"Only time will tell what will happen when blacks and Latinos start getting behind the scenes. When they start designing and programming and producing games in better numbers, what kind of stories will they tell?"

"Taking the Controllers:
The Urban Video Game Academy Is Training Teens to Join -- and Diversify -- the Industry"

Jose Antonio Vargas in the Washington Post today quite matter-of-factly shows that kids make and change the culture, not just suffer as victims of it.

Now, if only we could expand this concept to schooling. . .or maybe that happened already and we just aren't smart enough to see it? What we don't know or won't acknowledge about how kids are learning and engaging in our society -- completely apart from the artifice and irrelevancies of "school" -- could fill a mandatory national curriculum for politicians and decision-makers of every stripe, and it ought to!

I'm old enough to remember when radio was considered to be "theatre of the mind." If this emerging generation of urban gamers conceptually could turn their video violence against villains who really deserve it -- the villains of the mind, shall we say? -- what changes indeed to our culture they'd lead.

"On our trip, we quickly learned that kids and wine have one thing in common: they need to breathe in the open air. . ."

From Kevin Pattison's weekend piece on touring Napa Valley with his own real-life little boys (as opposed to grown men behaving like ill-mannered little boys in that academy-nominated movie.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/travel/22napa.html?th&emc=th