Interesting Stuff About Movies
No, despite what many believe, Thomas Edison did not invent the movie projector. He "bought" invention rights.
The first celluloid roll film came into being at the hand of Episcopalian minister Hannibal Goodwin, of Newark, New Jersey, USA. His great idea didn't go far because he couldn't figure out what to do with it.
Edison's company developed the first movie camera, the Kinetograph, which had the ability to make use of Goodwin's invention, in 1891. But the company and Edison himself still could not project images from the film so that a mass audience could see them. They tried to invent a machine to play back what had been recorded on film, but had no success.
Being the enterprising fellow he was, Edison bought the manufacturing rights to a machine called the Vitascope. An interesting clause to the deal gave Edison the right to claim that he had invented it. By the way, Edison didn't invent the light bulb either, he just took someone else's invention and developed a commercially viable bulb.
The Vitascope and its successors found a ready market at fairs and certain commercial establishments where customers lined up to pay to peer into a visor device where they could see the first early movies, still without sound. To make what customers saw more attractive, the movies often included what were known at the time as "cooch" dancers, creating what thereafter was known as a "peep show," as peeping Toms watched scantily clad women strut their stuff.
Another film loop (the projectors didn't need a projectionist--the films were short, from 30 seconds to three minutes) showed the reenactment of the execution by decapitation of Mary Queen of Scots, arguably the first horror film.
Peep shows on the Kinetoscopes in movie parlours ended in 1908 after complaints in New York City about indecency. Having developed a taste for seeing women without their bustles and long dresses, the Peeping Toms moved elsewhere, thus providing another example where politically correct advocates caused laws to pass which resulted in development of an industry of Blue Movies. We know them today as porn movies.
Sound came along later with a film short showing two men dancing as creator William Kennedy Laurie Dickson played a violin. Dickson synchronized the sound with the film, arguably creating the first sound movie. The first widely recognized "talkie" came three decades later with a full length feature, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson in a 1925 Broadway musical released on film in 1927. George Jessel had signed to play the role until he learned he would have to sing on film. The "talkies" ended Jessel's film career the way it ended other silent movie careers of such greats as Rudolf Valentino.
Sound movies required so many different sounds not required in live theatre that new techniques had to be devised to have some sounds simulate other sounds. Radio, the most popular entertainment of the day, benefited from sound effects as well for their dramas. Need the sound of crunchy snow? A boot pushed into ice layered with corn starch did the trick. Flapping leather gloves provided the sound of birds in flight.
Sound effects people had no end of tricks for creating the illusions they needed. A horror movie needing a human head being squished had the sound man squashing the frozen head of lettuce behind the scenes. Sometimes a sound effect worked simply because it went with the visual presentation and viewers believed what they wanted to believe. How many coconuts died in the cause of making the sound of galloping horses in cowboy films?
Some sounds need the real thing as no substitutes work. People talking in crowds, for example. "Walla" is the term for crowd murmur. A few people standing well back from a microphone, each saying "walla, walla, walla," sounds like a crowd. So does repetition of "rhubarb." However, this is not as simple as it sounds. People must say their own "walla, walla, walla" at a different rate than everyone else or it turns into a chant. People naturally synchronize their voices with those of others, given the chance, resulting in a choir-like chant of "walla, walla, walla."
Of course black and white film came first, with the much more expensive colour film only becoming popular when movie budgets became much larger. One early attempt at colour simulation, Kinemacolor, had a black and white movie played through rotating green and red filters. As artificial as it sounds, remember that people's brains will fill in the blanks or correct what they believe are errors in their own visual clues coming from their eyes.
Film creators have become masters of illusion. In The Ten Commandments, for example, movie makers filmed water pouring into a huge tank, then reversed the film to give the effect of the waters of the Red Sea parting for Moses. With digital effects, more illusion than ever is possible.
In The American President, for example, the scene with the Michael Douglas character entering the House of Representatives to deliver the State of the Union address showed the president shaking hands with members of Congress. The scene was shot with extras in place, clapping with the arrival of their leader, then the faces of the extras were replaced digitally with the faces of real congressmen. Crowd scenes and battle scenes can be shot with a handful of real people.
Some things about modern movies can be a tad too real. When the movie Earthquake, with bone-rattling Sensurround, premiered the seats shook so much that one patron cracked a rib.
