To the extent that children themselves want to become helpers, encourage responsible ways to assist. Children in one school in Maryland are writing letters to children in a sister school in the western Ukraine, electronic letters of support, assuring them of their friendship and sympathy, telling them about their days, sending their thoughts and prayers. They are offering a branch of compassion and friendship and normalcy in a time of chaos.
Point out to kids that acts of great evil, cruelty, and harm, often elicit the best from others: new depths of compassion and mercy. One thinks of the American experience of 9-11, and all those who raced to assist. (See our September 9-11 Heroes.) Right now, Poland has opened its borders to nearly 800,000 refugees, and not passively. Tens of thousands of volunteers from around that country and the world – people who did not know each other before March 1-- have come to that border to assist. And they can use our assistance. If a school wishes to raise funds to help the 400,000 endangered children, international relief efforts are mobilizing. Doctors Without Borders already has medical teams on the ground. The UN World Food Program has organized for Ukrainian Emergency relief. Caritas Ukraine, which is supported by Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children are also on site already with medical supplies, food, water, and refugee support. The appropriately named “Mercy Chefs” are sending food relief to Romanian and Polish border camps. All these efforts will be make-shift and provisional, as we hope and pray for a miracle that saves the weaker nation from the stronger. The international community is ultimately on the hook. “Faithfulness is standing by those we love, those we serve, and what we believe.” Will we? Mary Beth Klee Since this blog was posted two weeks ago, more than three million refugees have fled Ukraine during an unabated Russian attack.
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![]() “I think America has come further in giving opportunity to the best that’s in human nature than any other country ever in history, and we seem to be holding on for over 200 years already. We’ve greatly improved the inequalities and the shortcomings of our way of life as we’ve moved forward.” He didn’t end there. “One of the things I feel is that we are a country of good people. We are a country of well-meaning, hard-working, conscientious people — 90% of us. And we are blessed with progress in a number of fields today, the likes of which no people on Earth have ever enjoyed in all of history.” He pointed to progress in medicine, in the opportunity for education, and in the quest for equality itself. America is a can-do nation, and as long as we educate our children in the nation’s stories, “I am optimistic,” said he. The key is to educate our children in the nation’s stories. Martin Luther King Jr. knew them and loved them, and it made him a powerful agent for change. “History is an antidote to the hubris of the present. History should be a lesson that produces immense gratitude for all those who went before us." When McCullough points out that “there are still more public libraries in this country than Starbucks,” he affirms his fundamental optimism about the American experiment. We still have lots to be optimistic about. In the past three weeks my husband and I have been traveling by car up and down the east coast – “all come to look for America.” If you travel from Anne Hutchinson’s Portsmouth, Rhode Island to the Founders’ Philadelphia to the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk, then on to guess who’s Jacksonville, and come back through George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore and George Washington’s Mount Vernon, you’ll be mightily impressed too. Of course, you’ll be impressed by the stories of all those titans of the American past, but not incidentally by the people you meet working in each location in each city each day. Americans of all races, genders, and ethnicities are ploughing ahead (like Washington at Mount Vernon) with pretty good humor. They’re keeping their heads down as we close out this pandemic, and they’re fed up with restrictions. But everywhere you go, one meets hard-working, conscientious, decent, and fundamentally positive people, who truly live out the ideals of liberty and justice for all. The African American manager at the Hampton Inn in Alexandria, Virginia—when I told him I was from Rhode Island—pointed out to my delight that we were practically family because his aunt was from Rhode Island too, and wasn’t it great that Viola Davis got her start there? I practically hugged him. (But then again, there was an acrylic placard between us.) Still, our nation’s Home Away from Home (the Hampton Inn in Asheville NC), neatly sums up the national creed on the placard in its halls: “Today is going to be amazing!” Ya gotta love it. Go ahead and teach the kids: love your country. Do something for your country. Mary Beth Klee
![]() This moment and these findings have something to teach us about intellectual virtue and the nature of science. Some very tenacious researchers at White Sands had literally been digging in these dunes for decades when the new prints were exposed. The geologists who uncovered them had been over this region a dozen times before, seeking, wondering. But one day in 2019 high winds literally turned back the sands of time, and tireless British geologist Michael Bennett along with White Sands Park Director David Bustos beheld a different landscape. Exposed in the bluff were undeniably human footprints fading into a mound of sand. The two held their breath and forged forward. Gentle scraping exposed outlines of a buried track. “At that point,” Bennett recalled, “we said Bingo, we’ve got it.” White Sands had been on geologists’ radar since the 1930s, when a twenty-two-inch footprint thought to be the mythical “Bigfoot,” was discovered there. The remarkable print turned out to be a giant ground sloth, and in subsequent years ancient human and extinct animal prints were discovered nearby, dating to perhaps ten thousand years ago. Maybe more… But radiocarbon dating is a tricky business and requires seed samples from above and below the imprints, from which the age can be calculated. Many tracks are better than one. That’s why the 2019 discovery is breathtaking.
