In Mehta’s arguments I see another person like myself trying to think outside the box of conventional liberal/progressive wisdom on education “reform”…
I’ve been struck by the vitriolic reaction that always emerges around proposals to increase market forces in education. I wanted to use this post to say something about why even some of us on the left see some value to markets in education.
I find it ironic that in his commentary “Holy Week, Holy Shariah” for Townhall.com, former action movie star turned pundit Chuck Norris (his byline says “columnist and impossible to kill”) reminds us we need to be afraid (be very afraid) of religious influence creeping into our American legal system. Is Norris just another Hollywood apologist for Christian-hating secular humanists and the ACLU (American Communist License Unlimited)?
Not quite! Norris opens his piece with the following set up…
As most Americans have done since our republic’s inception, millions of us across the country this Holy Week will commemorate the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But what concerns me in America is not only the growing disdain for Christian sentiment but also the increasing spread of Shariah…There’s no mystery that radical Islamists intend to use the freedoms in our Constitution to expand the influence of Shariah. But still, too many Americans don’t know or understand how it threatens the very fabric of our republic. So I’ve decided to do a series on how Shariah is seeping into American society.
Well… mud wrestling in a sort of metaphorical way. My latest attempt to embrace and wrestle to the ground his at times elliptical ideas, with the title of this piece my homage to an outside-the-box thinker and crafter of provocative aphorisms like “the medium is the message”, its corollary, “the medium is the massage”, and the “Global Village”.
Though I only came close to meeting him once, I learned about McLuhan’s ideas through a dear family friend and one-time McLuhan collaborator, Mary Jane Shoultz, who I willingly let regale me with the synthesis of their radical thinking during my teen years in the 1970s. Mary Jane meshed McLuhan’s ideas on how we are profoundly impacted by our communication technology with her own radical feminist thought to come up with such provocative concepts as “spliteracy” and “patriarchal pimperialism”. She was my favorite “Feminist Aunt”, and beyond my own mom (Jane Roberts) probably had more influence on my own developing world view than anyone else in my youth.
In my most recent piece “Schools: Trying to Balance Coercion, Inspiration and Facilitation”, I put forward that many American public schools are on increasingly shaky ground because they are tasked with at least six very challenging and at times conflicting goals, and are being asked to achieve all of those goals with shrinking budgets. In this increasingly difficult juggling act of doing more with less, the focus is generally on curriculum, teachers, and even at times educational methodology. But I believe the mostly unexamined element in transforming our schools (as well as other institutions in our society) is the governance model – who makes the decisions and how.
Like the cautionary reminder made famous from Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, whenever I think about our society’s developmental path forward and I forget to focus on who the decision-makers are and how the decisions are made, I need to be shaken out of my stupor and reminded that, “It’s the governance, stupid!”
Continue reading →
Derry, another member of our Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) forum, has worked in the state (public) school system in the UK for 21 years. He joined into our current discussion about the compulsory nature of our public school systems and whether we have reached a point in our social evolution that we don’t have to compel kids to go to school. He considers himself a progressive educator who has spent his years in the system working to make state schools more democratic (less authoritarian). Trying to imagine what is possible within the current educational context (of compulsory attendance), he felt the best possibility for kids from families who can not afford private (including democratic private) was…
Attendance at a compulsory state school staffed by a significant number of adults who are able to inspire each other to work within the compulsion to create democratic-ish sub spaces and times.
Though he said that finding such a school in the UK was not very likely, he felt neither of the other alternatives available to these kids were very good…
1. Attendance at an authoritarian test-ridden non-respecting compulsory school
2. Refusal to attend such a school by ‘voting with their feet’ and just not going (assuming they can successfully avoid school attendance and police officers)
As I have mentioned before, I’ve been involved in an ongoing email “forum” over the past five years with fellow members of the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). Topics revolve around youth, learning, and our societies educational institutions and possible alternatives to those institutions. Admittedly, we forum participants can be guilty of arguing perhaps from more of an ivory tower rather than from the trenches at times, but then again you have to be able to see the entire forest at times to best take care of all the trees.
One of the topics that keeps coming up and engenders a lot of impassioned prose on our forum is the reality of compulsory education for youth and the possibility of making it non-compulsory instead. The opinions on what would result from this change run the gamut, even among this self-selected group of alternative educators and other supporters (like me) of learning alternatives. Some of the forum participants (like me) take a more left-libertarian position and argue that our schools and the formal education process in general would be transformed for the better by shedding coercive elements of compulsion. Other list colleagues think that though in some ideal world this would be the way school should be, in our all too real and non-ideal world ending compulsory school attendance would be a disaster, and particularly for poor families that live in dangerous neighborhoods with little other infrastructure to offer youth.
Continue reading →
There have been innovative alternatives emerging in cyberspace over the last couple decades to challenge the traditional models of selling people “stuff” (in this case hardware and software) to facilitate their use of electronic media for information gathering, development, storage and distribution. Many of these new models have been challenges to “the Man”, that is the big global businesses (like Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, etc) that have been dominate players in an information-industrial complex.
Shareware and freeware models like Linux, and for love-not-profit enterprises like Wikipedia are beginning to make significant inroads against for-profit computer operating system, encyclopedia and other business products.
But perhaps ironically, a more traditional 20th Century profit model applied to the facilitation of electronic information gathering, development, storage, distribution and commerce is powering the emergence of a new for-profit juggernaut that may be making the other traditional for-profit cyberspace companies and their profit-models obsolete. It certainly has positive ramifications for a more egalitarian access to the tools and benefits of the information age, but also possibly negative ramifications in terms of sheer size and concentration of power and money involved.
Continue reading →
There’s been a thread on the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) listserv I participate in titled “The Death of Literacy”, started by one of the more active list participants, Todd, who is closing down his book store which he has unsuccessfully tried to transform into a learning center or perhaps a library for alternative schools in the San Francisco Bay area where he lives. He is bemoaning a generation of young people who appear to be turned off to books and literature (at least the printed and bound versions you buy in bookstores or borrow from the library), in favor of electronic media and particularly dazzling video games that to many in the older generations seem like tools for killing time, perhaps self-medicating the stresses of life, and little more.
Continue reading →
My life has been lived to a soundtrack. Growing up in an age of ubiquitous car radios, restaurant juke boxes, record players and later stereos, it seems like the popular songs of the day were always playing in the background, over and over. Music affects us emotionally and can evoke strong feelings of all sorts in the listener. In my case it also became a sort of storage mechanism for a lot of those strong feelings.
Forty years later I can hear a pretty mundane pop song like Tommy Rowe’s “Dizzy”, which I heard constantly when I was in my junior high years and I can be overcome with the feelings of being that young teenage boy with a crush on a girl but afraid to tell her or even talk to her. Those sort of emotional memories stay with you and I believe shape you subconsciously.
Continue reading →
Competing with Japan’s earthquake tsunami nuclear crisis, Libya has jumped back to the top of CNN’s “breaking news” with the beginnings of implementation of a UN approved no-fly zone (plus more) authorization. The UN resolution came not that long after the Arab League had agreed to support that no-fly zone, apparently giving Russia and China the diplomatic cover to merely abstain and not veto the UN Security Council resolution. Surely this was the culmination of a great deal of collaboration, coordination and compromise between the administrations of key countries around the world.
But it was also a source of significant criticism from both progressives and conservatives in this country that were hoping the US would have acted more quickly and decisively. I find it interesting what may lie behind those criticisms, and what the more cautious and deliberate action by the US may be indicating in terms of the greater human transition from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchies of control to more of a circle of equals.
Continue reading →