Blog 8

Last Tuesday, March 13th, Dr. Marion Orr gave a talk titled “State Education in the City” as one of “Baltimore’s Big Three” lectures. This lecture highlighted aspects from The Year of The City as it discussed the currently poor condition of education of the youth in Baltimore. Upon reading “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound, I was able to see what Pound was talking about based on Dr. Orr’s Lecture.
In his lecture, Dr. Orr discussed that the way in which Baltimore became so heavily populated by African-Americans was through a mass departure of Caucasians. He further explained that this was from factors such as taxes, quality of neighborhoods, and education. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the population of Caucasians became a minority, and poverty spread throughout the city.
As a result of the poverty, Baltimore became less desirable a place to inhabit. As poverty increased, education became less important and the drop out rate of students increased. The more that education began fail society, the less teachers desired to stay, forcing the school board to replace them with less qualified substitutes.
The only optimism in this bleak situation is that knowing that there is now awareness permeating throughout Baltimore. As more and more attention gets called to the condition of education there is a more intense effort made to determine what can be done to curb it. What a prestigious Jesuit institution like Loyola contributes is huge in terms of playing a part in getting its students to help the situation. The Year of the City is designed to make Loyola connect with the city and help to make Baltimore a better place to live. The presentations such as this are being used to heighten awareness of the circumstances, and the service projects that are available make it possible to connect to Baltimore and its inhabitants on a more personal level.
Upon reading and researching “In a Station of the Metro” I found that the author, Ezra Pound, wrote this poem after an encounter in the Metro of seeing certain faces in the mass of people that he considered to be particularly beautiful, but not able to find the words to describe them. He compares the faces of the crowd to be like those of petals blooming on a tree. The comparison being made here to the talk by Dr. Orr is that there are people in what may seem to be a mass of a dismal situation that are outliers and need to be helped to fulfill their potential as human beings and be given the opportunities that are available to everyone in this country. As education is one of the most important things available to any person, that should make educating the youth a top priority. Like the “petals on a wet, black bough” some of these children have the potential to emerge from the masses as president, top doctors, and CEOs of major companies.