What do you do at school?

The twins have started pre-school and have been going for a while. We were visiting and so I asked full of curiosity, "What do you do at school?" My follow-up was going to be "How do you like it so far?".

The twins are two rambunctious little boys who love to tear around and they never seem to sit down. However, I was surprised by their answer, which was, " We sit." Their mom reacted very quickly and showed us all of the stuff they were doing. And she talked about how they really like school. The boys did say they liked what they were doing, and they enjoyed playing with their new friends.

I found it interesting that when asked about school, they both responded with the same idea. "We sit." Part of the reason for young children to attend pre-school is to help them socialize and learn skills that they will need in Kindergarten, through to grade 12. One of the first rules is that you cannot run around as much as you want to, you have to sit.

They have learned the first lesson, I wonder if the teachers realize that is what the twins understand about school. School is important and we there is evidence that pre-school is important for the preparation of students when entering grade 1. Socialization is important because in pre-school and kindergarten we learn the rules of life and how to get along with people outside of our immediate family. We also begin to expand our worldview as we see others behaving in ways we may not have been aware. 

A few years ago there was a book called “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. Here is an excerpt from the book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile

at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:

·       Share everything.

·       Play fair.

·       Don't hit people.

·       Put things back where you found them.

·       Clean up your own mess.

·       Don't take things that aren't yours.

·       Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

·       Wash your hands before you eat.

·       Flush.

·       Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

·       Live a balanced life - learn some and think some

·       and draw and paint and sing and dance and play

·       and work every day some.

·       Take a nap every afternoon.

·       When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic,

·       hold hands, and stick together.

·       Be aware of wonder.

·       Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup:

o  The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

o  Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die.

o  So do we.

·       And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK. 

·       Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.

·       The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.

·       Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

·       Take any of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or

your world and it holds true and clear and firm.

·       Think what a better world it would be if all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had a basic policy to always put thing back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

·       And it is still true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Your future self

Perhaps the best way to plan for retirement is to visualize your future, really think about the details of who you will be, where and why. Being able to imagine now who you will be in the future and what your needs and desires will be at that time is perhaps the most important aspect of planning.

In psychological circles, the idea of being able to imagine yourself in the future is called “self-continuity.” It is a concept that has been around since at least the ancient Greeks and scientists have discovered that you are better off if you can somehow connect to this future self.

It turns out that visualizing your future does a couple of important things with regards to retirement planning. By connecting with your future self:

·       You can create a better retirement plan — one that suits what you will want to be doing.

·       Helps ensure that you do create a plan and that you do the things you need to do now, saving money, keeping healthy and maintaining friends so that you will have a better future.

Research suggests that our brains naturally process our future selves as strangers. And, let’s face it – you are unlikely to save for the retirement expenses or care for the body of a stranger.  It turns out that by visualizing yourself in the future and “getting to know” that person, you are more likely to take steps now to take care of this future version of yourself.

Whether you are 40 and hoping to retire in 30 years or if you are 67 and hoping you have enough resources to fund the rest of your life, you need to connect to that person and you need to believe that your future self is not a stranger.

Happiness and age

Academics get research grants for many great ideas and we advance the knowledge base of mankind through these research grants. However, there are times when I wonder how or why funding for some grants is approved. Having said that, I find it interesting that experts from Princeton University and the London School of Economics and Political Sciences found that happiness peaks at the ages of 23 and 69.

That may be older than many of you, but it is an age that I have passed and I still am happy, I guess I was also happy at 69 because as we all know happiness does not drop off a cliff and end suddenly!

How did the researchers arrive at their conclusions? Well, they questioned 23,000 volunteers, aged 17 to 85.  The researchers believe these ages are the happiest for us a number of reasons. The three top reasons are:

At 23, you:

have left rigours of education behind.

are embarking on an exciting adult life. 

are earning income.

At 69, you

no longer have the stresses of raising a family.

have retirement to look forward and it represents a new start.

have time for yourself.

I don’t write for 23-year-old adults, I write for the 55+ age group, some of whom are approaching or are over 69. So, my question to that age group is what do you need to do now to ensure that your future is bigger (better, happier, more fulfilling) than your past? Here are some of my ideas

First, create a written retirement plan. It will reduce stress and make you feel better, and more confident about your future.

