Connecting the past with the present

I had underlined these sentences in Robert Graves’ introduction to The Greek Myths, when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964-65. Graves’ book was a secondary resource for making sense of ancient stories studied in the Humanities course that was required to be taken by every College student. I’m not sure Graves’ narrative has stood the test of time among anthropologists, even mythologists–it may be, in itself, myth not science. But for an eighteen year old (boy) from a small town in mid-America, this speculation certainly opened my mind to wondering about gender and culture in a way I never imagined. Here I am today wondering whether or not an epochal transformation is once again going to happen in the cultural/social relations of the sexes. Fortunately for me, too, I had enjoyed a wondrous summer of sexual play with the first woman I ever loved before I encountered university studies about the matter. I recalled, when I read these sentences, the power of the female over me, the male.

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the ‘weaker-sex’ characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.”

My intention is to live the remainder of my life as a loving man who wants nothing more than to witness the world become more sustainable and justly inclusive because wonderful, powerful, and loving women lead in transforming it.

culture, politics, and education

I’ve grown very curious about how American politics has played out over the time since WW2 that I’ve been alive. Although a student of politics during my college days, the recent U.S. Presidential election campaign re-engaged me in reading and thinking about American politics and even how it might be a subject for exploration by students of elementary school age.

I’ve just begun reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I had read Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and liked it. Although I am a liberal progressive who welcomes the end of the Reagan-inspired political practices and socioeconomic ideology, I have a more detached and longstanding historical interest in what some have called “The Southern Nation” which is still so evident on the U.S. map of November’s electoral results. (See also the eye-opening history, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II.) Today’s still deep-seated political divide is explainable from a long history of cultural divide. And the educational world is not immune from the effects of those divides.

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do (and write) with the societal divides I’ve been curious and concerned about in the U.S. for a long time. I just want whoever reads my blog to know that it is one of the important themes in my overall thinking about how to move our existing cultural understandings and behaviors in positive and constructive ways toward the new sustainability/inclusivity (“we the people”) paradigm I consider nearly imperative for global good. There are many tangents off this connected sphere of thinking and exploration. Many of them interestingly relate to the topics close to the Worldchanging perspective and agenda; others relate to questions of dead-ending militarism/imperialism and consumerism/addictive marketing and (non-)education for living superficial and dangerously manipulable/suggestible life-styles. I’m far from being a puritanical fundamentalist, but I do believe that those who claim to be educators of one kind or another need to be consciously aware of the close connection between cultural values and politics and education, as have been all of the historically great thinkers/practitioners on education and society.

Where Do the Children Play? (video)

Based on a song by Cat Stevens and video clips from “The Lorax,” muppetmeatloaf created this YouTube video which asks a very big question: Where Do the Children Play?