culture, politics, and education

[Skip Zilla]

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 how it might be a subject for exploration constructively even 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.