Johnny doesn't do well in school. All he wants to do is smoke weed and write beats. Part Two

Last time, we were speaking about our hypothetical Johnnies and their hypothetical teachers. Their teachers’ attitudes ranged from the most selfish reasoning (I need my job) to the less so (instilling education, discipline etc.) At the most basic level, the more selfish the reason, the less likely it is to work. Keeping a job or making sure the necessary percentage of students graduate are not educational goals, they are agendas set by regulatory agencies or economic requirements.

Just for a second, imagine if a teacher’s job was a partnership aimed at helping Johnny find out what he’s good at, and how to go about doing it. In that process, a teacher might find out that Johnny likes working on cars with his older brother. This opens the opportunity for any number of dialogues about chemistry, physics or mathematics that will have relevance to Johnny. That relevance to Johnny is a much more effective motivator for Johnny to learn and apply what he has learned than arbitrary grades and punishments from people who neither understand nor respect him.

In that process, it might be part of the curriculum for Johnny to get work experience at a local body shop in his community. It might even be a shop that does restoration on classic cars, or works on low riders. This provides a real-world example of where Johnny’s passion can lead, helps him develop goals and aspirations and provides him with inspiring role models.

Following this same train of thought, what if you were Johnny? What would your ideal school have looked like? For that matter, what would your ideal job look like?

Your ideal home? Your ideal community? Your ideal life?

And thus we come full circle, to the issue I mentioned originally: what our lives should and could look like. Since I wrote Part One of this blog, we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrate widespread discontent with the current landscape of the majority of people’s lives. This indicates to me that this is a systemic problem. Johnny’s “bad behavior” at school, the huge number of people incarcerated, struggling with addiction or simply zoning out on reality shows after work, these are symptoms of the same problem.

We are standing at a point in history where the façade is cracking. Most Americans no longer feel they can aspire to the American Dream. And that dream was a false one created by corporate manipulation of popular media, conspicuous consumption and the wholesale plundering of natural resources without concern for consequences.

American needs a new dream, one in concert with the rest of the world, one which is inclusive, inspiring and self-perpetuating, rather than generated, promoted and marketed to serve the interests of a moneyed oligarchy. Prosperity must be redefined at a societal level and the dialogue needs to begin on every street corner. I believe that every one of us has been forced by this society into abdicating our dream of self-fulfillment. In many cases, I think we have been so crippled in our thought processes that what we dream of is not truly ours. We dream of “having a safe place to raise my kids” or of “winning the lottery” – dreams formed from fear or lack - or, sadly, the new iPhone 4S.

How many of these gadgets are simply new devices to help us cope with our alienation or to navigate an impersonal society that no longer serves us at the personal or community level? We use facebook as a desperate lunge for human contact while we decompress from our frantic day in the rat race.

More importantly, I think this dialogue can and must also occur at the highest levels. Our economy, political system and basic infrastructures will not survive if there is not major reform. Corporations, medical practitioners, psychologists and physicists are all beginning to converge on some of the fundamental questions of existence. What wellbeing really is, what abundance is and how we create it on the individual or group level is no longer an esoteric concern.

Our lives and our futures are at stake.

Food for thought:

www.oecd.org/betterlifeindex

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