Spenders vs Savers- Who are we supposed to be?

So we watch TV, listen to the radio, or play on the web and all we see are advertisements. It is said that TV exists for the companies that advertise to us, not for the people who watch it. We’ve been conditioned by all this advertisement to spend, to buy everything we need or want. We see examples of who we want to (or should)  be glorified by shows like Cribs or people who deserve better like Extreme Makeover or What Not to Wear.

Nowhere except in dry news reports about the government do we hear about saving money. The gov says we aren’t, as a nation, saving enough money. I’m not sure what that means for our economy exactly. I guess it means we are spending all we can, not planning for the future, maxing out our credit cards.

There are no TV shows with people who save a lot or spend properly.  How do you work that into Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives? TV has to start advising us. Work it into the news, work it into some kind of plot, do PSAs. We can still buy, just do it within a budget. Companies will still get our money. Can’t a teen character on Friday Night Lights say he can’t afford to party next weekend because he doesn’t have a job? Just like some groups want more minorities in shows, this kind of plot needs to be there too.

Creating Fine Upstanding Citizens

I know that having jails and prisons is good for the economy. You need people to plan them and build them. Then you need staff to oversee them and guard the prisoners. Then you need staff to counsel and treat the prisoners. Then you need aftercare programs for when prisoners are released.

It seems though, that we could do away with the societal stress if we revamped our educational and social system to improve the parenting skills of potential mothers and fathers. Teach children from an early age about how to resolve issues, be a productive citizen, and raise children in a thoughtful, attentive, and moral way.

I think we just assume children will grow up knowing how to handle themselves, how to handle others, and how to make it through the world on their own. But we end up with kids who hang with the lowest element of society because their single parent doesn’t know how to teach them that they are worth more than that.

With Barack Obama as president, many people are thinking the future of black people will change. The mere fact that he is president won’t help anyone. If he is seen as an example of how to be a motivated contributing person in the American society, then we will all benefit when others (black, white, or anything else) see that only their hard work and drive will help them.

There are plenty of people in society we can use as examples of good people. And plenty at the other end of the spectrum. A lot of imprisoned people got there because they did not know their options, did not think they could succeed, or didn’t know how to make an honest life for themselves. It’s a cyclical thing, their parents didn’t know how to do it either an didn’t expose their kids to anything better than what they knew.

I think schools should step in and try to work more with kids on the social aspect of things rather than the abstract algebra and history they teach. While knowing all the presidents might make me well-rounded, if I don’t know how to budget so I don’t depend on a credit card, what will happen to me?

How I Would Change the Educational System if I Could

I remember learning about stuff that now seems to be not worth having spent time on. Why did I need to learn about all the wars we had? Great, it shaped our country, but we need to be producing business/industry leaders and people who are motivated to join the workforce. We need to spend time on practical skills like how to lead people, daily living skills like balancing a checkbook, budgeting, calculating what the best credit card would be, the mortgage process. We need to teach kids conflict resolution, about differences in personalities and how to work with others effectively, cultural differences.

Why didn’t I learn more about important women and minorities? I feel like I learned only that is was men who bought civilization and this country along.

I understand that all of what I learned wasn’t obvious – I know now I learned critical thinking by doing those word problems in math. But I also know I needed to be guided in applying skills to other areas. Do kids know that they can apply their critical thinking skills to TV-watching to know that reality shows exist because they are cheap not because they are good? Do they understand that TV news is a visual medium and that some of what is reported is solely because they have video of it and not because it is important to know? How come we learned about electricity in the same way the discoverers probably did rather than looking at the light switches in our own classrooms?