where the sun beats. And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief." -T.S. Eliot Ok, I honestly have no idea what that means but it sounds cool and I'm sure I'll figure it out before too long. In any case I'm feeling kinda pointless right now. I'm generally tired of High School, even though it's a vacation week. I didn't really do anything of value today. And I suspect that the rest of the week will be more or less the same. Alice is gone pretty much the whole week but we'll hang out tomorrow. But I'm bored of the way everything is going right now. School seems increasingly pointless, a senseless and unorganized world where the easy version of everything thing is promoted until it can no longer be accepted and then teachers wonder why no one can excel. Math is an endless spiral into something we will never use; global a study of names and dates but not one of causes and results, not people and times. English is an exercise in low expectations among amazing people. Science is not science at all, it’s not taught to us, it’s talked to us. All this has got me to thinking that education in America is broken, maybe hopelessly broken. We refuse to spend money on a sinking system. We refuse to ask the best Americans to become teachers. We have a system where (in my opinion) a great number of teachers are teaching simply because they could not be professionals in their fields. Sure there are exceptions but what qualifies many of our teachers to teach? Does any one believe that Mr. Bancroft has a great grasp on history or Mrs Forte on English? No, of course not. Those who have talent are removed by society from the teacher talent pool. Thus those who have talent with language become writers, talented artists become professional artists, those who get history will become historians. It’s a system waiting to die, reverse Darwinism. It’s getting worse and it won’t get better until we do something about it. In Amsterdam it’s worse then some places. What can we do? Who knows, maybe there is no solution. But then again maybe there are and that’s what excites me about politics; the challenges and the potential solutions. Just to solve education in America would be enough accomplishment for a life time. But who’s limited to just education? No one, we could have a New New Deal. A New New Frontier. A New War on Poverty. We could spread freedom though the world, not with military force but with ideas. Nothing is impossible for us. For me. And that is perhaps the biggest reason I feel restless with everything right now. I want to be an adult. I want to make my own choices and go where I want to go and do what I want to do. I don’t want my future limited by grades or test scores. I don’t want my life defined by what school I get into. But that’s the way it is. I hate having the future of America- my future- decided without me. But that’s the way it is. I hate having a relationship constricted to spare time. But that’s the way it is. It’s very strange indeed. What percentage of America is made of young people? Certainly a large part. Yet why do we have no rights? Is it any surprise that the Bloods and the Crips attract more young people then the boy scouts? Of couse not. When you look around the school- Amsterdam or any school- you’ll see that the people who dominate are those who are larger then authority. And who doesn’t want to try sometimes? Who doesn’t want to fight just to prove that you won’t get pushed around. Who doesn’t want to disrupt English class when you don’t get your way on Shakespear? Well ok, maybe there’s some who don’t. But in any case... who says it needs to be that way? Who says that’s how it is? Well, I just wrote a long and rather rambling entry when I didn’t really mean too.