Wise Monkey News is here to provide young people an opportunity to discuss the issues that affect their lives. We hope that, through your participation, this website serves as a forum for the development, exchange, and expression of ideas that will prepare us to assume our positions as the leaders of tomorrow's world. Have something to say?
The need for change in America's high schools
by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 01-23-2002
A bull's eye has been strapped to the back of the public education system. Republicans, Democrats, the Christian-Right, Libertarians, rich, poor, black, red, white, brown, everyone has discovered to root of societies ills-today's high schools.
Most public schools today are in fact a microcosm of society: numerous factions competing for limited resources, with those with the loudest, strongest, most visible, supporters commandeering the spoils.
Romero’s Legacy of Liberation Call and Challenge
by: Dawn Hunter - printed on 11-15-2000
Within the Catholic Church, a new approach to theology has blossomed during the second half of the twentieth century. This theology is now known throughout the world as the theology of liberation.
This theology is astonishing because its deepest insights did not spring from the minds of scholars in Europe, but rather from small communities of the poorest and least literate men and women in Latin America.
Monologues help women
by: Sruthi Mathews - printed on 09-25-2002
It was on a whim really. I had no idea. I wasn’t prepared for the depth of experience and truth which would resonate the theater walls on the day of auditions. Some of the women recalled the basic and occasionally humorous frustrations of simply belonging to the female gender— PAP smears, tampons, etc.—
Uniting Eco-efforts
by: Kristina Koenig - printed on 02-20-2002
No college campus is perfect from the idealistic perspective of an environmentalist. Everyday, cans and paper are thrown away instead of recycled; paper products are used in excess; people rarely use double-sided printing; annual food waste from campus food services may be enough to feed some small 3rd world countries; faucets and showerheads leak and sidewalks are watered in a way that makes water seem like a endless resource; faulty heating systems create unnecessary wintertime saunas; lights and computers are left on 24 hrs/day; harsh cleaning chemicals and fertilizers are used and fed to our rivers; heavy machinery is used for building and landscaping; students drive across the street to school; non-native species are planted for aesthetic purposes ? the list could go on forever.
When dealt death and tragedy: How do we play our hand?
by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 10-24-2001
My brother has been in El Salvador since last June. A friend of his from Santa Clara University, where he is a junior, was one of the victims of the attacks on September 11. She died, valiantly so it seems, aboard the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania.
She had volunteered with my brother once a week, for an entire year at a San Jose-area school, tutoring children. She was the girlfriend of his co-editor on the Santa Clara student newspaper.
Nagasaki to Portland: the Hanford nuclear reservation connection
by: Isaac Vanderburg - printed on 03-28-2001
When I was young, I would make parachutes by connecting the four ends of a bandanna to a fishing weight using four pieces of red yarn. Somehow the unfolding corners and the perfect billow and the gravity of it all produced a phantasmagoria of wonder, so much so that I would bunch the whole thing together and dart it back into mid-air, just to see if it all happened again.
Today I imagine that if I had looked up as a boy and saw the parachute that Katsuji Yoshida saw, with its impeccable aerodynamics and noble descent, I would have been excited just as he was.