It's Up To Each Of Us

When I first learned that my own senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had teamed up with Lamar Alexander, a Republican, to draft the bill that would reauthorize the odious No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that opened the door to our current regime of high stakes standardized testing, unaccountable charter schools, rapacious Wall Street backed profiteers, and a narrowing of curriculum that causes public schools to dramatically curtail arts, physical, and humanities education, I was heartened. They said all the right things, but the bill that has barely passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, does precious little to address any of these matters. It's not a done deal yet, many of us have been attempting to educate our senators, but the vote is likely today and it likely will pass.

That said, other legislation is currently moving through Congress that will greatly curtail the power of the US Secretary of Education, an office now held by Arnie Duncan, one of the leading taskmasters driving the now doomed Common Core national curriculum (and it is a curriculum in that classroom time in many schools has come to be largely comprised of teaching to the test, test practice, and test taking; it has become a stand-in for "the subjects that comprise the course of study," which is the definition of a curriculum). As one insider was recently quoted in the Washington Post, "The question is not whether we're going to put handcuffs on Arne Duncan. The question is how many handcuffs." So, at least there's that.

I know that many of us in early childhood would rather not think about these things, or perhaps even feel that there is little we can do, but the fact that the NCLB reauthorization is only just squeaking by tells us that our message is being heard, just not yet by enough people in Congress. I guess we'll have to shout louder to be heard above all the money being "yelled" at our elected representatives by billionaires and hedge fund managers seeking to profit off the labor of our children. The fact that Arnie Duncan is being handcuffed, however, is an outright win. To give you another unqualified example of the difference we are making, 23 states have now opted out of Common Core's high stakes standardized tests, leaving just 22 states now forcing students to take the SBAC or PARCC tests (for those doing the math, 5 states never signed on to the testing). 

No one ever said that democracy would be fast or easy, but our alliance of students, parents, and teachers is moving things in the right direction.

Recently, the AFL-CIO affiliated teacher's union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), representing some 1.6 million teachers nationwide, released the answers that major Democratic Presidential candidates gave to their questionnaire used, in part, to help them as they decide who to support in the upcoming primary. The AFT has come out in support of Hillary Clinton. As with most political things, it's a controversial move, with many members loudly insisting that they were not consulted. I'm not going to debate the wisdom of their endorsement, but I will point out that Clinton and AFT President Randi Weingarten are longtime friends and allies. It can't hurt to have the ear of the President: at least, if elected, we know she is hearing what teachers have to say. (The National Education Association -- NEA -- the nation's largest professional employee organization with 3 million members, the union that has, at least locally, been at the forefront of our pushback against the corporatization of our public schools, has not yet endorsed candidates. I suspect they will back Bernie Sanders.)

More interesting to me for my own decision-making purposes are the answers these Democratic candidates gave on their questionnaires. I've included links to the three leading candidate's answers below. 

The good news is that they all seem to at least understand that something needs to be done about the scourge of high stakes testing. I'll leave it to you to decide which one is most credible. Both Clinton and O'Malley have done what all politicians of every party always do, which is to talk about public schools as institutions of vocational training, and while Sanders doesn't specifically mention it in this questionnaire, I've heard him do the same thing in his stump speeches. Clinton and O'Malley, both with caveats, support the NCLB reauthorization. Sanders, as he reminds us, voted against it in 2001 and continues to be opposed. There are some real differences between these Democratic candidates when it comes to education. It seems to me that Sanders has more fully thought-out his positions and is offering more concrete ideas, but it's still early. I would like to hear more from all of them.

Yesterday, I wrote about the great progressive educator John Dewey, a man who believed deeply in the promise of democracy and who saw our public schools as its proper source. Some readers here have complained over the years about these political posts, preferring that I focus on teaching and the classroom. Personally, I can see no difference between those posts and this one. Democracy is about self-governance and, at bottom that's what we work on all day, every day at our school. All of my posts are about self-governance.

I urge you to take a moment to read through the answers these Democratic primary candidates have provided. They are asking to be your representative. It's up to each of us to decide which one we most trust to do that.

Hillary Clinton

Martin O'Malley

Bernie Sanders

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What Must These Men Think Of Us?