No matter how tough your circumstances, work and find one little glimmer or hope and happiness. Focus on that. Foster it. And, you’ll probably find that the little spot of goodness will get bigger.

Nurturing your relationships with friends and family and creating new friends has been proven in study after study to be the secret of not only a happy life — but also a longer life.  Loneliness is as big a predictor of an earlier death as smoking!

Have a Purpose: Giving back and feeling part of a community are well recognized as being keys to happiness — especially in old age.

Harvard University’s landmark study of ageing well, found that “generativity” (giving back and participating in your community) tripled the chances that someone would feel joy throughout their seventies.

Do you talk or think about your death? 

My friends and I were talking at the pub about the end of life, as within the last few days, we had five friends who had died. One of my friends said, “we need to think and talk about death more. I think it is important and life-affirming.”

Do you think about death? If you do there is an app just for you? It is called “WeCroak.”  It will send you an alert at 5 random times throughout the day that says, “You are going to die.”

The WeCroak creators say, “a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps us accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honour the things that do.” And, finding happiness by contemplating your mortality is a scientifically backed technique.

My friend and the folks at WeCroak may believe this but there are well over 200 experiments, where individuals have been instructed to imagine themselves dying. In these studies, it was found that if we think about our death, we become more punitive. Thinking about death also increases our nationalistic bias, makes us more prejudiced against other racial, religious and age groups, and leads to other such parochial attitudes.

Taken together, these dozens of studies show that being reminded of death strengthens our ties to the groups we belong to, to the detriment of those who are different from us.

Reminders of death also affect our political and religious beliefs in interesting ways. On the one hand, they polarise us: political liberals become more liberal while conservatives become more conservative. Similarly, religious people tend to assert their beliefs more fervently while nonreligious

Another study out of the University of Missouri found that thoughts of death can lead to decreased militaristic attitudes, better health decisions, increased altruism and helpfulness, and reduced divorce rates.

"According to terror management theory, people deal with their awareness of mortality by upholding cultural beliefs and seeking to become part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, such as nations or religions," said Jamie Arndt, study co-author and professor of psychological sciences. "Depending on how that manifests itself, positive outcomes can be the result.

This research proves that there are two sides to every coin and a glass is always either half full or half empty.  You get to choose what to focus on and focusing on the positive is a sure-fire way to feel happier.

Presumption of innocence

The following is taken from an article written by Eric London and published 5 October 2018.


It was in the 13th and 14th centuries with the development of the jus commune, however, that the presumption of innocence first crystallized into a fundamental legal principle. The adoption of jus commune marked a revolution in legal forms, replacing the unwritten custom-based European law of the high Middle Ages with a more advanced, written common law system that combined a revitalized Roman legal framework based on procedure with Catholic canon. It was the French lawyer Johannes Monachus who first used the phrase item quilbet presumitur innocens nisi probetur nocens—“a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

As Catholic University law professor Kenneth Pennington notes, this principle “summarized the procedural rights that every human being should have no matter what the person’s status, religion, or citizenship.” It “protected defendants from being coerced to give testimony and to incriminate themselves. It granted them the absolute right to be summoned, to have their case heard in an open court, to have legal counsel, to have their sentence pronounced publicly, and to present evidence in their defence.”

Pennington explains that the presumption of innocence came under attack in the late medieval and early modern period. During the Inquisition, many European Jews were accused of sexually assaulting Christian women and were burnt or otherwise killed.

In one such case in 1398 or 1399, Papal Judge Johannes de Pogiali took the rare step of conducting an investigation into the facts underlying the accusations. Discovering that the particular accusations were false, de Pogiali concluded: “It was better to leave a crime unpunished than to condemn an innocent person.” Pennington adds, “Many will recognize in these words ‘Blackstone’s ratio:’ ‘the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one person suffer.’”

In the 15th through the 17th centuries, the right to the presumption of innocence was affirmed in papal letters requiring that Jews be granted the right to counsel and to know the names of their accusers.
The emergence of a presumption of innocence coincides with the earliest development of bourgeois law. The presumption was advanced in opposition to the medieval torture chamber, where the accused person was simply tortured until he “confessed.” Under this regime of torture, the court proceeding consisted merely of the confessed sinner being brought before a tribunal to acknowledge his confession.

