Benefiting From the Injustice

Recently I have been thinking about the short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula  K. LeGuin. It is a story about a Utopian society that relies on the misery of one child. Everyone in Omealas knows the child exists and understands that their happiness relies on the misery of that child. Some leave but most stay. It is, to me, an obvious analogy of our own lives. After watching The End of Poverty?, I am so aware of how much we do have. I often tell myself that trying to live sustainably, besides being hard and time consuming is simply too expensive. I am not rich, and organic, humanely raised food is expensive. Beyond the expense is the difficulty in ascertaining where my food actually comes from. The labels are so deliberately misleading.
Watching The End of Poverty? was in fact a real wake up call for me. I really have so much. So much that I find it difficult to find places to put everything, there is simply not enough room in my house. And I have come to realize that this stuff, these material goods have become like an anesthetic or a drug. My stuff keeps me sedated, keeps me locked into this self designed cage. It helps me tell myself the story that I don't have enough and I am incapable of changing society. It doesn't help me sleep, it keeps me unaware. Well, not really. I am aware, but I am still maintaining my position. As I try to find my way out, try to rethink a culture and society I have been born into and contribute to the existence of, I find myself tangled in conversations I don't have the answers for. Both with myself and with others.
I feel like the young child who wakes before the rest of the family. Although I am trying to be awake without bothering anyone else, it is just too difficult. The silence is too uncomfortable and the life of what I know just wants to continue spreading.
So here I am, pondering not why the world is so unjust, but rather my own privilege and how I continue to allow the injustice. How I actually benefit from the way the world is structured. How my own ego and need to feel accomplished have been defined by the wrong measure. And of course, the hardest thoughts of all: What am I going to do about it? What am I willing to change?
For me, I guess working from the environmental road has been the easiest. However, there isn't one road. None of this work can be done in isolation. Equity, environment, humanity - our own -my own humanity are deeply connected.

Thinking On Education

Here is a link to an animated talk by Sir Ken Robinson. I have been aware of the economic, industrial template, of education for a while now.  This is the first time I've seen it connected with the Enlightenment model. As a product of parochial and public schools in the seventies and eighties, this was an ingrained mentality. Those who could do well in the school system and raise their social standard and those who couldn't.  I had always seen the two intertwined, most children of factory workers were educated to replace their factory worker parents, children from a higher economic standard were educated for college.
Reflecting on this, I think about how I define what it means to be educated and how that has changed over the years. There are reams of papers and vats of books that almost parallel my thought evolution from the Core Curriculum to Howard Gardner's Intelligences, to even Sir Ken Robinson's writings. There still remains a constant struggle over development, growth and talents of children against necessary skills and knowledge.
As a product of a blue collar education, there was a sense that there were pieces of information that students from better schools were getting and that if I could locate and master this information I could cross the divide. What was missing from this scavenger hunt was the platform for the learning process. It wasn't necessarily the content, although there were large missing chunks.  I never read any of the classics until college and read maybe four Shakespeare plays in all of high school. It was in fact, the vehicle of the content. The way the content is used to help children learn to analyze information, understand events and new information relevant to what they know.  Understanding how to find faults of logic, however small, and unpack them, even if it meant the whole structure fell. This template was the large treasure, that was missing in the educational system.
If I'm not alone in this sort of misunderstanding of what it means to be educated throughout a lifetime, and I don't think I am, I take a large leap here and think it is possible that many parents also feel this way.  Even if the education they received did give them more than the higher content.
I can't let this post go without addressing the ADHD. I do think many children are over medicated but I don't think denying a possible growing problem of ADHD is the answer. This is the first time I've seen this ADHD map of the United States. It is too deep a problem, and too serious for many children to disregard such a statistic so whimsically, funny as it was. IF this is true, then maybe we should start finding reasons, instead of the assumption that we medicate students to keep them quiet. Perhaps there is a fine line of what is the optimal dose, or perhaps there is an environmental factor that isn't being considered here, such as pesticides in foods.(Links for ADHD & Pesticides, a place to start.) There is too little information to dismiss this, and it is too large of an innuendo in the animation to be ignored.
So, as always, I am interested to hear what your reflections are on your education and your children's.  How do you evaluate a good system? What do you think your own educational experience did for you, and what are you looking for in your child's?