For those of you who are unaware of John Dewey, he was, among other things, an educational reformer working during the turn of the 19th century and who can rightly be called the grandfather of our current notions on progressive education. He was born and raised during the Victorian era, a time not unlike our own, when the prevailing idea about education was that children were simply incomplete adults who needed to be stuffed with knowledge, forced into stillness and silence, and "manufactured" into little adults ready to go to work. If you've ever used the terms "hands-on education" or "experiential education," you're quoting Dewey.

At bottom Dewey viewed education not as a process of learning specific pre-determined skills and knowledge, and certainly not as vocational training, but rather as a process of each human realizing her full potential by learning how to contribute fully, productively, and ethically in a democratic society. The role of adults, Dewey said, is to facilitate and guide rather than control and instruct. As he wrote: "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences."

This is the kind of education we strive for at Woodland Park even as our public schools have veered sharply back toward the Victorian "ideal" under such drill-and-kill federal initiatives as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core curriculum (and it is a curriculum in that classroom time in many schools has come to be largely comprised of teaching to the test, test practice, and test taking; it has become a stand-in for "the subjects that comprise the course of study," which is the definition of a curriculum).

Schools inspired by the work of Dewey can still be found, of course, and not just in the preschool world where we can more easily get away with our "play-based education," but most of those schools are private which greatly limits who can afford to send their children. My own daughter attended a Dewey inspired K-12 school here in Seattle that uses "Experiential Education" as it's slogan. President Obama's children attended the University of Chicago Lab School, a school actually founded by Dewey, as do the children of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel (a leading advocate for Victorian-style public schools). And, perhaps not surprisingly, so do the children of US Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan, the man most responsible for the current debacle taking place in our public schools.

The Chicago Lab School "is an excellent, well-resourced private school with a rich arts curriculum, small classes, entire rooms devoted to holding musical instruments, a unionized teaching staff that you pretty much never hear anyone suggesting should be replaced by untrained temp workers, and not one single standardized test until students reach age 14 . . . In other words, Lab School has to date experienced not on ounce of influence from Arnie Duncan's Department of Ed. Not one ounce of impact from his policies." Mayor Emmanuel has engaged in bullying and union busting in Chicago's public schools, and has unilaterally dictated curriculum despite protests from parents and teachers, while at Lab School the unionized teachers, by contract, must approve any changes to the curriculum.

John Dewey was a man who believed deeply in equality, education, and democracy. Indeed, he saw our schools as the proper source for social progress. As education historian and research professor Diane Ravitch writes: "If only Duncan wanted America's children to have public schools with the same rich offerings as the Lab School. Public schools that didn't have to waste time and money on endless bubble tests. Duncan knows what is best for his children, for Rahm's children, and for the President's children. Why isn't it right for other people's children? John Dewey founded the Lab School to see what was best for public education, not just for the children of elites."

Why can't our public schools be operated under the same principles as those of Lab School and others like it? It can't be about money because there is nothing inherently more expensive about experiential education. What must these men think of us when they seek to impose Victorian education on our children, while providing progressive education for their own?

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Being A "Strict" Teacher

While the rest of the kids crowded around the workbench, awaiting their turn at power drill painting, J was working on his own independent project. Finding our crate of wood scraps, he was purposefully arranging pieces on the ground.

Summer at Woodland Park is a time when children come together for only two or three weeks at a time, rather than for the nine month long haul of the regular school year. There are many of our "regular" students enrolled for a session or two, but these rosters are mostly comprised of girls and boys who have never been together before, or at least not since last summer. As a school that sets community building at the center of it's curriculum, this is a fascinating time for me. It's like the first week of school every week: the learning curve is steep, and just as we're beginning to understand the most clearly defined contours of who we are, together, in this place, with this teacher, it's time to say goodbye. It's a bit like having a look at a "control group" in the experiment of where I am as a teacher and where our school is as a place to build community. 

Early this summer, a boy and his mom who have been with us for the past three years brought a lunch to share with me after the others had left to commemorate our last day together. We sat down at our art tables, along with the big sister and her friend. The older girls started talking about their elementary school teachers, describing some of them as "strict." Joking, I said, "I'm the most strict teacher." The children got the joke, saying, "You're not strict at all," but mom corrected them: "Teacher Tom is strict about some things. He's strict about treating each other well. He's strict about not hitting or hurting people or taking things or being mean . . . Well, maybe "strict" isn't the right word. Strict in the gentlest possible way."

