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The Right Kind of Education

Sunday, February 28, 2010

The title of this post is taken from Chapter 2 of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life, which I was reminded of while reading Larry Cuban’s blog about Great Teachers:

For the past quarter-century, however, policymakers and politicians have chopped, grated, and mixed together the goals of schooling into a concoction seeking to make education an arm of the economy. They scan international test scores, focus on achievement gaps, and boost teacher pay-for-performance plans. This policy direction has shoved the notion of “great” teaching into one corner of the ideological debate and thoroughly erased the distinction between the “good” and “successful” in teaching. Now “great” teaching means test scores go up and students go to college. A big mistake.

When the educational mission is reduced to a test score, as it now has become, demoralization of all involved is the end result. Who, but corporate bean counters and politicians give a damn about any of that? Certainly not the kids. Not the parents. At least, not the ones I know. Test scores tell us nothing about who we really are as a community or as individuals. They are “funny money” created to serve an alien economy that only recognizes bottom lines, no matter how irrationally they were derived. As an educational practice, it is destructive and self-defeating.

But enough of all that. Larry Cuban mentioned Vivian Paley, and linked to her Wikipedia page, which contained a link pointing to an excerpt from her book, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. The book chapter that is posted online is a piece called Big “A” and Little “a”, which tells about what happens when Kindergarten imports first-grade curriculum content in order to boost achievement scores. The result, says Paley, is that play is banished from the grade where it has always been regarded as the primary instructional mode. Taking a long look back at an earlier time in schools, she notes:

Short attention spans were not yet considered a deficit in my schools in Great Neck, N.Y., and Chicago in the sixties and seventies. We saw that the children’s concentration was intense when they played and we filled the other times with playful rhyming games, songs, and poetry, to which we added picture books and fairy tales. The children’s own chants and shouts rang out as they ran, climbed, jumped, pushed, pulled, and rearranged their environment, all in the name of fantasy play. Restlessness, impulsivity, and timidness faded in the quest for a dramatic role, and daydreams awakened into social play and big arcs of paint.

Teachers, she recalls, began noticing superheroes and Barbies appearing in students’ repertoires of imaginary characters, and they began to wonder about the influence of television on children’s imaginations. Later, as increasing numbers of students entered kindergarten after having been cared for in pre-school centers, play gradually came to be regarded as unproductive, and a waste of time, giving birth to the “academic kindergarten” and the labeling of young students as “at risk.” The solution for students who enter school “behind” from the start has been to provide them with increasing amounts of academic skill instruction, and to give them less time for imaginative play. Says Paley:

We blamed television for making children restless and distracted, then substituted an academic solution that compounded restlessness and fatigue….We no longer wonder “Who are you?” but instead decide quickly “What can we do to fix you?”

I see this happening throughout the elementary school curriculum. More time now is required for Math and Reading instruction, and less for Science experiments. In fact, there may be more real science going on in the boys’ bathroom than in the classroom. I realized this the other day after I walked in on a fourth grader who was kneeling in the sink so he could make “fog” on the mirror with his breath. I asked him if he was learning anything, and the poor kid hustled out of the room, worried that I was going to complicate his day.

But, back to Krishnamurti. His little book, Education and the Significance of Life is a gem. In Chapter 2, he criticizes the overemphasis on method and stresses the value of self-knowledge. And, like Vivian Paley, he celebrates the value of play:

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.

Surely, this process is not relationship, but mere imposition, and it is therefore essential to understand the difficult and complex desire to dominate. It takes many subtle forms; and in its self-righteous aspect, it is very obstinate. The desire to ‘’serve” with the unconscious longing to dominate is difficult to understand. Can there be love where there is possessiveness? Can we be in communion with those whom we seek to control?

I believe this is something that anyone who aspires to become a “great teacher” needs to keep in mind. The school reformers will never get it.

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Central Falls – could be ANYWHERE

Friday, February 26, 2010

“Teaching really is not a job. I don’t teach; I’m a teacher. I’m a teacher. That’s who I am.”

… but, obviously, it’s a hell of a long way from Wall Street:

Mr. Dimon said he did not know whether he would have taken the $25 billion that the government lent to JPMorgan during the 2008 financial crisis to bolster its capital if he knew then how troublesome the TARP money would be for the bank.

