Theater of Social Action

From Christopher Maurer's introduction to Three Plays... by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Carmen Zapata and Michael Dewell (NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993):

"... by 1935 Lorca had declared himself an 'enthusiastic, devoted follower of the theater of social action,' and defined theater as

a school of laughter and lamentation, an open tribunal where the people can introduce old and mistaken mores as evidence ... The theater is an extremely useful instrument for the edification of a country, and the barometer that measures its greatnesss or decline. A sensitive theater, well oriented in all its branches, from tragedy to vaudeville, can alter a people's sensitivity in just a few years, while a decadent theater where hooves have taken the place of wings can cheapen and lull to sleep an entire nation." (xii)

Such a definition does raise the question - in admirably poetic terms - as to which sort of theater we have in this country to work with. Have hooves taken the place of wings - or vice versa? And how can we tell which is which?

Theatre & Knowledge

"... in my view the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding."

~ Bertolt Brecht

Pirate's Suggestion for Katrina Survivors

Fellow blogger Pirate has made a suggestion that we, the people, utilize closed military bases as potential housing sites for folks dislocated by the damage from Hurrican Katrina. While his proposal is far from modest - and somewhat problematic - it seemed a civilized thing to do to provide this link to his site and the discussion ensuing there.

5th Grade Reading Levels

Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto writes, in "Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education,"

In 1882, fifth-graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them.

In 1995, a student-teacher of fifth-graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

Gatto's article appears in Everything You Know is Wrong, published by Barnes & Noble Books.

No Child Left Behind - But Where Are We Going?

[In a document called the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, the U.S. Department of Education] outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967 ... [it] identified the future as one 'in which a small elite' will control all important matters ... Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant that they need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. ... It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions.

~ John Taylor Gatto,
"Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education"
in Everything You Know Is Wrong

Tired of Sleeping

Oh, Mom ...
the dreams are not so bad;
It's just that there's so much to do
and I'm tired of sleeping.

Oh, Mom ...
I wonder when I'll be waking.
It's just that there's so much to do
and I'm tired of sleeping.

~ Suzanne Vega