Fred Meijer, the Chairmen and co-founder of Meijer, passed away last month, and although I am hesitant to politicize his death, I really think that in his life and death there are important lessons for voters and citizens of our great nation.
Dutch immigrants Hendrik Meijer and his son, Frederik Gerhard Hendrik Meijer (Fred Meijer), founded the grocery superstore Meijer's in Greenville, Michigan during the height of the Great Depression in 1934. After studying trends in the grocery industry, Meijer was among the first store to offer self-service shopping and shopping carts, giving customers more freedom to choose the products that they wanted to buy without waiting for a helping hand from a friendly grocer. Meijer also worked hard to find and offer staple items at bargain prices, saving his customer money.
In 1962, the modern format of Meijer was started, with a store at the corner of 28th Street and Kalamazoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that set the standard for hypermarkets today. Unlike other grocers of the day, this store was large (180,000 square feet) and combined grocery shopping and department store shopping into a single large store, pioneering one-stop shopping. When Hendrik died, Fred Meijer took over a company that had dozens of stand-alone grocery stores and several large stores and expanded the company over the next several decades until it had over 190 stores spread between several states in the Midwest, revenues approaching $15 billion, 72,000 employees, and was rated as one of the biggest retailers in America.
Fred Meijer became very wealthy, and because of this, many in our nation might feel that he should have been taxed more, that he should have done more to help out others, or that we needed a government to confiscate his ill-gotten wealth from him and redistribute it to people who were somehow more deserving. He was one of the so-called 1%, and lived in a very nice community when he died.
But Meijer worked hard for his wealth and did more with it to benefit our society than government ever could redistributing it to others. To earn his wealth, he worked hard and used his talents in ways that benefited people greatly. For example, Wal-mart initially failed because Sam Walton thought that you could just tack on a grocery store to a discount store- but Fred Meijer knew that quality was important too, and so his stores were successful because of the quality produce and meat in them. Wal-Mart figured this out, improved its quality, and has been a success since. The success that Meijer earned through his hard work benefited all of us in higher quality foods in hyperstores, sold at cheap prices so that even poor people can now eat quality meats, cheeses, and produce.
Fred Meijer also gave back to his community in ways that government employees seizing his wealth and giving it to others could never understand. Perhaps his most significant contribution has been the land and sculpture collection for the 132-acre Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, a botanic garden and sculpture park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But he also donated land for a Grand Valley State University campus in Holland, Michigan, donated a section of the Berlin Wall (which now stands in the Meijer Lobby of the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids) personally offered a donation of $25 million and property to fund a relocation and expansion of the historic John Ball Zoo (voters voted against the proposal), donated $1 million to Michigan's White Pine Trail State Park for improvements, helped renovate Grand Rapids' downtown Civic Theatre, and has done many more projects too. He even bought a big-screen TV for residents of his retirement community so they could watch the Super Bowl better.
And perhaps most important, for nearly 80 years Meijer has contributed to the tax base of the states and communities where it has a presence.
Mr. Meijer worked hard for his wealth and had a right to do with it as he pleased- unlike a national government which believes that it has a right to his wealth simply because it has the power to take it from him. His hard work, innovation, and lifetime achievements created this wealth and it is to him to determine how it should be spent- and we should be grateful that we have people like him around. This class-warfare and envy that is engulfing our nation needs to stop, and we must once again celebrate success, achievement, and greatness, and not let the government encourage us to fight over the scraps and carcass of a failing nation.
RIP Fred Meijer: A Great Example of the Greatness of the 1%
Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 04/14/2011
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Steve Hargadon, and incredible leader in education and ambassador for Elluminate is a dear friend and someone I admire very much. He is branching out as the acquisition of Elluminate by Blackboard has sort of left him with only a part time position. Those that find themselves lucky enough to work with Steve are blessed indeed.
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Free Dyslexia Testing – Screen Your Child | Lexercise
Would love my accessibility experts to test this "dyxlexia screener" online. Does it work? Is it accurate?
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Advanced search overview from Michael Gorman.
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Nice post from my computer science go-to guy in education- Alfred Thompson. He contemplates why a college like Stanford is seeing a growth in Computer Science while high schools aren't. Interesting conversation and one we need to be having -- computer science jobs are some of the few that they just can't seem to staff fast enough.