Shaking may not be the worst thing in a movie theatre. Pick yourself up a large popcorn with butter and you could pack in 1,600 calories in a single serving. Diet cola with its heavy dose of aspartame (its long term effects on disease risk and possible genetic impact are under study) may not be the best choice of beverage.
Action films often depend on fire scenes (cars loaded with gasoline exploded, buildings bombed) for effect. For stunt actors, fire protection can be a chilly job. They coat their skin first with a fire retardant gel--a chilling experience in itself--then add layers of Nomex underwear saturated with the same gel. The top layer consists of flammable rubber cement (they have to appear to burn, remember).
Fire scenes are usually shot in as few takes as possible. The risk of getting singed by flames all over their bodies aside, inhaling rubber cement fumes ranks right up there with the most unhealthy parts of their job.
Funny things happen in making movies. At least they're funny after the problems are solved. In Jaws, for example, the mechanical shark did its own share of acting up. At one point its hydraulics had rusted so badly from the salt water that director Stephen Spielberg had to adapt quickly or waste a fortune on lost time. He chose to shoot the remaining shark scenes from the shark's point of view.
Four enterprising young Canadians aspiring to be film moguls had great ideas for the IMAX concept, but insufficient cash. After inviting Japanese investors to a meeting in their "offices," they quickly rented office space, furnished it in classy style with rented stuff, then entertained as if they had everything they needed. it worked. The Japanese wanted in. Fuji Bank bankrolled the whole venture.
Then the boys had to put their ideas to the test. They created a system with film ten times the size of 35 mm celluloid and camera(s) and projectors to boot, enough to fill a screen six stories high. With a screen that curves around the sides slightly, IMAX movie goers quite rightly have the feeling of being "in the movie."
The IMAX projector weighs as much as a male hippo, costs about $5 million. It's bulb is so bright that if pointed toward the sky it could be seen by astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station.
Speaking of the ISS, what sorts of movies do they have for the viewing pleasure of the space dwellers and their $10 million a shot civilian visitors? As you might expect, Apollo 13 and Armageddon are available. Around the World in 80 Days as well.
And So I Married an Axe Murderer too. Do we really want to know who chose that one?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids need to learn and when, not just what ivory tower curriculum writers think teachers should teach.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary source: Discover, June 2009]
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Monday, September 14, 2009
Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Night The Moon Will Appear Square
Those who understand only what can be explained understand very little.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Austrian writer of psychological novels (1830-1916)
We live in a world molded to a great extent by both science and economics. They don't control our moment to moment existence, but they form the framework around which we tend to build our belief system.
For example, science creates a drug and physicians (some of whom derive a commission by prescribing that drug) prescribe it, while the patients accept that taking the prescribed drug must be necessary as the only way to heal because a respected professional recommended it. We believe because we trust the source, or think we must.
Almost every major newscast on radio and television includes a stock market report even though its content bears extremely little on everyone but a few who may be listening. However, many listeners will believe that the rise or fall of the share price for Microsoft or Exxon has some magical effect on something that influences their lives, somewhere.
Scientists and economists, indeed all people in the traditional professions, work with factors they can understand and manipulate (or could if they had the power). The scientific method (hypothesis, testing, conclusion) depends on the users having factors they understand and can work with ("massage" in the case of economists). What they don't understand, they can't manipulate, thus isn't important.
That extends to what isn't important to them--as they have so much influence on our lives--being considered as non-existent or unimportant to us. In fact, some people claim the inability to prove the existence of God using scientific method as evidence, even as proof, that God does not exist.
That thinking is an easy sell for people who believe that science has the answers (proofs) and for those who understand just how much fraud has been perpetrated on simple minded people over the past millennia of human history.
Just as the fact that because someone robbed a bank means that banks are unsafe places to save our money cannot be accepted as valid by most people, the perpetration of fraudulent "facts" and imagined history on people who will not take the trouble to investigate for themselves should not make anyone believe that God does not exist. Even if science searches for evidence of God, but in places where God has no interest, though people have made fantastic claims about God working in these ways, that does not prove that God does not exist.
The article is not about the existence of God, but about how easily people's minds and belief sets can be influenced by convincing arguments made by determined people.
If I were to tell you that our moon will appear as a square rather than as its usual disk on August 1, a considerable number of people would make a point of checking out the sky on that date.