“The mistake was we let the government and the politicians not differentiate between irresponsible companies and prudent companies, from irresponsible, imprudent, and everybody got lumped together in the same boat,” Mr. Dimon said “Yes, a lot of those companies needed TARP to survive, and yes, a lot did not.”

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Millot: Sound Decision or Censorship at TWIE (V)

Thursday, February 25, 2010

-Marc Dean Millot:

This last post is not about This Week in Education editor Alexander Russo’s decision to pull “Three Data Points. Unconnected Dots or a Warning” because Andrew Rotherham suggested a colleague at Scholastic should make it so. It’s simply a list of my reflections on reactions to this series.

Thank You. I must thank five independent educator-bloggers who offered their hands in friendship for open debate. My posts can be found at Jim Horn’s Schools Matter, Norm Scott’s EdNotes Online, The Frustrated Teacher, Tom Hoffman’s Tuttle SVC, and here at Borderland. The complete record resides at TFT. I could not have responded as quickly or broadly if they had not lent me their platforms and credibility with their readers – and done so even though we disagree on some important policy matters. They are the ones who took risks.

Now that this series is ended, I will end my guest column status on their sites and return to the school reform blogosphere sometime in the future. In the meantime you will undoubtedly see a few of my comments on others’ sites.

Effect. Convincing these unknown colleagues to borrow their blogs offered me a quick response to Russo’s decision and Rotherham’s blog posting. One upside of the “five-blog” strategy was the potential to reach a larger audience. The downside might have been that it was harder to follow the series, yet most of my colleagues reported higher than normal traffic when I posted on their sites.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I had hoped to generate some interest in the mainstream education media. Diane Ravitich and Anthony Cody did post on their blogs in edweek.org, but I have no reason to believe the national media is interested. If you think they should be, let you favorite education reporter know. Reader suggestions can have influence.

Silence. Before I go deeper into the blogosphere’s reactions, readers have probably noticed that neither Russo nor Rotherham recognized any of my posts on their blogs, or any blog. For both it was probably the best “communications” strategy. From their perspective, any response would simply add fuel to the fire and keep the story going. Neither has a credible rejoinder on the merits, and the blogger’s usual knee-jerk reaction – the snide remark, was unlikely to go over well. Accepting responsibility and fault was never in the cards.

However, we do know that someone with Education Sector has spent hours reading my series – see here and here, so ignorance is not a valid plea for Rotherham.

General Trend of Comments. When I had edbizbuzz.com on edweek.org I found that: comments were made by a tiny proportion of readers, opponents were far more likely to comment than “allies,” a good portion of negative comments were ad hominem, and that edwonks who might be the targets of my posts were well-defended by their “blogroupies.”

This was the opposite experience: a much higher ratio of commentators to readers, more vociferous agreement than disagreement, ad hominem attacks directed against Russo or Rotherham, and no comments from either’s entourage. My guess is more “destination readers” followed the series than might follow a typical site.

Russo and Rotherham: Both have had several years of non-stop edublogging; plenty of time to make friends and enemies. No one expressed great admiration for Russo, but there were few real attacks on him. Rotherham was a different story; he has a great many detractors. There are the usual suspects, like the Klonsky brothers, but quite a few people who do not blog expressed similar sentiments.

Conspiracies. The series definitely became fodder for those inclined towards conspiracies around Scholastic, the Gates Foundation and for-profit education. As I’ve written before I’m not inclined in this direction because I don’t think people are sufficiently disciplined.

I would say that Scholastic was the unwitting accomplice of a friend or colleague of Andrew Rotherham – no executive of any standing had anything to do with ordering Russo to pull the post. Maybe someday I’ll remember or figure out the guy’s name.

As for Gates, New Schools, their grantees, EdSector etc., my own experience with very large nonprofits is that senior staff can leverage their organizations in ways their presidents and boards can’t dream of. Instead, see a network of people – Shelton, Smith, Rotherham etc., with a similarly focused view of school reform from a similar subculture of philanthropy, similarly invested – psychologically or otherwise – in a specific group of grantees, working towards the same ends. It’s not a conspiracy so much as an open secret. They’ve never hidden themselves from the public, they’ve spent a decade daring people to challenge their positions. They are a case of emperors wearing no clothes.

