Cheap Children

[donsu]

“We have expensive children and we have cheap children.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061205_paul_cummins_cheap_children/


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Actually, I believe this is true not just in the USA but all over the world. We have children in every country who enjoy every blessing known, and yet we have other children that each nation and culture allows to live in abject poverty and then to die—currently at the rate of more than 20,000 a day.

Malnutrition, diarrhea, starvation, AIDS, a host of preventable diseases. Cheap children. Children mostly of color. Children doomed the day they are born to die young and to die miserably. Somehow our species, which has the resources and the wealth to prevent almost all of these deprivations and deaths, somehow our species, our power structures and our class divisions lack the will to apply our collective resources and wealth to prevent “cheap children” from suffering and from death.

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What is desperately needed in education are teachers and principals committed to engaging the students and schools in wild debate and discussion on research and action programs dealing with the critical issues of our times. Currently, we bore our children and youths to death and then wonder why they drop out in droves. I believe if we confronted issues of life-and-death importance, our students would become engaged in their own education. How else are we to save our planet and ourselves if the young do not gain a conscious, passionate desire to act and to lead?

The late 20th century American poet William Stafford provides us with a startling image and challenge. In his poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” he states that elephants parade each holding the other’s tail: “...but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park.” If the leadership strays, we all “get lost in the dark.” Our salvation lies not in standardization and standardized tests. As Stafford writes, “ ... it is important that awake people be awake.”
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20,000 a day is probably a low number

[The2ndWheel]

1. They're not just cheap, they're not needed

Most of us aren't needed.

"our power structures and our class divisions lack the will"

No, they weren't created to do it. It's not about will. They don't function that way.

"If the leadership strays, we all “get lost in the dark.” Our salvation lies not in standardization and standardized tests."

But if we all follow the leader, isn't that standardization?

[Warpy]

2. "Useless eaters" is how the servants of the wealthy put it

I await the tumbrils, they're way overdue. I already know how to knit.