Impactful Decisions

These messages describe how decisions can have far reaching consequences.

    • Subversive Kindergartens

      Friedrich Fröbel was born in Germany in 1782. His mother was in ill health for most of his young life. She died when he was nine months old. Friedrich’s father sent him to live with an uncle. Friedrich had a love of nature and became a forester’s apprentice at the age...

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    • Hemp and the Environment

      It was a cash crop for many of the founding fathers of the U.S. It has applications in food, building materials, paper, jewelry and fuels. It has environmental applications such as clearing impurities out of wastewater, weed control without pesticides, and even...

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    • Judgment Based Upon Aspirational Guidance

      The movie was set to be released. It had been shown to a screening audience to get reactions. The only thing that needed done was to remove the song at the beginning of the movie. The studio’s chief executive felt that the song didn’t fit the audience for the movie....

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    • Collective Action

      Charles was an agent for an absentee land owner. The land owner rented out small properties to tenants. As an agent, Charles collected the rent on the properties. The rent was often more than could be paid from the sale of produce from the property. Renters could...

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    • Expansion of Choices

      Tobias was a 17th Century entrepreneur. His primary business was the delivery of mail between London and Cambridge England. He had a stable of horses which he used for his mail deliveries. When horses were not used for mail delivery, he would rent them to family and...

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    • Reaching Agreement

      In June of 1967, Israel soundly defeated united armies of Arab nations and occupied territories held by the nations who attacked them. The occupied territories became a continuing source of conflict in the Middle East. In 1978, the leaders of Israel (Menachem Begin)...

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    • Crossroad Decisions

      It was 1910, and the United States was facing a shortage of meat. Meat riots were occurring in major cities. Native animals were still being hunted in rural areas, but cities faced a shortage of meat in part due to the flood of immigrants. America was facing a crisis...

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    • Negative Capability

      “John Keats, Portrait by William Hilton, after Joseph Severn (National Portrait Gallery, London)” by Books18, CC BY-SA 2.0 February 23, 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet John Keats. Many of us studied his poems “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a...

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    • Taking the Long View

      Barbara McClintock was a geneticist who did much of her work with maize, or what we in the US commonly call “corn.” Because maize has a far longer generational cycle than E coli bacteria (the subject of most genetic research at the time), McClintock’s work took longer...

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