Today the ritual was specially rewarding due to the sunrays falling on the butter. It looked like it was the sunrays that melted the butter.

The warmth of the bagels, its color and texture, the sight and the smell of the melting butter formed a complex sensual symphony, a hymn to the new morning.

What a perfect Epicurean pleasure practice! Until my being diagnosed with cancer I considered myself too active for “”wasting” time on memories. Since I understood that my life could statistically end within the next 2-3 years I started reminiscing, deriving pleasure from remembering the pleasurable moments I spent with nice and decent people.

Yesterday one of my friends sent me a link that facilitates this process: http://upchucky.org/

Listening to the juke box of a certain year kick-starts the reminiscing process almost automatically. Yes, this is an  American juke box and most of my Italian idols of the sixties (Domenico Modugno, Remo Germani, Gigliola Cinquetti, Adamo) are missing but our old radio stations in communist Romania and the less repressive stations from neighboring Hungary and Yugoslavia did play Harry Belafonte, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and many others. The gaps were filled by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. We even saw movies with Elvis.

All these pieces help me piece together my memories of a certain year. I have started  systematically going back to a certain year every day. Today I am back in1956 and I remember the playmates from the nursery school (two of them are dead for years, and probably many more of those I lost track of). I also remember the fascination and thrill I felt watching the endless rows of Russian tanks, inhaling their smell and  absorbing their sound, as they majestically rolled on the Calea Armatei Rosii (Avenue of the Red Army) of my hometown, Arad, westwards. I remember my father listening to squeaking radio stations in the night and wearing a kind of expectation on his face.

The tanks crushed the Hungarian freedom-fight in a few weeks and that special expression on my father’s face only came back in December 1989 as he found out that Ceausescu, one of the worst dictators of the century, was shot.

On the other hand my kids re-introduced the card game “uno” which can be played by all of us, whether only three are available or we manage to infect and persuade our guests to play with us, versus euchre, which strictly requires  4 players.

Playing cards, like every play, creates its own world, with its own rules, space and time. I vaguely remember some 30 years ago having read Johan Huizinga’s  “Homo Ludens” proving this very fact we experience now daily.

Harmless plays simply add to own pleasure balance without hurting anybody. Well, most of them. The kids also got a ‘traffic jam game’ called “Rush Hour”. I watched them push the little plastic cars left and right following some kinky strategy reminding me of  Rubik’s cube and then I decided that I would not start playing it, thus avoiding the possibility of being disturbed by visible proofs of my incompetence and impatience.

We also know that there are enough resources to eradicate hunger for ever from the face of the earth and those who do the maths ask this question:

Could Just 4% of the Wall Street Bailout End World Hunger?

http://www.ecosalon.com/could_just_4_of_the_wall_street_bailout_end_world_hunger/

I am happy for the question mark, because just having the resources will not solve the problem – which is a problem only for those dying of hunger, of course.

No matter how much money there is, as long as

-    there is no will to spend it on food for the hungry

-    the employees of the government agencies or the NGOs who distribute the funds are corrupt and put that money or large parts of it into their own pockets

-    some governments systematically kill their own co-citizens – not only through starvation but also actively shooting them

there will be no eradication, yea not even serious mitigation of hunger.

The mass murder through letting people starve to death will go ahead as it always has since history is being recorded. The number of the victims has grown exponentially – but who cares?

The larger context is – as we also know: overpopulation. But who cares to go one step further and stop the exponential growth of world population through  appropriate programs.

My son started asking these questions in the religion class. In German schools religion is a compulsory curriculum but you can opt for the Catholic or the Lutheran Evangelic version. Luckily there is a standard procedure when children make themselves conspicuous. The German word is “auffallen” and is used almost exclusively in a negative sense. When the kids moved to this country a few years ago, the Head Nurse of the Kindergarten wanted to send them to a psychologist, because they made themselves conspicuous by being much too friendly, almost servile. At that time I explained the Head Nurse that it was my mistake: I tried to educate them in conformity with the manners expected in that other country they were born in, forgetting that too much friendliness is interpreted in Germany as weakness and servility. They enjoyed my re-education because now they did not have to be friendly and were allowed to suppress the weaker ones. My son was so successful that he started beating his 2 years younger sister.

