Category Archives: Democracy

Citizen’s Guide to FOI in BC

Via MediaSavvy–BRITISH COLUMBIA: A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO FOI
Unless you’re a specialist, it can be tough (and expensive) to pry what you want out of the hands of the bureaucrats. But fear not. Galloping to rescue are the students from UVic’s Environmental Law Centre, who have written a layperson’s guide to British Columbia’s Freedom of Information legistlation, designed to make it much easier, and talk you through the process, step by step.
(UVIC, tip from PEJ News)

Tips on “radical” teaching

In his June 1 ZNet Commentary Gary Olson, a professor at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, offers his take on “objectivity” and radical teaching. His tips are not really so much about “radical” teaching as they are about good teaching and the role of academic freedom in insuring such.

As he notes free expression and independent thinking in university classrooms “is jeopardized when powerful voices outside the academy attempt to dictate not only how subjects are taught but by whom. Some of these folks believe that any independent, critical thinking by students is inherently subversive. They prefer a certain conformity of perspective even at the cost of faculty authority, academic freedom and democracy itself.”

Perhaps the best example of the current threat is embodied in the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” promoted by lefty turned right-winger David Horowitz and which has been considered in nearly twenty state legislatures.

Read on for Olson’s ZNet CommentaryZNet Commentary
Radical Teaching June 01, 2005
By Gary Olson

The issue of objectivity in the college classroom is widely misunderstood outside and even within colleges and universities. Frankly, many of us in academia contribute to this confusion by failing to adequately explain our larger mission.

On the one hand, this dereliction deprives the defense of academic freedom of potential allies. On the other, it makes higher education more vulnerable to external partisan groups intent on stifling open educational discourse and imposing their own narrow agendas. In what follows, I’ll sketch what I believe to be the essential responsibilities of college teachers.

First, any attempt by a teacher to slant discussion by knowingly misrepresenting, shading, or distorting information is unacceptable by any standard. Beyond that I doubt if one can be anything but subjective in most teaching situations. In fact “objectivity” is an inappropriate term.

Inevitably a teacher’s perspective will accompany any course. In my opinion there an element of dishonesty involved if this “bias” is camouflaged behind so-called detached scholarly neutrality. Given this fact, I try to be as up front as possible about my subjectivity. Presumably, faculty have spent considerable time and study mastering their subject. Their primary responsibility to that subject “is to seek and to state the truth as they see it.” (AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics) But no teacher has the “objective truth.”

Second, I readily plead guilty to not being neutral about the topics addressed in my own courses, from sexism, racism and homophobia to what I view as the the destructive nature of globalizing corporate capitalism, virulent nationalism and the misuses of religion. As a student I was invariably put off by teachers who feigned neutrality about the grievous state of our world: “Okay, Native Americans (or holocaust survivors, domestic abuse victims, starving children in Africa, etc.) we’ve heard your story, now let’s be fair and give equal moral weight to the other side! ”

Third, I’ve always found much to admire in the European tradition where professors are expected to “profess” something. As long as I don’t penalize students for disagreeing it’s imperative that students know what I think. So far, anonymous evaluations have never accused me of belittling a student’s right to disagree or lowering their grades for it.

Fourth, students are evaluated by appropriate scholarly standards for materials in a given course. And here a crucial distinction must be made. While I always respect students, I don’t always respect the content of their opinions. Why? Because all opinions aren’t equally valid. For example, a “student has no ‘right’ to be rewarded for an opinion of Moby Dick that is independent of these scholarly standards. If students possessed such rights, all knowledge would be rendered superfluous.” (AAUP)

Fifth, what students personally subscribe to at the end of a course is entirely their free choice. For example, in a biology course you would be expected to understand the theory of evolution but you could still “believe” in creationism in your personal life.

Or in astronomy you might retain the belief in a flat earth, but just don’t put that on the final exam. In other courses you’d be expected to demonstrate thorough familiarity with critiques of capitalist economics — receive an “A” — and then be free to go on to become a wildly successful Wall Street ruler of the universe.

Finally, in my ideal college, as students move from course to course they’re exposed to differing interpretations of the world from teachers who defend those positions with evidence, skill, and conviction. Am I confident that exposure to my radical version of “truth” will measure up well against these contending views and more importantly, against a student’s life experiences? (e.g. ZNet authors will offer a more convincing case to students for how the world works than any alternative perspective). Well, I suppose I am. Why else would I have devoted my life to this pursuit.