“Must we assume that witches are guilty?” asked German Jesuit professor Friedrich von Spee, an early opponent of torture, in his 1631 work Cautio Criminalis. “I assume that no one can be condemned unless his guilt is certain: an innocent person ought not be killed. Everyone is presumed innocent, who is not known to be guilty.”

In the 18th century, the revolutionary European and American bourgeoisie were determined to deliver a blow against centuries of feudal backwardness and arbitrary dynastic rule. Their chief ideologists, schooled in the ideas of the rational Enlightenment, recognized the presumption of guilt as a characteristic of tyranny that is wholly inconsistent with democracy and the rule of law.

The revolutionaries rejected the notion that rights could be granted or rescinded by the state at will. Rather, rights were vested in “the people” themselves, and the maintenance of the rule of law meant protecting them from the power of the government. In this sense, the American Declaration’s “right to revolution” is incompatible with the presumption of guilt. Strong, repressive states justify their existence based on suspicion of the population and the need for social control.

It was a rejection of this reactionary view that guided the revolutionaries and led John Adams to remark in relation to the presumption of innocence that “there was never a system of laws in the world in which this rule did not prevail.” Benjamin Franklin expanded Blackstone’s ratio by a factor of ten, declaring “it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer.”

Similarly, during the French Revolution, Quintard-Morénas explains that the third estate viewed the monarchy’s use of torture and its belief in the presumption of the guilt of its subjects as an indication of the regressive character of the Bourbon dynasty:

“The relative indifference of the population to the plight of accused criminals, combined with the widely shared opinion among jurists that torture was not a punishment and that humanizing criminal procedure would encourage crime, contributed to maintain a practice that increasingly fell into disuse in France at the end of the seventeenth century.”

The representatives of the third estate who gathered at the Estates-Generals in 1789 “referred to the presumption of innocence to request a better treatment of suspects and their complete absolution in the event of insufficient evidence.” The presumption was enshrined in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and serves as the foundation for the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Today the powerful anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by the government in the conduct of the war on terror have advanced the erosion of democratic consciousness and seeped into all aspects of domestic law.

Thousands of victims of police murder in the US do not receive the benefit of the presumption of innocence. They are presumed guilty as a result of living in “high-crime areas,” where the police shoot first and ask questions later. Instead, police on the beat, armed with the latest weaponry from the battlefields of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, serve as judge, jury and executioner and are hardly ever punished.

Tens of millions of undocumented immigrants, whose very presence in the US has been deemed “illegal” by the same laws aimed against “terrorists,” can be dragged out of their homes or off the job, separated from their loved ones, thrown into cages and forced to face physical and sexual abuse in detention centers for months or years on end.


Eight million people are either in prison, jail or on parole or probation. That arrestees who have not been convicted of a crime can be held in jail while they await trial is no longer even a matter for debate.

The abandonment of progressive attitudes toward due process and the presumption of innocence is most pronounced among affluent sections of the upper-middle class. For this privileged layer, identity politics and postmodernist philosophy have become key theoretical vehicles for the attack on the presumption of innocence.


Proponents of this view have leapt to defend the accusers in several instances where the accusations were false. In the Tawana Brawley, Duke Lacrosse and University of Virginia Rolling Stone cases, the media and supporters of identity politics assumed that the accused must be guilty because they were white men.

The modern-day opponents of due process can claim all they want that they wish only to presume the guilt of the rich and powerful, not the oppressed. But the common law is based on precedent, and instigators of attacks on democratic rights do not have the luxury of deciding whose democratic rights will be violated and whose will not.

Whatever rules are established against the wealthy will be brought down upon the backs of the poor and defenceless with the ruthless force of the power of the state and public opinion.


In cases like the Scopes Monkey trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti frame-up, the Dreyfus Affair, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the Leo Franks case, the Leopold and Loeb trial and the frame-up of the Scottsboro Boys, the political left rejected calls for blood and vengeance and sought to expose the powerful interests fanning the flames of passion and prejudice.