Inner City students making their hands dirty!
Germai Medhanie, Good Economic News
By Germai Medhanie
Common Ground High School students are engaged in learning about the value of healthy living and sustainable agricultural practices by making their hands dirty. The New Haven Ecology Project, which created the school, centers education around the basic issue of food. Most of the students at the Common Ground High are minorities, people of color. Maybe their great-grand-parents were farmers or farm workers but those skills and knowledge disappeared due to urbanization. Also, working on the land has been associated to the horrible memory of slavery but the skills must be valued and reclaimed. This school is part of the new movement for Urban Agriculture, which is mushrooming in inner cities all over the country. The struggle for true, engaged education is key to social transformation – the price is high but its reward is limitless. It is hard to create liberatory education in a public school system focused on drilling students to pass high-stakes standardized tests. It took eight years of planning to birth this special school, but now it can serve as a model for other transformative experiments. To learn more, watch my video interview with Joe Lesiak, co-organizer of the school, read the , or visit Common Ground’s website.
Germai Medhanie August 6, 2007 at 12:35 pm
“Even so, affluenza has reached the point where government interference is necessary to control these wants…”
This statement makes me nervous. I agree that government interference will be a part of the “cure” for affluenza, but I think it needs to have more to do with controlling firms rather than people. The concept of a government controlling the “wants” of the people brings to mind several failed experiments – Cuba, for example. People have natural “wants” that for the most part are perfectly reasonable – we want to be comfortable, we want to be well-liked, we want to be happy. The problem is when unregulated firms go out and advertise, brainwash and capitalize on those wants, attaching false solutions to them. We will be comfortable if we have a big house and an expensive car, we will be well-liked if we wear designer clothing, we will be happy if we keep buying things that make us happy. Yes, now these attachments or amendments to our wants are fully internalized by the public, but I think it makes more sense for the government to go about addressing the cause of the problem – advertisement and unregulated firms, rather than the effect – a public that buys unnecessary and unhealthy products.
I like the idea of limiting options to children, but I think it would be even more effective in the long-run to limit the amount of advertising of unhealthy foods that reaches children. It’s a good first step to take unhealthy food out of school, but the children are still being inundated with advertising outside of school. Kids tend to want what they can’t have, especially when they know what it is and that other kids like it.
Lauren, I really appreciate your comment, but I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. If you read on, I clearly say that the government can’t control the wants (desires) of the people directly. What I was trying to say in the phrase you commented on was that the government will be necessary to control affluenza (whether that be by a carbon tax, limiting the food options to children, or by controlling advertising–which I think is a very good point). I meant that the government (in some cases) will have to control the wants in an indirect way by controlling the causes. I should have been much more explicit in saying that. Thank you for drawing that to my attention.
Sorry for nitpicking about the wording, Ali. I definitely agree with what you are saying. I’m sort of having an inner debate right now about how much government regulation I want in general and I think I took it out on you!
I think it’d be cool to do something like an ad campaign to teach children about healthy consumption, a mix between regulating advertisement and regulating consumption.
I, too, find it especially interesting to consider the role of government intervention in the context of both affluenza and our country’s current financial situation. We live in a country that very much values capitalism and individualism. Many people are very wary of government intervention and its potential to “rob” the individual of rights and infringe upon our personal freedoms. With lingering Cold War-era taboos against communism and socialism, some people look very negatively upon the notion of government control. However, I believe that the government should hold the fundamental role of acting in the best interest of its citizens. In that context, the government should step in and enact programs that promote the overall well-being of the people. I agree that, in fighting against affluenza and strengthening our country’s economy, government action is necessary and has the potential to bring about a great deal of positive change.