In our laundry room by the door to the garage, we have a wall calendar that lists important historical events for each date. The kids look at it every day–we talk about the events on the way to school and learn a little history. I’ve always been a little bit of an amateur history buff, reading the little daily notice in the back pages of…
Student Disengagement: The Fallacy of Technology in the Classroom
The Errant offers an insider’s view at what is often a real barrier to an engagement with learning in our classrooms: technology. A brief Errant perspective: pencil, paper, text, teacher. Done. Our contributor Eric Sargent teaches English at a private high school in St. Louis. The marginalization of “true” education abounds once again under the guise of “school reform” in Wisconsin as those persons…
Rally for Action Not Abstraction
Lenin famously asked, “What can be done?” Without following the path of Lenin (!) we must recognize our moments and take our chances as people to speak out, act out, against the tyrannies of entrenched injustice. We attended a recent “rally” on the square in Bloomington that was organized by Jobs with Justice in order to make citizens and our Congressional Rep. Todd Young of…
Being Honest About Knowing Nothing: Who to Read
Hey, a quick note to ask you (while always paying proper attention to your favorite idlers here at the Errant) to bookmark and check in frequently with a few of my favorite writers and thinkers out there in cyberspace. If you think I’m an ass, and you want to know who else is an ass like me to avoid them, this list will work for…
More than Markets: “We are Workingmen!”
(Update in the text: Big Food in Schools) I will always admit to an inability to connect point A to point X, Y or Z through the clear delineation of points B through W. I tend to believe all those steps in between must surely be obvious, until I try to explicate them even to myself! Be that as it may, I beg your patience as…
True Public Education: Marketing at Abercrombie & Fitch
This past Saturday my children and I participated in the end-of-summer ritual of back-to-school shopping. My daughter is 9 and my son is 7. Shopping, other than at the Lego store, is not a favorite pastime of theirs. I feel the same way about it; it’s all about efficiency. Make a list, get in, get out and be done with it. Since it had to…
A Labor Day Note on School Vouchers, Psychopaths, Chile, and the United States
As the paid propagandists bamboozled the public in the Bill Gates-controlled “education media” on the eve of the Save Our Schools March, Robert Enlow appeared in Education Week, declaring Milton Friedman the savior of both school and democracy for first sermonizing on school vouchers in 1955. Anyone who deems Milton Friedman as anything but a psychopath should familiarize themselves with Orlando Letelier’s 1976 letter on…
No Charter School Left Behind: Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, and Dennis Bakke’s Imagine Schools
This is a guest post by B-town Errant contributor, Doug Martin. This post was originally published on Mr. Martin’s blog on Fire Dog Lake, and has been republished on B-Town Errant with his permission. Introductory comments from B-town Errant’s Editor-in-Chief: Doug Martin shows us the machinations of crony capitalism. The USA is the land of opportunity for the connected criminals who brazenly use corporate governance rules and tax…
The Actions of the Criminal Classes: The Mask of Freedom
“The plague has freed them from the blind impulse to fall under the influence of contemporary laws. The knights, the merchants, the warriors and women, who demand–they each demand a new life.”–Viktor Shklovsky How about we just talk about liars for a few hundred words? First, I don’t think I’m a liar; though no one has offered me money to lie, “fudge” the truth or…
Organs of Force: Free Market Grifters and Edupreneurs
*Please see footnote at the bottom of this post for a comment about my title choice. Fellow blogger and “education-minded” investigator Steve Hinnefeld suggested I check out the work of Karen Francisco who helms Learning Curve, “a blog about education,” at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. And when Steve suggests something, you make a b-line (did you like that?) for it. A recent “brief” from…