Finally there is nothing like a coherent “for profit education industry.” It’s kind of like talking about the “United Nations.” The industry is divided at least between the multinational publishers, their local consultants and everybody else selling products, services and program. The first two groups want no change to the status quo and would be happy to repeal NCLB. The few, mostly weak, trade groups have badly fractionated the broader industry’s Washington presence. And within any segment of the industry there are literally hundreds of small for- and nonprofit organizations motivated by every force known to man.

Very few in the for-profit world are interested in running public schools – it’s a very unprofitable business. Having reviewed the economics of both the charter management and teacher training businesses, I would say the new philanthropy actually wants to push the burden of their own subsidies onto the government, via RTTT and I3. Finally, there’s just not a lot of exchange going on between the for-profits and the nonprofit represented by the naked aristocracy. Sure it exists, but its not very likely that anyone at for-profit Scientific Learning knows anyone at nonprofit KIPP knows anyone at for-profit University Instructors knows anyone at nonprofit Success for All knows anyone at Scientific Learning. With a foot in both worlds, I can say they are two different worlds and cultures – although they share the fee-for-service revenue model.

Hearsay. I did not explain the term in my first post because there was enough jargon as it was and, although I am a lawyer, I felt I could make my point without still more. But as reactions to the series progressed Rotherham’s post demonstrated the risks policy wonks face when they forget the limits of their expertise by managing to confuse a lot of readers.  What follows is the best, simple discussion on point that I found online http://www.lectlaw.com/def/h007.htm :

[A] statement introduced to prove something other than its truth is not hearsay. For example, testimony may be offered to show the speaker’s state of mind.

Example: Dana and Bruce were fighting, and Dana shouted “Bruce, you are a lousy bastard.” Marla heard the argument and was asked to testify at Dana and Bruce’s divorce trial. Marla was permitted to repeat the statement “Bruce, you are a lousy bastard,” because it is not hearsay. It was not introduced at the trial to prove that Bruce has lice or is an illegitimate child, but rather to show that Dana was angry.

What I wrote was not hearsay at all. I introduced the information, not to prove “the fix is in,” but to show the state of mind of people interested in the RTTT and I3 grants program. If Rotherham, or maybe his contact at Scholastic, had looked the term up in a dictionary and reflected on its application to my column, you probably would not reading this post.

Censorship. There also seems to be some confusion about this word. At least one commentator suggested that Russo’s decision was not censorship. It was not “government” censorship, which is how most people think of the term. After reviewing various dictionaries on the web, Wikipedia offers a fair summary of its meaning:

Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.

Readers can decide who the censor was: Rotherham, the Scholastic employee, or Russo. The net result was censorship.

Millot. No great opposition to me, actually a great deal of personal support. Some commentators had a very hard time accepting that I’m pro-market. Frankly, I think there is more common ground between those who share my view of a school improvement market and teachers than many educators believe. This would be a useful area for discussion and at least one blogger – Anthony Cody, has extended an invitation to have such a dialogue. We shall see.

Other complaints included too much detail, too much legalese, talking too much about me, and my use of the Millot-Russo email record.

Without going on and on (any more), some quick responses: The detail, legalese and autobiography were deliberate choices. I did not want to engage in a running, sniping, indecisive blog battle. Short items leave too many openings for misleading counterargument. I decided to take “one bite at the apple” with each segment of my argument; I wanted readers to have all the facts relevant to making up their own minds. Printing the email transcript was the hardest decision, but absent it, this would all be “he said, she said.” Russo’s termination of the contract without public explanation left me no choice, and he never disputed the record.

Would I do this again? Absolutely. And if you ever face the decision to sit this out or dance – I hope you’ll dance.

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Visited

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

screenshot
Visit length: 4 hours 21 mins 20 secs.

Go figure.

Let’s hear from Diane Ravitch:

When someday we trace back how large segments of our public school system were privatized and how so many millions of public dollars ended up in the pockets of high-flying speculators instead of being used to reduce class size, repair buildings, and improve teacher quality, we will look to the origins of the Race to the Top and to the interlocking group of foundations, politicians, and entrepreneurs who created it.

