Author Archives: E Wayne Ross

Gibson: “I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End?”

San Francisco Gray Pathers Blog: “I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End?”

I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End?

The following was was written by Rich Gibson, who teaches at San Diego State and is part of the anti-high stakes testing movement in public education. This post was to an on-line discussion about raising consciousness and getting teachers and parents organized, but it applies to much of our work.

“It is good to see people beginning to lay out positions prior to the Fresno gathering, meaning we are taking this moment seriously.

So, let us stake out areas of agreement and disagreement and see where we may, or may not, coalesce.

At the outset, I want to restate my respect for anyone engaged in resistance to the regimentation of schools via regulated curricula and high stakes exams, in beating back the military, and especially those who want to overcome the system of capital that lies behind all that. Disagreement is not disrespect and, so far, many of us have found that friendship over the long haul arches over our differences.

That said, I disagree with those who want to disconnect capitalism, imperialism, war, and the trends in school that capital creates, like the Big Tests and the military recruiters.

I disagree with those who see this US government as anything but a weapon for the rich, and executive committee for the wealthy. Urging people into electoral work, into the courts, etc. merely lends credence and support for a state, a government, that is flatly on the other side, the enemy of the mass of people including most students.

That teachers are largely unaware of the nature of government speaks to their own mis-education, especially in colleges of education, but also to the limited privileges teachers have, like health benefits.

I am interested in building a mass base of class conscious people (who, for example, recognize that the working class and the owning class have only contradiction in common), people within a caring community, people who are willing to take serious risks and at the same time are willing to see that discipline and organization are necessary to reach into a world where we can live reasonably creative, more or less equitable, free lives. I want people to become less alienated, more responsible for our own histories, if not our birthrights. I want to get rid of capitalism. That is a pedagogical and practical project.

I put the question to all other reformers: Toward What End? If that question is unanswered, then all that happens is more of the same, perhaps in new forms, running on capital’s many treadmills: nationalism, hierarchy, mysticism, racism, sexism, irrationalism, more wars, etc.

Opposition to curricula regimentation, high-stakes exams, child abuse, can only be carried through if it is connected to the source of those problems, to capital and its need for a docile, uninformed, work force and witless military. Winning gentler Big Tests and more “progressive,” scripted curricula, without building a base of people opposing capital itself, is not winning. Even abolishing the No Child Left Behind (which is not going to happen) without an educational project that takes on capitalism is a hollow victory.

I see work in schools and in the military as central to that work for peace and justice in the de-industrialized US. There are other key places, like the immigrant worker rights movement, but schools and the military are important because they are anchors to daily life.

Any plan of action, tactics, needs to be rooted in a careful examination of our current situation, both in general (an international war of the rich on the poor intensifying, and within that imperialist wars), and in specifics (in San Diego, for example, the heavy presence of the military, the connections of all schooling to the military industry, and the racist border, etc, or In Detroit the racist collapse of the entire city). The general cannot be split apart from its particularities; they interact.

Of course, there are some answers in history to our current situation, but those answers are very limited, and are especially useful only in our criticism of past movements. Our situation is quite different from what people have faced in the past. We are in the midst of a technologically powerful empire that is not about to give up its domain with a whimper.

This is not the British Empire (which went out with fewer bangs but plenty of massacres in Africa) that had the US to hide behind and manipulate. It is not Germany in the thirties when people could look to the USSR or the US. It is not Japan in the thirties when people could look to the Chinese Red Army. It is not the US mired in Vietnam in the sixties; the Iraqis are not the sane peasant nationalists of Vietnam. Rome did not have the Bomb.

While there are some similarities to our context in the past, we are mainly in a unique, and very difficult, position. The emergence of fascism in the US as a popular movement is quite real (80 million Christian fundamentalists, a historically illiterate population, a culture industry thriving on the “300,” misogyny, racism, the celebration of violence, coupled with nationalism and the direct rule of the rich).

The civil rights movement and the freedom schools of the 50’s and 60’s are good examples of both what can be done, and what should not be done. After all, the civil rights movement, as Bob Moses honestly portrays in Radical Equations, was easily diverted from a mass movement for jobs, against racism, to a voting rights project directed by foundation grants. While it would not be hard to find a dozen movements that turned out to be what they claimed to set out to oppose, surely the US civil rights movement would be one of them. All those movements, from the Soviets to the civil rights movement, lost sight of the project of going beyond, transcending, the inequality and exploitation that capital requires. Why do that again?

