I shared yesterday’s Brief about Finland’s success in international testing standards (success that flies in the face of “teaching testing”) with a local message board that is a space of community conjunction between the municipality…
Browsing Category Society/Culture
How to Blind Justice
Greenwald’s new book (With Liberty and Justice for Some) arrived yesterday. As is my, er, usual practice, I repaired to the water closet for a prefatory inspection. I will offer the full amount of the…
Occupy Common Core Standards: Butchering and Packaging Kids for Global Capital
This is actually pretty simple to see and realize: the ruse called education reform is being legitimized from the top down by offering a “veneer” of scholarly research and governmental agreement alongside the “scare tactics”…
An Errant Request: Reader, What is a School?
I would honestly prefer to read, think and write about poetry, about Bei Dao or Margaret Fuller in The Dial, or “the tyranny of vision” that I fear is our only REAL problem (vision becomes…
Occupy School Reform: Against Stealing Our Public Schools
I don’t know how to tell you this; we’re getting our asses handed to us on a platter. By we, I mean those of us who are against the corporate school reform movement. My friend…
Occupy Wall Street: A Sit-in Defining Being Against the Doing
Two bits, more than a shave and haircut, on the “unrest” that appears to be morphing nicely into actual thought. Both of these from the web magazine The New Significance: “A web magazine exploring revolutionary…
In Praise of Life Work: Against Jobs
Today, walking the dogs, air heavy with a cold mist, moving up a gentle grade into the rising sun, trees in autumn raiment, yellow and fading reds, my eyes are on the road ahead, yet…
Sunday Sermon: (Nobel) Prizing Doing
What are people for? This is the title of a book of essays by Wendell Berry (and one of the essays within). I’d say people are not generally for anything. But that is probably not…
The Shackles of Citizenry: Guilty In Any Land
Quaint, quaint, quaint…the good old days. Imagine a time when being an American citizen was justifiably a dream of humans from all over the world. This was the great experiment in democracy and finally, eventually,…
The Draft, the War at Home, and Occupy Wall Street
What do the demonstrations on Wall Street and those spreading across the country such as the one in Baltimore on Tuesday, praised and encouraged by the Baltimore Sun in an editorial with guts, and the…