This time, however, we had to go to the psychologist with my son. His verdict was terrible and had far reaching consequences: intellectual giftedness. The psychologist tried to soothe my fears: yes it’s true that these kids accept no authority, do not adjust readily to the expectations of their environment.  But on the other hand they can be persuaded by intellectual arguments. He even said that our country would need more intellectually independent persons. Had we had more of them, our whole history might have been different. I was thinking about Karlrobert Kreiten who was a talented pianist but he made himself conspicuous by questioning Hitler’s final victory. He did this in a small circle of friends and family but his mother’s best friend turned him in and they shot him dead a few months before the war ended without Hitler’s final victory. We lived in a street named after Karlrobert Kreiten and our friends were always irritated by the length and unusual spelling of our address so we had to tell them to type in their GPS Richard Wagner Street 68 and then just turn into the first street across the adventure playground. Had we had more people like Karlrobert Kreiten our history would have turned out totally differently, indeed: we would have had millions of people with difficult or unusual names questioning Hitler’s final victory turned in and shot dead.

My son was only questioning the education system. Who invented it for whom for what end – he wanted to know, asking me the dreaded critical questions. He did not see any reason in getting up early and sitting for 5-6 hours in a classroom instead of learning those things at home in an hour and then be able to chase cars on the computer of a soccer ball on the playground.

I did what I mostly do when I feel intellectually cornered gasping for a breath of fresh air: I clicked on the Wikipedia for a definition. This is what we found:

Education in its broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another.

After careful perusal of this information I had to go back to my son’s basic questions:

What is the aim of HIS school education?

Instead of trying to give a halfway intellectually honest answer I lapsed back into story telling:

-    All your friends go to school too

-    You all learn a lot of interesting and useful things there

-    This is the system, everybody has to conform

His counterarguments were:

-    All HIS friends hate to go to school, too. If they want to meet they can visit each other or meet on the soccer ground.

-    He can learn from the internet and me what is interesting and useful for him

-    Have I investigated whether there are gaps in the system, like taking special long leaves? Why not move into another country where education might be compulsory but not necessarily at school? He showed me on the internet a list of countries where home schooling is accepted.

Having no acceptable counterarguments I flew to another never failing educational tactic of mine: bringing in more aspects for consideration. I asked him what else he has learned at school, besides the curricula taught by the teachers. First he did not grasp what I wanted to hear, but I helped him with leading questions, so he would realize what a treasure chest of skills and culture techniques necessary for his future survival in society he had the privilege to acquire at school:

-    how to cheat at tests

-    how to look down on those of his former class-mates who did not make it to the “Gymnasium” (the high school after the 4^th grade elementary school for the top performers in the 3 caste German school system) but lagged behind in the “Realschule” (high school for the second best performers) or even Hauptschule (the high school for the poorest academic achievers) and how to show the caste differences though hairstyle, clothing and language

-    how to impress the teachers by

• saying what they want to hear, rather than what he thinks
• feigning interest in what they say

-    how to impress the other boys by

• having the latest cell phone model and the coolest downloads
• distributing some of the cheat techniques in the computer games they play judiciously, selectively and profitably
• changing alliances and loyalties diligently

-    how to impress the opposite sex by

• using tough language towards the day care staff
• letting his hair grow down his neck endlessly

-    how to increase his revenues by

• falsifying his pocket money account
• lifting plastic bottles at home and at school and cashing the deposit

-    how to tease and make fun of his sister in such a subtle way that makes reprimanding impossible

I have the impression that he grasped the value of the skills transmitted by our education system – unlike his sister who, at 8, stills acts in ridiculous childish ways like

-    saying what she thinks

-    showing her emotions overtly

-    trusting her friends and parents

-    helping her friends with their home works

-    admitting to having made mistakes

But then she has been only two and a half years through our school education system and therefore there is hope that it will take on more and more efficiency and society will “deliberately transmit its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another” so that she will only make herself conspicuous at socially accepted occasions.

Read more here:

http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/10/05/beware-of-intense-stress/8755.html

The study of 1,011 adolescents (aged 10-15) and their mothers from low income families living in three cities — Boston, Chicago and San Antonio — was posted on the Web site of the Journal of Adolescent Health (http://www.jahonline.org/inpress), which will publish it in the August issue. Forty-seven percent of the teens in the sample were overweight or obese, but that percentage increased to 56.2 percent among those who were impacted by four or more stressors.

 ”We found that an adolescent or youth who’s more stressed — caused by such things as having poor grades, mental health problems, more aggressive behavior, or doing more drugs and alcohol — is also more likely to be overweight or obese,” said lead author Brenda Lohman, an Iowa State assistant professor of human development and family studies (HDFS).

