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, which was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. 

Lewis was the youngest speaker on the platform that day, August 28, 1963, 23 years old, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial next to such civil rights giants as A. Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.

He had prepared a young man’s fiery speech, denouncing the federal government for being timid and slow to grant civil rights to all citizens, talking about the need for “revolution” and threatening bolder action.  The organizers knew that President Kennedy was wary of the march, but was working for civil rights legislation behind the scenes.  Lewis was planning to denounce Kennedy’s bill as “too little, too late.”  Fearing Lewis’ rhetoric would scare Kennedy and other whites, march organizers enlisted Patrick Cardinal Boyle, first Archbishop of Washington DC, a civil rights activist who had ordered all parochial school desegregated years before the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on desegregation, to help them get Lewis to tone it down just a bit.  He finally agreed.  But just in case, black security guards stood next to Lewis on stage, ready to turn off the mike if he went off script.  Today, his original words, and the changes seem minor, but the back story reminds us of the complexity and power of words and context. 

Two years later, in 1965, when those state troopers bashed in his skull on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, John Lewis might have been thinking of those other guards slowing his fiery passion.  But ultimately neither billy clubs nor firehoses nor separate entrances nor white troopers nor black security guards could stop Lewis and the civil rights marchers.  Two weeks after that March 7, 1965 skull bashing, John Lewis was out of the hospital and helping to resume the march, now granted a permit and police protection. 

Once again a walker, he journeyed 10 miles a day, for five days. March 25 they finally completed the journey from Selma to the state capitol, by this time leading 25,000 other folks.  Then-President Lyndon Johnson saw that 1965 March on TV, and, braver than his predecessor Kennedy, he introduced Civil Rights legislation the next day.

John Lewis hasn’t stopped walking.  At the 50^th anniversary commemoration this weekend he urged the crowd, “You cannot stand by.  You cannot sit down. You have to stand up, speak up, speak out and get in the way.  Make some noise.  The vote is precious.  It is almost sacred.  It’s the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society and we’ve got to use it….So hang in there, keep the faith.  I was arrested 40 times in the 60’s, beaten, bloodied and unconscious.  I’m not tired.  I’m not weary.  I’m not prepared to sit down and give up.”

This month a new comic book educates and inspires another generation of Americans.  March: Book One is a graphic novel by Lewis and two associates, the first of a trilogy about the ups and downs of the civil rights movement as told by his life.  Lewis says that as proud as he is to serve his district, and to have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he is totally amazed at being the subject of a comic book.  But he hopes it might do for others what the 1956 story of King did for him.

John Lewis has the skull scars and the weary feet to prove his persistence.  Keep walking, John.  Keep walking, America.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Johnny Appleseed

It’s the last two weeks of our US summer road trip.  After Labor Day we’ll pull back into the driveway of whatever goes for a normal fall here at the Back Road Café. 

Since lazy America seems to travel only by car and superhighway, let’s close out the road trip by celebrating two great American long distance walkers.  Both are named John.  I’ll keep you in suspense til next week for who I’m thinking about besides Johnny Appleseed.

If Johnny Appleseed had lived 175 years later, he would have been a hippie or a Jesus freak.  As it is, he is an American icon of free spirit generosity, frontier expansion and the very uber-Americanness of apples. 

But how did he really intend those apples to be used?  Why did farmers welcome him so enthusiastically?

He seems mythic, but he was a real guy.  John Chapman was his name, lived 1774 to 1845, wandered the Midwest his whole life sowing apple seeds.  With no family or fixed address, he handed out free, to farmers and frontier pioneers of the Ohio River Valley, not only apple seedlings, but also news from the road, and his mystical Swedenborgian faith. 

He slept outside, was kind to animals and befriended the feared native folks.  Barefoot, he  dressed in a burlap sack, a tin pot for his hat.  Sort of a John the Baptist, St. Francis type, wild nature-loving weirdo.  A contemporary described his preaching:

"We can hear him read now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrillin—strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius.”

During his lifetime popular magazines called him a living legend and he fast entered the American public imagination, appearing in novels, TV shows, songs, and even Apple video tutorials (get it – Apple?) and most insidiously, a 1948 Disney movie for kids.  My post war baby boom generation was just the first (it still shows on the Disney channel) for whom Johnny became a wimpy, slightly lost soul until an angel encourages him to go West with just his seeds and tin pot hat, to befriend animals, and to sing a lot of catchy tunes.  The most catchy was a cheerful and easy sung grace, “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple seed, the Lord is good to me.”  I still sing that grace at camp and church.

Popular food journalist Michael Pollan recently challenged this American myth by debunking the happy seed sower.  No, he wrote in The Botany of Desire, Johnny Appleseed was an “American Dionysus” a carefree planter and probably consumer of intoxicants.  Johnny didn’t give away apple trees so settlers could make that most American dessert, apple pie, or even fulfill the vain promise that eating one a day would keep the doctor away. 

No, Pollan says, frontier families welcomed Johnny into the cabin because they wanted to get loaded.  Sugar was a rare and expensive commodity on the frontier.  Some eschewed it because of its source in the slave trade.  But apples  - now there was an easy source of sweetness, especially in the northern colonies and what came to be called the Northwest Territory, that is, Ohio.  And you need sugar for fermentation.  Cider is easy to make quickly from apples, and cider then becomes hard cider in just a few weeks. Johnny brings more apples, we’re all happier.  Johnny WAS a hippie freak, he was like the old dope peddler, he helped those hardworking frontier folks kick back.