ACORN today is little more than a Rockefeller Foundation diversion–hardly an exemplary movement.

Myles Horton was, I think, more honest. I suspect he would argue that we must connect the particularities of people’s lives today with the larger realities, like war and the emergence of fascism. Or perhaps not. It is hard to tell, Myles Horton was a reformer, above all, but he was not blind to his surroundings, and he was usually surrounded by Marxists of one kind or another. What are the social conditions that might change Myles from a reformer to one who wants to transcend the system of capital? Well, maybe the reality of the brink of WWIII, financial collapse, the eradication of civil liberties, the clear exposure of all governments as corrupt, violent, unable to serve the need of masses of people, and impervious to reformist change.

Jean Anyon’s work has been pivotal in understanding education policy. Her comment that “doing school reform without doing social and economic reform in communities is like washing the air on one side of a screen door,” stands as a lighthouse for beginning any discussion about education reform. Her political economy of the Newark schools was path-breaking. But her hopeless thought in “Ghetto Schooling,” that the only way out of the schools/community crisis is for the rich to give up their money makes no sense—as it is the result of a failure to really critique capitalism and its transformation. The rich are not going to give up their money, and they are far less positioned to do that than they were in the 1960’s, when the US was still an ascendant capitalist nation. Now the US is in rapid decline, badly positioned against imperialist rivals like China.

What is possible in Newark and Detroit and elsewhere is that people are positioned so they must fight to live, as in the California Grocery Strike, in the Detroit teachers’ wildcats, the student walkouts against this war, and the massive Mayday strike last year.

At issue is whether people will be able to make sense of the fights they must make, or will they make the same errors and lose, again? That is a question of education and organization.

Organizing 101 is not merely listening to people and synthesizing their problems as social, not merely individual, problems; but also having a sense of where you want to go, and being able and unafraid to communicate that. A good part of the reluctance to talk about capitalism is the fear that people will either not understand, or be scared off by it, that they have to be walked through to the reality of capital on baby steps.

That’s not true in my experience. This process of one-step-at-a-time teaching and learning surely seems odd when it comes from people steeped in Whole Language, ie, a desire to withhold the real Whole (capitalism) from people in order to walk them through a process (sound out the parts of the social system but never view the whole of it) which it is assumed they cannot understand in discussions or in reading.

The idea of hiding one’s politics (if that is the case, and if it is not, then just what are one’s politics?) is commonplace on the left. To make a small leap, it winds up with the people who need to know about left politics not knowing, and the people who do not need to know, like the cops, knowing all about it. Such was the CPUSA, the SWP, and many others.

I agree with Kathy Emery (whose book with Susan Ohanian says nearly all that needs to be said about capitalism and education) in that we need to build close personal ties with people, real principled friendships, especially anti-racist friendships, and that the Education Roundtable petition is a good starting point for organizing. It can, as we have seen, expose the absolutely corrupt leadership of the NEA and AFT, for example.

The petition does not, however, ask people to take control over their own lives, to be truly class conscious. Instead, it asks others (corrupt politicians on the Gates’ payroll for example) to act for us and, at the end of the day, that will not happen. Nor is it an especially good idea to have an mass of education school grads writing the national curriculum, especially not when more than 90 percent of them are white and middle class. There is not going to be a good national curriculum until there is sufficient strife to cause an elite retreat, as in the sixties when the curriculum got briefly interesting. In the absence of a social movement, of organization: nothing. Power only bends to power.

The US ruling class is not going to be voted out of the Iraq oil fields and it is not going to be petitioned out of the school mind-fields, the pipelines for wars, militarism, and voluntary nationalist servitude.

It is possible that civil strife will hasten the retreat of the empire, in schools and out. Surely the invasion of Detroit by the 82nd Airbourne, recalled from Vietnam in 1967 to fight Americans, would be a good historical example. Thousands of jobs, indeed tens of thousands of jobs, were won as a result of that uprising.

Even so, however, this situation today is much different, the empire’s rulers much more desperate and even more ruthless because of that. Witness what was done to New Orleans when racism merely connected to nature. Imagine what would happen if Detroit went up again. It might. For black people in the US, the situation is already nearly intolerable. What will educators do?

There are debates about how organizing is done. One can seek the lowest common denominator of complaints that an organizer finds in a community, build a centrist base around that, and see where it goes. This, however, abandons a broader outlook and typically winds up with, at best, very short term effects, a la Alinsky.