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This is Not A Test

Saturday, February 13, 2010

After noting the disappearance of Marc Dean Millot’s post from Alexander Russo’s TWIE (Scholastic Inc) blog, I got an email from Millot asking if I’d be interested in providing him with some blog space to explain what happened. I said OK, and he says he’ll submit something here in the next few days. In the meantime, he’s putting the story online in various places, serial fashion. To follow the thread thus far, visit Schools Matter and Education Notes Online. It gets more interesting by the day.

In the Schools Matter post, Millot challenged Andrew Rotherham’s evidentiary standards for what constitutes bad faith acting, and he explained his interest in this matter:

I started K-12Leads and Youth Service Markets report, an information service that covers federal, state and local grant and contract RFPs for commercial and nonprofit organizations providing goods and services around teaching and learning. It is literally my business to keep up to date on federal grants, and talk about them with my clients and the media.

It is in my interest that these kinds of competitions are both based on the merits rather than relationships, and perceived as such by providers of school improvement products, services and program. One of the biggest hurdles to marketing my services, especially to the entrepreneurs leading smaller businesses and nonprofits, is the belief that the RFP process is a sham, that contracts are “wired.”

I don’t much care for what Millot calls “the school improvement industry” because I don’t see much improvement coming from that direction, and I don’t see market-based “solutions” taking us where we need to go, based on just about everywhere I look. But I do have enormous respect for Millot’s straightforward honesty and his knowledge about how policy and business interests interact, and I agree that public business should be done fairly and out in the open. At Education Notes Online, Millot questions Russo’s judgment in removing a post because of pressure from Rotherham, suggesting that yielding to pressure from Scholastic might hurt Russo’s “bad boy,” media-outsider image.

And now, today, another test of Alexander Russo’s editorial independence presents itself:

Los Angeles schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines earned more than $150,000 last year for serving on the board of one of the nation’s leading educational publishing companies, a firm with more than $16 million in contracts with the school district over the last five years.

Scholastic Inc. provides the main reading intervention curriculum for the Los Angeles Unified School District, a program that is part of the company’s fast-growing educational technology business.

Scholastic and LA Unified Schools both come out looking bad in this story. Will it get any attention on TWIE? Naturally, I’m suspicious of the motives of people when billions of dollars are on the table. But the other story here is about how information is both circulated and contained by corporate media. To get a clearer view of how that works, people should see this video, based on Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent:

Or read the book, itself; it’s at AAAARG.ORG.

In The New American Century, an article adapted from Arundhati Roy’s speech to the World Social Forum in Mumbai, 2004, Roy levels this sobering charge:

It’s important to understand that the corporate media don’t just support the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a moral position they have chosen to take; it’s structural. It’s intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media work.

Almost nothing is really what it says it is. “It’s all in the editing,” says Roy.

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In Case You Missed It

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Earlier today, Marc Dean Millot at TWIE, published a report, Three Data Points. Unconected Dots or a Warning? which seems to have been deleted. Millot reported:

I have now heard the same thing from three independent credible sources – the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive grants, in particular Race to the Top (RTTT) and Investing in Innovation (I3). Secretary Duncan needs to head this off now, by admitting that he and his team have potential conflicts of interests with regard to their roles in grant making, recognizing that those conflicts are widely perceived by potential grantees, and explaining how grant decisions will be insulated from interference by the department’s political appointees.

I saw the post in my news reader earlier in the day, and I figured Millot’s warning was yet one more reason to treat money cloaked as school reform with suspicion and cynicism. This evening I saw Kenneth Libby’s commentary on Millot’s post, and I attempted to follow the link back to the original article, only to discover it was gone. Hmmm… Too controversial, maybe? Libby drew a line from the monkey business that sank Reading First straight to Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. Kenneth Libby pointed to additional regulatory provisions in the ARRA legislation that promote partnerships with private sector interests, adding fuel to the fire. Messy. Very messy, and not hard to believe that a conflict of interest may be in the works, considering who the players are. But who knows? It’s a blog, and Millot was just reporting what he was hearing. Scholastic’s move to bury the post by taking it down just adds to the intrigue. Millot was right; the Dept. of Education needs to deal with the charge out in the open.

