Cultivating failure

I tend to excel at standardized tests. It is how current education system and society define success. People with good scores are entitled great incentives for their "merits" (sometimes as the loss to people who can't keep up in the system). The definition of "merits" then comes under my analysis. Would we limit definition of "merits" to just the scores of standardized tests? And let others fail?

I have spent my life, it seems, in and around schools. For complicated reasons, I attended a score of them, both in the United States and abroad; I taught in Louisiana and Los Angeles for more than a decade; I have volunteered in all sorts of schools, and am now a mother of elementary-school students. I have never seen an entire school system as fundamentally broken and rudderless as the California public schools, a system in which one out of five high-school students drops out before graduation, and in which scarcely 60 percent of the African American and Hispanic students leave school with a diploma. These young people are cast adrift in a $50 billion system in which failure is almost a foregone conclusion.

Above is an abstract from an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/school-yard-garden) by an educator highlighting how the education system determine "failure" instead of educating all in benefit of society.

In my opinion, society is like lotuses in a pond; only when water-level comes up, lotuses could rise. It is not so wise to polarize individuals just with results of standardized tests.

It is also true

In my whole life, I have never seen much more than what I have seen in the last year...

The more I put more effort to look, the more I see others' perspectives and the more I understand others... but where is the limit I should set to settle with my own perspective?

I guess it is not about setting limit but having wisdom to judge and decide.

Interesting talk about how different views can be in different societies or even in the same society.

security update

putting across humorously... below is an email i sent out to my office team this morning...

i aspired to be a professional comedian anyway... :)
dear team,
thanks for staying put through all these attacks. I hereby would like to make update on security issues to address concerns you might have.

#1 websites - i am highly confident that the same nature of attack will not bring us down again

#2 Pdrive - service interruptions are caused by a virus launching an attack on our server... the antivirus we have on our Pdrive faithfully stops the network to protect our sacred files (i am running updates and hopefully it will fix the problem) - so please don't use the computer itself, you may access Pdrive from your computers... and if it is down, just give me a ping

#3 tuesday - today our super police is not around, so remember to lock the door when you go out in the evening... don't leave your laptops around unattended as researchers have allegedly hypothesized it to be the main source of getting infected... so keep them safe and stay healthy...

cheers,
soe

Fixing flaw in capitalism

Perfection is almost unattainable. Capitalism has pros which other political systems such as communism and socialism might not have.

I have come to realize that outcomes of overhauling a system to fix some cons in it are dramatic. It is evident in devastation of Cambodia back to Year Zero when communism was implemented during Pol Pot regime to replace colonialism/capitalism. It doesn't necessarily mean communism is evil.

Change needs patience. Change needs insight of the existing system and the next system. Change happens at the time when tipping point is touched. It is very evident in how Mr Obama came out to be the US president.

Capitalism, as of now, won't change in few years to come. However, the poor who has fallen out of the system can be saved. Dr Yunus has proved his point - empowering credit to the poor who otherwise won't be able to participate in capitalism.

Rather than waiting for the change to happen (which might now come in near future), it is important to see how to fix existing problems within existing system.

(It is always exciting to work on new system. However, 80/20 rule applies. Now, change which Mr Obama offered to the voters might not be as exciting as before. Some are apparently getting fed up. However, the beauty is in seeing and working through the last 20%.)

So how to fix existing problems without overhaul?

Poverty
Educate people about financial system: not to be taken advantage of, not to be nakedly swindled. It would be interesting to do a survey on how many people with a bachelor degree know about naked short selling.

Democracy (in Cambodia)
Though there are a lot of complaints about how shady Cambodia political system is, it is evident that NGOs are operating quite freely within the country. There is relatively so much freedom in civil society space. Don't believe? Compare it with its neighbor, Burma. Through vibrant civil society, democracy will surely be attained. But, obviously, it will take a long time.

Look a problem with another perspective. There might be more pragmatic and meaningful solution.