The better way to organize is to organize the left, find the more antiracist, more militant, more internationalist, more dedicated people, organize them and have this left move the center.

Boycotts of the tests and driving military recruiters off campuses–all that has already happened without sophisticated structures and lines of communications—though surely it would be better if those elements were in place, and if we could successfully link the boycotts to freedom schooling on or off campuses.

Test boycotts, or driving military recruiters off campuses, do not happen because they are simply announced, but are the product of many factors, including working with parents and students over time, walking door to door in communities, building reputations, taking smaller actions like demanding toilet paper and books in Detroit or exposing the recruiters’ lies in San Diego. But any action at some point requires some one to get it going, and far too few teachers have been willing to gird up the courage to halt what is obviously child abuse.

Teachers do not have to be missionaries for capitalism, and schools its churches. School workers have far more freedom than most other workers. Self-censorship, however, remains powerful in schools where freedom is typically overwhelmed by (often unwarranted) fear; a real inversion of any educational effort.

Teachers now participate in the oppression of kids, and themselves, as we see wages and benefits attached to test scores—as we predicted a decade ago. Part of the reason for that is that thinking teachers have few people to talk to, are isolated, and they know they do not have the power to defend putting real critical thinking into classroom reality. Isolation and fear can be answered by organization.

The Rouge Forum is the only organization in the US that has not only linked capitalism, war, and schooling, but has also led conferences that include school workers, profs, k-12 nd university students, parents, community and cultural activists, and rank and file labor leaders—and led test boycotts, massive walkouts against the war, helped organize demonstrations against the wars and racism. Take a look at the recent Rouge Forum conference in Detroit http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/rouge_forum/EducationActionPostConference.htm.

There are many voices inside the Rouge Forum: Democrats, anarchists, libertarians, marxists, Greens, four troops in Iraq, profs in the UK and South Africa, teachers in the Caribbean, students from the US now in Oaxaca, unaligned students and teachers, etc.

The leadership of the Rouge Forum is shifting to younger people and a more open, transparent, structure is under discussion.

We have organized people across the divisive boundaries of union membership, race, age, occupation, and nation. We created a community where educators can meet with others who share similar, intelligent, views—and where passionate debate is mediated by friendship.

We have conducted action-research about the US unions, especially the school unions, and demonstrated how the organizations are structurally incapable of meeting the crisis at hand (dividing people more than uniting them), why it is their leadership is completely corrupt (bribed by the high salaries, more than $450,000, that imperialism offers them in exchange for promoting the nationalist idea that school workers, politicians, and the US Chamber of Commerce have common interests), and most importantly, we helped people work inside the unions, and out, for justice and peace.

We have led strikes in schools and supported strikers (like the California Grocery strikers) outside schools. We recognize that without the working class, a schools-based movement cannot sustain itself. But students can surely initiate resistance, as can school workers, especially when hope is eradicated from schooling: France, 1968.

With an “injury to one only goes before an injury to all,” outlook, we have learned how to defend our friends (as the unions surely will not) on the job and off. Our collective, online and in person, has helped school workers keep their ideals and still teach.

We already have a more than a decade of experience of how that can be done. We have also offered self-criticism about where we went wrong. We have joined a variety of community groups in coalitions against the war and in developing real, practical, strategic plans. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/strategicplanningSD.htm

We have attempted to link test boycotts with freedom schooling, with only a little success.

We’ve had fun, using guerrilla theater to disrupt the workings of the Testistos, organized regular social gatherings around films and books, promoted artists and musicians in the movement.

We have researched the tests, the scripted curricula, and published extensively in books, the popular press, and academic journals. Our web page gets 32,000 “hits” a month and serves as a useful research tool (www.rougeforum.org).

We have supported Substance News, edited by George Schmidt, as a central voice for education and community activists, a voice of our own. We can never rely on the good graces of the corporate press.

We continue to work in many community based groups. Many if not most of us recognize that coalitions that seek to combat a ruthless enemy that has a centralized command system can be shattered like glass under pressure and will not prevail; nor do we support the identity-politics movements that reduce social movements to the lowest denominators of human life, divided along lines of nation, sex/gender, etc. We recognize the need to fight racism and to demolish the divisions among us, before they are used to demolish us.

We struggled to combat the individualism and careerism that is endemic in the academy and among middle class school workers, resulting in a fear of organization and, hence, more powerlessness.

