There's
a nifty YouTube video making the rounds among teacher types. I have a pretty
high threshold for being charmed, but this infectious little bit of fun made me
stop obsessing about the stimulus money for education, Arne Duncan, and all the
rest of my worldly cares. If you haven't seen it yet (hint: Julie Andrews pays
a visit to Centraal Station in Antwerp, Belgium), take four minutes and treat
yourself, here.
If
there were ever a right time to have faith about the innate goodness of man, demonstrated
by his willingness to drop self-consciousness and prance around in train
stations, it's now. Don't want to get all Anne Frank here, but there's a lot of
free-floating anxiety out there (justified free-floating anxiety)--and it's refreshing
to see people of all ages having a blast, singing and dancing in public. Gives
me hope.
As
a music teacher, I seriously wonder about bloggers who engage in verbal death
brawls over the question of whether creativity can be taught. Even without a
randomized trial evaluating the precise measurable impact of strategies
designed to expand thinking-- isn't it worth the attempt to create an
environment where the hatching of new ideas is nurtured, and kids' brains get
to go out and play? Somebody with a
creative idea got to live out their fantasy in the Do-Re-Mi video. Just
watching it made me confident that we--the teaching profession--can make a
convincing case that life is no good without imagination. Even for investment
bankers.
Bill
Moyers recently interviewed Bill Black, the former regulator who cracked down on
banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. It's a sobering piece.
Black makes it clear that the economic crisis was data-driven, that data being
the precise measurable results of loosening constraints against excess risk, and
permitting more creativity in leverage strategies and compensation packages.
Moyers: I
was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say
that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is
driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?
Black: Fraud
is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I
betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a
result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially
fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
I
keep thinking: the most intelligent guys
on the planet just led us into global economic collapse by inventing a clutch
of economic and financial parlor tricks that made them very rich. Smart bankers
who hustled 1580s on their SATs and came out of our best, most competitive
universities went straight for the nation's fiduciary jugular. Experienced
policy lions convinced colleagues to scrap commonsense regulations that had
been protecting Americans for decades. Their sleight of hand maneuvers sucked
money away from millions of ordinary, hard-working Americans, the ones who
got unimpressive scores on their college board--if they took them at all--and
went to trade school, Regional State U or straight into the workforce. Boring folks
in boring towns, who believed that paying down their ranch house mortgage was
like tucking money into a sock for their kids' future.
I
also keep wondering what those financial-market whiz kids were like in first
grade. Did they ever have to wait their turn in line for the merry-go-round?
Were they ever in the Sparrows reading group, not yet proficient enough to be a
Bluebird? Were they ever humbled by a math problem they couldn't understand? Did
anyone ever explain the concept of "to whom much is given, much is
expected?"
And--did
they ever joyfully pretend to be a needle pulling thread?
That
will bring us back to Nietzsche, who said: "Without music, life would be a
mistake."
Image: jfrancis/flickr creative commons