At first I wanted to object, but upon a moment's reflection, had to concede her point. It's true that the things I'm most "strict" about are those foundational principles of community that always emerge from the agreements (the rules) the children make with one another. For better or worse, I am the executive charged with carrying out the legislative intentions of the children and I do take that responsibility seriously. So in that sense, I suppose it's fair to say I'm strict.

But that's how it works during the regular school year, when we have the time to discuss and wrangle; when we have the luxury of agreeing and disagreeing, of failing and succeeding, of trying out this and trying out that. During the summer, however, we have no choice but to take it one day at time.

Several years ago, a couple boys, one with a year of experience at Woodland Park under his belt, Charlie, was eating snack with Nathan, a summer-only kid. Nathan suggested that once they were finished, they should race around the classroom, to which Charlie replied, "We can't. It's against the rules. No running inside." Nathan asked, "What happens if we break the rules?" After taking a moment to digest this idea, Charlie shrugged, "We don't break the rules."

I reckon I take Charlie's lead when it comes to summer: I tend to assume that the agreements from the most recently completed school year are still in force, even if we don't actually talk about "rules."

J was working on his project methodically, moving back and forth between his construction zone and the crate of wood scraps where he carefully selected pieces of a certain shape and size. While his back was turned, a younger boy, L, spotted the creation. While J was bent over the wood crate, L helped himself to one of J's lengths of wood, then kicked at the construction, disheveling it. When J returned, he immediately noticed the alterations. He stood for a moment as if confused, looking from the ground to L, who still held the piece of wood he'd removed.

I'd been standing aloof, observing from a few feet away. J turned to me, "Teacher Tom, that boy is breaking my bridge."

I answered, "That's L. He probably doesn't know you're building a bridge."

"I don't want him to break my bridge."

"He probably doesn't know that either. Maybe you should tell him that."

J paused for a moment and I wondered if he was feeling that I'd abandoned him, even if it was to his own devices, but he apparently decided to give it a try. By now L had removed several more pieces of wood from the bridge. J said, "L, I'm building a bridge. I want you to stop breaking it."

L stopped in his tracks, looking from J to the wood on the ground. J said, "You're breaking my bridge."

L replaced the wood, then J dropped to the ground to arrange it more perfectly. L toddled away, returning moments later with a new piece of wood, not exactly the shape and size with which J had been working, but close enough, and lay it down in a way that more or less matched the pattern with which J had been working. 

J stared at L long and hard. When L returned with another piece of wood J apparently decided to share his project, showing him where to place it. When L then proceeded to awkwardly cross the bridge, J said to L, "It's our bridge."

These are the baby steps of community building, using one another's names, telling one another what we want, sharing resources that are always in some way limited, and undertaking projects that we come to call "ours." Throughout the entire interaction, I knew that if push came to shove, I'd have "strictly enforced" at least the spirit of the regular school year rule that you can't knock down other people's buildings. But before getting there I found myself attempting to adhere to a higher rule of giving the children the time and space to figure it out on their own without the interference of adults or rules they'd not had a voice in creating, and this time they did. 

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Hills

You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself. ~H. Norman Schwartzkopf

I don't know if you'll take the leap with me here, but if "the cardboard box" and "the stick" have been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, then certainly "the hill" belongs there as well. Of course, hills are not portable, which may be part of the definition of a toy. And if you admit the hill into the pantheon, "the tree" would undoubtedly be next, followed by "the wind" and "the tides."

When we moved to the center of the universe, we got a hill, a couple hills, in fact. The first thing many of the kids do each morning is run down the long hill from the gate to our entry door, some cautiously, up on tippy toes, while others pound down pell mell to the bottom. I've been thinking we need a stack of hay bales or something down there. 

The overall hilliness of our outdoor classroom was what inspired the two-level sand pit, down which our water flows, from the cast iron pump through gutters and channels dug into the sand, making waterfalls and eddies and floods. Some of the kids spend most of their day playing with this hill. 

If you went to a toy manufacturer to pitch this concept, I'm guessing you'd be laughed out of the office. "What's it do? There's an up and a down. That's it?"