The founders of the Rouge Forum have demonstrated in practice that we are not out to be somebody, to become icons, but rather we have sacrificed to collectively do something important. We recognize that organizing is always humbling.

There is room in the Rouge Forum for nearly any educator, student, community or cultural activist, and parent who wants to find a place where they can exert the creativity they cannot exercise in other parts of life, and where what we do actually counts.

You are welcome to join us. Just email rgibson@pipeline.com

Should the US choose to attack Iran, and many indications are there that say the ruling class will as they must have that oil and regional control (http://www.umich.edu/~twod/writing/z_iran_28apr06c-wkg.pdf ) , then our situation will probably change dramatically, with an even more rapid attack on civil liberties coupled with sharpened economic assaults on life in schools and at work, that is, a draft becomes more likely, freedoms to teach or organize on campuses will diminish, wages and health benefits come under attack, as the war costs come home. That could lead to a profound economic crisis, or not, and it could also rachet up propaganda for a fascist mass movement.

Such is our current situation.

There is a story about a frog in a well who became an expert on what it believed was all of the sky. Our current context demands an organization that can see a larger sky than the one viewed from the bottom of a well.

All the best, r “

‘Devastating’ Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week

Editor & Publisher: ‘Devastating’ Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week

By Greg Mitchell

Published: April 21, 2007 9:00 PM ET

NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called “Buying the War,” which marks the return of “Bill Moyers Journal.” E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again — yet Moyers points out, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses.”

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, “The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should’ve all been doing that.”

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war&hellipWe didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.” Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to “dig deeper,” and he replies, “No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas&hellip.nope, I don’t think we followed up on this.”

Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a “softer” way, explaining to Moyers: “I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn’t seem ridiculous.”

Moyers replies: “Going to war, almost light.”

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, “We didn’t question our sources enough.” But why? Isaacson notes there was “almost a patriotism police” after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and “big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.'”

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, “Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails.”

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters “do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something.” But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.

The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student’s thesis, downloaded from the Web — with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with “plagiarism.”

Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have “two conservatives for every liberal.” Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue’s firing that claimed he “presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a “quick war” with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote “a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war.” The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration’s case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would “editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times.”

Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.

The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that “so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media.” He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Then he explains: “The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush’s top speechwriter.

“He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist.”

***
Greg Mitchell’s most recent column on Iraq: “Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here’s $500”

Rouge Forum Update: Happy May Day!

Dear Friends,

We support the many school walkouts that will take place on May 1, the international workers holiday. All school workers should back the students with the courage to take direct action. We also support the immigrant-workers rights movement that seeks, once again, to demonstrate its potential on this great day.

In that vein, here is a link prepared by the Lawyers Guild on the rights of students, especially as related to walkouts.
Go to www.schoolwalkouts.info

And here is a fine, old, piece by Alexander Trachtenberg on Mayday

Long time Rouge Forum readers will note that we are not linking to our own traditional Mayday flyer, nor have we sent out a Rouge Forum update for two weeks.

That is because our service provider, Earthlink, has had our web site shut down, illegally, since April 1. We have paid all our bills but Earthlink simply refuses to restore the web site.

At least two officials at Earthlink seem to have responsibility for this, a Mr Lunsford at , lunsford.support@corp.earthlink.net , and Bil Quince, Mr Lunsford’s underling at bquince@corp.earthlink.net

Maybe if, say, ten percent of the 4400 people on our email list send them a note, they will wake up and act right. All you need to do is say, “Turn on Richard Gibson’s (rgibson@pipeline.com) web site NOW.”

Thanks to Gil, Tommie, Bill B, Amber, Wayne, Susan H and O, Connie Lane, Doug, Marsha, Sally, Sandy, Nancy, and Nancy P.

We hope to be restored to life, fully, next week.

All the best, r

Teacher’s job on line for student column

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”—Sinclair Lewis

Okay, now advocating tolerance in US schools is controversial.

An Indiana teacher has been suspended from her job because in her role as student newspaper adviser she did not censor a student opinion column that advocated tolerance for people “different than you.”

In the Woodland Junior-Senior High School newspaper, The Tomahawk, tenth grader Megan Chase wrote:

“I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they’re just different than you.”

Now the school district has recommend that teacher Amy Sorrell be fired because she did not alert school principal, prior to publication, regarding the “sensitivity” of the material.

