This post is probably too long for some readers--just stop reading when you lose interest.  For many youth here helping the world requires an ability to communicate and an ability to communicate often involves the ability to write. The following may be useful to such youth. It is written by a man who has spent half a century in classrooms and is now retired. It is written about a man who lived to write rather than writing to live.-Ron in Tasmania

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THOMAS MANN: LIVING TO WRITE

When I retired by stages from FT, PT and casual/volunteer work as a teacher, during the years 1999 to 2005, I found that I was able to watch a marvellous range of educational and visual material on TV. I had drawn on TV, video and film resources as stimulus in my work as a community and classroom teacher, adult educator, tutor and lecturer in the years 1967 to 2005; I had watched my share of TV and cinema in the years 1948 to 1967 as a child, adolescent and young adult in that first generation, 1950 to 1970, to be able to enjoy both mediums.

German television director Heinrich Breloer made a docudrama for TV The Manns: Novel of a Century. It was aired on German television in 2001. It is the saga of an extraordinary family that stamped Germany, its culture and its era like no other. Six hours of viewing, it examines the history of Germany’s most celebrated literary family: the Manns. This program made its TV debut in Australia in 2006 in the early years(60-64) of my late adulthood as human development theorists define the years 60 to 80.

Thomas Mann, his writing and his career have interested me since I first come across his diaries in the 1990s while still a teacher in Western Australia. Like many subjects that came across my desk and my reading as a student, as a teacher and as a member of society living through the tempestuous decades from the 1960s through the 1990s, my study of the life and writing of Thomas Man had to go on hold. This man had to be put in the pending, impending, in the "to be examined later in life" category.

Even with my well-developed,

highly enhanced skepticism

which sixty-years of television¹

watching has produced in the

application of a rational faculty

to this highly believable medium;

aware of the fundamental difference

between: stage, printed page and TV,

all of which have some unmistakable

politico-social and potentially distorting

point of view arranged for an audience;

his diaries, his novels, his letters, his life,

his eloquent and outstanding humanism,

his courageous espousal of democracy,

his transcription of the raw materials of

his experience & personal history into form,

his literary and autobiographical writings

as novels, his utter-productive absorption

in self and society, his observational skills

and relentless reporting anchoring, as it did,

his imaginations and inventions in the soil

of facticity--and his very living to write--²