I just started reading David Graeber’s new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years and I’d like to keep you apprised as I go. I heard Graeber via a podcast and then saw an interview with…
Browsing Category Society/Culture
Making Room for a Finnish Education in America
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…
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,…