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From Groups to Teams: The Key to Powering up PBL | Edutopia
Nice article at Edutopia by Thom Markam.My favorite quote about pbl is:
"But its ultimate benefit is to help students think, learn, and operate in the new century by challenging them at deeper levels. That requires reversing the equation between skills and content: PBL is method for teaching students to find, process, understand, and share information, not a way to extend the industrial landscape of regurgitation and recall." -
From Daniela Birch, Education Community Coordinator for Adobe that is helping me learn about the new Adobe Education Leader program that has allowed me to join and participate (very excited about the potential learning I can get there as we are heavy users of PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, and I'm a bit rusty on Flash.)
From Daniela
Hi Y’All-
MIT and the Smithsonian have created a two-month-long online game for students that involves games and discovery along with collaboration to uncover messages from the future and solve a mystery. This highly engaging project was built using Flex and Flash, which is what is what put us in touch with the developers.
Encourage your students to explore this.Thousands have already begun participating, many as individuals and many as a part of their classwork.
Enjoy!
-Daniela -
Learning analytics presentation (a trend from the Horizon 2011 report) from George Siemens.
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Wolfram Demonstrations Project: Wolfram Demonstrations Challenge
This is an excellent use of technology for math, statistics, and information literacy!
Watch ideas and concepts come to life as you solve each of the challenge questions by exploring interactive Demonstrations. Answering eight questions correctly earns you a chance to win great prizes, including:
GRAND PRIZE: A copy of the computational supertool Mathematica 8,
a $300 ThinkGeek gift card + a Wolfram Spikey sculpture kit
2ND–4TH PLACE: $100 ThinkGeek gift cards + a Wolfram Spikey sculpture kit
FIRST 100 CORRECT SUBMISSIONS: Our sought-after Wolfram Spikey sculpture kit
Hurry! The contest ends April 18, 2011.
Sign up today » -
Kindle kids corner is on facebook and the students are reviewing books. We're planning to add some schools in the future - we have over 20 that have applied to join us!
The 'Olokun head' was 'made in' Africa after all
In the Independent:
More hereEver since a pure copper sculpture was found buried in a palm grove near the Nigerian city of Ife, experts from the West have argued that the artefact was a fake that was too sophisticated to have been created by African hands...At the time of discovery, the head was considered too great a masterpiece to have been created by indigenous African artists – a reflection of prevailing attitudes of the early 20th century. Some Europeans even theorised that the work was a remnant from the lost city of Atlantis. A spokeswoman for the British Museum said when the head travelled to the West, it caused a huge stir because "it flew in the face of Western perceptions" (of African heritage and cultural achievements).It is now accepted by the curatorial community that the advanced artistic techniques used to create the sculpture were "more advanced than those of Renaissance Italy, and comparable to those of [the artist] Donatello".
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Peter Oloya-Sculptor
Ugandan sculptor Peter Oloya uses sculpture as a form of therapy to overcome a profound, personal trauma. When he was a child, he witnessed the deaths of friends and family who were victims of the bloody insurgency waged by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).Peter's work draws on traditional African visual art to depict the savage reality of war...[continue reading]
'African classical art' - Inside the Kingdom of Ife
In the Guardian, art of the Ife Kingdom:
More hereThis is an exceptional exhibition, even by the high standards the British Museum has established in recent years. It is extraordinary because it brings together such a large number of masterpieces that have rarely or never been exhibited outside Nigeria before – and when I say masterpieces, I mean artworks that rank with the Terracotta Army, the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamun as treasures of the human spirit.
For European artists a century ago, African sculpture was powerful precisely because it did not conform to the smooth idea of beauty that Picasso's generation had been brought up on – ideas that went back to classical Greece. But they had not seen the art of Ife, a medieval city state that flourished from the 12th to 15th centuries in West Africa, trading across the Sahara with the Islamic Mediterranean world.
‘Heroic Africans’ at Metropolitan Museum of Art
More here...a quick stroll through this exhibition’s eight sections, each devoted to a different West or Central African art tradition, confirms African art’s variety, in a stylistic spectrum stretching from detail-perfect representation to near-abstraction. And as to African art’s pertinence to Western concerns, suffice it to say that almost all the sculpture in this exhibition is asking a question that is foremost on the mind of many Americans in the early stages of the presidential campaign: what are the qualities we want and need in our political leaders?
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum
via Africa Works