But, you know, you never run out of the things to do with a hill. A gradual slope makes for a terrific place to work on summersaults. While a steeper slope is built for thrills.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it, but the view is much better at the top. ~Henry Ward Beecher

And just think what would happen if the toy maker brought in his attorney.

That would result in one doozy of a warning label, if he'd even let them go into production at all.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. ~Nelson Mandela

But you can hardly be considered educated without the wisdom of the hills; without the battle with gravity; without the dance with gravity.

Even the simple act of standing on a hill skews you, makes you use your body differently, forces you to take a different point of view.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ~Phillips Brooks

No, I take it all back, hills are so much greater than mere toys, abstractions of something real. Hills are the material of life.

They are opportunity and challenge and beauty and toil. They prove truth to the optimist and pessimist alike: a perfect symmetry of ups and downs. Hills are the balance of trudging and flying; running like the wind and falling like a stone. And let me tell you one other thing I know about hills: no one enjoys walking on them sideways. That's not the way humans are made.

Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. I'm only going to the top of the hill. ~Tom Waits

All of life is about hills. If we're not in the process of going up or down, we're contemplating the challenge or taking in the view, but inevitably a hill is to be undertaken, at some point, one way or another, even if all we're doing is rolling things down it.

Hills are perhaps the first metaphor we're capable of understanding. In fact, it's one we're each lead to by our experiences with ups and downs.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help. ~Vinton Cerf

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.  ~Jose Marti

No one throughout time has misunderstood hills.

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Milestones

As adults, we talk a lot, too much, about children and their milestones, often ticking them off like a "to do" list. Both parents and teachers have lists of things we expect children to do and by when. We boast when they reach them early and worry when they are late.

This isn't to say that milestones aren't important, it's just that the ones we adults focus on are not necessarily the ones that are important to the child. I have a very strong memory, for instance, the day I taught myself to whistle, a milestone that was on no one's list but my own. Snapping my fingers was another, as was successfully performing the "rock the baby" trick with my yo yo. These are things that won't show up on any of the copyrighted lists of milestones, but most of us, even today, have marks in our memories of when we passed them. That's because these were important, these moments of success, these moments when we knew we had learned something that made us like the bigger kids, or even, in some cases, the adults. Despite how our memories have stored them, these moments don't usually come us in a flash, but rather after weeks and months of effort, but it is the moment of success, the personal milestone, that we both set and passed for ourselves.

And, of course, there is learning to "pump." If you hang out at our swing set for any length of time, the subject comes up, and you'll find children at various stages of figuring it out. Adults don't teach this to children, although I've seen some, frustratingly, try. "Pumping," moving the swing under one's own power, is something most children learn because they are self-motivated to acquire the skill. I remember working on it myself, striving to rock my body in just the right way to make the swing move. Not only had I seen the older kids doing it, but I knew that once I'd mastered it, I was no longer reliant upon finding someone to push me. It was a milestone I had set for myself and that I was free to pursue on my own with no adults telling me when or how to do it. My motivation was made up of equal parts aspiration to be like the older kids and a desire for the freedom the skill would give me.

The freedom to pursue the answers to our own questions is the key to all self-motivated learning. And most of what we are motivated to learn is because we seek more freedom, to be more self-reliant, to be more like our older, more sophisticated elders, especially those glamorous ones who are only a few years older than ourselves.

The other day, a younger sister, long frustrated by her inability to to pump like she sees her older brother and his friends do it, was fussily working on her skills, complaining to no one in particular, "I can't do it." In a moment of frustration, she gave up and walked away, only to return a short time later to try again, finding that both of the swing seats were full. To bide her time, she climbed into our pallet swing, where she began experimenting with rocking herself. Soon the pallet swing began to move a little in response to her body. And as slight as that motion was, I heard her say aloud, excitedly, but to herself, "I'm pumping!" It was like a she had shouted the word, "Freedom!"

So far, she's barely moving, but it won't be long before she's soaring with the big kids.

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Without Diminishing Your Degrees Of Freedom

"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom." ~Buckminster Fuller

Yesterday, I wrote about a girl who picked all of our schoolyard garden blueberries before they were ripe. This is not the first time it's happened, indeed, in our six years of attempting to grow various kinds of berries, we've never had one make it to ripeness before being picked. I also mentioned that I have an agenda and that is to one day actually harvest a crop of ripe berries.

