No matter how I looked at the issues in my course and the content, I could not see the big idea. I spent hours researching the concept. I asked my teammates for help. In the end it took a good night’s sleep. Then it hit me. The real focus was why we need to be informed and participate in our system in order to change policy in Washington and Olympia. We the people…even if we are semi-sovereign as Elmer E. Schattschneider wrote in his book, The semisoverign people must find a way to partcipate:
Abstention reflects the suppression of the options and alternatives that reflect the needs of the nonparticipants. It is not necessarily true that the people with the greatest needs participate in politics most actively. Further, it is an outrage to attribute the failures of American democracy to the ignorance and stupidity of the masses. Only a pedagogue would suppose that the people must pass some kind of examination to qualify for participation in a democracy. The most important thing about any democratic regime is the way in which it uses and exploits popular sovereignty. The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive.
My bias in thinking about the world around me is found in the educational choices I made. I began as a sociology major with a focus on criminology and finished in the field of political science and law. I see the need for the “masses” to participate in their governmental processes when a crisis is looming. I hope you do not doubt that one is just beginning and will last for the next twenty-five years. So just what kind of crisis is there? It is the one that is occurring between the political interests of the afluent and those of limited resources. This conflict is beginning over the resources needed to meet the needs of Americans in the shrinking middle class and the socio-economically disavantaged which will allow them to live out their end-of-life cycle years with some dignity and quality of life.
One of the most powerful political lobbyist’s organizations in the country is AARP or the American Association of Retired People. Their membership begins at age 50. They are well aware of the fact that 78 million people born between 1946-1964 will retire and apply for social security benefits and Medicare benefits over the next twenty-five years. The National Institute on Aging is aware of the problems regarding long term care. Tammy Flanagan (Senior Benefits Director for the National Institute of Transition Planning) wrote in an article on retirement planning that there is a federal long term care program available for federal employees. This program is easier to get than those existing long term care insurance plans for employees who do not have access to federal programs. Most of these non-federal plans are far too costly for people over 45, with limited funds, to purchase. Also, common sense tells us that without funds no matter what program is out there for seniors they will not have access to it. Flanagan gives us an idea of what long term care costs in her article. But the figures are so depressing I will not attempt to cover them here.
When I started putting the class together, my first quarter as a student in the eLearning certification program, we were asked to think about the course we might be teaching as we progressed through the elements and courses needed to teach on-line and get the certification. It was during one of these courses, I became familiar with curriculum designing for on-line teaching and the concept of backward design. It was, simply put, a way to design lessons from the concept of the big idea of a course. Easy to do? Not!
I am still not completely certain I have it right. My idea was, our governmental institutions and policies must be flexible and changeable in order to meet the changing needs of its citizenry. American citizens must become involved in their political processes to guide the making of law and policy on critical issues that face the so called “masses” today. That brings me to the idea,”… we must begin to think of new ways to solve old and new social problems.” I hope this is the lynch pin that holds all the information in this course together; because, that is where I was going with the course. In fact, sociology studies help us understand how groups of people behave or think. Politial Science helps us understand how political institutions work and how they develop laws and policy. Gerontology helps us understand the influence the process of aging has on a nations citizenry, socially, politically and financially.
Although my classmates have heard me say this ad nauseam, in the next 25 years we will have to re-think our concepts of retirement, aging, Medicare, Medicaid, insurance, end of life saving plans and care-giving methods and institutions. We will have to re-define quality of life and personal dignity issues and concepts. Finally, we will have to truly investigate the aging process and determine what needs to be done in order to live longer, healthier and more prosperous lives during our end-of-life cycle.
Note: The video is circa an hour and eigtheen minutes long. You can get much of the information watching the first 14 minutes. For those of you interested in the ideas, it is worth watching the whole video if you have the time.
JOYSTECHTOOL 