And speaking of reading: some books have chapters or sections that can be considered apart from the whole work as something like illustrative set pieces. These pieces are part of the whole, but can be encountered on their own and will still convey the power of a complete argument. Dickens’ Hard Times opens with an immediate indictment of industrialization in its application to schools by…
Go Fetch!
In Greece in the mid-90s when I was there, plumbing lacked pressure and one could not as a rule flush tissue paper. Because of this the bidet was common. Paper was for drying, not for wiping excrement. At the same time homes where I visited, both in Athens and in smaller towns like Markopoulo and villages like Derveni, still used rotary dial phones. However cell…
120 Years Too Late
William Morris in an 1896 address to the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising: Next, we have to remember that the enormous majority of the people of the country do not care one straw about natural beauty. They have, I allow, a certain sort of pleasure in wandering about in the fields and enjoying the fresh air, but, as for looking at nature…
Becoming is Revolutionary
This is too good for me not to lift right off of one blog and plunk it down here (“Steal this Blog Post!”)–this is from Paul Thomas cross-posting at DailyKos and Schools Matter, “Universal Public Education Is Dead: The Rise of State Schools.” More than thirty years, however, before Rich’s bold and accurate commentary on public education, Paulo Freire warned against the danger of authoritarian…
Diagnosing Ownership, or Why Would You Believe Them?
This piece by Michael Lind in Salon, “Why do Republicans nominate blue bloods,” asks why Republicans pose as the party of the “Self-Made Man” when they are nearly wholly (in the upper register) “rentiers” or “people who make money in their sleep.” The mystery deepens even further. In the 19th century, the Republican Party was founded by Abraham Lincoln and others, devoted to the Henry…
You Say Sharia, I Say Shulchan Aruch and Ave Maria
This post, “English Citizens Increasingly Turning To Sharia Courts,” by noted Law Prof. Jonathan Turley is a little short (well a lot) short on substance but it basically says many Muslims in England are “circumventing the court system in favor of Islamic courts and Sharia law.” He goes on to say this is proper in a free society “citizens should be allowed to resolve their own…
Inoculating Against Progress
I suspect that there is no such thing as a commons. Well, historically, there are “commons” all over the place. But it appears to have been erased by the Enlightenment discovery of “progress” and “improvement” as a socially desirable project. (See how I got all those terms in there? Progress, Improvement, and Project.) The Commons is an anarchist’s dream of a shared sense of what…
So Proud of Our Dirt
I fear we have yet to understand, to wake up to the fact, that every single thing that seems to create contentious debate and divide our citizenry is endemic and intentional. That this disease of industrial capitalism and imperial aggression has in wretched collaboration, in approximately 200 years, found a way to upset all the ways the planet restores equilibrium. All flows to all. MLK…
Educating Unethical America: The Lie of Impartiality
Or, immorality in amorality Or, the Ownership View Or, the View from the Top I. I got canned in January 2010. We had had several shake-ups in middle to upper management and had a new “brash” VP that, upon reflection, seemed to have been given the “clean house” directive. I’m sure there were myriad other reasons for my being “re-organized” into the bliss of unemployment…
Light Thrown by Tinder-Boxes
It might be hard to do better than George Eliot does in this bit of psychological dissection of some ways of thinking in the face of “mysteries” and motivations (1861). The next morning the whole village was excited by the story of the robbery, and Godfrey, like every one else, was occupied in gathering and discussing news about it, and in visiting the Stone-pits. The…