When we look back 100 years, or even 50 years, we can see things that people did that seem bizarre to our modern eyes.
How could they have done that? That’s so cruel, that’s so inhumane, that’s so barbaric!
The thought occurred when a friend sent this article from the archives of the New York Times about a plan to “electrify” a classroom for children with special needs (they did not use such a polite term in 1912).
What were they thinking? How could they have thought of these children as lesser human beings, as subjects for experimentation?
Don’t you wonder what people will say about us 20 years from now, or fifty years from now?
Maybe they will be amazed that we ate meat or that we smoked little sticks with tobacco in them.
For sure, they will wonder why our public officials decided to ruin our education system, which produced the most successful nation and the greatest economy and most vibrant culture in the world.
What were they thinking, they will say. How could they have been so harsh and mean-spirited towards children? How could they have treated teachers with such disdain and condescension? Why did they let corporate greed take over their schools? It will seem so puzzling to them in the future.
I hope it won’t take 20 years to realize how stupid our policies are.
Please don’t lose your sense of ethics, your capacity for moral outrage.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The part that is often not discussed is that children from wealthy families will continue to go to the best schools money can buy. They will be extremely well educated and go on to run the country and businesses. It is our students in poverty who will be affected the most. The achievement gap will become larger and larger, as planned. The deformers have no idea of the disaster they are creating. I don’t know all of the players in the Ed Deform Game, but I bet if they do have children, those children would never be exposed to the kinds of things they propose are good for ” other” people’s children. And we all know that means children in poverty. As Educators, we know that democracy requires an educated citizenry. That means the goal of public education should be for ALL children to be able to participate. Not just those who can afford it. As long as corporate greed is allowed to drive this runaway train, our future looks grim. But not for their own children. As long as our elected officials represent only those who paid to put them in office, our future looks grim. Teachers have a big voice, let’s start using our combined voices.
The East India Teaching Company is pushing to recreate the order of society that we had before the Revolution.
Two roads diverged in the backwoods of America in 1776 — our choice was to keep all hands on the reins, all hand on the table — thanks, but no thanks, the Redcoats can keep their invisible hands to themselves.
I guess some revolutions just never stop turning …
Hmmm, the NYT article is one year after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and just three years before the Paterson Silk Strike. We are living in a reality evocative more of 1912 than what 2012 ought to be. KKKattle Prods Fer Dumb KKKids. It’s a brilliant, widely accepted program. Heartless jerks, then and now.
“Maybe they will be amazed that we ate meat or that we smoked little sticks with tobacco in them.”
I don’t think eating meat will be seen any different than it is today. Now maybe they might be surprised at the inhumane conditions some producers of beef, pork and chicken (and even fish now) kept their animals. Cigs-still be there.
“For sure, they will wonder why our public officials decided to ruin our education system, which produced the most successful nation and the greatest economy and most vibrant culture in the world.”
Boy the last half of that sentence is pure American exceptionalism nonsense at its worse. Rah, Rah go USA! Just because many Americans think like that doesn’t make it true, desirable or right.
Remember frontal lobotomies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
Rendered obsolete by FOX News.
Decades from now, this era of this sinister “Education Reform” will be viewed with the same shame and horror that we now view:
1) the Japanese internment camps of the 1940’s;
2) the blacklist hysteria of the 1950’s ;
3) the esclation and eventual involvement in the Vietnam war of athe 1960’s.
MICHELLE RHEE is the “Joe McCarthy” figure (as is Scott Walker, who like McCarthy, was also form Wisconsin)—a sociopathic, money-motivated, pathological liar and demagogue, who in her times, is afforded respect and fear, and whose whose rank charlatanism is almost inexplicably being swallowed and promoted by the mass media and others in power without the slightest skepticism… when even a cursory and objective examination of her background, statistics, claims, and destructive effects would out her as a complete phony.
ARNE DUNCAN is the “Robert McNamara” figure—someone with ZERO background in the area in which was placed in leadership, and who has a blind, slavish devotion to bogus theories, statistics, strategy—and who, while doing the bidding of his 1% corporate masters, persists in these destructive endeavors in the face of all evidence that they are failing miserably, and who, in the process, is destroying the lives of millions, while enriching his 1% corporate masters… and who, along with his allies who are promoting this damaging agenda, has an appalling disregard for the victims of what he says and does… (though he later owned up to this before he died)
You could go on and on…
Unfortunately, history tends to be written by the victors. Unless we can get people with common sense in positions of authority, it’s very likely that the “reformers” will continue to chip away at public education until it no longer exists. At that point, they may be asking how we could ever challenge the “wonderfully effective” [sic] strategies of privatization and high stakes testing.