Because they believe the moon will appear square? No, because they believe me as someone with authority on one subject, so I might have expertise in another. How many predictions of Armageddon go unfulfilled each year around the world, despite the fact that many people prepared for the Final Event in each case?
In the investment business there is a saying that "If it sounds too good to be true, it likely is." That should apply to what we believe as well.
Asking followers to "just believe" or to "have faith" that something that sounds unbelievable is real or true should be a tipoff that a fraud is in progress. Or at least a distortion of reality. Though there are many examples of this in religions, more happen every day in television commercials, in unsolicited mail in our mail boxes and email inboxes, even in movie promos that precede the feature we went to watch.
Those who understand only what can be explained not only understand very little, as our Austrian writer stated, it's more important for us to know that they may not be capable of understanding more than they can manipulate in their minds. They form beliefs based on what they can and cannot manipulate with their minds.
Let's take a common example that has been foisted on us for decades. Science fiction movies have made us believe that if "aliens" came to earth from a distant planet, they would almost certainly want to harm us, to obliterate us. According to these movies, the only viable action we should take is to destroy them as soon and as completely as possible.
Other movies have humans travelling through space to other planets and approaching them in peace, with the objectives to make contact, to share and to help them if we can.
Apparently in the movie business only humans are civilized enough to travel with peaceful intentions. Peace, just like here on earth, right?
Those two possible scenarios have been repeated dozens of times in movies, even though together they are not just hypocritical, they are absurd. Yet one of our major forms of entertainment perpetrates this absurdity on us again and again. We go in peace, everyone else comes to destroy us. We find enemies not just on earth, but we invent them in space.
If Moses or Jesus of Nazareth or the great prophet of Islam were to return to earth today, how long would they last before they were killed in some manner or another? Half the people alive in the world today purport to believe in these people and to follow their ways and their words (which differ very little, except in ritual). You can be certain that one of the "believers" would be the murderer, not someone who doesn't believe in that person in the first place.
Do we really believe that peace is possible in the world? Our media don't present us that way. Should the real heroes not be those who can bring peace where none existed before, not those who can defeat one invented enemy after another? Which is the greater accomplishment, bringing peace or making war? Heroes should save lives, not destroy them.
If we will ever make sense of a world that is trying to twist our minds into knots, we need to teach children how to think critically and to not be bamboozled by frauds, charlatans and propagandists. We could never teach the older ones, the adults, because they already believe what they have been told to believe.
Beliefs are at the centre of the life of every human. Everyone accepts that we need to teach beliefs to children. I propose that we need to teach how to distinguish among that fraudulent claims made by many people and many sources about what we should believe. The only way that could succeed would be to teach children before their minds get tangled, twisted, molded.
That change would not be hard to enact. But we can't expect schools to change themselves because teachers get paid to teach what is on the curriculum and teachers rarely have the final say about what goes on the curriculum.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can avoid becoming automatons, products of corporate interests.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Austrian writer of psychological novels (1830-1916)
We live in a world molded to a great extent by both science and economics. They don't control our moment to moment existence, but they form the framework around which we tend to build our belief system.
For example, science creates a drug and physicians (some of whom derive a commission by prescribing that drug) prescribe it, while the patients accept that taking the prescribed drug must be necessary as the only way to heal because a respected professional recommended it. We believe because we trust the source, or think we must.
Almost every major newscast on radio and television includes a stock market report even though its content bears extremely little on everyone but a few who may be listening. However, many listeners will believe that the rise or fall of the share price for Microsoft or Exxon has some magical effect on something that influences their lives, somewhere.
Scientists and economists, indeed all people in the traditional professions, work with factors they can understand and manipulate (or could if they had the power). The scientific method (hypothesis, testing, conclusion) depends on the users having factors they understand and can work with ("massage" in the case of economists). What they don't understand, they can't manipulate, thus isn't important.
That extends to what isn't important to them--as they have so much influence on our lives--being considered as non-existent or unimportant to us. In fact, some people claim the inability to prove the existence of God using scientific method as evidence, even as proof, that God does not exist.
That thinking is an easy sell for people who believe that science has the answers (proofs) and for those who understand just how much fraud has been perpetrated on simple minded people over the past millennia of human history.
Just as the fact that because someone robbed a bank means that banks are unsafe places to save our money cannot be accepted as valid by most people, the perpetration of fraudulent "facts" and imagined history on people who will not take the trouble to investigate for themselves should not make anyone believe that God does not exist. Even if science searches for evidence of God, but in places where God has no interest, though people have made fantastic claims about God working in these ways, that does not prove that God does not exist.
