Morpheal’s Social Commentary - April 24th, 2009 - Education Needs Change, South Africa the Industrial Engine for a United Africa, Star Trek - The Final Episode on Imagination’s Old Frontier ?, Taxation Reforms Need to Promote Basic Values, President Obama’s First 100 Days, Social and Cultural Recession Always Follows Economic.
UK FALLS TO 24th OF 29 EUROPEAN NATIONS - EDUCATION NEEDS CHANGES: (Educators, and Doctors Guilty of Gross Professional Negligence) The UK is reported to have fallen to 24th place of 29 European nations as to being a suitable place, providing properly, for the upbringing of children. What is the problem ? It is simple and relatively readily solvable. The care and upbringing of children is a community responsibility, and must involve education from the earliest stage in life, with community participation to assure the best opportunities for every potential. Where parents fall short it is up to educators to fill in the gap, and sometimes that means schools must feed children bread as well as knowledge, discipline and manners, values and goals, as well as facts and figures. For far too long we have insisted on dividing the this is their responsibility and this is our responsibility, dividing life into expert niches, with fought over boundaries and contentions that do nothing good for the victims of that divisiveness and failure to take a more comprehensive responsibility for the actual outcomes of what are proving to be failing policies and processes. Our society can no longer tolerate that failure or it will perish in its collective failure. Positive change will not really be achievable until educators are empowered to enforce disciplined proper conduct in educational institutions, and empowered to extend influence outside hours of instruction to create the fullest realization that education occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not only during the school day. The divide between home and school, schoolwork and free time, needs to be eliminated so lessons learned must be practiced in life outside in order to achieve passing merit. When children have to conduct themselves within certain standards, outside of school, in order to do adequately well within school, change will be achieved. Recently Prime Minister Brown announced a program of 14 to 22 weeks for community work for young school leavers. The program is good and necessary. However, the number of early school leavers is an indication insufficient psychological and remedial help is being made available prior to young people leaving school at 16 or shortly thereafter. It stresses a need for comprehensive psychological and academic assessment of those with poor grades and those seeking to leave prior to completing adequate education, with the development of plans to remedy problems that will inevitably affect later life and society. Every early school leaver in today’s society and every student with poor grades needs assessment. It is long past a time when what are usually serious behavioral, psychological, and social problems continue to be ignored as if early school leaving and school failure is simply a personal matter, not requiring intervention by society, for the common and future good of society, at a professional level. We cannot expect that early school leavers and children who are in any way failing during their school years, are doing so with adequate understanding of themselves and what is affecting them. Many are frustrated, alienated, and otherwise suffering from mental and sometimes physical issues that our society, its educators, and its medical community refuse to recognize and to deal with responsibly. That irresponsibility, amounts to gross professional negligence, and it needs to end. Supervised community involvement programs should be mandatory for all teenaged students, not only made into an offering for early school leavers That type of program, with proper assessments of individual needs will do more to fight crime and other negative effects on society, than most other potential steps towards building a new future. SOUTH AFRICA THE INDUSTRIAL ENGINE FOR A UNITED AFRICA: South Africa can be the industrial engine that empowers radical change in Africa, but it cannot be done from within the decades of struggle between capitalism and communism. Stepping outside that dialectic, South Africa can partner with the other African states, within a united Africa, to bring Africa into a future that does provide the means to alleviate their common problems. A new approach must be taken to allocating and managing resources. What I am referring to is the managing of the real wealth of Africa, not its paper currencies which are easily manipulated, and most easily undermined in a world system that does not measure future potential but always has looked backwards and thus has thwarted progress. Africa must look forward, and cannot allow a backward oriented system to dominate and subjugate Africa. The real, true, wealth, of Africa is in its people, its raw materials, and its means of production. There South Africa must necessarily play a pivotal and essential role. The management of that wealth must be a management of wealth for the common good, and thus for real progress across the whole united continent. There are those who have sought to undermine South Africa, because it is potentially the industrial heart of what could become a strong and self sufficient African Union. While South Africa remains quagmired in what it perceives as purely its own localized problems, that divisive power, threatens all of Africa's future, and its progress. Strong measures to strengthen South Africa are the necessary means towards its essential role in all of Africa meeting its own needs, and freeing itself from foreign servitude. STAR TREK - THE FINAL EPISODE ON IMAGINATION’S OLD FRONTIER ? Star Trek was a wonderful concept in its day, but it has grown technically and conceptually stale and dated. Like a Jules Verne classic, it had something worth