My Old Kentucky Home (with apologies to Stephen Foster) - AIPG

STUDENT’S VOICE

My Old Kentucky Home (with apologies to Stephen Foster) Stephanie Jarvis, SA-1495

Back in the brachiopod and bryozoaninfested Ordovician limestone of the Bluegrass for winter break, my attention has once again been brought back to the happenings of the world outside of my Wooster bubble. In my first week home, the paper out of Louisville, The CourierJournal, seemed to be on a coal streak— two days in a row it was front-page news. Tom FitzGerald, a lawyer with the Kentucky Resources Council who I had the great pleasure of meeting this past summer, was pictured in an article on December 18th about the suspiciously quick notification of an Alliance Coal lobbyist regarding the firing of Ron Mills, the director of Kentucky Division of Mine Permits, who had refused to issue permits under a policy he deemed illegal. The next day a picture of a subdivision being built on recently reclaimed land in Perry County graced the front page with an article about the different religious perspectives on the issue of surface mining. In the following days, articles dealt with the proposed expansion of the LG&E ash pond right on the Ohio River, the violence surrounding the issue of mountaintop removal, a proposed coalto-gas plant in Wyoming, the conversion to natural gas or shutting down of two out of four Duke Energy coal-fired units across the river in New Albany, and the never-ending shortfalls of mining safety. Of course, these articles were sprinkled among news on the happenings at the climate-change summit in Copenhagen, health care, the snowstorms, the Cats making 2000 (basketball wins, that is), and general good ol’ Kentucky politics (Gatewood Galbraith: “a perennial candidate because Kentucky’s got perennial problems”). It’s nice to know some things haven’t changed. It was in the Sunday forum section on December 20th that I found words

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by one of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry. Berry was responding to a piece published the previous week by four Kentucky university/college presidents, in which the presidents address the need to “prepare for a very different energy future” and assert their dedication to focusing higher education and K-12 on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) initiatives in order to do so. Nobody will argue with the prospect of a “very different energy future,” or the importance of STEM education, but Berry takes issue with the specificity of the presidents’ goal. He points out, very correctly, that energy is one of many equally pressing and interrelated problems that need to be addressed. Focusing education on what is seemingly relevant to this single issue excludes many other possible solutions to it and others, contradicting the concept of a liberal arts education that has so much to contribute, even outside of the sciences, to “energy research and development.” As Berry puts it, “An unsolvable problem of education is that nobody can foretell what may be relevant.” To focus education, from kindergarten through college, on four subjects in order to address one issue is not preparing students to face the challenges of the future, nor is it equipping them with the knowledge and skills they need to be good citizens, good stewards, or good teachers. On a different note, of the four institutions (University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, Centre College, and Berea College) represented by these presidents so concerned with energy and climate change, only one (UK) offers a geology degree (UK and UL also have geography programs). I’d also like to point out that as a product of the Kentucky public school system, which these presidents

hope to and are in a position to influence, I didn’t know what “geology” was until I was a senior in high school looking at colleges and a family friend suggested I might be interested in it. I know there is an effort to change this-at the recent GSA meeting I spoke with a woman from Morehead State University who was presenting a poster on a teaching method to train teachers to teach earth science, and she explained the difficulty of finding (and funding) earth science teachers, even though schools are technically required by the state to teach the material. This might be a good starting point for the presidents—how can students be expected to solve energy problems without an understanding of where the energy comes from? With a good background in STEM (including geology) as well as a healthy dose of history, politics, and literature, students should be well equipped to make the necessary connections between science and culture to solve the problems of tomorrow. They might be able, for instance, to take a look at the process of surface mining, and then at the health crises in Eastern Kentucky, and see how the two are related in causes and effects to each other and to other issues like soil loss, water contamination, drug use, or poor education in the area, and how one or more of these related causes and effects might also be at the heart of, say, global warming. Stephanie Jarvis, SA-1495, is a 2009 AIPG Scholarship Winner. She is junior at The College of Wooster with a double major in geology and biology. Originally from Shelbyville, KY, Stephanie is very interested in water quality issues, especially those pertaining to her region.

MAR/APR 2010 • TPG 39