The article is not about the existence of God, but about how easily people's minds and belief sets can be influenced by convincing arguments made by determined people.
If I were to tell you that our moon will appear as a square rather than as its usual disk on August 1, a considerable number of people would make a point of checking out the sky on that date.
Because they believe the moon will appear square? No, because they believe me as someone with authority on one subject, so I might have expertise in another. How many predictions of Armageddon go unfulfilled each year around the world, despite the fact that many people prepared for the Final Event in each case?
In the investment business there is a saying that "If it sounds too good to be true, it likely is." That should apply to what we believe as well.
Asking followers to "just believe" or to "have faith" that something that sounds unbelievable is real or true should be a tipoff that a fraud is in progress. Or at least a distortion of reality. Though there are many examples of this in religions, more happen every day in television commercials, in unsolicited mail in our mail boxes and email inboxes, even in movie promos that precede the feature we went to watch.
Those who understand only what can be explained not only understand very little, as our Austrian writer stated, it's more important for us to know that they may not be capable of understanding more than they can manipulate in their minds. They form beliefs based on what they can and cannot manipulate with their minds.
Let's take a common example that has been foisted on us for decades. Science fiction movies have made us believe that if "aliens" came to earth from a distant planet, they would almost certainly want to harm us, to obliterate us. According to these movies, the only viable action we should take is to destroy them as soon and as completely as possible.
Other movies have humans travelling through space to other planets and approaching them in peace, with the objectives to make contact, to share and to help them if we can.
Apparently in the movie business only humans are civilized enough to travel with peaceful intentions. Peace, just like here on earth, right?
Those two possible scenarios have been repeated dozens of times in movies, even though together they are not just hypocritical, they are absurd. Yet one of our major forms of entertainment perpetrates this absurdity on us again and again. We go in peace, everyone else comes to destroy us. We find enemies not just on earth, but we invent them in space.
If Moses or Jesus of Nazareth or the great prophet of Islam were to return to earth today, how long would they last before they were killed in some manner or another? Half the people alive in the world today purport to believe in these people and to follow their ways and their words (which differ very little, except in ritual). You can be certain that one of the "believers" would be the murderer, not someone who doesn't believe in that person in the first place.
Do we really believe that peace is possible in the world? Our media don't present us that way. Should the real heroes not be those who can bring peace where none existed before, not those who can defeat one invented enemy after another? Which is the greater accomplishment, bringing peace or making war? Heroes should save lives, not destroy them.
If we will ever make sense of a world that is trying to twist our minds into knots, we need to teach children how to think critically and to not be bamboozled by frauds, charlatans and propagandists. We could never teach the older ones, the adults, because they already believe what they have been told to believe.
Beliefs are at the centre of the life of every human. Everyone accepts that we need to teach beliefs to children. I propose that we need to teach how to distinguish among that fraudulent claims made by many people and many sources about what we should believe. The only way that could succeed would be to teach children before their minds get tangled, twisted, molded.
That change would not be hard to enact. But we can't expect schools to change themselves because teachers get paid to teach what is on the curriculum and teachers rarely have the final say about what goes on the curriculum.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can avoid becoming automatons, products of corporate interests.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, July 04, 2008
Do You Know Who's Bending Your Mind?
By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic Americaneducation. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick alock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety ofsophisticated armaments.
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Could Baker possibly be right? Is it that easy? Surely making contact with people who could facilitate any of the illegal situations he mentioned would prevent most people from even considering the acts as possibilities.
Children six years old can find people who will sell them marijuana and other drugs, right outside of their schools in some cases.
Anyone who knows how to use the internet can contact someone who will provide them with anything. Of course you, who are reading this, would not likely search for a web site that offers plans to make a dirty bomb, or access to fissionable materials, or war weapons of any description. You don't want those things, so you assume that no one else does either, other than very bad people.
You may even assume that web sites that offer free education within a warm brotherly group of people who will support the joiner every step of the way (perhaps until the person ignites the explosives strapped to his or her chest) are monitored by government agencies somewhere. And they are. Some. But new ones come into existence every day.
No law enforcement agency can act to indict until they gather enough evidence to prosecute the perpetrators and put them behind bars. How often do you hear of that happening? Rarely, if ever? Yet there are dozens of sites waiting to "help" people out there. (A majority of suicide bombers are rural young people who go to the city and find thsemselves lonely, without jobs or friends.)
