A promise broken

The Woodland Cemetery to the founders of Des Moines was seen as a promise of security for all time.

Located at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Woodland Avenue, Woodland Cemetery is an honored and revered resting place for the founders of our city and heroes of our nation.

The cemetery advisory board voted last night to strip the barrier between this revered site and vandals, the homeless, dog walkers.

There is simply no more historic place that is seeded so deeply the history of Polk County, aptly named for President James K. Polk. But among those interred at our cemetery is a different Polk. Jefferson Scott Polk (1831-1907) as a lawyer well educated, clear headed, deliberate, optimistic, positive, nervous, sanguine temperament, aggressive and plain of speech.

In 1859, J.S. Polk formed a partnership with Judge Casady and M.M. Crocker, making one of the strongest law firms in the district.

In 1861, when Mr. Crocker entered the military service, and the firm became Casady & Polk, which continued as such until 1864. At that time Casady retired and was succeeded by Fred M. Hubbell, as junior partner. For twenty-five years Polk & Hubbell thereafter became synonymous with push and enterprise in our town.

In 1867, Mr. Polk and others organized the Equitable Life Insurance Company. The following year, he was elected Secretary and held that office fourteen years.

In 1871, Mr. Polk organized the Des Moines Water Works Company.

August 29, 1866, Des Moines was finally treated to the iron horse with a line fully built from Keokuk along the Des Moines River, after a long and oft-fruitless battle to bring a rail line. On October 1st of that year, Mr. Polk, Fred M. Hubbell, Dr. M.P. Turner and U.B. White completed the first mile of street railway in the city as the Des Moines Street Railway Company. Now fully connected by rail, Des Moines enjoyed 38 daily rail connections and the beginnings of a world class mass transit system, thanks in no small measure to the work of Mr. Polk.

By 1888 Jefferson Polk procured a charter for the Rapid Transit Company, and in 1889 he purchased other competing Railways, and began installation of an entire new public transit system.

In 1874, he laid a narrow-gauge track to Ames, purchasing and laying out the town of Sheldahl.

Sources: Find A Grave/Katie Lou; History of Polk County, 1880

Humanity at its finest

It's easy to find character flaws in people, so it's refreshing to find and share stories about selflessness and compassion. What may have begun as a self-serving exercise, this generous individual turned his personal misfortune into life changing tools for children.

Unfucking our educational system

The public has been brainwashed into thinking that voting for more money in a fucked up education system will somehow, magically, unfuck it.

School boards and administrators are politicians and operate in much the same way as the ones in the state assembly and in DC. They're wined & dined by organizations desperate to suck on the enormous teat of the taxpayers. Teachers are organized into packs whose mission is to benefit teachers, and in no way concern themselves with higher learning or figuring out a better way to impart wisdom for our future.

How can that model ever be anything but massively dysfunctional and corrupt?

I'm tired of hearing the big education thinkers using terms like "at grade level" when there's absolutely no evidence showing kids learn better while in lock-step with peers of the differing intellect. A child learns based on his or her own cognitive abilities and the learning resources available and it's intuitive that no two kids are alike. Therefore assigning a rigid grade level to a child is completely arbitrary.

The starve-or-struggle grade-level system insures no kid will learn on pace with his or her cognitive ability. One child will always complete a module early and find himself board, while another will always struggle to keep pace with the class and eventually give up. It makes no sense to try to force their instruction into the arbitrary constructs we have built and selected for them.

On the other hand, systems like Khan Academy [www.khanacademy.org] can facilitate learning at one's own pace. That's a conversation this country should have sooner rather than later.

Part of the problem is thinking in terms of centralized instruction (and food prep and authority) as opposed to more evenly and accessible distributed systems throughout the community. Distributed models in all domains inherently have less bureaucracy and tyranny, and therefore offer more individual accountability resulting in less waste and corruption. This is a topic that deserves note here, but far more discussion in public forums.

A major factor is that teachers are unavoidably flawed. They're notoriously inconsistent from day to day, year to year and among classrooms across the nation. That means there are no consistent quality standards to ensure all kids have access to the country's best possible instruction -- but they definitely deserve it.

As a community and as a state and as a nation we should be able to objectively and openly produce the best of the best instructional materials and presentations and lectures and put them to work for the students.

And another not-so-impermanent thing: information is free. Why are we wasting so much money on that which is free? In any other domain we'd be appalled by how much information is locked behind paywalls which are put in place for the sole purpose of revenue generation on the backs of the people.

It's hard to define what education is today. It's part political, part institution, part incarceration, part indoctrination and part corporation. Kids learn better how to be reliant on and subservient to the totalitarian class instead of discovering how to be free-minded explorers.

One day not that long ago we had an educational system that was at its core a means to provide kids with a schoolhouse and the best information available, and that resulted in world class thinkers and doers of the industrial age. They were not institutions and their purpose was not to generate revenue or political power, but simply to help kids develop into contributing, productive members of the community and go out in the world as free people and invent and build new things and enrich the lives of our neighbors.

Today, instead of giving the children the smartest mind in town, a world class education could mean giving them the smartest minds in the world from which to develop their new found wisdom and places in our collective society, to invent and build new things to improve the lives of our neighbors.

So before you vote one more time to throw more money at an educational system in hopes that will finally unfuck it, put to the schoolmasters how they intend to leverage a modern infrastructure and a bounty of information into a world class education for all children.