Tag: education

There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.

“The War Against Youth” (via climateadaptation)

After reading this, I am concerned about my future and the future of my kids.

Creative Talents

> So often, we limit our exploration of our photography identity to just photography! Yet our lives and personality are much broader and richer than this narrow perspective....

> There really is no other YOU. You have a unique perspective because of the combination of inputs that you have in your life. Inputs such as: who you live with. Where you live. Your upbringing. Your particular talents in many different areas. Your interests. Your hobbies. Your beliefs. Your education. Your friends. Your life adventures. Your unique weaknesses or life challenges. All the good and bad influences of our life come together to create a one and only unique output: YOU. No one else has your specific ingredient list that makes you who you are. Isn’t this fascinating?

Source: [FuelYourPhotography](http://www.fuelyourphotography.com/how-to-leverage-your-other-creative-talents-in-photography/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FuelYourPhotography+%28Fuel+Your+Photography%29)

I was talking with another photographer last night and he mentioned that people have told him that his photography has a distinctive style.  He didn't set out to create a style it just happened.  His style found him.  That hasn't happened to me yet — at least I haven't been told my photos have a style.  I feel my photography lacks a cohesion.  I do try though to hook my photographs to a story.  This isn't something unique to me though.  I'm just channeling the style of [+Jorge Qinteros](http://plus.google.com/112016758168531084450/posts) and others.

 

Elite Education

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - The American Scholar (The American Scholar)

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.