Again, I hope all teachers feel as strongly as I do about what they’re doing in the classroom so as to provide a worthy contest in the marketplace of ideas. Again, the only way truth can emerge and falsehoods be exposed (as Chomsky’s famous charge to intellectuals put it)is if, in the larger curriculum, we value tolerance and are open to hearing all points of view. Democracy depends on free expression and independent voices.

That mission is jeopardized when powerful voices outside the academy attempt to dictate not only how subjects are taught but by whom. Some of these folks believe that any independent, critical thinking by students is inherently subversive. They prefer a certain conformity of perspective even at the cost of faculty authority, academic freedom and democracy itself.

Beyond all the reasons cited earlier, I would argue that this last chilling threat is the clinching argument for protecting the autonomy of colleges and universities, yet another reason to provide students an environment where they can emerge from the shadows of Plato’s Cave and view the world for themselves. At least that’s my subjective opinion.

Gary Olson, Ph.D. is Chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem,PA. Contact: olson@moravian.edu

BCTF sues BC Premier Campbell

B.C.T.F. Sues Premier for Defaming Teachers

[Article for upcoming issue of Substance newspaper, Chicago, IL]

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation has launched a lawsuit against the recently re-elected B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, claiming teachers were defamed by Campbell, who in the closing days of the election campaign said they were going to strike in June.

In May, during last stages of the provincial election campaign, Campbell raised fears about the disruption the school year, particularly the provincial exams, by claiming that the B.C.T.F. was poised to take a strike vote immediately following the election.

At a news conference on May 12 (and in a press release titled “Put Students before Strikes”) Campbell accused the B.C.T.F. of harboring a “secret” and “duplicitous plan meant to engineer a school strike only weeks before the provincial exams that would throw our school system into chaos.”Campbell also accused the B.C.T.F. of acting in concert with the New Democratic Party, his primary opposition in the election, saying “they have run a campaign of deception, half-truths and misinformation. They are turning our classrooms and playgrounds into places of propaganda instead of places of learning.”

Campbell is also quoted as saying, “this is the N.D.P. and B.C.T.F.’s hidden agenda. It’s a shameful confirmation of what we have suspected all along. It’s about putting strikes ahead of students and union interests ahead of public interests … no one wants another strike in our school system to deny our children their right to learning.”

B.C.T.F. immediately declared the Campbell’s comments and the imputation that the B.C.T.F. and the N.D.P. have colluded and conspired to achieve some improper purpose were “false and slanderous.”

During the last week of the campaign, B.C.T.F. President Sims challenged Campbell to explain “why he’s misleading British Columbians with ugly falsehoods about teachers holding children hostage. He’s using children as a wedge issue for his own political purposes.”

The B.C.T.F. called on Campbell to stop spouting inflammatory rhetoric and to tell the truth about teacher strikes: there has not been a single one in the last 12 years.

Here are a few important facts teacher actions in British Columbia:

Since 1993, when provincial bargaining was introduced under the N.D.P. government of Mike Harcourt, not one single school day has been lost due to a teacher strike. There have been some local strikes by school support workers, and in those instances teachers have respected the third-party picket lines. But in the last dozen years, B.C. schools have never once been closed due to a teacher strike.

Teachers first won full bargaining rights, including the right to strike, in 1987 under the Social Credit government of Bill VanderZalm. Since then, not a single student has failed to complete the school year due to a teacher strike.

In 2001, shortly after they took office, the Campbell Liberals attacked teachers’ bargaining rights by imposing essential service designation on education. B.C. is the only province in Canada to do so, and remains one of the only jurisdictions in the industrial world that deems education an essential service. Normally that designation is reserved for police, fire, and health care — services that impact life and limb.

In January 2002, the Liberals imposed a teacher contract through legislation. Bills 27 and 28 gutted the provisions that upheld the quality of public education in B.C., and teachers were outraged. As a result, tens of thousands protested this blow to public education with massive demonstrations in Vancouver, Victoria, and throughout the province.

“January 28, 2002 is the only day that schools have been closed due to a teacher action, and it would never have happened without the B.C. Liberals’ unjust legislation,” B.C.T.F. President Jinny Sims said. “Teachers are deeply concerned that parents are being unnecessarily alarmed by Campbell’s attempt to manufacture a crisis in the final days of the campaign.”

Sims added, “It is unconscionable for Premier Campbell to claim that there are plans for a school strike only weeks before provincial exams and days after the election.” She added, “It is outrageous that the premier would tell such blatant lies to the electorate. This is nothing less than fear-mongering. It is a disturbing act of desperation from a government that has failed our students and therefore needs to deflect scrutiny of its record.”

