Dear bloggers,

One of our recent conversations on the blog has been about education.  I believe that in the natural way that things work, the best school is the home.  We can argue about “What is a home?  What goes on there?  What are the roles of the parents and the children?” but ultimately what is learned in the home stays with the individual, in one form or another, for our whole lives.

I look on last year as a real learning experience for the American people, where we’re going outside the normal procedures to elect our leaders; where we’ve opened it up to really three different types of people who are vastly different and vastly the same:  a man who was a POW during war; an African-American activist; and a woman whose whole life has been dedicated to governing.  Fifteen years ago, if we had predicted this, we would have thought, “There’s no way this is going to happen!”  But we have made such leaps from one place to another.

In my observation, listening to the pundits, it seems to be a constant reference to the children coming in and projecting their openness to these new political realities to their parents.  It seems that the roles have been reversed as far as the children telling their side of the story, and the parents then reassessing what they had thought about.  Thinking back on my childhood, I came from Bridgeport, on the south side of Chicago.  It was a very cosmopolitan, mixed community within a very small geographic area, where we had Irish and Polish and Lithuanians, Greek and Italians, and in many cases the parents’ first language was not English.  So they relied somewhat on their children to interpret and explain the nuances of the new country to them.  So how we act as a family unit, how we educate each other, who is the teacher, who is the student...  as strange as it may be, quite often we change roles, we’re both the students and the teachers.

In my art career, when I’ve started getting uptight about my color preferences or my directions and forms, I turn to my granddaughter, from the time she was 2 or 3 or 4 years old.  She would grab 2 Crayons, one in each hand, and just go at it.  Some great manifestations would come forward.  I would always use her as my teacher to see what freedom of expression is really about; to do something but not really give a damn about what was going into it; just do it and experience it and enjoy it and celebrate it.  I believe that is probably the broader notion of school.

In what context, in what environment, can we manipulate the educational system so that our children become better than we are, that they have more opporutnity than we do?  I’ve encouraged my grandchildren to travel from an early age to different environments.  Whenever I go into different countries or neighborhoods of different nationalities, colors, creeds, and religions, I like to bring my children or grandchildren with me.  I think the experience of other places and people is a great school.

Matt