January 22, 2004
The truth about the 'No Child Left Behind' Act.
Via the
Guerrilla News Network, via Eliot Gelwan's excellent
Follow Me Here weblog, via the equally excellent
Wood s Lot, (God, I love the web), is this
excellent article by
Greg Palast, accusing George Bush of lying in his State of the Union speech about what the 'No Child Left Behind' is really intended to do.
Go ahead, George, and lie to me. Lie to my dog. Lie to my sister. But don't you ever lie to my kids.
Deep into your State of the Siege lecture tonight, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act," you said, "We are regularly testing every child ... and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."
You said it ... and then that little tongue came out; that weird way you stick your tongue out between your lips like the little kid who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snakey tongue dart out and I thought, "He knows."
And what you know, Mr. Bush, is this: you've ordered this testing to hunt down, identify and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.
Here's how No Child Left Behind and your tests work in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago. Millions of 8 year olds are given lists of words and phrases. They are graded, like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many failed.
Once the kids are stamped and sorted, the parents of the marked children ask for you to fill your tantalizing promise, to "make sure they have better options when schools are not performing."
But there is no "better option," is there, Mr. Bush? Where's the money for the better schools to take in the kids getting crushed in cash-poor districts? Where's the open door to the suburban campuses with the big green lawns for the dark kids with the test-score mark of Cain.
And if I bring up the race of the kids with the low score, don't get all snippy with me, telling me your program is color blind. We know the color of the kids left behind; and it's not the color of the kids you went to school with at Philips Andover Academy.
You know and I know that the testing is a con. There is no "better option" at the other end. The cash went to the end the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire's son another million.
But you'll tell me, you took tests as a youth. I know you did. And you scored on the Air Guard flight test 25 out of 100, one point above too dumb to fly. But you zoomed past the other would-be flyboys. They were stamped, "Ready for 'Nam." And you took a test to get into Yale. And though your pet rock scored a wee bit higher than you, your grandpa on the Yale board provided the "better option" which got you in.
Here in New York City, your educational Taliban, led by Republican Mayor Bloomberg, had issued an edict to test the third-graders. Winnow out the chaff and throw them back, exactly where they started, to repeat the same failed program another year. In other words, the core edict of No Child Left Behind is that failing children will be left behind another year. And another year and another year.
You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program - because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: Identify the nation's loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. The system will provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale alumni club, to punch the McDonald's cash registers color-coded for illiterates, to pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new service economy order.
That's exactly it. That's exactly what they're trying to do. Destroy the American educational system in order to keep people stupid. But there are smart people out here, George. A lot smarter than you. Don't ever forget it.
And to insult to injury, it should be pointed out that most of the tests mandated by the act are published by McGraw-Hill. And that the McGraws and the Bushes are very close friends, fraternity buddies and business associates, going back three generations at least. They're making money off of this, as they do off of everything they do.
The Guerrilla News Network has a
forum where you can discuss this and other issues. And see
Greg's own site for more of his writings. I hadn't heard of him before, but he's got a lot to say.
permalink, posted by mike on Thursday, January 22, 2004 at 11:12 AM
January 14, 2004
Nobel Prize winners who hated school.
Via
Metafilter is a link to this
page of comments by various Nobel Prize winners who hated school. Courtesy of the
Learn in Freedom organization.
There are some great quotes on the page, by the likes of Einstein, Tagore, etc. Including, to be fair, one by someone who actually enjoyed school. But most of the world's most creative thinkers would, I think, agree with George Bernard Shaw:
. . . and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to the turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow-prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: A book from which no human can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
"A Treatise on Parents and Children," preface to Misalliance (1909), reprinted in Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, volume IV (1972), page 35.
I couldn't agree more. I myself hated school, and think that it severely retarded my education and my ability to think creatively. My ability to learn in general actually. Goodness, when I think of the hours I had to sit there doing busywork, and listen to teachers explain things for the umpteenth time that I got the first time, I could cry. Yechhh! I have thought for many years that I should have been taught to read, pointed at the library and left alone. Just my opinion of course.
To add to that I have to express my opposition to public education in general. Which I see as mostly an attempt at government brainwashing. I'm a big supporter of efforts not only to privatize schools, but to get government out of the education business entirely. I think it does a great deal of harm to children, and is the major source of the ever-increasing conformity in our society. What public education does is reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator. It frustrates the most intelligent kids, and leaves the less intelligent ones way behind.
The first thing people like Hitler and Stalin do is to take over the schools. Once you have the kids you have the society. It follows as naturally as night does day. And it's no surprise to me that one of Bush's first priorities on becoming president was to push his education bill, and to establish more standards and controls.
Most people seem to automatically assume that it's only so-called conservatives who want to privatize schools. But I'm what you would call a "progressive liberal". (Although I hate that label and now that I think about would have to say that teaching people to label and categorize everything is one of the biggest faults of education.) And I think we ought to privatize them all as soon as possible. Colleges too. It's curious that those on the "left" who are supposedly most opposed to what the government does, are the ones who most vociferously back government control of childrens' minds.
I agree that every child is entitled to an education, but that doesn't necessarily mean doing it through the public sector. For one thing that doesn't appear to work very well. For another, it inevitably leads to government control. There are other methods to accomplish the same goals, ways that would be much more efficient and would better satisfy each individual's special needs.
And, by the way, the desire the help kids who want to teach themselves, is the major reason I set up the Galileo Library. In order to make the texts and such available to home schoolers, private schools and others trying to work without government support and control. When I was in college I wanted to do it as a doctoral project. But it was new, different and hadn't been done before, so they couldn't handle it. I was supposed to just study what other people had done, not actually do anything myself. So stupid, so sad.
I didn't know about the Learn in Freedom organization, but I'm glad to hear there are some folks out there who have the guts to take on this most sacrosanct of all institutions. Freedom of Education is the most important freedom of all. Without that, all of the other freedoms, religion, speech, press, are absolutely meaningless. Freedom of religion, for example, doesn't just mean the right to believe what you want. It means the right to pass those beliefs on to your children, and entirely in the way you want to pass them on. Without the government looking over your shoulder going, "Well, this part is OK, but not that part."
permalink, posted by mike on Wednesday, January 14, 2004 at 03:46 PM
End of entries.
