I’ll be honest, today has me flooded with indignation and it has become hard to think amidst the noise made by the onslaught of corporate legislation removing the education of children from the public charge…
Date Archives December 2011
Remaking Public Schools Instead of Abandoning Them
For the most part, when our community online chat boards discuss “issues” regarding our local school system they begin with a specific issue, like increased security surveillance or lengthening the school day, but quickly become…
Doug Martin’s Abecedary of Indiana’s Corporate Education Pirates
Below are the main groups involved in destroying Indiana public education. Many of these outfits have a national reach, as well, and their main goal is to hand our schools over to for-profit companies. Vouchers…
Hazlitt on Coriolanus: Poetry of Power
As there is a movie staring Ralph Fiennes, or Voldemort to you youngsters, (who also directs) coming out based on Coriolanus I thought I’d share what is perhaps the greatest English essayist, William Hazlitt, on…
Academica Bought FBI Investigated Broward County School Board
(This is Doug Martin’s newest article detailing Florida charter school operators’ funding of school board members in Florida. The first article on Mavericks in Education Florida can be read here.) While the Miami-Herald recently noticed…
The Uses of Revolution
“A revolution, then, is a way of putting power in different hands.” Guy Davenport Jamie Warren, Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (and former Bloomington resident and graduate student in the Indiana…
Clare-ity on Enclosure
From “The Mores,” by John Clare These paths are stopt–the rude philistines thrall Is laid upon that and destroyed them all Each little tyrant with his little sign Shows where man claims earth glows no…
Stand from betwixt me and the Sun…Thoughts on Enclosure
I’m working on a longer piece intended to be about parallels between eighteenth century land enclosures in England as they became legalized via Parliamentary Acts at the behest of vested private interests and the current…
Virtual Schools: Setting Minds Adrift on Black Ships
Excerpted below is a report from the Texas Observer’s Abby Rapoport, “Virtual Schools, Virtually Unregulated?,” about how a “virtual school” has avoided accountability in order to avoid being a, well, school. At this point, the…
Watching Jonathan Franzen Dance on HBO
Below is from an essay by Denis Donoghue in the New York Review of Books, “Coming in from the Cold,” (2006) discussing the work of Jonathan Franzen. This, from the excerpt below, seems incisive and…