moritherapy/education

Born on January 30, 1844 in Philadelphia, Richard Theodore Greener was raised from the age of ten in Boston. He attended the Broadway Grammar School in Cambridge, Massachusetts until he was fourteen, then dropped out of school to help support his family, working as a porter, clerk and night-watchman in an assortment of jobs. With help from two of his employers, August E. Batchelder and George Herbert Palmer, Greener attended preparatory school at Oberlin College from 1862 to 1864 and Phillips Academy at Andover from 1864 to 1865. Batchelder arranged for Greener's admission to Harvard in 1865 as an experiment in the education of African-Americans. In 1870 Greener graduated from Harvard with honors, the first African-American to do so.

From the page: "I know from personal experience that the difference between an impoverished high school dropout and a university graduate with a decent middle-class income can be one good school. A good education is the best and most enduring way to break the cycle of poverty.

And when impoverished children become educated, productive adults, their whole society benefits-- from lower violent crime rates, from more competent, more efficient workers, from more qualified doctors and scientists and engineers and businesspeople.

No child in this country should have to go to a school with no books, or a school with no heat, or a school where she has to fear violence daily. But in the two decades since I attended that impoverished elementary school, many public schools, and students, across the country have continued to suffer under similar conditions. "

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"African American Lives" was fascinating in its inaugural season last year, when it made a splash by researching the family tree of Oprah Winfrey.

It gets even better this time around.

The subjects in the four-part series include Chris Rock, Maya Angelou, Tom Joyner, Don Cheadle and Morgan Freeman, hardly a random anonymous cross-section of African-Americans, but this latest effort feels less like a star search and more like opening a book whose stories get richer and more complex by the page

In the Central African Republic, UNICEF, with funding from the European Commission, is supporting bush schools to provide education and a sense of normalcy to displaced children.

Liza is a talented music student who sings, composes and plays piano. She once organized a benefit to collect instruments for needy students at her own school, and then heard about the need for instruments in New Orleans, where schools struggling to rebuild had few funds for "extras" like music programs. She was horrified to find out that in the city that spawned Louis Armstrong, there were students who had never so much as heard a live piano.

"When I was growing up if I needed a book or an instrument, or wanted to study with a music teacher, it was easily done," she explains. "To hear that there was a school that had no music program at all was really shocking."