Russell Baker was only partly right about television being the primary source for "basic American education." What the television also purveys is propaganda (called advertising) designed to help people fall into a dependent lifestyle where they believe they need various kinds of products to make them beautiful or young, or at least to smell good all day long.
Television has nothing on the internet as a source for information and even products that most of us would call totally anti-social.
In general, what we call terrorists gather together into cults based on contacts they make over the internet. Criminals source whatever materials they need without having to see the supplier using the internet. Charitable organizations find people willing to contribute to worthy causes on the internet, though the organizations themselves may be bankers for terrorist organizations.
Organized crime gangs are the source for most of the spam we receive in our email inboxes. Yes, that same spam that takes so much of your time to delete. Yes, including the young girls who are bored and want to talk to lonely men by email: "Here's my email address!" Write so I can learn that yours is a valid address. Yes, the same outfits that send heart wrenching messages with cutesy graphics that ask you to forward it to everyone you know (and, by the way, never remove the email addresses that came with them because those emails call home to the gangs with all those addresses).
Does that mean we should close down the internet entirely and return to a simpler time? It couldn't happen. For one thing, the very organized crime gangs that send the spam and gather personal information have enough money to bribe enough politicians and bureaucrats to prevent the internet from being closed down.
Should we have a new version of the internet that is monitored by authorities to ensure that nothing bad is available to people? A new form of internet is coming, but it won't have those safeguards. The bad guys will cry "invasion of privacy" and "loss of our constitutional freedoms" in the media and in advertising so no future internet will ever be safe. They will get good people they can dupe to do the crying job for them.
I get very little spam on my computer. I could count on my fingers the number of times it gets hit with viruses, spyware or malware. Why? Because I know what to expect from the internet and I avoid the kinds of activities that will cause me grief.
Can everyone's computer be as free of viruses, malware, spam, trojans and disk-destroying codes as mine? Yes. That would require everyone to learn what I know and what others who operate their computers safely on the internet know.
Having everyone know that much requires our education systems to teach this information. It requires parents to encourage school boards to put it in their curriculum. Parents will never know enough and will never be able to keep up with advancements in technology (including rogue computer code) so it would have to be taught in classrooms.
That's not likely to happen either. Our culture teaches us not to take responsibility for anyone but ourselves. And maybe our children, which some do obsessively, making the kids permanently paranoid. Look at the number of people who daily harm their own health with tobacco, drugs, alcohol, lack of exercise and self-adopted stress to see that many people don't even look after their own best interests.
Don't expect those people to help you change school curriculum. Or to change anything.
When was the last time someone consulted you about what should be placed on the curriculum of the schools in your area? Likely never. A few people make decisions like those with very little input from outside, even from politicians.
Find out who makes the major decisions within your local school system, your department or ministry of education. Propose these ideas at political meetings where politicians meet the people, such as before elections. Speak to the leaders of Home and School associations in your area. These people can all work behind the scenes to make changes happen.
Don't go to the head of the local elected school board or the director of the local school system. These people effectively have no influence over curriculum decisions. They will listen to you, then ignore your requests.
Curriculum change is a political issue, not an education issue. If you want change, you must act in a political way. Acting in a reasonable way with well reasoned arguments with the wrong people (those who don't matter) will gain you nothing but frustration.
It doesn't require a revolution to change school curriculum. It requires people to talk about the subject they want changed, and talk and talk until enough people know about the need for change that the decision makers in the back rooms decide it's a good idea.
Change is hard, which is why school curriculum changes very little over long periods of time (though its methods of presentation change). Talking is easy.
So talk. Tell others you talk to to spread the word around as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who won't be naive victims of bad guys who sound really good on the television or over the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Could Baker possibly be right? Is it that easy? Surely making contact with people who could facilitate any of the illegal situations he mentioned would prevent most people from even considering the acts as possibilities.
Children six years old can find people who will sell them marijuana and other drugs, right outside of their schools in some cases.
Anyone who knows how to use the internet can contact someone who will provide them with anything. Of course you, who are reading this, would not likely search for a web site that offers plans to make a dirty bomb, or access to fissionable materials, or war weapons of any description. You don't want those things, so you assume that no one else does either, other than very bad people.