saying, but it no longer provides an adequate vision of truly possible futures. The human imagination must boldly go where imagination has never gone before, and Star Trek can no longer provide that stimulus in a time when humanity is truly approaching the crossing of a very real star gate, with the equivalent of a very real warp engine. The new physics, being advanced during the past nearly 15 years, promises not only a star ship engine, but new sources of as yet undreamt of energy, which could revolutionize energy production, potentially making most of what we know about energy obsolete in the not too distant future. The new physics, with its increasing understanding of the universe we live in, with research such as that being pursued by the Cosmology Group and the Permimeter Institute (U. Of Waterloo, Canada), is at a theoretical stage, and needs renewed and greater emphasis in terms of funding for both theoretical and potentially applied science. It is in that science that the promise of the final frontier is most likely to be realized. TAXATION REFORMS NEED TO PROMOTE BASIC VALUES: Any government budget today needs to improve its taxing of excesses. Excess borrowing, excess profit, excess use (eg. frequent foreign travel), excessive luxury should be subject to a significant toll in support of far more programs to benefit those who have no excess, and often have not enough for their own needs. Rewards and penalties need to be built into the system to promote basic concepts such as having only two children, one family vehicle, and in support of reducing energy consumption. Ideally there needs to be a reduction or elimination of taxes on basic needs for energy, transportation, food and shelter, with introduction of upward scaled taxation depending upon the level of excess to those needs. The poor would pay less, with taxes eliminated. The average person would pay no more than before. The wealthy and those who choose more luxury than average, would pay the most. Keep in mind that any national economy need not shrink, and could grow, if the right corrective action is implemented. A much larger swing towards public works, away from proven irresponsibility of private enterprise as to doing what ought best to be done in terms of R&D, infrastructure, housing, education, and in fact all key areas. The ideology of creating false needs, to drive a consumer economy cannot succeed in the long term. In these dire straits the captains of industry must give over the helm to a government piloted economy. PRESIDENT OBAMA’S FIRST 100 DAYS: It is too early for a report card. It is uncertain what will in fact be accomplished. It is unclear as to exactly how much of that will be accomplished and measurably when it will be effectively accomplished. Politics is full of promises, and politics has long lost credibility. A new government's policies are measured by their long term effects and consistency in effective practice, not on the basis of the 100 first days in office. There remains far too much residual faith and reliance upon prior conservative practices. We have yet to see how the needs of the USA will be planned for, and managed, and what milestones will be set and when they will actually be met, not only to rescue the countless victims of the failed economic system and its false beliefs, but as a measure of what will be done to build the nation's education system, healthcare system, and in infrastructure. We need to see real plans, and real progress in areas such as energy, transportation, research and development, housing, conservation and the environment before we can award a passing grade to Barrack Obama's administration. That is a lot to expect, but it is more than diplomacy and window dressing. It is the whole future, and America's leading role in that future, that is at stake and the world will not tolerate diplomacy any longer, that remains without real and immediate substance. It will not tolerate any longer a leading nation's leadership that does not lead by example, rather than lead by its own example. SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RECESSION ALWAYS FOLLOWS ECONOMIC: Recessionary economics always makes society worse, in terms of less cooperative, less collaborative, far more money obsessed, and far more demeaning, deprecating, and sometimes violent. Of course accountants cannot find a formula to factor in the cultural and social damage that lasts for many more years after the economic recession ends. The one trough of the wave inevitably follows the other and the current waves are already coinciding, promising a vast wake of not only the already evident economic damage but also social and cultural destruction from which it is even harder for society to recover. It is in times such as these that the value of culture tends to be most deprecated and when in fact it is most needed, both as economic stimulus and as the primary means for supporting freedom of expression, and maintaining more positive means for the enjoyment of life, as well as being the major proponent for creative solutions and innovations. More usually culture is the advance engine that drives more practical invention forward, and not invention driving culture despite the illusions promoted by the rapid technical advance of our modern toys. However, better toys are not necessarily better imaginations, and better creative expressions and it is time to renew emphasis on cultural excellence, not simply mass accessible mediocrity as has largely become the tedious, routine, largely peer dictated, habits of many of those claiming to be culture producers. We must overcome the enforcement of cultural mediocrity, and our sciences and invention will gain immeasurably from that renewed progress in dreaming the as yet undreamt of, for futures as yet unimagined. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Black Focus Inc." group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Black-Focus-Inc?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