That said, another of my adult agenda items, a higher one than a crop of berries, is that children have a garden of their own, a place where they can be among things that grow, day-to-day, from seed to fruit and back again; a place where they can freely experience growing food with all of their senses. And that derives from an even higher value, which is that our school should be a place where children have the freedom to educate themselves by asking and answering their own questions about their world.

I could impose rules about the berries. I could put a fence around the berries. But rules and fences, imposed from on high, would rob her of freedom. She is clearly seeking answers to her questions about berries, about a community garden, about cause and effect, and she should have the freedom to pick those berries, even as I want her to wait until they are ripe. It's only through that exercise of her freedom that she can acquire the knowledge she is seeking.

My agenda is that the other children not be deprived of their share of the blueberries. And I do want to emphasize that this is my agenda. I have this idea that children should experience eating food they've grown themselves. So far, I've never had a child complain about missing out on his share of the berries. If that happened, it would be a different story, a conflict between two or more free people, and my role as the teacher becomes clear: to be of service to them as they attempt to hash it out.

As it stands now, however, the whole blueberries-for-all thing is my agenda. We won't be uprooting our blueberry plants. I reckon we'll leave them right where they are, where they will continue to fulfill their destiny of never producing ripe berries.

In the meantime, we have our new greenhouse, located on the other side of the building. The adult plan is to one day grow enough food there that the children are everyday eating something they've grown themselves, and among those crops, I expect there will be berries. I intend to speak of the plants growing in and around our greenhouse -- the green room -- as our food, as everyone's food. I intend to speak informationally about how plants grow, what they need, and that we often must wait for the good stuff. I hope to create the space in which these free children can think for themselves about their garden and make their own decisions about how we explore this new part of our world.

Will these berries grow to be ripe? I hope so, but they can't come at the cost of diminishing the children's degrees of freedom.

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"Then Everybody Can Have Some Berries"

One of the crops that grow particularly well in our Pacific Northwest climate are berries. For the past several years, our schoolyard garden has grown strawberries and raspberries, and this year we added blueberries. So far, over the course of several growing seasons, we've not once had a berry survive until it was ripe. No matter how carefully we adults eagle eye those hard, green, immature berries, every one of them gets picked too early. In fact, this year, many of our strawberries were harvested early in the spring in the form of a tiny bouquet of white and yellow flowers. 

At least this year most of the un-ripe blueberries were consumed, as one of our three-year-olds discovered she had a fondness for sour fruit. She went through our entire crop in a single sitting. Growing up, they always warned us kids that eating green berries would give us tummy aches. Apparently, that's not always the case, but I'm tempted to revive that myth for next year's efforts. That said, we've hopefully remedied our problem of early harvests with the addition of our new greenhouse, an operation that will allow us to better control harvesting so that our communally grown plants benefit more than just a single sour berry lover, while still retaining the freedom of our little playground "grazing" garden.

I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's book, Collapse. Whereas his book that preceded it, Guns, Germs and Steel, took a look at the factors that underpin "successful" societies throughout history, this one is about the conditions that cause civilizations to rise to great heights before failing, with a focus on those that did so spectacularly. The ancient Mayan civilization is a case in point, having risen to become one of the most prosperous, creative, and thriving societies in the world, only to, in very short order, fall apart. Providing example after example from history and prehistory, Diamond is meticulous in laying out the dynamics that caused each demise, drawing parallels not just to one another, but also to our modern times. He has identified a set of five factors, any or all of which can cause a collapse, some of which are beyond human control, but most of his examples are case studies in human shortsightedness, especially regarding economic and environmental activities.

In case after case, from the Polynesian kingdoms to the Mayans in Central America to the Anasazi in what is now the American Southwest, as well as civilizations that rose, prospered, and the fell on every continent, the seeds of their demise are found in a failure of foresight, usually driven by an elite that was either unable or unwilling to give up a little today in order to have a tomorrow. Or, as we might say today: their lifestyles were "unsustainable," yet they pursued them to the bitter end. 