Fortunately, thanks to the resilience of the internet, we have Google’s cached version, and Millot’s post [pdf] lives on.

millot: unconnected dots or warning?

Education Sector applauds Scholastic’s move to take down the post. But, the important thing about blogging is that we’re not all “serious” publishers.

Update(s): Link added for reference to Reading First corruption, and corrected attribution to the post at Schools Matter. Also, I found an article by Sec. Duncan at ed.gov with the ironic title, “Race to the Top – Integrity and Transparency Drive the Process,” which outlines the RttT selection process, and states:

The Department’s legal ethics team also eliminated any applicant with existing or potential conflicts of interest, including people currently employed by a state department of education or school district. In the end, we chose 58 highly qualified and distinguished peer reviewers, each of whom will receive an honorarium of about $5000 for their work. They include retired teachers, principals and superintendents, college professors and scholars, business leaders and education advocates. Their names will be kept confidential until the winners are announced so as to shield them from undue outside pressures. The education world is relatively small so it is quite possible some names will emerge, but the Department will not confirm the names of any of the peer reviewers until the first round is over.

…which is obviously not completely transparent and seems to say that it can’t be, because nobody in a decision-making position can be counted on to have any real integrity. Cynical, yeah. Like I said. That’s how it goes now.

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Howard Zinn

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Howard Zinn died today of a heart attack. He was 87. The AP published a short biography in memorium.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including “Voices of a People’s History,” a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

A full-text HTML version of A People’s History can be found at History is a Weapon.

I’ve been listening this evening to a talk he gave at Reed College, November 20, 1995 which I found at pdxjustice, a good source for social justice-themed media productions. Zinn’s talk at Reed, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train is laced with quite a bit of humor; it’s an entertaining exposition of his belief that a story, truly told, can not be divorced from a point of view.

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The Corporation – A Legal “Person”

Monday, January 25, 2010

Maybe you’ve heard that the Supreme Court ruled there should be no limits on corporate campaign contributions, finding that “the government has no business regulating political speech.” This follows from the corporation’s status as a person, and money’s ability to talk, legally speaking. Consequently, a movement to legalize democracy is taking shape.

The video clip below is from chapter 3 of The Corporation:

Having acquired rights of immortal persons, what kind of person is the corporation? By law, the corporation can only consider the interests of their shareholders. It is legally bound to put its bottom line before everything else, even the public good.

Watch or download the whole movie, uninterrupted, at the Internet Archives.

From The Corporation’s Wikipedia page:

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Take a few moments to see what a class of 8th graders in Ontario did with the film.

Worth noting in Chapter 6, psychologist Robert D. Hare offers a diagnosis of the corporation’s psycho-social “personhood,” and finds that “The corporation is the protoypical psychopath.” (See Hare’s complete diagnosis [pdf].) According to the Personality Diagnostic Checklist, corporations exhibit:

  • Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
  • Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
  • Reckless disregard for the safety of others
  • Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
  • Incapacity to experience guilt
  • Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Examples are all-too common. Alaska, my home for the past 30 years, depends entirely on the oil industry to fund our state government. We are a single-client state. Our situation is typical of any community that depends on resource extraction, agriculture, tourism, or any major corporate interest for jobs and a tax base. In the end, people figure out where they stand. Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop, speaks about the oil spill:

We thought that the worst thing that could happen to us was the spill, and killing the physical environment in Prince William Sound, and killing off our fisheries. But we have learned since 1989 that really the worst thing that happened was tearing apart our community – the mental health effects on our community. And this wasn’t just with the spill; it was with the clean-up effects, with the money coming into town, the very divisive atmosphere….This has been 18 years. And there can be no closure to an emotional trauma when there is this much upheaval still being generated…

How did corporations get this big, where their values count more than the values of ordinary people and ordinary communities? We’ve got to rebalance power. And we’ve got to give power back to the people and make people’s values count. Community values count.

Twenty years after the spill, Exxon has still not made things right.

