If you read this pamphleteer, you discover that education is under ideological assault. Not because there are conflicting ideas about what to learn, how to learn, why to learn, etc. (though there are), but because…
you searched for doing nothing
The Keynote: Everything Was Fact
From Chapter V of Dickens’ Hard Times. THE KEYNOTE. COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind…
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…
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…
State of the School Corporation: Roll Over and Play Dead
In Bloomington recently the new (7 months on the job) Superintendent offered a kind of State of the School Corporation address and our local paper chose to offer mostly pictures of the event rather than…
Against Oligarchical Roundtables In Education (and really, everywhere else too)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow It’s that simple really. All we do now is ask the wrong questions and…
The Principal is not your Pal: Backstabbing as Pedagogy
From the Bloomington Herald-Times this morning (1/9/2012) comes this betrayal of learning and education. I had intended to simply excerpt but it is too valuable as an example of the way the Project Loving Capital…
Imperial Philanthropy: Using Education Reform to Buy the Earth and Sky
Editor’s note: Doug Martin’s work supplies a kind of corrective to the simple “top-line” story and understanding of the education reform movement. It can be understood to be “about” management and assessment to enforce a…
“Can ponwyi”–The Grace of Gods by Force
In Acholi, a language of the Acholi people of Northern Uganda, “can ponwyi” literally translates as “disaster and poverty teach you.” (Allen, “Postscript: a kind of peace and an exported war,” 283)* This might put…
Boycotting the Indiana Press’s Corporate School Reform Agenda
Through biased reporting and their unrelenting pursuit to promote Bennett, Daniels, and the corporate school reformers, the Indiana media flunkies have been selling the privatization of our schools for too long. The time is now…