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The Sun Interview
School’s Out
An Interview With John Taylor Gatto
The first thing I discovered was that the types of learning that are measured by standardized tests are not real learning at all. To do well on a standardized reading test, for example, does not mean that you read well. There are approximately 150 categories of information that a complex passage of reading delivers, and the standardized test covers approximately six of those categories over and over again.
September 1995Environmentalism And The Mystique Of Whiteness
An Interview With Carl Anthony
I agree that, no matter what the noise level, each person is entitled to hear his or her own inner voice. That’s an important first step to hearing the voices of others, as well as the cry of the earth. But the ability to respond intelligently, creatively, and compassionately to the claims of different human communities is undermined by the false sense of privilege that comes from thinking of oneself as “white.” Wanting to hear the voice of the earth, the notion that nature is crying out in pain, has a limited potential for reaching and touching many people who are living much more prosaic lifestyles than those who think about these matters only in an intellectual and philosophical way. People of color often view alarmist predictions about the collapse of the ecosystem as the latest stratagem by the elite to maintain political and economic control.
August 1995On Racism And Nonviolence
An Interview With Arun Gandhi
Peace without nonviolence is impractical. Some people think, if there is no war, we have peace. But, in effect, no society is at peace at the moment. In the United States, there is street violence. This is not peace at all. No country has ever made an attempt to achieve a thoroughly peaceful society.
June 1995The Trouble With Religion
An Interview With Matthew Fox
If you teach people that the number-one problem is their sin and that when they came into the world they made a blotch on existence, they’ll never get over it. We talk about sexual abuse of children, but this is religious abuse.
April 1995Higher Learning
Kenneth And Gloria Wapnick On A Course In Miracles
Fundamentally, the Course says that only spirit is real, and there’s nothing else. It also says that God is not involved in the world of matter. It says the proper role of Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, is not to solve problems for you, but to be a loving presence in your mind that reminds you not to accept the world of time and matter as real.
March 1995At Home In The World
An Interview With Peter Matthiessen
There seemed no way that animal wasn’t going to charge. I stood there for a moment, terrified, my temples burning. But then, inexplicably, I calmed right down. I had a feeling of complete peace with that animal, and I knew she wasn’t going to charge or hurt me in any way. I was treed by a rhino once, so I knew how very different this encounter was.
January 1995The Reach Of The Mind
An Interview With Larry Dossey
What really knocked my socks off was a study that I first found out about in 1987. It showed that people in coronary-care units who were prayed for did a lot better than people who weren’t.
December 1994Free Radical
An Interview With Noam Chomsky
Up until December 1967, almost everybody had been a hawk. Starting in February 1968, everybody who was not a dove was saying they had been all along. If you look at the Kennedy-era intellectuals, they have two versions of what happened: the memoirs they wrote before the Tet Offensive and the books they wrote after it. These are radically different. Before Tet, there is no hint that anyone wanted to withdraw from Vietnam. The books after Tet are full of explanations about how Kennedy had plans to withdraw from Vietnam. The game was over by then, of course, and they wanted to cover their asses.
November 1994Holding Our Power
An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé
The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.
August 1994Stones Of Light
An Interview With David Freidel
One of the wonderful dimensions of shamanism for me is its unleashing of the imagination, the intuition, and the emotion of a person, rather than allowing the banality of the material world to overwhelm one’s life. Making the life experience conform to the imagination is a great thing, and it’s something I would like to see our society pursue actively. Instead of simply consuming fantasy, we should generate fantasy, generate alternative understandings.
July 1994
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