Education Matters: Let Cambodia teach us a lesson

Editor's Note: Numerous instances of plagiarism have been discovered in Dan Kimber’s “Education Matters” column, which ran in the News- Press from September 2003 to September 2011. In those columns where plagiarism has been found, a For the Record specifying the details will be appended to the piece.

My column this week was going to be about the Glendale Teachers Assn.’s vote to oppose the school bond coming up for a vote on April 5, but I’ll put it off for a week or two as things continue to unfold.

I’m trying to understand both the school district and the union’s positions knowing full well that both sides, when all is said and done, have the best interests of our children at heart. That should be acknowledged and never far from the minds of union and district officials before they allow economic issues to divide them.

The union is fighting to reclaim furlough days that will substantially reduce teachers’ incomes. The district wants to avoid future layoffs and furlough days. The union wants to reduce class size, which has increased over the years to intolerable, educationally unsound levels.

The district cannot commit millions of dollars to that end when it does not know how much further the state will be cutting into its budget. The union’s “no vote” was actually a rep council vote and is not necessarily representative of the 1,400 teachers in the district. Ultimately, the people will decide whether Measure S passes, and that is how it should be. Tune in next week for the full story.

For now, if I may switch gears entirely, I’d like to use the rest of this space to plug a book just out. It’s written by an old friend and colleague, Pierre Odier, and is titled “Cambodia Angkor, A Lasting Legacy.”

Some of you may recall from my having mentioned this man in previous articles that he has dedicated a good part of his life to searching out and documenting people on this Earth who have been forgotten, lost in time, swept up and discarded by a modern world uninterested in preserving old ways and traditions, cast aside by contemporary societies who have come to regard indigenous populations as irrelevant.

In Cambodia, those attitudes extend to people whose ancient traditions and rich cultural heritage have been almost completely obliterated by the genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge. (Millions of people were massacred in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979).