Tag: us

Library of Lost Dreams


This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven’t burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and “sadness” some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city’s school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people.
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by 1000s of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential.

that picture captures the state of american high school education perfectly

Payday Loans

Small Loans, a predatory lender owned by Money Tree, Inc, gave a $200 “payday loan” to a disabled, elderly, illiterate man and thereafter took in his benefits check for him and paid him a small “allowance” out of it, less the money they deducted as “repayment” on the loan. They took 1000s from the man over a period of years, bleeding him so badly that he ended up homeless, begging for power to run the machine that treated his chronic lung infection.

if the us banking system were not so decrepit this would not be an issue

Useless High School

Yet sometimes I was haunted. Would I have been happier, more emotionally adjusted, had I not skipped 3 grades? Did skipping rob me of 3 years of growing up? I thought back to Hong Kong International School, where I’d sat in a room full of administrators and told them why I wanted to leave 8th grade. I told them about social studies class, where we read the front-page articles from USA Today aloud, pausing to define such troublesome words as ‘distinct’ and ‘priority.’ And about science class, where we learned that Genesis, Native American creation myths, and the Big Bang theory were all equally true in their unique ways. And about my homeroom teacher, who wishing me to socialize, had banned me from reading books during free period and specifically from bringing math-related books to school. I told the administrators that I wanted to skip to 9th grade, in the more academically focused high school, and this I did. After the intoxication of my first skip, I didn’t ruminate about the 2nd or the 3rd. When my family returned to Pennsylvania the following year, I enrolled in 11th grade at Council Rock, sneakily counting my 9th-grade credits from Hong Kong as 10th-grade credits. The following year I absconded to a program for high school seniors at Clarkson University in upstate New York, and the following year, armed with college credits and a G.E.D., I came to Cornell.

This essay made me understand why american kids need college to get the education they should have gotten in high school, something that had always puzzled me.

Canadian slur

Recent revelations that the term “Canadian” is being used to replace racist names for black people have got a Texas assistant district attorney into trouble and have left others wondering what exactly it means to be labelled a Canadian in the American south.

looks like the south needs another attitude adjustment

Rule by Decree

I was somewhat surprised by these results. I’d kind of assumed that with the growing concentration of political power in Washington, and the expansion of the authority of executive departments into all sectors of American life, that executive orders would grow apace, but this is not actually the case. Measured by executive orders per year, America’s Great Dictator was none other than Teddy Roosevelt, who cranked out an average of 356 every year he spent in the White House. Presidents Coolidge and Hoover: often stereotyped as laissez-faire hands-off executives, averaged 225 and 242 executive orders per year, not far behind FDR’s 274. Eisenhower issued only 60 per year, and no president since has issued as many as 80 per year.

who knew. dubya is not the most authoritative president