Read on for the AP wire story:

Teacher’s Job on Line for Student Column
By TOM COYNE
Associated Press Writer

WOODBURN, Ind. — The column in the student newspaper seemed innocent enough: advocating tolerance for people “different than you.”

But since sophomore Megan Chase’s words appeared Jan. 19 in The Tomahawk, the newspaper at Woodland Junior-Senior High School, her newspaper adviser has been suspended and is fighting for her job, and charges of censorship and First Amendment violations are clouding this conservative northeastern Indiana community.

At issue is whether Chase’s opinion column advocating tolerance of homosexuals was suitable for a student newspaper distributed to students in grades 7 through 12 and whether newspaper adviser Amy Sorrell followed protocol in allowing the column to be printed.

Media advocates say the debate has deeper ramifications.

“This is a real threat to quality student journalism if an adviser can be removed for not having censored a perfectly legitimate story that there was no legal reason why it shouldn’t have been published,” said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.

School officials in this community of 1,600 residents, 10 miles east of Fort Wayne, say the issue isn’t First Amendment rights but a teacher’s failure to live up to her responsibilities. They contend Sorrell should have alerted Principal Ed Yoder to the article because of the sensitivity of the material.

“The way we view it is the broad topic of homosexuality is a sensitive enough issue in our society that the principal deserves to know that it’s something the newspaper is going to write about,” said Andy Melin, assistant superintendent of secondary education and technology.

Melin said Yoder would have allowed the article to be printed but likely would have suggested some changes.

Sorrell has been placed on administrative leave and the school district has recommended she be fired. A public hearing is scheduled April 28, and the school board expects to vote May 1.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argued that students have access to much more mature material in the school library and on the Internet.

“Advocating tolerance is controversial?” she said.

Chase’s column, which she wrote after a friend told her he was gay, said society teaches that “it is only acceptable for a boy and a girl to be together,” which makes declaring one’s sexual orientation difficult.

“I can only imagine how hard it would be to come out as homosexual in today’s society,” she wrote. “I think it is so wrong to look down on those people, or to make fun of them, just because they have a different sexuality than you. There is nothing wrong with them or their brain; they’re just different than you.”

She said she was surprised by school officials’ reaction.

“I didn’t think it was any big deal,” Chase said of the column.

Sorrell, 30, said she showed the principal four stories about teen pregnancy, including an opinion piece advocating teaching safe sex practices over abstinence education, for the same Jan. 19 issue because she thought that “was going to cause the stir.”

But she acknowledges she never mentioned Chase’s column. “There isn’t anything controversial about tolerance,” she said.

Stan Pflueger, president of the Fort Wayne chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays and a graduate of the school district, said he was disappointed with the school system’s reaction.

“The spirit of the article is just asking people to consider what your previous beliefs were about this particular subject,” he said. “There’s a difference between tolerance and agreement.”

But resident Jim Bridge took a tougher stand.

“We all have rules that we have to abide by and it appears that she hasn’t chosen to abide by the rules,” Bridge said. “I own my own business and anybody that did that to me would be fired on the spot. She knew it had to be controversial.”

Sorrell, the daughter of a newspaper editor, said she thought she knew what was acceptable in the school district where she has taught English for four years.

“I’d still make that same judgment,” she said.

___

April 22, 2007 – 11:10 a.m. Copyright 2007, The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/National/School_Newspaper_Flap.html

University goes on offensive against RIAA

Via the Rock & Rap Confidential listserv…

University goes on offensive against RIAA

Advises students to stay anonymous
By Nick Farrell: Monday 16 April 2007, 15:11

from theinquirer.net

NC State University is helping its students stave off attacks from the RIAA. The RIAA filed John Doe lawsuits against 23 students who have been identified by their IP addresses.

Pam Gerace, the director of Student Legal Services at the University, is fighting the lawsuits for her student clients.

Currently she is warning students to remain anonymous because the RIAA has said that it will make sure that their job records are blighted.

Since this is so out of proportion to any copyright protection problems, it was dangerous for students to put their hands up and admit anything. She told the Technician Online that this could prove dangerous for the students, as the RIAA could pursue other legal actions or give the names to record companies.

She said the RIAA implies that cash must be handed over right away, when this is not true.

The outfit has also been changing the number of songs it thinks have been nicked and how much students should pay, which makes it sound like they are making it up as they go along, Gerace said.