Wendell Berry, in The Idea of a Local Economy offers some thoughts on rebuilding communities, seeing that we’ve mostly given away our ability to feed, clothe, shelter, care for, entertain, and educate ourselves because we’ve delegated these cultural practices to others. Berry sees that as people begin to take back portions of their economic responsibility, they discover that “the ‘environmental crisis’ is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens.”

The idea of the global “free market” is merely capitalism’s so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a “right” within its presumptive territory. The global “free market” is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms, and replaces them with a new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby “freeing” the hounds.

The loss of the idea of vocation is a critical cost of the globalized economy, says Berry. As economic determinism replaces vocation, people are encouraged to mold themselves into whatever form is called for according to current economic conditions rather than each of us being given the opportunity to work at the task for which we are best suited and inclined. Contrary to what Arne Duncan says, education for “economic security” is not the “civil rights issue of our generation.” The issue is a human rights issue, and it hinges on each person being given the freedom to explore who they are, and what they might wish to become. When we honor human freedom and dignity in our schools, in our workplaces, and throughout our communities, then corporations might find their rightful place in our service, not the other way around.

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Critical Readings

Thursday, January 7, 2010

The Public School in Los Angeles is a school with no curriculum. Someone proposes a class, and when enough interest builds, a teacher is found to teach whoever signed up. The school isn’t accredited; there are no degree programs. It’s a project of Telic Arts Exchange, an organization that “emphasizes social exchange, interactivity and public participation to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture.” More on the history, here.

Of interest to me is a partner site that functions as a library for The Public School; AAAARG.ORG is a goldmine of academic texts – hundreds of them. I’ve been subscribed to the RSS feed for a few weeks, following what is posted, and I’ve watched the site grow steadily. Topics generally concern philosophy, politics, media theory, economics, sociology, art and architecture, and… more.

Sean Dockery runs the site and also serves as one of the Directors at Telic Arts Exchange. He says that AAAARG used to be more discursive, but now he sees that reciprocity in sharing texts is, in itself, a form of discussion, and he claims that “there is still a discussion happening, but it’s not really in the words.” OK; whatever. Everything is a conversation now. He also says that people use the site as a library, which is how I see it – way cool, with loads of great stuff to read. There’s not a search function, though, as far as I can see. You can browse the index or search with Google.

And yes, the stuff is mostly copyrighted. Janneke Adema, who is doing research on Open Access Academic Publishing for the OAPEN project has some things to say about academic text sharing in an article that serves as an introduction to a budding movement, Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing. Adema looks at a few examples and offers some reasons why publishers are not more upset about these kinds of websites. She challenges the idea that there is harm done to “producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses),” and she also says:

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

I just figure that a bunch of anti-corporate left-wing radicals would not want to gripe about copyright.

I’ve been reading a lot there, lately, and I’ll probably link to it from time to time. So, for starters, I want to mention an article by Paulo Freire on critical reading called, The Act of Study. I found this after Mike Klonsky and Stephen Downes both linked to an article about Freire, written by Henry Giroux, Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom. After I read it, I wondered if there was anything by Freire on AAAARG, and there it was.

The Act of Study is really a primer on how to read critically. Freire made his case against what he called “banking education,” the view of teaching and learning as a function of depositing information into the minds of students, which they are then expected to store for later retrieval or personal enrichment. Freire maintained that this form of learning kills our creativity and our curiosity, since the point is memorization, as opposed to comprehension.

Rather than seeing ourselves as “vessels to be filled” Freire recommended that we become “subjects of the act” and attempt to recreate the text for ourselves. He saw critical reading as the expression of an attitude toward the world, and not just a relationship to a book or an article. “To study,” he said, “is not to consume ideas, but to create and to re-create them.”

As an example, Clay Burell’s recent post touched on this very problem. He wrote about the challenge of teaching history, noting that his students understood the text without understanding the issues. He says:

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

Agreed. Read well. The main idea is yours.

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Night Visions: Celebrations in Failing Light

Monday, December 21, 2009

There’s not much sunlight in the interior of Alaska these days. Today is the winter solstice, and we have just about three and a half hours of daylight to work with. At this latitude the sun barely climbs above the horizon at mid-day, and it has virtually no warmth. Bit still, it’s reassuring to see it parked out there on the southern horizon, knowing that eventually we’ll swing back around for a better angle on it.