The most stunning example to me is the story of Easter Island, an isolated land that was once heavily forested by the largest palms ever known, growing to nearly 100 feet high, with trunks seven feet in diameter. When humans first settled the island, those trees became the foundation of a great society, providing not only building and boat making material, but the sweet sap could be fermented to make wine or boiled down to make sugar. The nuts were a delicacy and the fronds useful for everything from thatching and baskets to mats and boat sails. By the time Westerners "discovered" Easter, however, those palms were gone, the island completely deforested, the farmlands exhausted, and the once thriving civilization that built those mysterious giant stone heads reduced to only a few hundred natives scratching out a meager existence. Someone made the decision to cut down that last tree the way the Onceler did in Dr. Seuss' masterpiece The Lorax.

Of course, there is no way to know exactly what happened on Easter because they were a pre-literate society and the stories come to us thousands of years later as part of an oral tradition, but as I read Diamond's book it becomes clear that a major contributor to collapse, perhaps the major contributor, are elites who chose the maintenance of their privileged lifestyle, their greed, despite the evidence before their very eyes that it was coming at the expense of the long term success of the rest of their civilization.

The girl who picked that bouquet of strawberry blossoms isn't a member of any sort of "elite," but by skimming off those flowers for her own short term pleasure, we were left without berries for the rest of us. The girl who loves the green berries, deprived the rest of us of our share of the bounty in pursuit of her short term enjoyment. I'm not blaming these girls for anything because they are simply children exploring their world, but I do blame adults, who should know better, when they destroy our Commons in pursuit of their own short term self interest.

There are no new lands to discover on our planet and, very slowly, maybe too slowly, we are beginning to understand that the pursuit of our short term convenience and pleasure is making our world increasingly less livable. There is still a ridiculous debate centered in the US as "climate deniers" continue to advocate for their own short term self interest, but much of the rest of the world is waking up to the fact that we're going to have to change our ways, and quickly, if we aren't going to "collapse."

Last week, the Greek people voted overwhelmingly to reject economic austerity measures that the elites representing the European Union are attempting to force upon them. I have a particular fondness for Greece and her people, having lived there as a boy and traveled there more recently as an adult. I've been engaged for the past couple of days in fascinating and alarming discussions on Facebook and elsewhere with smart people who disagree about what has happened, what could happen, and what should happen. It's a mind-bendingly complicated situation, with so many moving parts, ideas and opinions that it's nearly impossible to know which end is up. It's become clear to me that anyone who claims to know what is happening, or what should happen, or what could happen, is just guessing right along with the rest of us. Historians of the future will, of course, be able to tell us what we did right or wrong, but in these unprecedented times, I must commend the Greek government for turning toward democracy in the search for answers. There was nothing that required them to make this a matter for referendum, and indeed, the bankers warned them not to, but in lieu of a clear path forward, they turned to the people. And the people have spoken. "No."

The farther we get away from the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, the clearer it becomes to me that our international banking system has been engaged in a kind of economic clear cutting operation whereby they gave irresponsible subprime mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them, packaged them up as ticking time bombs called "mortgage backed securities" then sold them to pension funds and cities and countries throughout Europe, skimming off hundreds of billions in the process. The biggest banks, who knew exactly what they were doing, then bet that those bombs would explode, which they did, resulting in the big banks buying the smaller ones at a great discount, raking in billions more in profits from the people they bankrupted, and blackmailing taxpayers for trillions in bailouts while the rest of us lost our jobs, homes, and standards of living. The Greek people alone bailed out their bankers to the tune of $30 billion. Governments around the world took on massive debt, then, from the very people who caused the problem, which is the primary reason they are all so deeply in debt today.

Now these bankers, stuffed with green berries, are standing before the final Truffula trees demanding that we let them cut them down. The Greek people have said, "No."

This might seem like it is just about Greece with its economy that is about the same size as a major American city, but there are a half dozen other nations in Europe that appear to be headed toward a similar conflict with the technocratic bankers at the helm of Europe's economic ship. And those bankers seem hell bent on cutting down that last damn tree. That tree belongs to all of us.

A couple weeks ago, I was in our garden with the girl who consumed our entire crop of blueberries. There is still some hope for a few strawberries and raspberries and we were discussing them. She told me she really wanted to pick them because they were so "good for my tummy." There were several other children with us, listening to our conversation. One by one they said that they didn't like green berries, but they did like ripe berries. Then this three-year-old said, shrugging, as if teaching us all a lesson she had now learned, "We have to have patience. Then everybody can have some berries."

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