![]() The dating of seeds above and below the prints suggests humans and animals tramped here between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. “We’ve really tried to prove it’s not that old, and we keep coming up dry,” Daniel Odess, archaeologist and one of the authors of the study reports. Layer after layer of track yields the same data. Wow. Of course, caution should prevail. Is there anything “off” about these radiocarbon dating results? Can a second method of dating be found? Or do these new findings constitute a body of evidence so overwhelming that it’s time to alter former theories? We don’t know yet, and I am a student of history not science, but I’m betting on a paradigm shift. And that will challenge teachers. For almost three decades first graders in Core Knowledge Schools across the country --and high schoolers everywhere--have been learning that human settlement in the Americas dates to the end of the last Ice Age. I personally wrote and recorded song a called “Back in the Ice Age” that hundreds of former Crossroads Academy students can sing. It has the lyrics “Back in the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago…woolly mammoths crossed the land bridge with hunters close behind, from Asia to America, a new world they did find, back in the Ice Age.” Now what? Maybe I just change the lyrics to “Before the ice froze, thirty thousand years ago….” In October the Core Virtues program spotlights the virtues of diligence and perseverance. Those are indispensable intellectual excellences: care in our work, pressing on despite difficulty. My hat is off to the tenacious team of international researchers at White Sands, who worked assiduously and never gave up on an elusive quest. Well done, noble scholars! And I tip my hat too to the 22,000-year-old teens and kids, who left their mark, perhaps drawing water for their folks at the now extinct “Lake Otero,” where the prints remain. And let’s not forget to spotlight two other intellectual virtues these scientists displayed, ones that are also cultivated at Core Virtues Schools: openness to inquiry and humility in the face of facts. Those traits are key to the progress of knowledge in general and science in particular. Scientists construct theories (or “paradigms”) of what happened in accord with the most reliable data they have. For years, it has seemed from dating of glacial moraines, ice cores, human remains and artifacts that a post-Ice Age crossing was the most likely explanation of human settlement in the Americas. But that is a theory, not a fact. And science is a process. New evidence hinted the theory might be incorrect, and an intrepid few researchers were open to questioning how “settled” the science was. They didn’t shy away from research that might yield pre-thirteen-thousand-year-old results. Colorado geologist Thomas Stafford notes that it has not been common scientific practice to think past that date. As a radiocarbon dating expert, he would often receive samples to date and be told not to bother looking past the thirteen-thousand-year material. “If you’re not looking for anything, you’re not going to find it,” Stafford says. Openness to inquiry must guide intellectual endeavor. When advocates for various theories and policies proclaim, “the science is settled,” all our alarm bells should go off. On highly complex issues, the science is hardly ever “settled.” Ask Copernicus. Ask Galileo. Ask Einstein. Ask Michael Bennett. Nature surprises us, and our understanding evolves. We have to be humble enough to allow that evolution -- admit that we might not know it all. Meanwhile, what do we teach those first graders and high school students about how human beings came to inhabit the Americas? Maybe we say: Well, it was a very long time ago, and because we don’t have written records and our scientists are literally still digging, we don’t know for sure. But here’s what we think. Early human hunters probably crossed from Asia to America at a time when that area wasn’t covered with ice. That could have been before the last Ice Age. We used to think we humans came at the end of the Ice Age, but now we’re not sure because of evidence found in our own national park at White Sands, New Mexico. Maybe you can help solve that puzzle if you become an archaeologist or geologist. And teachers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to tell students they should learn some lessons from those Ice Age youth. When your parents tell you to take your little brother or sister and go do something, just do it. Leave a legacy….. Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D. has taught the Ice Age unit to first graders numerous times and now needs to regroup.