The suit against Campbell was filed in B.C. Supreme Court on May 25 and is seeking unspecified damages after Campbell and the B.C. Liberal party refused to issue an apology or retract statements made in the last week of the election campaign. The full text of Campbell’s comments can be found on the BC Liberal Party web site.

The suit claims the defendants knowingly committed defamation “in order to enhance the electoral prospects of Gordon Campbell personally, and the B.C. Liberal party’s candidates in the provincial legislature generally.”

Campbell’s remarks were based on a leaked memo from Mission, B.C. teachers that purported to show a strike was being prepared.

“Any decision to strike would have to be made by the [B.C.T.F.’s] representative assembly and that was said right in the Mission memo. At no time was a decision made to strike and even today no decision has been made and no recommendations have been made for a strike by the executive committee,” Sims told The Vancouver Sun [May 26].

“We have been without a contract for a year and we’d be remiss if we didn’t consider all the tools available to us, but at no time has a decision been made to take a strike vote,” said Sims.

Five days after the press conference in which Campbell made his inflammatory remarks, and for the first time in 22 years, British Columbia voters re-elected the governing party, but the new legislative assembly has a significantly stronger opposition. In their first term, Campbell’s Liberal’s hacked away at health care, social programs, and attacked unionized labor at every turn.

The opposition New Democratic Party, which held only two seats in the previous assembly, exceeded expectations by winning 41 percent of the vote (to the Liberals 46 percent). The new legislative assembly will host 33 N.D.P. representatives, with one seat still undecided. The B.C. Labor Federation backs the N.D.P.

Nationalism, patriotism, and textbooks

In recent days, China has seen the biggest public protest since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. Thousands of people, in over a dozen cities, have participated in anti-Japan protests. China-Japan relations are now at their lowest point since diplomatic relations were established in 1972.

The protests have been fueled by a number recent actions by Japan including: its campaign to become a member of the UN Security Council; a joint statement with the US calling for a peaceful resolution of Tiawan’s future status; and the decision to drill for oil and gas in disputed waters of the East China Sea. But the main targets of Chinese anger are new Japanese history textbooks.There is a rising tide of patriotic nationalism in Japan that coincides with the rise of the political right in national politics. Japan’s schools, which have traditionally been dominated by left-leaning teachers have become the major battleground in the right’s effort promote jingoistic nationalism.

Since 1999, Japan’s flag and anthem (which was written at time when the Japanese believed the emperor was an immortal diety) have become mandatory elements of school life in Tokyo. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday that over 300 teachers in Tokyo have been punished for refusing to sing or play an musical accompaniment to the anthem in the past two years. Pacifist teachers who have resisted new flag and anthem regulations have been harrassed by parents and even received death threats.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party is planning to reform Japan’s basic education law this year to require schools teach “love of country” to students. Politicians are working revive the status of the emperor, ditch the country’s “peace constitution” (which prohibits an offensive military); and require students memorize a constitutional preamble that would praise Japan’s history and culture and the Japanese race.

Within this context, it’s not surprising that Japanese history textbooks, which are subject to government approval, have been revised so as to help meet these nationalistic goals. And, what has fuel the recent protests in China is the whitewash of Japanese aggression that appears in the latest junior high school history textbooks.

Today, The New York Times published excerpts from various editions of Japanese history texts illustrating how Japanese World War II atrocities of sexual slavery (“comfort women”) and forced labor have vanished from school texts in the past six years.

Obviously the USA doesn’t have a monopoly on the “shut up and march” brand of history education.
________
The New York Times
April 17, 2005

In Japan’s New Texts, Lessons in Rising Nationalism
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

TOKYO — In a region where history remains unresolved, the fight over the past is often a fight over the future. Seldom does it crystallize as perfectly as it did last week, in the biggest anti-Japan protests in China since the two countries re-established relations in 1972. Oddly, to Westerners at least, the focus of Chinese fury was Japan’s approval of junior high school history textbooks that critics say whitewash Japanese aggression in Asia.

This wasn’t the only textbook tempest, and it may not be the last. Not only are Chinese authorities bracing for further protests, but just before this week’s marches, Japan objected that China’s patriotic education breeds anti-Japanese sentiments, and South Korea castigated the Japanese textbooks for allegedly trying to justify a colonialist past.

Although it may yet be decades before the three countries agree on history, they have long shared a common trait that helps explain how revisions can stir such deep emotions. Their students learn history through government-approved textbooks that are, especially with nationalism rising in all three countries, useful tools in shaping national identities. Since the textbooks require the central government’s imprimatur, they are taken as a reflection of the views of the current leaders.