You may even assume that web sites that offer free education within a warm brotherly group of people who will support the joiner every step of the way (perhaps until the person ignites the explosives strapped to his or her chest) are monitored by government agencies somewhere. And they are. Some. But new ones come into existence every day.
No law enforcement agency can act to indict until they gather enough evidence to prosecute the perpetrators and put them behind bars. How often do you hear of that happening? Rarely, if ever? Yet there are dozens of sites waiting to "help" people out there. (A majority of suicide bombers are rural young people who go to the city and find thsemselves lonely, without jobs or friends.)
Russell Baker was only partly right about television being the primary source for "basic American education." What the television also purveys is propaganda (called advertising) designed to help people fall into a dependent lifestyle where they believe they need various kinds of products to make them beautiful or young, or at least to smell good all day long.
Television has nothing on the internet as a source for information and even products that most of us would call totally anti-social.
In general, what we call terrorists gather together into cults based on contacts they make over the internet. Criminals source whatever materials they need without having to see the supplier using the internet. Charitable organizations find people willing to contribute to worthy causes on the internet, though the organizations themselves may be bankers for terrorist organizations.
Organized crime gangs are the source for most of the spam we receive in our email inboxes. Yes, that same spam that takes so much of your time to delete. Yes, including the young girls who are bored and want to talk to lonely men by email: "Here's my email address!" Write so I can learn that yours is a valid address. Yes, the same outfits that send heart wrenching messages with cutesy graphics that ask you to forward it to everyone you know (and, by the way, never remove the email addresses that came with them because those emails call home to the gangs with all those addresses).
Does that mean we should close down the internet entirely and return to a simpler time? It couldn't happen. For one thing, the very organized crime gangs that send the spam and gather personal information have enough money to bribe enough politicians and bureaucrats to prevent the internet from being closed down.
Should we have a new version of the internet that is monitored by authorities to ensure that nothing bad is available to people? A new form of internet is coming, but it won't have those safeguards. The bad guys will cry "invasion of privacy" and "loss of our constitutional freedoms" in the media and in advertising so no future internet will ever be safe. They will get good people they can dupe to do the crying job for them.
I get very little spam on my computer. I could count on my fingers the number of times it gets hit with viruses, spyware or malware. Why? Because I know what to expect from the internet and I avoid the kinds of activities that will cause me grief.
Can everyone's computer be as free of viruses, malware, spam, trojans and disk-destroying codes as mine? Yes. That would require everyone to learn what I know and what others who operate their computers safely on the internet know.
Having everyone know that much requires our education systems to teach this information. It requires parents to encourage school boards to put it in their curriculum. Parents will never know enough and will never be able to keep up with advancements in technology (including rogue computer code) so it would have to be taught in classrooms.
That's not likely to happen either. Our culture teaches us not to take responsibility for anyone but ourselves. And maybe our children, which some do obsessively, making the kids permanently paranoid. Look at the number of people who daily harm their own health with tobacco, drugs, alcohol, lack of exercise and self-adopted stress to see that many people don't even look after their own best interests.
Don't expect those people to help you change school curriculum. Or to change anything.
When was the last time someone consulted you about what should be placed on the curriculum of the schools in your area? Likely never. A few people make decisions like those with very little input from outside, even from politicians.
Find out who makes the major decisions within your local school system, your department or ministry of education. Propose these ideas at political meetings where politicians meet the people, such as before elections. Speak to the leaders of Home and School associations in your area. These people can all work behind the scenes to make changes happen.
Don't go to the head of the local elected school board or the director of the local school system. These people effectively have no influence over curriculum decisions. They will listen to you, then ignore your requests.
Curriculum change is a political issue, not an education issue. If you want change, you must act in a political way. Acting in a reasonable way with well reasoned arguments with the wrong people (those who don't matter) will gain you nothing but frustration.
It doesn't require a revolution to change school curriculum. It requires people to talk about the subject they want changed, and talk and talk until enough people know about the need for change that the decision makers in the back rooms decide it's a good idea.
Change is hard, which is why school curriculum changes very little over long periods of time (though its methods of presentation change). Talking is easy.
So talk. Tell others you talk to to spread the word around as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who won't be naive victims of bad guys who sound really good on the television or over the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Civilization Progresses As We Help Each Other
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. - John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
This opinion enters the realm of morality. Only in part does it involve legal repercussions if inaction causes injury to others. Morality and law often overlap (by design), though mostly in the area of criminal law.
