Economic Drama
Apart from Turkish dramas, I watch US daily news programs. From them, I have a clearer view of the quarantine’s economic impact on the world. I learned of the recent drop in oil prices. Of course, now people don’t go to work, buses don’t run. Almost everyone is stuck at home. Therefore, demand for fuel has shrunk. When that happens, prices go down. Economics!
But when there are fewer cars on the road, there is less air pollution. There are more birds singing in the trees, as Father Gerry Orbos, SVD, mentioned at last Sunday’s televised Mass. Nature is alive again. That suggests that God is pleased with us again. He sent us COVID-19 to keep us at home, to make us reevaluate our lives and experience how good life can be, to point us in the proper next direction for change.
I don’t have little children anymore. My youngest grandson is 18. This quarantine made me wonder what it was like for parents with children in grade school who were supposed to be in school and now suddenly have to stay home. I remember what a handful my children were. How grateful I was that we lived with my mother who made up for not taking care of me when I was growing up by taking care of my children when they were growing up. They always seemed to be fighting over everything and driving their mothers up the wall. Moms in the US have it harder than we do. A few of them with small children admitted in an interview that they tended to drink more after the children were asleep to calm themselves down. I felt so sorry for them.
Then a wild idea popped into my mind. What if we had neighborhood schools where children could just walk to classes while they were in grade school? This school would not need huge campuses like we have now. They could rent a few big houses in the neighborhood and hold classes there. They could get teachers from the same community so everyone — children and teachers — would have lower transportation expenses. They could all walk to school instead.
They would have more time to study because they no longer would have to sit in traffic. Morning dismissal could be at 11:30 a.m. so kids could go home for lunch and be back in class by 1:30 p.m. No more need for cafeterias in schools. Students could be dismissed by 4:00. Those were once our class hours in grade school. We turned out to be smarter than the young students of today.
The grade school curriculum should be simplified into Reading (including literature, which teaches about life), Writing (including grammar and sentence construction so everyone writes skillfully) and ‘Rithmetic (meaning basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). I am only a high school graduate but I retired as president of an advertising agency because I lived off those basic skills, including computing for profit. Also I read a lot and had many hobbies.
We must teach children about hobbies and how to create them so that they know what to do with their spare time. I know I spend time doing hobbies. I remember when we were in grade school, we learned how to cross-stitch in the first grade. I learned how to knit during a summer in Baguio. I really think we must teach children how to identify their interests while they are young. There are new tools — laptops, cell phones — that can be incorporated into developing new skills. Hobbies have commercial and therapeutic value, but we have to introduce children to the basic skills and possibilities.
There are many ways to teach children many things including creativity. But the adults who plan educational curricula must use their imagination: take into consideration the new tools, the problems of going to school during these times of color coding, expensive fuel and tedious traffic jams that consume so much time just going to and from school. Those are the dots in the planning constellation. Somehow they must be connected until a clear shape of future community education emerges.
All right. Maybe I’m dreaming of a simpler life, a simpler world where neighborhoods or communities are friendlier, more willing to channel adult skills to teaching the children in their vicinity how to walk to school, how to live more intimately in their neighborhoods. But I believe it is more worthwhile to dream of what we all can do to simplify, but at the same time enrich, the quality of our lives than to get ourselves into a righteous fit and sue China for sending us a disease that led our countries into economic breakdowns.
If we do that, what will happen next? Of course, China will refuse to pay. There will be more bickering. In the end we will have World War III. It will be the end of the world, probably. All of us will be dead.
* * *
Please text your comments to 0998-991-2287.