Pollan’s ideas are entertaining, but he often writes just for effect and attention (most of us writers do).  I think he may be exaggerating both Johnny’s insidious intent and the extent of frontier alcoholism.  Most of Europe at that same time consumed low proof booze daily. 

But his revisionist history is a good reminder of how we Americans do love to mythologize and romanticize our folk heroes, from Pocohontas to Babe Ruth.  Johnny Appleseed sounds to me like a complicated and creative person, not a sappy Disney one-dimensional man.  (Don’t get me going on what Disney has done to so many folk heroes.  Our European readers may now chime in on the Disney crimes against Victor Hugo, A.A. Milne and P.L. Travers.)

But I still like Johnny Appleseed.  Why?  Because he walked.  And worked with nature, not over and above it. Because he had a spiritual life and message (not sure what, but his friend called it “strangely eloquent.”).  And that he was generous.  Today he’d be suspect, followed and attacked under “stand your ground” laws.  Or mocked by agribusiness for trying to keep the gene pool diverse.   Or dismissed as a PETA fanatic (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  Or thrown in a drunk tank. 

Sounds like my kind of guy.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter

Three Cross Country Trips, 1903-2013

On our summer US road trip we’ve visited cities, borders, jails and mayor’s offices.  Today we consider the great American coming of age experience, driving across the country.

Driving all the way from one coast to the other, 3000 miles from sea to shining sea, is something of a rite of passage for young Americans.  A summer adventure during college, a relocation to a new job in your 20’s, a way to end a relationship or move to be with a new one, it’s the American walkabout, a way to earn the badge of adulthood.  Driving cross country, you find yourself and you find America.  Or like the characters in the great cross country movie, Easy Rider, America finds you.

Most Americans can tell you a dramatic story about their drive, emphasizing that it was:

- Fast (You can do it in two days of straight driving, with some crazy all night adventures.)

- Slow (Some chose a theme, like visiting every major league baseball park.)

- Winter (Make sure you drive south of the Rockies and take snow tires.)

- Summer (Start each day before sunrise, get to the motel pool by 3, explore the small towns at dusk.)

- Interstate (Just get on Rt. 80 in NYC, cross the George Washington Bridge and next thing you know, San Francisco Bay.)

- Back roads (Delightful local cuisine, curious radio stations, obey the speed limit with your out of state license plates.)

- Solo (I started a major new chapter in my life by driving alone in my Volkswagen bug with everything I owned in it, including a nice old chair, from New York to California.)

- In a group (This can be tricky; shall we stop here, you like to eat what?  Also very bonding; remember when we drove through the tornado?)

In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first American to drive all the way across the country.  A wealthy doctor, he and his wife were on holiday in San Francisco, having taken the train from their home in Vermont.  There they became enamored with this new fangled contraption, the motor car, and took some driving lessons.  Many people thought the automobile was just a passing fad, but Jackson was so enthusiastic he accepted a $50 bet that he couldn’t drive back to Vermont.   He bought a used, 2 cylinder, 20 horsepower Winton, which he renamed The Vermont.  He set out on May 31 and had one adventure and disaster after another; blown tires, no ways to get new tires, no maps, no roads, part of the way he drove on the old Oregon trail, got lost in Wyoming, begged a farmer for wheel bearings from his mower, forded streams.  But he finally made it home (his wife took the train back) after 63 days on the “road.”  Read the Wikipedia account of it or even better watch the Ken Burn’s documentary, Horatio’s Drive.  The Vermont is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.  Later in life Jackson got a speeding ticket in Burlington, Vermont for exceeding the 6 mile per hour limit.

65 years later two scruffy drug dealers named Billy and Captain America left Los Angeles on Harley Davidson motor cycles for their cross country trip, which (spoiler alert!) did not end as happily as Dr. Jackson’s.  The movie Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson (and a memorable scene with Karen Black as a New Orleans prostitute – she died this past week) was a counterculture classic that took the nation by storm and continues to evoke and symbolize the late 60’s mood in our nation.  The sound track by itself blasted conventional movie music; Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 was 9” – the filmmakers were concerned that long shots of motorcycles in the southwest would be boring, so they spent more on the music, $1 million, than the film’s whole budget.  The film made $41 million, and along with two other films that year, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde signified a new era of avant-guard independent movies.  (Come to think of it, there are a lot of travel scenes in both those movies as well.)

Last story of a cross country drive.  This very summer, 2013, my two dear friends Joan and Marie spent six weeks driving in their Mini Cooper, with their two dogs, all the way across the country and back, California to their home state of New York and back. This wasn’t a coming of age trip for sure; Joan and Marie are in their 70’s, and have been together for 30 years.  They came home tired and happy from many adventures, and with a new possession – a marriage license from New York.  None of their many friends here in California knew of their wedding plans, but it sounds to me like a good use of a cross country trip – set out on the road, roll with the challenges, slow down for the surprises, end each day with a thank you.  Oh, that’s not just a cross country trip.  That’s marriage.  A good road to travel.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter