QUID EGO FACEO?: A Case for Latin

If you read my previous post, you can tell I've been thinking a lot about languages lately. 

You have no idea. 

About three years ago I began studying Spanish, or rather picked it up again after decades. Then almost exactly one year ago, I decided on top of that, to take up Italian. And just recently I added a third language to the mix, Latin.

There is a method to my madness, the three languages I'm learning are closely related, the siblings Spanish and Italian both being the children of the mother tongue, Latin. My previous knowledge of Spanish made learning Italian easier, especially the grammar, and taking wobbly beginner's steps in Italian made me a little more confident with my Spanish, While I do from time to time confuse the two, I'd say it's worked out pretty well. 

But why Latin? Who after all would want to learn a dead language?* There's a question that's been pondered about, especially in academic circles for at least a couple generations. 

Here are the standard answers you get from Latinophiles:

• Latin is the mother tongue of the Romance languages so gaining a knowledge of it, makes learning French, Portuguese, the two languages mentioned above, and a host of other languages much easier.
• Almost sixty percent of the words in English have Latin origins so leaning Latin helps improve one's English vocabulary. 
• Learning Latin's complex case structure helps in learning other languages as well such as German and the Slavic languages. 
• Many terms used in science, medicine and law come directly from Latin so a prior knowledge of the language gives people a heads up when entering those fields.  
• Much of the collected wisdom of Western Civilization put down in writing from the time of Julius Caesar to the nineteenth century was written in Latin, so knowing the language enables one to come in direct contact with those works as they were written, rather than through the lens of a third party interpreter. 
• Learning Latin makes you smarter.  

These are all good reasons to learn Latin and there are a host of others. But as many folks point out, quite reasonably I might add, all of these, except the second to the last, are fringe benefits of learning the language, and can all be achieved in other ways without going to the trouble of learning Latin. 

For example:

• If you're interested in learning Spanish, Italian, German, Czech (as I am), or any other language, just learn those. The truth is, learning a foreign language is a skill and learning ANY foreign language greatly improves your ability to learn others. 
• If you're looking to improve your vocabulary through Latin, you can simply study the Latin root words relevant to your language, again without learning Latin. I did just that in my high school etymology class which improved my English vocabulary as well as gave me an interest in learning other languages. Yes it took forty years to address that but hey, better late than never.
• You don't need to take Latin to learn terms used in the profession of your choice, just learn the terms. 
• And finally studying lots of things can make you smarter, it doesn't have to be Latin. 

But here's the thing, only by learning Latin can you accomplish ALL of those things, and much much more!

OK I know, it's a hard sell, especially in this day and age.

There are a few things going against Latin. For starters, our contemporary values, at least from those who call themselves "progressive" (not sure why that's become such a pejorative term), place an emphasis on learning from a vast array of cultures, not just the culture of Europe and the colonial expansion that culture inspired. 

I get that and champion it. After all let's face it, our culture has been inundated with education focused on Eurocentric themes at the exclusion of all others. It's time for a change. Latin, the paradigm of the "dead white man's language", represents all that. 

On the other hand, I don't believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Over two thousand years of history and wisdom that has greatly influenced our culture and the way we think, both for the better and the worse, should not be discounted. 

Then there's the notion that we should concentrate on teaching our children practical things that will help them get jobs and get through the daily routine of life. If I had a quarter for every time I've been subjected to a meme that said something like "Wouldn't it be better to teach our children how to balance their check book rather than teaching them how factor a quadratic equation?" I'd be, well a lot richer than I am today. 

My ideas on the subject jibe perfectly with those of advocates of liberal education, best expressed by the president of the college my son is currently attending. He said essentially this: "We don't know what the jobs of the next decade or so will be, so instead of teaching your children how to do a job that already exists, we each them how they can learn to do a job that doesn't exist yet, but certainly will."

Learn of course is the key word there, hence the emphasis. I'm a strong believer that schools, especially at the elementary and secondary levels, exist not just to teach our kids stuff, but much more important, to teach and inspire them to learn things on their own, kind of like the biblical passage that says give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and feed him for life.  

So I believe there's a good reason to think that the experience we gain from the mental exercises of learning something like Latin  can be applied to a whole range of other things we do in our lives. And it makes us more rounded individuals to boot.

Take speaking our own language. As I recall, my high school etymology class consisted of receiving a new list of root words at the start of every week, the first half of the class, Greek, the second, Latin. We memorized the roots and their English counterparts, then learned the English words that were formed by putting those roots together. Fascinating stuff but here's the deal, one of the least inspiring ways to learn a language, including your own, is to memorize random lists of words. And in this case, it wasn't even words, but parts of words.

For most language learners, it's much better to learn words in context, preferably through sentences, articles and stories geared to the students' level. Not only is it a vastly more interesting process, but it's a way more effective teaching device. 

Consider this passage from the Roman poet of the 1st Century BCE, Horace. I found it in one of the classic Latin textbooks, Wheelock's Latin and it has been edited and adapted into prose for the sake of clarity for newbies such as myself:

Agricola et vitam et fortunam nautae saepe laudat; nauta magnum fortunam et vitam poetae saepe laudat; et poeta vitam et agros agricolae laudat. Sine philosophia avari viri de pecunia semper cogitant: multum pecuniam habent, sed nihil virum avarum satiat. 

Like all the passages in the Wheelock book, it's up to the reader to translate it so I'll do my best:

The farmer often praises both the life and fortune of the sailor; the sailor often praises both the great fortune and life of the poet, and the poet praises the life and the land of the farmer. Without philosophy, greedy men always think of money, they have a lot of money, but no greedy man is satisfied.   

I know this translation leaves a little to be desired (in fact they all do as we'll see in a moment), however it's the best I can do after only about a month. But the moral of the story, which is as old as the ages, is as Dr. Wheelock points out: "The Grass is Always Greener." 

That passage not only transmits wisdom across the millennia, it's also a great lesson in etymology:

• For starters, the word Philosophia was "borrowed" from the Greeks and is composed of two roots, phil (love) and sophia (wisdom). 
• Agricola and agros come from the same stem, agr (land). Lots of English words come from that stem, the most obvious being agriculture. 
• From vitam, and its stem vit (life) we get vital, vitality, vitamin, etc. 
• From nautam, naut (sailor) we get nautical, etc.
• From cogitant, cog (think) we get cogent, cognizant, etc. 
• From pecunia, pecun (money) we get pecuniary, pecunious, etc. 
• From viri, vir (men) we get virile, virtue, etc. 
• Fortunam, poeta, laudat and a few others should be self-explanitory. 
• Oh yes and from et cetera (and the rest), we get etc.        

Maybe it's just me but I think it's vastly more interesting learning these stems in the context of actual words in action, rather than simply as a random list of stems. 

As I mentioned, the one unequivocal reason to learn Latin is to be able to read over two thousand year's worth of thought and expression in its original form. 

Here is another piece by Horace, this time in its unedited form in verse. If you're not already familiar with it, you may recognize a couple of words in the last line: 

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi

finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios

temptaris numeros. Ut melius quicquid erit pati!

Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,

quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare              

Tyrrhenum, sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi

spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

My Latin isn't nearly good enough to translate all of that but here's a link to a page with four, count 'em four different translations.

But did you catch it? "Carpe diem" and the philosophy that inspired those words, have become a pop culture phenomenon since the movie Dead Poets' Society was released in 1989. Here's a link to the scene where an English professor named John Keating, encourages his students to "seize the day." 

In addition to making me realize how much I miss Robin Williams, it is truly a wonderful, dare I say inspiring scene with no stop going un-pulled in the emotive department. 

Like the message of the earlier quote from Horace, I believe the message of this stanza is very clear, life is short, so make the most of every day. 

But according to the Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric, carpe dium has been "hijacked" by a society which has turned it into little more than a marketing gimmick. Krznaric sites the Nike slogan "Just Do It" which in itself is more or less in the spirit of the ancient mantra. However according to Krznaric:

the spirit of "Seize the day" has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and one-click buying: Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It.

Writing in JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu takes Krznaric's observations one step further:

Even life experiences have become commodities, in a world where people can no longer afford to buy a place to live. We’re encouraged instead to buy into precarious economic lifestyles celebrated by ad campaigns like freelance startup Fiverr’s “You eat a coffee for lunch… Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” This is the “carpe diem” aesthetic of a modern world of aggressive action, not all that different from the “work till you drop” mentality of industrialism.

My guess is that "working until you drop" isn't exactly what Horace had in mind when he wrote his poem.

Part of the problem, according to Kznaric and Luu lies in the translation. Luu puts it bluntly when she says that "carpe dium" is a mistranslation because "carpe" does not mean "seize" but rather "pluck", as you might pluck a flower. Obviously according to her, the two English words convey a quite different meaning. 

It's true that had Horace wanted to use an explicitly more forceful metaphor, he could have chosen the very similar word "cape", from which our word "capture" comes. 

But he didn't.

Luu suggests that using the metaphor "seize" rather than "pluck" is... 

...an example of one of the more telling ways that we mistranslate metaphors from one language to another, revealing in the process our hidden assumptions about what we really value. Metaphors may map to similar meanings across languages, but their subtle differences can have a profound effect on our understanding of the world.

As Luu suggests, we are a society who values action over passivity, and our metaphors reflect that. So it's only natural that we would choose the aggressive metaphor "seize", over the more passive "pluck".

But wait a minute. Ancient Rome wasn't exactly "pink tea for mollycoddles" either. They meant serious business as we all know, look at what they did to Jesus. So it seems a little silly to assume that an ancient Roman would be any more averse to using a forceful metaphor than we would.

It has to be remembered that except for most nouns, there is rarely a perfect one to one correspondence between words in different languages. An adage I've heard over and over again in my adventures in language learning is that words don't mean words, words evoke ideas. And different languages have different ways to express those ideas. From its appearances in a great variety of texts that survive, it turns out the word carpere (the infinite form of the verb from which the imperative carpe comes) is very flexible, that is, in different contexts it can mean a great deal of things. Indeed, many English words including "pluck", "harvest", "seize", and dozens more can be appropriately used to stand in for it. English has many similar words. 

Take the word "take":

• We can take a nap.
  
• We can take no prisoners.
• We can take the bus.
• We can take the car to the garage.
• We can tell someone to take a hike.
• We can take off our clothes.
• We can take off in an airplane.
• We can take some time off.
  
• We can take on a project.
  
• We can take the spaghetti.
• We can take credit cards.
• We can take something that doesn't belong to us. 
• We can "take it easy but take it." (Woody Guthrie)
  
• We can even take the day.

In each of those examples, the verb "take" performs a different action, and each sentence conveys a different feeling, some mundane, some passive, some defiant, and some aggressive. But even though we're using the same verb, there is no ambiguity in any of those sentences for someone who is fluent in the English language, because it's all about the context. But if we were to translate those sentences into another language, we'd most likely have to use a different verb for each one.  

Of course, Horace didn't write seize the day or pluck the day, he wrote carpe dium. And just the same as those examples of take, anyone with a good knowledge of Latin can understand what Horace meant.

Could it be though, that Horace was being intentionally a little ambiguous in his choice of carpe over cape? 

Much like ourselves, people in Ancient Rome would have had their own interpretation of what it meant for themselves to carpe dium. For some it may have meant stop and smell the roses, for others it may have meant to screw it and spend their life savings on that snazzy new chariot. After all, vita brevis est. 

Given that, it's possible that a long lost ancient Roman version of Roman Kznaric, or maybe even Horace himself might have bemoaned the fact that carpe dium was being hijacked 2,000 years ago, just as it is today.

Because as we learned from the first writing of Horace I mentioned, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

For what it's worth, as a translation I prefer "seize the day" by a mile. 

Pluck in my opinion is a terrible word. For starters it rhymes with a common English four-letter word. Imagine someone listening to that passage from Horace being read in English and mishearing the phrase as "fuck the day." Furthermore, every old comic will tell you that words with the letter "K" in them are inherently funny. Had Robin Williams used the line "pluck the day boys" in the movie, people would have thought he was making a joke. 

Most of all, when I think of pluck, I don't think of flowers, I pick those. No, I think "pluck the banjo" or "pluck the chicken".   

Shall I pluck the day like I would pluck a chicken? I don't think so.

Long story short, no matter how good the translation, it's always better in the original.

Of course as Horace reminds us, life is short and most of us mere mortals don't have the time to study the language of every piece of writing that interests us. I'll probably never get around to reading the Old Testament in its original Ancient Hebrew, the Quran in Arabic, or the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, not to mention the classic works of Chinese literature in their original Ancient Chinese, or modern Chinese for that matter. I started to read the Gospel of St. John in Latin, (In principio erat Verbum...) but had to remind myself that it too is a translation from the original Greek. 

All of these ancient languages are well worth learning, especially if you have an interest in the particular culture they are associated with. But since life is short, I'm not going to get too carried away with my bucket list. 

On the other hand:

Τα ελληνικά μπορεί να μην είναι και τόσο κακή ιδέα.

* A "dead" language is defined by linguists as a language that currently has no native speakers. That distinguishes it from an "extinct" language which is lost. Currently, Latin, a dead language by that definition, is still widely studied around the world, but it's difficult to get a reliable number of how many people actually know it, tougher still to get an accurate number of people who speak it fluently. That number ranges from about 200 (ridiculously low I think) to the tens of thousands. That's understandable as most folks study the language purely as an academic exercise, not as one to communicate verbally with other people.  

Here's a guy who definitely speaks Latin fluently. His name is Luke Ranieri and he's a strong advocate not only of learning Latin, oh yes and Ancient Greek as well, but speaking them, truly bringing those ancient languages to life. In the video below, he goes to the Vatican, where the official language is still technically Latin, and tries to find people who actually speak it. He found only a handful and as you can tell, the three priests who agreed to go on camera, speak it quite hesitantly.  

But I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a resurgence of Latin, Ancient Greek and other ancient languages in the future, thanks to of all things, the internet, and guys like Ranieri.

By the way I kind of cringe whenever I hear Latin described as being a dead language. I think eternal is more like it.

Valete!    

Brush with Greatness II

Many years ago I was at the kind of establishment that we old timers used to call a "record store" in Chicago's Loop. At the time this particular store had the most complete selection of recordings in the city and was THE place to go for just about anything recorded on vinyl, but especially for their extensive catalog of classical music. On that particular day, it so happened that a very famous violinist was there, signing albums of his which customers purchased in the store. It was at the end of his ordeal (at least that's how I would describe it from the look on his face) when a young boy, maybe eight years old, after waiting his turn as the last person in line, finally made it to the table where the famous violinist was sitting. The boy was carrying his own violin and it was obvious that the man sitting at the table was his idol. "Mr. Famous Violinist..." (not his real name), said the little boy, "...would you please play something on my violin?" The way the world famous violinist looked at that little boy, you'd have thought the child asked him to slit his own throat. "No..." the famous violinist said to the little boy, "...I can't do that.". That was that, and off into the sunset went the famous violinist, leaving a crushed little boy and his violin behind in the dust.

How that incident ultimately affected the boy I'll never know, but it sure gave me pause about the thought of meeting celebrities whom I admired. Even though my relatively few encounters with famous people have ranged (with the exception of this one) from pleasant to downright inspirational, I still have the nagging thought in my head that given the chance, I'd rather take a pass on meeting someone I truly admired, lest the impression of my idol would be forever tarnished by the fact that the person is actually a jerk.

But a couple weeks ago I was offered a chance I couldn't pass up, to document the visit of a very famous musician, and someone I've always admired, to the school where I have been photograping for the past three months.

Like the famous violinist in the record store, from all outward appearances, this musician projects a gregarious, friendly, public demaeanor. That made me all the more suspicious; could his public face really be just an act?  Could this famous musician, perhaps the most recognizable classical music artist in the world at the moment, really be a jerk, just like the famous violinist? 

Like famous people often do, the musician kept us waiting. The school's orchestra and concert band were on hand for the event and filled up the music room to well beyond capacity. Members of the Chicago Civic orchestra were also there, personally mentoring the student  instrumentalists. No one knew exactly what to expect from the famous musician, would he give a lecture, would he treat us to a small performance, or would he just sit regally up front, privileging us with his mere presence?

Eventually there was rumbling in the room. "He's coming, he's coming.." the adults wispered in admiration, much like the members of the orchestra in the cartoon whispered "Leopold, Leopold..." as Bugs Bunny impersonating the great conductor Leopold Stakowski walked up to the podium.

"Find a chair..." someone whispered, "...he wants to sit in the cello section."

Like all important people, the great man had an entourage who preceeded him. Members of a film crew hired by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were on hand filming a documentary Then came an assistant who carried in the famous musician's instrument.

Finally, in came Yo-Yo Ma who took his seat among the cellists as he sat in with the band...

Now I don't necessarily believe that every picture is worth a thousand words, or that one can read into the soul of a person simply by looking at a photograph. But I think these pictures testify to the fact that my trepidations of Yo-Yo Ma were put aside the second he entered the room and began playing music with the students.

The combination orchestra/band with their new second cellist played an excerpt of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and an arrangement of Dave Brubeck's Take Five. After the music was finished, there was time for the students to ask questions. When the orchestra director opened the floor, there was the typical few seconds of awkward silence, followed by a few giggles coming from the assembled, including the guest of honor. Finally someone worked up the courage to ask why Mr. Ma originally chose the cello. He told the kids that the instrument he really wanted to play was the double bass, because it was the biggest instrument in the orchestra. But being only four at the time, and a smallish four at that, the double bass was not a practical choice. 

Yo-Yo Ma exchanging thoughts with students at Nicholas Sean High School

Then someone (not a cellist) asked if he ever got tired of playing the cello. That question gave Mr. Ma pause to think and become philosophical. He said that while practice can become mundane and somewhat tedious, it paves the necessary path to be able to connect with the music written over the centuries, be it written by Tchaikovsky or Dave Brubeck, two wildly divergent composers, or any of the other composers from the baroque to the current day in his remarkably varied repertoire. Then he added that the true joy of his work is connecting with other musicians, such as those assembled in that room, in the effort to in turn, connect with people gathered to listen to the music. That, he said, is where the magic comes in.

After a few more questions, his assistant came back to retrieve Mr. Ma's cello. A few kids asked if they could take selfies with the maestro, who gladly obliged. After trading a few pleasantries with the orchestra and band directors, both of whom confided with me that they got no sleep the night before, Mr. Ma was gone, leaving the room filled with musicians young and not so young, with a feeling of exultation.

I can't say for sure quite how many of the students assembled in that room knew of Mr. Ma before being introduced to his work by their teachers before he came to their school. but they're all serious musicians so the meaning of his visit was not lost upon any of them. A couple of the kids I talked to, with tears in their eyes, were moved beyond words. That said, everyone was swept up by the tremendous generosity of his spirit and I think it's fair to say that not a soul in the room, Mr. Ma included, will forget that magical day anytime soon.

A Little Schoolin'

The viral video du jour, actually three of them, show a white police officer grabbing a female African American high school student while she was sitting at her desk in class, then flipping the girl and the desk over and dragging both of them out of the classroom. Not surprisingly, these videos shot by fellow students in a South Carolina school on their cell phones has drawn universal outrage, and the reactions as we have come to expect from the right and the left of this country, are entirely predictable.

To one side, this is an obvious case of a racist cop egregiously overstepping his authority. To the other side, it's a case of a teenager disrespectful of education and authority, selfishly disrupting a class thereby denying her classmates the opportunity to learn.

These reactions came well before any context surrounding the confrontation were brought to light. After the actual facts were brought out into the open well... nobody changed their mind.

The facts, some of them at least, are these:

• During class, the student was either texting of having a conversation (eye-witness reports vary) on her cell phone and the teacher demanded she stop. She refused. (Score one against the student).
• After a standoff, the teacher requested help from a school administrator. The student refused to cooperate again. At that point the cop, a "resource officer" who was assigned to the school was called to the room. The officer asked the student several times to get up and leave the classroom. Again she refused. (Score another against the student)
• After unsuccessfully convincing the student to leave her seat and the classroom, the cop grabbed the girl who continued to resist. This resulted in the ugly scene in the videos described above. (Score one against the cop and the student).
• It was later revealed that the student's mother recently died and that the young woman was in foster care. (Score one for the young woman).
• It was also revealed that the same officer has charges pending relating to incidents of a similar nature involving students of color. (Score one against the cop).
• The officer's boss, the county sheriff, before firing him, released a statement that his employee was no racist as he is currently dating a black woman. (No idea how to score that one). 
• Defending his firing of the cop, the sheriff also said that the officer's actions were "not typical of the job I expect (him) to do." (Score yet another against the officer).

Heard consistently throughout the coverage of this incident is the opinion that nothing the student did, at least anything apparent from the videos, justifies the officer's actions. Perhaps this is true. However, two critical questions that desperately need to be addressed, especially by police and school officials are these: why are policemen permanently assigned to schools in the first place, and secondly, what exact actions ARE typical of the job(s) that officers are expected to do when someone flat out refuses to comply with an essential and perfectly reasonable request?

I think it's safe to assume that the teacher's and administrator's reason for calling in a policeman was to remove a disruptive student from the classroom so the class could continue. It's highly unlikely they expected the officer to council the student, offer her words of encouragement, or invite her to tea. They could have done that themselves, perhaps they should have. When all else fails, short of building trap doors or ejector seats in classrooms (hmmm, maybe not such a bad idea), the only way to remove a student who simply refuses to leave, is by using the threat of force, and when that fails, use force itself. That's why the policeman was called. If the student responds in kind with force, as was the case with this particular child, things can get pretty ugly, which they did.

It has been stated over and over again that the officer acted irresponsibly and perhaps even criminally in roughing up the student, but no one, not even the sheriff could offer any clues as to how the officer could have acted responsibly while still doing what was asked of him.

A policeman's responsibility beyond dealing with bad guys and wayward students is to use proper judgement and restraint, and to act according to the rule of law while carrying out those responsibilities. Like other people who are paid to do unpleasant work, we expect the police to do a job that most of us are unwilling and/or afraid to do. Clearly the school administrator and the teacher felt the need to remove this student from the classroom, yet they didn't want to perform the messy, perhaps job-threatening work themselves. Perhaps they should have tried harder before taking the draconian step of calling in the police officer.

I asked my resident authority on such matters, my mother, (a long time teacher, administrator and principal of a large inner-city elementary school) what she would have done. Without missing a beat she said that if a student was stubborn about leaving the class and making a scene, she would have had all the other students leave for the library and left the student alone in the classroom to sit and think about her actions without the benefit of an audience. Had the situation been handled in that way there would have been no need to call in the federales in the first place, no violence, no viral videos, and of course, no blog post.

In my book, the school officials are as responsible for what happened that day as anybody else. Calling in a police officer to handle a situation they probably could and should have handled themselves was only asking for trouble. Like I said, the officer was doing the job that was asked of him. Violent and ugly as those videos are, I am not in a position to judge if the officer acted inappropriately, and frankly with the unreliable information we have, I don't think most of us are.

As for the student, what if any responsibilities does she have? First of all I think it's reasonable to expect all students to act in the spirit of the class, if not by directly participating, then at the very least showing respect by refraining from disrupting the teacher and fellow students. Every student knows full well that using a cell phone in class is unacceptable. Except in an emergency, where the student should have excused herself from the class, there is absolutely no excuse for violating this obvious breach of common sense and respect for her teacher and her peers. It was the student's choice to violate both the spirit and the rules of the class by using her phone, refusing to stop when asked, and resisting the officer when he demanded she leave. Whether his actions were appropriate or not, the student brought upon the those actions entirely by herself.

This week, a friend of mine taught me a new word he encountered in his work in the field of social justice. That word is "de-opportuniteed", an adjective made up by social workers as a substitute for the term "at risk", used to describe children who have a good chance of falling between the cracks in society. The old term was neutral in that it didn't claim to place judgement on a child's circumstances, it merely flagged a problem. The new term by contrast explicitly states that the children in question are in their precarious position because something has been done TO them, thereby eliminating any trace of responsibility from the child.

Clearly we need to have compassion and empathy for children who lack the love, guidance, care and protection of a loving family. But there are two things that must be considered. First, not all "at risk" children are neglected by their families, and second, not all children with difficult backgrounds are at risk. At some point, all children regardless of their background must be taught to be responsible for themselves.

I see a great deal of harm in the attitude that this whole mess is entirely the responsibility of the officer and none of it belongs to the student. To me, that sends a very clear message to students all over the country that it is their right to behave exactly as they please in school, to ignore the demands of teachers, school officials and other authority figures, and that their education is entirely the responsibility of the school, and none of it their own.

And we wonder why we are falling behind the rest of the world in terms of education.

Finally, one last question has been raised over and over again in this discussion: "How would you react if that was your child?" To that let me state without any reservation that two of the most cherished people in my life are my son and daughter and if any harm came to them I would be devastated. While I refuse to lay a hand on either of my children in anger, I believe that in order to become engaged, successful individuals as well as good people, all children must be challenged to some extent in every aspect of their lives. At this point in their young lives, being a student is my children's job and they have the responsibility to do the best they can at that job. I think both of them understand that and both of them work very hard at school, even if they'd rather be doing something else.

To answer the question how would I feel if my kids were treated that way by a police officer: if one of my children at that age showed as little respect for their teacher, their education, their classmates and the police officer as the student in South Carolina did, then with much sorrow and regret I would have to say, yes, he or she would have had it coming.

Strike!

Which occupations in your opinion, are the most important to society? Nurses, doctors, police and firefighters, the people who keep us safe and healthy would certainly rank high on anybody's list. Judges, lawyers, yes even politicians, at least the honest ones, are the folks who keep the gears of society greased and well maintained. Then there are the jobs we take for granted, the ones that keep our communities moving, transportation and sanitation and other public sector workers whose impact is most deeply felt when they go out on strike.

I don't think we take teachers, members of a profession I would put at or near the top of that list, for granted. Most sensible people realize that while the other professions listed above deal mostly with the here and now, teachers are responsible for our future.

Right now parents in Chicago are forced to take notice of teachers more than usual as they have to scramble to figure out what to do with their children. Members of the Chicago Teacher's Union have gone on strike, keeping the 350,000 students (two of them mine) of the Chicago Public Schools home in mid-September for the first time in twenty five years. In this increasingly polarized society, people are taking strongly defined sides.

The notion that the Chicago Public Schools are failing to turn out successful students across the board, ready for the challenges of higher education and the increasing demands of employment in the 21st Century is a given. As a strike loomed over the summer, the finger pointers prepared to sharpen their weapon of choice.

On the one side are people who look at the mess in the city's public schools, the violence, the high drop out rate, the poor academic standards, and blame the schools and the teachers. It is the Teachers Union they say who is responsible for making bad teachers with seniority unaccountable and virtually untouchable at the expense of newer teachers who regardless of their energy, skill and dedication, are always the first to go in times of cutbacks.

On the other side are the supporters of the teachers, whose already difficult job is made worse they say by unfair wages, bad working conditions, high class sizes and the unfair practice of performance evaluations based upon student test scores. They blame the politicians and the school board.

Another issue of the teachers is the support of the Board of Education and the city government of putting money and energy into charter schools manned by non-union teachers. I've heard the following argument made by folks on both sides of the issue so many times it makes my head spin:

If they only put more money into the local neighborhood schools, we wouldn't have these problems.  

It would be truly nice if the problems faced in the public schools could be solved with more money. Unfortunately, like any social problem, they can't. Unlike charters or other public schools in the city with one kind of selective enrollment or other, local neighborhood schools have to take all children that come their way. They don't have the luxury of transferring out students who are disruptive to the student body because of behavioral problems. Unfortunately it's these students who demand the lion's share of time and resources of the school's staff, short changing the rest of the kids. In many schools across the city, a teacher's role is more babysitter than educator. In most cases, we're not talking about the one or two disruptive kids in a class that we all knew back when we went to school, but far more.

Then why not get rid of selective enrollment schools altogether and dilute the number of troubled kids per classroom? Well in a perfect world, that would be a nice solution. Even without the selective enrollment schools, there are a number of options for parents who take an involved role in the lives of their children. Unfortunately the most popular option is moving out of the city. The Chicago Public Schools have been hemorrhaging students with concerned parents for decades. In the sixties, I was one of them.

Despite working as a Chicago Public School teacher, my mother did not want me to go to one. After a two year stint in a parochial school which came after two years in a Chicago public school, we moved to the suburbs where I spent the rest of my school career in suburban public schools. Many of my friends had the same experience. By far the biggest reason given by middle class families for leaving the city in favor of the suburbs is the quality of education. Clearly it behooves the city and the Board of Education to create alternatives to neighborhood schools, it's a matter of survival.

Mayor Emanuel took the bull by the horns last spring when he declared the amount of time per day CPS students spent in school was far too short. He was right. In my son's school, the teachers complained non stop that there was no time in their five and three quarter hour school day to teach basic skills such as multiplication tables and writing in script. Many other subjects were skimmed over so quickly that it was almost pointless to go into them at all. The kids had a fifteen minute lunch break where they remained seated in their classrooms, forced to watch "educational" videos. And after the fourth grade, there was no recess. That last omission inspired a petition from parents to extend the school day by ten minutes, so the older kids could get a short recess. The principal put the issue to a vote by the teachers who rejected it nearly unanimously.

That all became moot when the mayor and the Board of Ed decreed that the school day had to be longer, in our school's case by an hour and fifteen minutes.

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that this action alone coming at contract time would set the wheels in motion for a strike. I know exactly how I'd feel being told I had to work an extra 6.25 hours per week with no extra pay, even if that included time for breaks. But since I don't have the privilege of collective bargaining where I work, I wouldn't have much of a choice, other than quitting.

One of the arguments put forth in the battle of rhetoric during this strike is that as professionals, teachers are paid much less than folks with comparable education working in the private sector. In the jingoistic world of social media, I've seen countless posts asking the question:

Who deserves more money, the people who are responsible for teaching our children, or the people working on Wall Street responsible for collapsing our economy?

That question while provocative, is utterly pointless. Whether it's just or not, public sector employees no matter what their worth to society, will never be compensated in the same way as people working in lucrative private sector jobs. As far as teaching jobs are concerned, public school teachers in fact do better than their counterparts in the private sector. The average public school teacher's salary in 2007 across the country according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics was $49.600 compared to $36,300 for private school teachers, a difference of almost 27 percent. As we've all heard this week, the average public school teacher salary in Chicago is around $75,000. Now that's certainly not a fortune and given the difficulty, many people wouldn't consider taking on a such a job for that kind of money. Still 75K is not bad given that teaching is in most cases a 9 1/2 month a year job.

The teachers in Chicago's public schools have many valid issues, most of the ones expressed by the CTU during this strike concern the children and their well being. I have no doubt the vast majority of the rank and file are entirely sincere about this.

That of course is why they became teachers in the first place. One certainly doesn't take the time and spend the money to go to college and beyond in the hopes of becoming an elementary or high school teacher, expecting to get rich.

One of the acts of the Union during this strike that rubbed me the wrong way was their decision to picket at the few schools that remained open as a service to parents who had no alternative means of daycare, and to fulfill their commitment to serving disadvantaged children breakfast and lunch. I've heard it pointed out that those two meals for some of these kids might be the only ones they'd get all day. This strike is adults feuding with adults, children shouldn't be forced to cross picket lines.

This brings up the difficult question of parental responsibility. If indeed the meals they receive from the Board of Ed are the only ones some children get all day, how it is possible for parents not to feed their children? Poverty is a terrible thing, I have never experienced it personally, but I am a parent and can't for the life of me believe that poverty can be used as an excuse to let your kids go hungry. If there are parents out there who are not responsible enough to provide even the most fundamental care of the children they brought into this world, they certainly can't be expected to do the slightly more involved tasks that prepare their kids for school such as reading to their children, or teaching basic skills like learning numbers and the alphabet. They can't be expected to teach their children values such as respect for others and respect for education. And no one God forbid, expects these parents to help their children with their homework. Small wonder so many children who are not prepared for school disrupt classes and make it hard for other students to learn properly, do well on achievement tests, and force schools to close and teachers to lose their jobs. It's a cruel and vicious cycle.

This problem is not unique to the poor. Far too many parents assume that schools are like factories that take raw material and turn it into a finely crafted product. They fail to see that a child's education begins at home and to effectively teach a child, parent(s) and teachers must work together as a team. Until that happens, schools, and more importantly children will fail.

The current strike has brought many important issues to the forefront and that alone makes it worthwhile to a degree. Many folks expect both sides will come to some kind of agreement this weekend. If that's the case, the teachers strike will have lasted one week and will not have disrupted life too significantly, no harm, no foul. However, if it lasts much longer, lives will be disrupted and the good will that exists now between the public and the teachers will not last. The union rhetoric that they're fighting big money and the powers that be, (aka The Man), resonates with many who themselves feel disenfranchised in our society. But the fact is it's the taxpayers who pay the teachers' salaries. In other words, you and I are The Man. There is not sufficient money in the public coffers to give the teachers everything they want, and even if there were, it would barely scratch the surface of all the problems facing public education in this city. On the flip side, achievement tests alone are an incomplete and unfair measure to judge the performance of schools and teachers. We need to find a better way.

Both the teachers and the city and its Board of Education have for the most part placed the interests of the children first. Both sides bring valid issues to the table, some I agree with, others not. I am a strong supporter of public education and refuse to support one side over the other. The teachers and their adversaries in this conflict are all professionals, trying to make the best of a very difficult situation. I honestly believe neither side is responsible for failing the children of Chicago.

As for the parents, well I'm not so sure.

The "answer" to our education woes...

is making computers available in every student.

Or so the argument goes. Here is an excellent article that refutes the "false promise of technology".

I agree with it completely.