News from the outside world never stops, though, and thanks to the internet I can now read about the big Climate Summit in Copenhagen where nothing changed, and the watered-down health care legislation that nobody really wants, the contractor “surge” in Afghanistan, and the good-for-nothing shock doctrine education reforms, all of which seem to fit my solstice-inspired musings. It’s like what digby said:

One thing the old political hands may not realize is that in this era of 24/7 cable and the internet this is the first time most people have watched a big piece of legislation enacted in such close-up detail. And what they are seeing is shocking and disturbing — the obvious corruption of the process by wealthy corporate interests. There’s a lot of populist resentment out here and it’s coming down on the heads of the Democrats who are now ironically seen to be funneling taxpayer dollars to rapacious corporations which have been making people’s lives miserable, insurance companies being among the worst of them. This health care debate has reinforced that perception.

I’m thinking about the importance of maintaining optimism as we work to compensate for chronic neglect and institutional abuses, looking for sustainable ways of living. Teachers who see the standards and accountability movement in education as a toxic substitute for real democratic reforms can take a lesson from activists in Copenhagen. They gave Monsanto an award. When criticism doesn’t work, we can always give ridicule and mockery a try.

The Angry Mermaid Award has been set up to recognise the perverse role of corporate lobbyists, and highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions.

Hey, I’m thinking, we could use an award like that to give away, too! We could call it….

The Happy Stripy Leech Award

Happy happy stripy leech

Nominations are open. Deserving contenders would include test-making companies, neoliberal think tanks, corporate charter school management organizations, Eli Broad and Bill Gates, and anyone who feels inspired listening to Arne Duncan.

It is becoming very clear that education reform – the official version – has never been about teaching or learning. Without addressing education specifically, Glenn Greenwald explains why the Obama administration policies look so much like the Bush administration’s:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.

But there are rays of hope. Climate activists announce, “We’re not finished yet,” and they point out that the reform model is, itself, a failure:

Klein, meanwhile, highlighted what she saw as the “successes” of the last two weeks. “The rich world can no longer claim not to know (what) failing to act (entails). The voices of the South, the cost of millions of lives, the disappearance of countries and cultures – all that has landed on the agenda,” she said.

Paul Rosenberg did a post featuring many formerly unheard voices from the global South that he gathered from various sources over the past couple of weeks. And he ended with a Gary Snyder poem that I want to leave here, too.

Revolution in the Revolution in the Revolution
by Gary Snyder

The country surrounds the city
The back country surrounds the country

“From the masses to the masses” the most
Revolutionary consciousness is to be found
Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:
Animals, trees, water, air, grasses

We must pass through the stage of the
“Dictatorship of the Unconscious” before we can
Hope for the withering-away of the states
And finally arrive at true Communionism.

If the capitalists and imperialists
are the exploiters, the masses are the workers.
and the party
is the communist.

If civilization
is the exploiter, the masses is nature.
and the party
is the poets.

If the abstract rational intellect
is the exploiter, the masses is the unconscious.
and the party
is the yogins.

& POWER
comes out of the seed-syllables of mantras.

(from Regarding Wave. New Directions. New York. 1970.)

While I’m thinking about Gary Snyder, here’s a little story he shared in an article called Writers and the War Against Nature:

One time in Alaska a young Koyukon Indian college student asked me, “If we humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?” I thought it an excellent question, directly on the point of etiquette and propriety, and putting it from the animals’ side. I told her, “The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game, speak words to them, say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. Performance is currency in the deep world’s gift economy.” The “deep world” is of course the thousand million-year-old world of rock, soil, water, air, and all living beings, all acting through their roles. “Currency” is what you pay your debt with. We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. How do we repay that gift? Performance. “A song for your supper.”

I went on to tell her that I felt that non-human nature is basically well-inclined toward humanity and only wishes modern people were more reciprocal, not so bloody. The animals are drawn to us, they see us as good musicians, and they think we have cute ears. The human contribution to the planetary ecology might be our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists—because that is what seems to delight the watching wild world.

Happy solstice. And singing, too.

Photo: by Laurie Pink

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