| Once again we see the short-term and long-term effects of the continual cutting at our public schools in order to feed the monster of corporate education. As we celebrate our country’s independence, I also find I am mourning the loss of teaching civics to our young people and how that has reduced us to ranting instead of discussion, and polarization instead of compromise. When so few understand the role of government and how it works (current legislators definitely included) how can we and the next generation possibly hope to continue and build the brilliant work that created our nation? We have not only stopped trying to be an enlightened society, but the constant dumbing-down of public education is ensuring that we will be left with no choice but to hand over the education of our next generation to the corporate world. I am hopeful that more and more are seeing that government and business are two very different things and serve two very different purposes. And the goal of education should not be to return on shareholder value, but to give each and every child a chance to become a contributing member of society. I’m will not stand by and see our nation become the United States of America, Inc.
Keep up the good fight Diane! I joined our school board to be part of the solution, not the problem! |
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Your insight is invaluable. Keep fighting the good fight!
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Well said. Corporate benevolence is chewing away at a lot of accumulated human capital besides education
Anthony Cody just published part 1 of my guest blog on Edweek, examining the theoretical basis of the Gates Foundation’s profit-driven philanthropy, and its effects on world health and agricultural development. It isn’t what we all thought it was.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/the_gates_foundations_leverage.html
The news you might not have heard is that there is are well-developed, huge efforts around the world to recover our Social Sector and rescue the planet from corporate domination-by-leveraged-largesse. Open the links to the World Health Watch’s 3rd Report, and Friends of the Earth’s Rio+20 Summit Outcome Document. We need to create something like that!
I’m working on the links for part 2 now, covering corporate leveraging of Education Reform. I can’t find that “outrage” Susan Ohanian ran a while ago, from the DOE press office, I think, explaining how the Common Core will increase profits for edubusinesses. If anybody has that link, can you post it?
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Thanks for sharing the links. My cursory understanding of Gates and his other endeavors is that they are doing more harm than good with a variety of explanations as to why. I look forward to the results of your work. Have you contacted Susan directly? She’s pretty good about responding. I would love to see that press release. If one was issued that just solidifies my belief that Duncan is –, well lets just leave it at that.
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Try this one.I read the article earlier today.
The Common Core standards will ultimately serve not to improve student achievement but to increase the profits of standardized testing companies. The effects of poverty, family and socio-economic factors on education will continue to be largely ignored in our infatuation with the misguided belief that student achievement will improve through intensified measurement.
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/07/01/are-the-new-national-academic-standards-rotten-to-the-common-core/?cp=3
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I would call them Vulture Philanthropists if only the comparison did not defame vultures, who do after all perform a useful service in the natural scheme of things.
And that is the difference between vultures and disaster capitalists — the vultures do not engineer the demise of their dinner.
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True charity means giving more than you expect to get back.
Your loss-leader “charity” won’t get you into heaven anymore.
Tip o’ the Hat to John Prine …
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Apologies for rambling and not taking thoughts all the way to their logical conclusion and tying up all the loose ends, and for not providing annotations, references etc… Its July 4th, sun is shining, much of this has been rolling around in my head for years and has never come out in one piece before – it still isnt complete AND…
I wish I didnt feel impelled to say this…. AND… I think you all take a very simplistic view of what is going on and thus will never be in a position to fight back effectively…
what is happening in education is merely one small aspect of a much wider agenda, which is playing out around the globe – there is no politics, there are no differences between the parties – at the national and state levels, all of that is a sham, an illusion, perpetuated to fool us into thinking we have choice, power, whereas in reality its the same people, money, behind the scenes pulling the strings – and they’re the people controlling the money supply, employment, the food chain, health care access etc … and now almost the entire public education system… George Carlin says it much more eloquently than I do – go check out his piece on education and who controls this country and “there’s a club, and you and I aren’t in it”…
referring back to public education, IF WE WANT TO GAIN ANY TRACTION, we must accept that what we understand and want the word ‘education’ to mean IS NOT THE SAME as what the oligarchs understand and want it to mean… IF WE DONT ACCEPT THAT, WE WONT EVER WIN BECAUSE WE’RE NOT PLAYING IN THE SAME GAME…
It’s NOT that they don’t understand somehow, that they’re misguided – they really want/intend/designed public education to be/do something other than what we want for our children…. what’s happening is a very deliberate campaign, planned out to the Nth detail, following a very predictable format and its 95% in place around the country…
It’s become apparent to me that many people have this idealised view of what public education is, and was, from its earliest inception….
Public schools and public education started out, not to give opportunity to all children, to nurture each to his/her full potential but to manage the transfer of labour from an agrarian-based economy to an industrial one… education has always been seen as a tool for TRAINING…. training of living widgets to perform certain tasks, fill gaps in human inventory, to skim off the brightest to act as functionaries in public service and for the oligarchs in their businesses etc and to consign the rest to be the serfs they had always been, just in a different environment… and this sprang from the same age-old mindset that has supported, and still does support, slavery as a legitimate tool used by plantation owners etc for profit making …. listen to some of what the early advocates for public education really thought here: http://sahilachangebringer.blogspot.com/2011/03/rage-against-machine.html
and yes, slavery is still supported in this world – what else is it, if you can’t live without working? What is it if you work 40 hours per week AND STILL DONT MAKE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY YOUR RENT? The only thing that has changed is that we arent living on plantations any more – the slave owners got clever – they ‘freed’ us, AND shifted the bulk of their production costs of housing, feeding, keeping us healthy, back to us… we really, still, are nothing more than serfs – paying the lords of the manor our rent/mortgages while they pay us to ‘sharecrop’ society, to keep the wheels turning… we really are very stupid….
ANYWAY… for a while there, something happened, and the public school curriculum was expanded to give children a much more liberal-arts based experience of education…. that I dont think, was ever really intentioned… maybe the oligarchs’ eyes were turned in another direction and it just evolved and they didnt really recognise the danger to themselves in that at first…
BUT when the effects of experiencing that width and breadth of education really permeated through the middle class and down to the working class and people started to really expect, DEMAND more say in how this world is being run (see the human rights, anti-war, feminist etc protest movements of the 50s, 60s, 70s), the oligarchs began to move to shut it all back down to the basics and to re-establish a choke-hold of control… the final stages of which, we have happening now….
I think that what is happening is a combination of that need to reassert control, and to do what capitalists do everywhere in the name of the free market (Milton Friedman’s input into this stuff) – suck all known resources dry, with profit, power and control being the driving force…
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George Carlin’s insight on the American Dream is timeless, too, “They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
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Education is now dominated by imposters who have claimed ownership of our field, while failing to acknowledge to the public that what they assert is of very limited value, due to their lack of education credentials and experience.
If non-educators truly cared about children and their education, every policy, practice and law they created would have a disclaimer similar to the Dog Whisperer’s, “Do not attempt the techniques you are about to see without consulting a professional”.
Non-educators should be required to obtain informed concent from parents for chidren’s participation in experimental research.
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