The Bennett, et. al. study is at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586 and the National Geographic article at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/fossil-footprints-challenge-theory-when-people-first-arrived-americas. And for another thought-provoking challenge to a realm in which “the science is settled,” read New York University physicist and Obama Under Secretary of Energy Steven Koonin’s latest work Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters. (April 2021)
![]() And speaking of life, a sparkling river—the Colorado—runs through it all. That stretch of jade did a lot of the work – eroding the mighty cliffs, shaping, and elevating them over time. The snake-like river a full mile below contrasts with the canyon walls but keeps our focus on the rocks—which are becoming more awe-inspiring and breath-taking as they age. They testify to the wonder of aging.Even as they evoke wonder, can these rocks be considered symbols of hope and joy? Without question, they lift the spirit and humble the intellect. The Grand Canyon, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, does not compete with any other rock formation on earth. But her cousin formations in Utah’s Bryce and Zion national parks have an eerily similar heart-lifting effect. Bryce wows with its “hoodoos,” miles of playful orange-red spires shooting from the earth in magical sculptures. Squint to see a Silent City, Thor’s Hammer, the Chinese Wall or Queen Victoria. Further south, sister canyon Zion overwhelms with Olympian color and height. Here the visitor walks through sunken canyon trails with two-thousand-foot red rock cliffs soaring on either side. We gaze up to The Court of the Patriarchs, Angel’s Landing, and Temple of Sinawava (a Paiute wolf god). The Virgin River gurgles, Archangel Falls hush, and at sunset from Canyon Overlook, silence preserves splendor. Oh joy. A bubble of hope. ![]() But you’re right -- they're just rocks. And it is always more compelling to tell stories about real people. So, let’s close with a tribute to some real people who really get rocks, and inspire wonder, hope and joy. Here is a photo of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an intrepid Mars explorer team last month. These happy NASA folks are celebrating the successful launch of “Ingenuity,” a four-pound helicopter that became the first aircraft in earth’s history to fly on another planet. They have reason to rejoice in this "Wright Brothers" moment because they designed it. Launched from the Mars Perseverance Rover, the rotors bit into the thin atmosphere, lifted, and sent back splendid images. Of red rock. And of massive craters, winding channels, dips and swells. The 2020 NASA Mars team is building on the tradition of linking new wonders to all world civilizations. The Rover Perseverance set down in the enormous “Jezero Crater,” which scientists speculate was once a lake fed by a winding channel of a river. Jezero is a Slavic word meaning “lake” and NASA chose the name specifically to salute the small Bosnian village of Jezero with geography (lake and river delta) eerily similar to the Martian landing site. After its war-torn recent history, the thirteen hundred citizens of Jezero now have a lot to cheer about. “It is the most fascinating and unique experience for us,” a student at the village school said. “The mighty Perseverance rover landing in a crater on the red planet that owes its name to our town. Wow!” (On the day of the landing the town of Jezero sponsored a volley ball game between “Earth” and “Mars.” Mars won.) The section of the crater where Perseverance landed is named “Tséyi,” a Navajo term for the heart of their homeland (Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly). A series of other Martian landmarks will receive Navajo names too; for example, a distinctive rock the team is drilling into is named “Máaz” (Navajo for Mars). And appropriately, Navajo engineer and Ingenuity team member Aaron Yazzie designed the drill bits that will extract samples from the rock's core. Navajo nation President Jonathan Nez remarked “We hope that having our language used in the Perseverance mission will inspire more of our young Navajo people to understand the importance and the significance of learning our language. Our words were used to help win World War II [Navajo Code Talkers], and now we are helping to navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.” The first samples of Martian rocks will be returning to Earth in 2030. Some of the scientists who will be examining them are in our grade schools now. Let’s not fail them. This May let’s celebrate human wonder that conduces to awe and knowledge. Let’s celebrate the hope and joy that come from such wonders and understanding. Let’s challenge them to “dare mighty things,” so we can keep on rockin’ it for the twenty-first century. Mary Beth Klee
![]() This April’s volunteer focus complements ourCore Virtues themes for the month: humility, graciousness and courtesy, and even forgiveness. Pastor Rick Warren once described the virtue of humility as “not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. Humility is thinking more of others.” That’s what voluntarism is all about. Most of us have an innate understanding that “no man is an island” and we are part of something larger than ourselves. We have a choice to be part of that and to serve others. One of the most poignant volunteer initiatives underway, “Children of Vietnam,” dovetails with themes of forgiveness and humility. Through this organization many veterans of the Vietnam War (and others) have returned to Vietnam to assist their former enemy -- needy families in the Central Highlands who now benefit from their initiatives building kindergartens, giving food assistance, and providing medical help for kids. Some work with children suffering from the effects of chemical Agent Orange, which was dropped during the war to despoil the jungle. "I have the feeling that we need to restore some things," said Captain Larry Vetter, who served in the war. "The United States government refuses to do that, so I'm here to do my part." They stay for weeks or months and some for years. It is not just a path of service but one of healing for many, bringing closure to a time when the two peoples were enemies, and lending credence to the old adage that “in giving, we receive.” So this month, we salute the millions of volunteers nationwide and worldwide who do more than just your part. Three cheers for the volunteers. Mary Beth Klee |
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January 2023
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