Thread

I browsed. Titles: from Fantasy Land, to Why Kennedy Assassination matters etc…then finished up with the Vietnamese (Foreign Language) section of the library. A book suddenly jumped out. Author? Bang Ba Lan, my language teacher in High School. He translated Jesse Stuart’s “The thread that runs so true”, a book about education the hard way i.e. mountaineers of tobacco country in the early 1900.

I felt connected to ” those barefooted, older students in Kentucky around 1930,” written in 1948 and translated in 1958 by my teacher. Now, that’s the thread. Since recently I uncovered my mom’s class picture, showing all her 57 elementary students in barefoot or flip flops.

With AI, who knows 100 years from now, someone somewhere in KY will read these blogs and close the loop.

We are never alone. Someone will impact us, shape us, and show us that There is More. Qualities that don’t depreciate: investing in others, showing and guiding the way. Being a Teacher’s kid, I know and benefit from these intangibles albeit it’s a long game.

Yes, we need food. But we also need to tend to our souls. The thirst for knowledge, to become our fullest selves, as opposed to defaulting to unexplored and underexploited beings.

By way of preface, my teacher wrote….”so that we can all be challenged to build a more civil society”. He argues that learning help us know ourselves.

Back in my teacher’s time, we were in a race against ignorance, diseases and destruction. Today, a new force is joining the fold: Artificial Intelligence (machine which learns 24/7 ) crowding out a field already with totalitarianism, prejudice and poverty. Since the thread that started in rural Kentucky, Climate has gone berserk, weapons are with eyes, and targets in cross-hair.

That desire to learn, still runs deep and true, from first edition of the book, to the streets of Vietnam, then translated, printed, and re-surfaced in the ethnic section of an US library.

So accessible. Only lacking in desire.

Readers now a days prefer to scroll and zoom, to read the summary and glance at notable quotes.

No one gives attention to rural education, rural electricity and broadband. We learned that our author started his teaching at age 17, himself barely finishing High School. He then faced enormous challenges getting started including teacher- student bloody brawl as initiation rites.

His students were older than he, without shoes or educational accessories. He had to “sell” the values of math (which helps calculate farm output and production yield). In one case, the tonnage of a haul.

In our age of get-rich-quick, con man prospers at the expenses of common man. Theranos, not thread.

For every vacated seat in the classroom, two could easily fill that slot. But as it often goes, the one who needed it most, can’t afford. And the ones who easily can , don’t want to “waste” their playboy life on books. To them, education is nice to have, not need to have. After all, peripherals, irrelevant facts and non-monetizable concepts e.g. ethics, moral, history and arts are so foreign. Most times, it’s delay rewarded, nọt immediate gratification.

Give it another decade, we’ll see Artificial Intelligence loom large. Then the thread that runs so true, this time, would mean the AI version of once KY idealistic Teach Corps.. Learning takes time. Most time, in the back of our heads, we need to sit still, be quiet, and unwind/unlearn all previous misconceptions; before updating with new facts. Still it’s good to see the thread sit incognito, tucked-away in the Foreign Language section of the library, still warm and ripe for the picking.