Taking Learning to the Streets

I realize that anything I write will pale compared to my last post, President-elect Obama's acceptance speech, but there are important issues at hand, so I'll do my best.

The last two weeks have been a blur of excitement, besides the election my every waking moment, and there have been a lot of them, have been taken up thinking about a company, Apangea Learning, that can help change the world. It is a learning system that teaches math over the Internet very, very well. The world needs this right now, and I'm going to tell you why.

In the guise of SWS Network, our Model Based Marketing firm, we have discovered things about the education system that belong in a Dickens Novel instead of the 21rst Century. We weren't looking at the shining successes we are all familiar with, but rather the underside of the system known in the vernacular of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 as "Failing Schools".

The NCLB Act has been praised by some and trashed by others, but after a while one thing is perfectly clear, as a country we are guilty of a perpetuating a terrible wrong to a class of citizens for decades. Children born into districts with failing schools, those which are defined as being unable to teach their students at a level that allows them to compete for positions in colleges and jobs, are essentially given a life sentence simply for being born.

How in the hell did we let this go on so long? I've spent many hours this week crying with joy due to Obama's election and crying with the pain of the suffering that we have let continue generation after generation. The reason we can't do anything about this travesty are as long as Donald Trump's Xmas list, everyone gets blamed from teachers, parents, neighborhoods, government, God and the devil and most wrongly, even the Kids.

You can read a million reasons why things can't get better, not enough good teachers, not enough money, even the evil comments that imply they just can't be taught, a sickening comment that once came out of the mouth of a man that headed the United States Department of Education.

This is unacceptable and so wrong you can taste it, feel it like a cold wind on bare skin, it is as wrong as apartheid, as wrong as slavery, as wrong as the holocaust and we can't tolerate for one more second, one more minute, certainly not one more generation.

You say we can't fix it, then you weren't listening over the past year, you weren't listening the last month, and you sure weren't listening last Tuesday night because you would know this, "Yes We Can".

Starting with Apangea Learning we are taking learning to the people and we are going to teach them Math, that's right Math. Math is the key to knowing how to solve problems, how to reason , how to compare, how to calculate, how to measure, how to be fair, if you know Math you can do almost anything. Math will take you more places than any car, will keep you warmer than a coat and give you more confidence than a beautiful woman or man on your arm.

Yes We Can give every child born into that life sentence early parole so that we can hear their voice, they won't all be scientists or chemists or accountants, but with the confidence that they will have by passing those same tests that kids out the suburbs pass without a second thought. And we will all be better for it, and another age of slavery will end and a new era of equality can begin.

I need to go now, there is much to do to make this real, but we have the tools now and as long as we work these tools and we can find people who embrace this effort like Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, MLK and JFK embraced theirs with help and support and yes a little money we make this happen in our lifetimes and the last generation will look back on educational inequality with the same distain as any type of slavery.

Yes We Can!