One

Last week IntrepidEd News published another of my pieces. This one is about how schools are on the front line of the political and emotional turmoil of these times.

The world is in crisis and schools are in the middle of it. Schools are on the front line in an emotionally charged space where existential threats amplify parental worries about their children’s safety, both physically and emotionally.

But there’s an opportunity for direction.

It’s about DEI, and how – in spite of all the good intentions (and good work) – it can contribute to the problem because of the unexamined ideologies on which it is currently founded. I also have some proposals for how to fix it. Some might call them controversial.

I hope you’ll take a look and tell me what you think. 

Two

Because reading and watching the news can grind you down, here’s a Serenity Prayer from  Brian Bilston.

Three

I was taken by Jane’s review of Hilary Mantels’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost in Just Reading a Book 

Giving Up The Ghost

There are some wonderful bits about her childhood, her idiosyncratic family, and the experience of school.

I am four. Four already! Ivy Compton-Burnett describes a child with ‘an ambition to continue in his infancy’, and I have that ambition. I am fat and happy. When I am asked if I would like to give up my cot for a sweet little bed, the answer is ‘No.’ Every day I am busy: guarding, knight errantry, camel training. Why should I want to move on in life?

I thought I should be abandoned for ever, in the Palace of Silly Questions. Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?

There are council houses at the upper end of the settlement, built for people from Manchester who had been displaced by the war. ‘She comes from the council houses, you know,’ is the phrase used; which means, roughly, lock up your spoons. I guess the council houses have superior sanitation – indoor lavatories, hot water, baths perhaps – and the Hadfield people are always anxious to sneer at anyone who they think might be going soft.

My childhood ended, so, in this occluded way: darkened by the smoke from my mother’s burning boats.

Four

I got the book thanks to the New York Public Library which brings me to the yahoos and street thugs who tried to disrupt the Thanksgiving Parade and then turned their rage on the library.  Why? Simon Schama tweeted this: 

There are many reasons to be angry with Netanyahu’s government. But this behavior reeks of something else altogether.

Five

Thinking of anti-Semitism brings me back to my article Dismantling DEI, Ideology, and Some Modest Proposals to Reimagine Purpose I hope you take a look and give it a read (and a “Like” if you do). And you don’t have to agree with me. It’s just one person’s point of view – mine.  Agreeing to disagree without being disagreeable should be what it’s all about. 

The featured image is of the tools of The Garden People who tend the oasis of beauty that is the community garden in Riverside Park at 91st Street.