 Susan Stewart, an ISU associate professor of sociology; and Steven Garasky, a professor of HDFS at Iowa State; joined Lohman on the research team. Former ISU faculty members Craig Gundersen, a member of the agricultural and consumer economics faculty at the University of Illinois; and Joey Eisenmann, a member of the kinesiology and pediatrics faculty at Michigan State University; also contributed to the study.

The study analyzes data obtained from the “Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study” — a six-year longitudinal investigation. Researchers measured the height and weight of the adolescents to determine their body mass index, which was subsequently used to determine weight status based on two widely used classification systems. Adolescent food insecurity status and individual, maternal and family stressors were also determined through interviews.

The five factors used to determine the individual stressor index for the adolescents were:

* Academic problems

* Consumption of drugs and alcohol

* Depression or poor mental health levels

* Acting out or aggressive behaviors

* Lack of future orientation [...]

The study also found that a mother’s stress, [...]contributes to a child’s chances of becoming overweight or obese. [...]

While this study singles out mothers, fathers aren’t immune to their child’s weight status either.

“My own research focuses on fathers and shows that fathers, too, have an effect on children’s eating habits and obesity,” said Stewart, author of the book “Brave New Stepfamilies,” who had another study posted by the Journal of Adolescent Health last month on nonresident father involvement and adolescent eating patterns.

“In our latest study, we found that kids who are involved with nonresident dads eat better — more vegetables, less fast food,” she said. “However, similar to the Lohman study, living with a single mom was associated with worse eating habits.”

Lohman says the new research should emphasize the need for healthcare professionals to take a more holistic approach in their treatment of obese teens.

“We absolutely have to focus on their (teens) health, well-being, nutrition and exercise — and education of these things for them,” she said. “But we really need to also look holistically at their life and work towards reducing stress [...]

Original title:

Stress, obesity linked

Source and full text here:

http://www.scientistlive.com/European-Science-News/Medical/Stress,_obesity_linked/22357/

 Objective: This study investigated whether cytokine responses to acute mental stress are associated with adiposity in healthy young women.

 Design and Subjects: A laboratory study of 67 women, aged 18-25 years, recruited from University College London.

 Measurements: Height, weight and waist circumference were measured and body fat mass was estimated by bioelectrical impedance body composition analysis. Laboratory mental stress testing was carried out and blood pressure and heart rate were recorded at baseline, during two moderately challenging tasks (Stroop and speech) and during recovery 40-45 min post-stress. Blood samples taken at baseline, immediately post-stress and 45 min post-stress, were used for assessment of circulating cytokines. Saliva samples taken throughout the session were assessed for cortisol.

 Results: Women who had larger cytokine responses to stress were more abdominally obese than women with smaller cytokine stress responses. Specifically, there was a positive correlation between waist circumference and stress-induced increases in plasma levels of leptin (r=0.35, P<0.05) and IL-1Ra responses (r=0.29, P<0.05). There was also a significant positive correlation between prolonged diastolic blood pressure responses to stress and measures of total and abdominal obesity (r=0.28-0.33, P<0.05).

 Conclusion: Increased cytokine production could be a mechanism linking stress and abdominal obesity.

 Source:

http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v32/n3/abs/0803767a.html

Original title of the study:

Stress-induced cytokine responses and central adiposity in young women

Authors:

L Brydon, C E Wright, K O’Donnell and A Steptoe from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Psychobiology Group, University College London, London, UK

I Zachary from Centre for Cardiovascular Biology and Medicine, Department of Medicine, BHF Laboratories, The Rayne Institute, University College London, London, UK

J Wardle from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Health Behaviour Unit, University College London, London, UK

Nevertheless, all the education systems I know – excepting Elliot Aronson’s  jigsaw class, the Summerhill and the Waldorf school systems are based on making the kids compete for the attention and acknowledgment of the teacher and for grades. They were established in the industrial age with the aim to perpetuate class differences, to provide the industries with workers, engineers and managers and to keep young people within highly organized and disciplined structures.

Now the Culture Ministers (called Kultusminister, i.e. ministers of cult) of the fifteen German federal states  decided to introduce the same standard tests in each state so the can compare students’ performances across the state borders.

The tv programs for kids are mostly structured as team competitions as well.

It looks like those in charge of the reproduction of culture  and administration of learning will never learn. Even the tests the designed were full of mistakes: to redesign them will cost the taxpayers 200.000 euros.