Yet another example of how the Dems are no different from the GOP

In his ZNet commentary of April 13, Norman Solomon gives us yet another example of how the leading Democratic candidates for the US presidency are warmongers, just like Bush.

ZNet Commentary
Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack, John… and Whitewash
April 13, 2007
By Norman Solomon

The Pentagon’s most likely next target is Iran.

Hillary Clinton says “no option can be taken off the table.”

Barack Obama says that the Iranian government is “a threat to all of us” and “we should take no option, including military action, off the table.”

John Edwards says, “Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.” And: “We need to keep all options on the table.”

A year ago, writing in The New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported: “One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.”

For a presidential candidate to proclaim that all “options” should be on the table while dealing with Iran is a horrific statement. It signals willingness to threaten — and possibly follow through with — first use of nuclear weapons. This raises no eyebrows among Washington’s policymakers and media elites because it is in keeping with longstanding U.S. foreign-policy doctrine.

This year, with their virtually identical statements about “options” and “the table,” the leading Democratic presidential candidates — Clinton, Obama and Edwards — have refused to rule out any kind of attack on Iran.

If you’re not shocked or outraged yet, consider this:

On Feb. 22, the national leaders of MoveOn sent an e-mail letter to more than 3 million people with the subject line “War with Iran?” After citing a need to give UN sanctions “a chance to work before provoking a regional conflict,” the letter said flatly: “Senator Hillary Clinton has provided some much needed leadership on this.”

The MoveOn letter quoted a passage from a speech that Clinton had given on the Senate floor eight days earlier: “It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further congressional authorization. Nor should the president think that the 2001 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in any way, authorizes force against Iran. If the administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority.”

But, while quoting Hillary Clinton’s speech as an example of “some much needed leadership,” MoveOn made no mention of the fact that the same speech stated: “As I have long said and will continue to say, U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. And in dealing with this threat, as I’ve also said for a long time, no option can be taken off the table.”

Earlier this year, David Rieff noted in The New York Times Magazine on March 25, “Vice President Cheney insisted that the administration had not ‘taken any options off the table’ as Iran continued to defy United Nations calls for it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. The response from Democrats was not long in coming. Senator Clinton helped lead the charge, reminding the president that he did not have the authority to go to war with Iran on the basis of the Senate’s authorization of the use of force in Iraq in 2002.

“But what Senator Clinton did not say was at least as interesting as what she did say. And what she did not say was that she opposed the use of force in Iran. To the contrary, Senator Clinton used virtually the same formulation as Vice President Cheney. When dealing with Iran, she insisted, ‘no option can be taken off the table.'”

To praise Hillary Clinton for providing “much needed leadership” on Iran — and to mislead millions of e-mail recipients counted as MoveOn members in the process — is a notable choice to make. It speaks volumes. It winks at Clinton’s stance that “no option can be taken off the table.” It serves an enabling function. It is very dangerous.

The stakes are much too high to make excuses or look the other way.

______________________________________

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Be nice to America or else

My buddy Paul O sent this in after his latest visit to The States…

Classroom Caste System

Here’s a good commentary article from the Washington Post by a second grade teacher in Silver Spring, MD, who describes the growing divide between rich and poor students as a result of the focus test-prep pedagogy that currently dominates in US classrooms.

Classroom Caste System

By David Keyes
Monday, April 9, 2007; A13

Written five years ago to reduce the “achievement gap,” the No Child Left Behind Act has in fact created a gap in American education. Its pressure to raise test scores has caused many schools to give poor and minority students an impoverished education that focuses primarily on basic skills.

As it comes up for reauthorization, members of Congress should consider the unintended consequence of the act: a new gap between poor and minority students, who are being taught to seek simple answers, and largely wealthy and white students, who are learning to ask complex questions. In my work as an elementary school teacher, I have seen this new gap and I worry about its impact on my students’ future prospects.

Although supporters and critics of No Child Left Behind agree on little, both would acknowledge that testing lies at the heart of the law. Schools approach the act’s testing requirements differently, depending on the students they serve.
Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, American schools remain largely segregated. Schools serving mostly wealthy and white students have a distinct advantage when it comes to testing. Their students are far more likely to be raised in an environment that gives them the necessary tools to succeed on tests. They grow up with the intellectual abundance their wealth provides: books, educational videos and Baby Einstein games, to name a few. Having these resources may not make children smarter, but it does educate them in many of the skills — such as letter sounds and addition facts — that are covered on standardized tests. Knowing their students are likely to succeed on tests gives these schools freedom to teach higher-level thinking skills.