If you were to stand by watching another person being beaten or killed, you might be charged if you could have done something to prevent it but did not.
At its core, this dual responsibility (guilty by action or inaction) raises the question of to what degree we are each our brother's keeper. That is, what is our responsibility to help someone who may not have helped us if the roles were reversed? Are we both responsible to and for each other and what are the consequences of not acting?
In an urban environment where helping others has become less common than it was in pioneer days or when people were spread across the land more evenly and people helped each other because they knew that one day they were need help themselves, many of us give little thought to the possibility of helping others.
Charities must beg for donations because people do not have a natural inclination to give money to help others. Yet stories of heroism where one person has risked death or made a great commitment to help another reach the news media as well.
Today someone who helps another is considered to have done so out of goodness. In the past, it was more of a social obligation for everyone. Mill considered it duty.
In movies, on television and in newspapers we give unintended social lessons that each of us must look after our own best interests because no one else will help us when we most need help. In general, we have responded to this with me-first selfishness.
Yet the good examples, the role models, are with us every day. With each passing day, especially as the world experiences increasing numbers of natural tragedies, more opportunities to help others present themselves. At the same time, more people than ever before complain about the selfishness, the greed and the thoughtlessness of others.
People will tire of the ethics of reality TV programs and realize that the world should not be that way. It's part of a cycle.
In the past, such cycles were traditionally broken by war, where people need to help each other through catastrophe. Most countries of the world are not at war today, but their people take a greater interest in the welfare of people of others countries than ever before. When people hurt and die, others will care.
Civilization advances only when people help each other. This opportunity presents itself today as more of us take an interest in an earthquake in Iran, a tsunami in Sri Lanka or a flood in Bangladesh. They all kill people. We feel the need to help the survivors. In doing so, we learn about the lives of people we previously knew nothing about.
More of us than ever before no longer stand by and watch tragedy and wrong as spectators.
Mill said it was an obligation. We see it today as more of a necessity to help others in need in the global village that is our home.
The lessons of civilization are learned slowly and painfully, but they happen and we do progress.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light through the dark smog that some people view as life today.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
This opinion enters the realm of morality. Only in part does it involve legal repercussions if inaction causes injury to others. Morality and law often overlap (by design), though mostly in the area of criminal law.
If you were to stand by watching another person being beaten or killed, you might be charged if you could have done something to prevent it but did not.
At its core, this dual responsibility (guilty by action or inaction) raises the question of to what degree we are each our brother's keeper. That is, what is our responsibility to help someone who may not have helped us if the roles were reversed? Are we both responsible to and for each other and what are the consequences of not acting?
In an urban environment where helping others has become less common than it was in pioneer days or when people were spread across the land more evenly and people helped each other because they knew that one day they were need help themselves, many of us give little thought to the possibility of helping others.
Charities must beg for donations because people do not have a natural inclination to give money to help others. Yet stories of heroism where one person has risked death or made a great commitment to help another reach the news media as well.
Today someone who helps another is considered to have done so out of goodness. In the past, it was more of a social obligation for everyone. Mill considered it duty.
In movies, on television and in newspapers we give unintended social lessons that each of us must look after our own best interests because no one else will help us when we most need help. In general, we have responded to this with me-first selfishness.
Yet the good examples, the role models, are with us every day. With each passing day, especially as the world experiences increasing numbers of natural tragedies, more opportunities to help others present themselves. At the same time, more people than ever before complain about the selfishness, the greed and the thoughtlessness of others.
People will tire of the ethics of reality TV programs and realize that the world should not be that way. It's part of a cycle.
In the past, such cycles were traditionally broken by war, where people need to help each other through catastrophe. Most countries of the world are not at war today, but their people take a greater interest in the welfare of people of others countries than ever before. When people hurt and die, others will care.
Civilization advances only when people help each other. This opportunity presents itself today as more of us take an interest in an earthquake in Iran, a tsunami in Sri Lanka or a flood in Bangladesh. They all kill people. We feel the need to help the survivors. In doing so, we learn about the lives of people we previously knew nothing about.
More of us than ever before no longer stand by and watch tragedy and wrong as spectators.
Mill said it was an obligation. We see it today as more of a necessity to help others in need in the global village that is our home.
The lessons of civilization are learned slowly and painfully, but they happen and we do progress.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light through the dark smog that some people view as life today.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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