Things I Think....

Things I think…..

I have a hard time reading the newspaper these days.  It is hard, when you read the letters to the editor, or the news about the behavior of our Congressmen and Senators, or see the lack of critical thinking skills and ability to look at anything besides political considerations in decision making, that I have a hard time having faith in where our society is going.  We seem to have moved backwards into an era where we distrust everyone who looks different from us, or who speaks different from us, or has a different cultural background, or, God forbid, came from a different place.  We won’t even get into some of the opinions about those who have a disability.  It seems as if many of our fellow citizens have forgotten – or maybe never understood in the first place – what civilization means.  Too many seem to be more concerned about what can they get, and that someone different doesn’t get more than them.

I have long seen this with groups like the Tea Party in particular, and with many at the extremes of both ends of the political and social spectrum.  But more and more, I’m seeing this kind of thinking move towards the middle of our society, and it does concern me.  Yet what concerns me more is the lack of critical thinking, of deeper understanding.  Too many can read the words to the Constitution without really understanding how they came to be, and without that understanding, it is hard to really understand how they were intended to breath and flex over time.  That is what has traditionally made that document so successful. 

Further, too many of these people have forgotten how important compromise is in society.  They do not realize that our Constitution was created through a series of compromises by the framers, without which the document that we have would not exist.  Someday, check out the Virginia Plan (from the large states), or the New Jersey Plan (from the small states), or that little agreement that counted slaves as 3/5 a person for congressional representation in the House.  For so many people today, and particularly those in political leadership, the word compromise has become a dirty word, and governance has become a zero-sum game.    Whether or not you liked Ronald Reagan, he was very successful as a president.  Part of his success was that he was good friends with the powerful Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill.  When things got sticky, the two of them would often meet and hammer out details of a compromise, trust the other to uphold their end of the deal, and get the agreement through the legal process.

John Locke’s writings on liberty and the concept of a social contract, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings concerning the importance of a the social contract to control the baser instincts created by civilization, or Thomas Hobbes, whose views on a social compact and the inalienable rights of man also had great influence on John Locke, are all writings that had major influences on our founders, and all emphasized the need for society to be more than just self-interest.  There are others, as well, like Francis Bacon and Voltaire that also had strong influences on the principals of our founders.  Unfortunately, it seems that too few people today have read Leviathan, or The Second Treatise on Government, or The New Atlantis, or On Toleration.  None of them are huge, some of them are complex, but all of them discuss ideas and concepts related to what is western society and the place of the individual in a society at a level of depth that we should all at least consider as we participate in our world.

So why is any of this important for a blog about raising a child with a disability?  Simple, we help influence the world in which we live and the rules by which our children will grow up and live under in the future.  If we are not willing to speak for them and their interests, and the interests of other children, then we really are not doing our jobs as parents.  Look at education – we live in a world where high-stakes testing means everything, followed closely that every child will be ready to go to college, whether college fits that child or not.  One size fits all.  They are wonderful sound bites for accountability and success as an educational process, and fit the politicization of education, but it really does not fit reality.  Offering alternatives to high stakes testing, or offering options for job training and other skills or other paths to success for those students who don’t fit the norm or fall inside a neat political reality do not fit well into 30 second commercials and require deeper thought and discussion.  Too often, we seem to want to treat our children like widgets, where if they are not coming off the assembly line correctly, just change the molds and start stamping them out again.  The more we understand about how our society operates and the more we think about our place both as an individual and as a people in that society, the better we can serve our children. 

One final point on this general topic - there seems to be a devaluation of the concept of a liberal arts education.  I would think the opposite is true.  I was raised by my parents (both school principals, by the way) with the understanding that you got an education to learn.  Jobs came later.  You did not go to college to get a job but to prepare yourself for that world, and you did so by learning.  Their belief was that you did not limit yourself, but made yourself as well read and knowledgeable as possible.  That would make you employable and flexible as the society and its employment needs changed.  For me, that seems to be pretty true.  I finished college with a degree in Political Science and a minor in English.  I’ve worked for state government with a rehabilitation agency and a mental health agency.  I’ve worked in the private sector designing computerized billing systems and computerized phone networks for banks and major retail businesses, and now I do something I enjoy greatly, helping families of children who are deaf or blind in an educational setting.  Interesting, that liberal arts education certainly has served me well.  And I do think I have had the opportunity to make changes in my life that have allowed me to best help my child who has a disability, as well as others that are in a similar boat.

Anyway, I hope those of you who read my blog will understand I do have a wide perspective of what raising a child with a disability entails.  This may be on the outer edges of that perspective, but it is something I would ask you to all think about.  It is worth a few minutes.  And depending on your perspectives, maybe more.