Poor and minority children also come to school with rich backgrounds. They speak foreign languages, make music, tell vivid stories and have other skills not typical of their peers. Their backgrounds, however, often do not provide them with the academic skills needed to succeed on standardized tests. Fearful of poor test scores that can bring punitive measures, schools spend an inordinate amount of time preparing their students for the tests.

Schools often use test-prep programs to try to raise test scores. The problem with these programs is that they teach the skills covered on tests, and only these skills. Poor and minority students spend hours repeating “B buh ball” and two plus two equals four. Every hour spent drilling basic skills is an hour not spent developing the higher-level thinking skills that are emphasized in wealthier school districts.

I have worked in both types of schools. Currently, I teach in an almost exclusively minority, high-poverty elementary school. Administrators require teachers to strictly adhere to a months-long test-prep program. My students recoil at the sight of their test-prep books. Last year, some of my students cried, wracked with anxiety over the tests.

My students are 7 and 8 years old.

I did my student teaching in an almost exclusively white and wealthy school. There, the students studied the role of quilts on the Underground Railroad, brainstormed plans to save wolves from extinction and performed dances based on retellings of Cinderella. The children learned to think and they loved it.

At the end of the year, test results will come out for these two schools. Educators and politicians will trumpet any reduction of the so-called achievement gap. This misses the point. Students will leave these two schools and schools like them with a widely varying set of skills. As the achievement gap is being reduced, another gap is being created. Students in largely wealthy and white schools are learning to ask larger questions; students in poor and minority schools are only being taught to answer smaller ones.

The effect of this gap will be long-lasting. Students taught higher-level thinking skills will be able to compete for jobs at the upper echelon of the 21st-century economy. Students who receive an impoverished education focused on basic skills will be stuck at the bottom.

The No Child Left Behind Act is creating a caste-like system in which students’ future prospects are likely to be similar to those of their parents. This undemocratic development is at odds with a society that prides itself on being a meritocracy. As Congress debates the renewal of the law, members should consider not only whether the act is reducing the achievement gap but also the skills gap it is creating.

The writer is a second-grade teacher at Bel Pre Elementary School in Silver Spring.

Let’s abolish high school

Over the past couple of years there have been some interesting discussions among Rouge Forum folk about the merits of shutting down the schools-we-have and, instead, creating freedom schools.

The key tensions in the discussion include: (a) schools as a key organizing point for social change and (b) schools as mind-numbing, sorting machines/holding tanks that strip many students of their creativity, agency, and ability to think.

A “third way,” so to speak would be to abolish compulsory schooling, which is what this commentary by Robert Esptein is essentially arguing, at least when it comes to high school.

Education Week

Published: April 4, 2007

Commentary
Let’s Abolish High School
By Robert Epstein

Well, not quite. But while writing a new book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, I explored some ideas that go almost that far.

I’m a father of four children, and about 10 years ago I noticed—I couldn’t help but notice—that my 15-year-old son was remarkably mature. He balanced work and play far better than I did, and he seemed quite ready to live on his own. Why, I wondered, was he not allowed to drive or vote, and why did he have so few options? Simply because of his age, he couldn’t own property or do any interesting or fulfilling work, and he had no choice but to attend high school for several more years before getting on with his “real” life.

As a longtime professor and researcher, I got curious. Were our young people always required to attend school, and were their work opportunities always limited to babysitting, yard work, and cleaning the floors at fast-food joints? Were they always subject to so many restrictions? Are teenagers necessarily incompetent and irresponsible, as the media tell us? Is there really an immature “teenage brain” that holds them back? After all, past puberty, technically speaking we’re not really children anymore, and presumably through most of human history we bore our young when we were quite young ourselves. It occurred to me that young people must be capable of functioning as competent adults, or the human race quite probably would not exist.

Over time, through interviews, surveys, and scholarly research, I began to investigate these matters in depth. What I learned amazed me—even shocked me.
Consider school, for example. The first compulsory education law in the United States wasn’t enacted until 1852. This Massachusetts law required that all young people between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school three months a year—unless, that is, they could demonstrate that they already knew the material; in other words, this law was competency-based. It took 15 years before any other states followed Massachusetts’ lead and 66 years before all states did. Along the way, some powerful segments of society staunchly opposed the mandatory education trend. In 1892, for example, the Democratic Party stated as part of its national platform, “We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children.”
TalkBack
Join the related discussion, “Creating Young Adults.”

Restrictions on work by young people also took hold very gradually. In fact, the earliest “child labor” laws in the United States actually required young people to work. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that laws restricting the work opportunities of young people began to take hold. Those laws, too, were fiercely opposed, and in fact the first federal laws restricting youth labor—enacted in 1916, 1918, and 1933—were all swiftly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. After all, young people had worked side by side with adults throughout history, and they still helped support their families and their communities in countries around the world; the idea that there should be limits on youth labor, or that young people shouldn’t be allowed to do any work, seemed outrageous to many people.

Eventually, multiple forces—the desire to “Americanize” the tens of millions of immigrants streaming into the United States to get jobs in the land of opportunity, the effort to rescue millions of young laborers from horrendous working conditions in the factories and mines, the extreme determination of America’s growing labor unions to protect adult jobs, and, most especially, the extremely high unemployment rate (27 percent or so) during the Great Depression—created the systems we have today: laws severely restricting or prohibiting youth labor, and school systems modeled after the new factories, established to teach “industrial discipline” to young people and to homogenize their knowledge and thinking.

Unfortunately, the dramatic changes set in motion by the turmoil of America’s industrial revolution also obliterated from modern consciousness the true abilities of young people, leaving adults with the faulty belief that teenagers were inherently irresponsible and incompetent. What’s more, the rate at which restrictions were placed on young people began to accelerate after the 1930s, and increased dramatically after the social turmoil of the 1960s. Surveys I’ve conducted suggest that teenagers today are subject to 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, to twice as many restrictions as are active-duty U.S. Marines, and even to twice as many restrictions as are incarcerated felons.

Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history. This trend is continuing. Just last year, Reg Weaver, the second-term president of the National Education Association, while lamenting the fact that 30 percent or more of our young people never complete high school, called for extending the minimum age of school leaving to 21. When adults see young people misbehaving or underperforming, they often respond by infantilizing young people even more, and the new restrictions often cause even more distress among our young.

Some leaders in education are far more trusting of our nation’s young—and also recognize the inherent dangers of infantilization and isolation. The former New York City and New York state teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto has long warned about the dangers of artificially extending childhood, and has blamed our schools for damaging families and stifling creativity and a love of learning. Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College and the youngest college president (at 23) in U.S. history, has called for the outright abolition of our high school system, pointing out the obvious: High school is a waste of time for the majority of the students—that is, for those who haven’t already dropped out.

Our educational institutions today are cursed by at least four fatal legacies of the Industrial Revolution—ideas that may have been helpful a century ago but have no place in today’s world.
In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

First, although cars can be assembled on demand, it’s absurd to teach people when they’re not ready to learn. As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

Second, although mass education was exciting in the era that invented mass production, it does a great disservice to the vast majority of students. People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Third, although it’s efficient to cram all apparently essential knowledge into the first two decades of life, the main thing we teach most students with this approach is to hate school. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires all young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

A century ago, there was no way to address these concerns, but, thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have rapidly improving tools that will soon allow virtually all young people to master essential material at their own pace, and to do so at any point in their lives. There will probably always be a place for the classroom, but it will be a place where intense and intimate learning takes place with highly willing students, not a step on an assembly line.

Are young people really inherently incompetent and irresponsible? The research I conducted with my colleague Diane Dumas suggests that teenagers are as competent as adults across a wide range of adult abilities, and other research has long shown that they are actually superior to adults on tests of memory, intelligence, and perception. The assertion that teenagers have an “immature” brain that necessarily causes turmoil is completely invalidated when we look at anthropological research from around the world. Anthropologists have identified more than 100 contemporary societies in which teenage turmoil is completely absent; most of these societies don’t even have terms for adolescence. Even more compelling, long-term anthropological studies initiated at Harvard in the 1980s show that teenage turmoil begins to appear in societies within a few years after those societies adopt Western schooling practices and are exposed to Western media. Finally, a wealth of data shows that when young people are given meaningful responsibility and meaningful contact with adults, they quickly rise to the challenge, and their “inner adult” emerges.

A careful look at these issues yields startling conclusions: The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible.

Robert Epstein is a former editor in chief of Psychology Today, a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the host of “Psyched!” on Sirius Satellite Radio. His latest book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, was published last week by Quill Driver Books (http://thecaseagainstadolescence.com).

Vol. 26, Issue 31, Pages 28,40