“In all three countries, there is a tendency to propagandize history,” said Jee Soo Gol, a professor of history education at Kongju National University in South Korea.

The extraordinary fury at Japan stems not just from its 20th-century atrocities, but from what its neighbors describe as its increasing attempts to evade past wrongdoing. And they have a point. A look at the new textbooks and those from two previous cycles, 2002 and 1997, shows an unmistakable backpedaling on some of the most contentious points.

The most glaring example surrounds the issue of “comfort women,” the euphemism for the women, mostly Asian, who were forced into sexual servitude by Japanese authorities during World War II. In 1997, all seven textbooks included passages about them, explaining, for instance, that Japan “took away young Korean and other women as comfort women to battlefields.” In 2002, the number fell to three out of eight; this time, only two out of eight acknowledge the comfort women, and none use that term.

During the war, Tokyo dealt with a severe labor shortage by forcing hundreds of thousands of Asians to work in Japan. In 1997, the textbook published by Tokyo Shoseki and now used by 52 percent of all junior high schools stated that “700,000 people were forcibly taken to Japan between 1939 and 1945” as laborers. The 2002 edition omits any number, and says, “In order to make up for a labor shortage, Japan and Germany forcibly brought in foreign people and made them work in mines and factories.” The newest edition cuts out “forcibly” and says only, “There were Koreans and Chinese who were brought to Japan and made to work against their will.”

Nobukatsu Fujioka, the founder of the nationalist Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, said that textbooks focusing on Japan’s alleged wartime wrongs were unhealthy for the country’s students.

“I established this association because I thought it was a serious problem that this masochistic education is making the youth lose their pride and confidence in their own country,” said Mr. Fujioka.

“The words ‘war comfort women’ disappeared from textbooks in the last 10 years,” he added. “It is a fruit of our movement that the false fact was expelled from textbooks.”

The changes are also in keeping with a strong rightward shift in Japan.

“There would be a problem if the textbooks state something that the government does not assert, or if they go beyond the bounds of what the government asserts,” Shinzo Abe, one of Japan’s most popular politicians, said recently. “It’s natural that the textbooks follow the government line.”

Given the scrutiny and Japan’s comparatively long record of democracy, the textbooks here are perhaps more balanced than others in the region. China’s textbooks, for instance, teach that Chinese resistance, not the United States, defeated Japan in the war; they say nothing of the postwar Great Leap Forward, in which some 30 million Chinese died because of Mao Zedong’s misguided agrarian policies.

In South Korea, which democratized in the late 1980’s, textbooks have improved, though certain taboos remain, such as any mention of Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonizers.

Shin Ju Baek, an education expert at Seoul National University, said that descriptions of the colonial period used to focus only on Japanese exploitation and Korean resistance, ignoring the role of Japanese colonialism in Korea’s modernization.

“There is still an emphasis on exploitation,” Mr. Sin said. “But textbooks now include other issues, such as the consumer culture that developed during Japanese occupation. Our textbooks are getting better. But Japan is a problem – it’s going in the other direction.”

Who owns culture?

This past Thursday, the New York Public Library held a “sold-out” forum on the question of “who owns culture?” The stars of the show were Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessing, the author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

The New York Times quoted Lessing as saying “freedom to remix, not just words, but culture” was critical in the development of art. At one point Lessing asked, “What does it say about our democracy when ordinary behavior is deemed criminal?”

Tweedy and his band Wilco famously streamed their album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” over the internet, after being dropped from their record label Warner; ironically, they were then resigned by Warner subsidiary Nonesuch after the internet release proved successful.Tweedy expressed no sympathy for artists, like cyber narcs Metallica, who complain (or pursue law suits) against downloaders. “To me, the only people who are complaining are the people who are so rich they never deserve to be paid again,” Tweedy said.

The P2P technology continues to be assaulted in US courts by greed-driven coporations. Wendy Seltzer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Wired magazine that lawsuits against those who trade or enable the trading of copyright music files online will continue to have little effect on P2P traffic.

Seltzer also said the MGM v. Grokster case now before the U.S. Supreme Court could very well determine the future shape of copyright law as it relates to the internet.

While P2P networks remain legal in Canada, as the battle against this technology intensifies in the US, effects are sure to be felt north of the border.

The spectacularization of education

In Our Spectacular Society

Are public schools the source of hidden riches and starting points for the transformation of society or are they impoverished zones to which the construction of real education can only be opposed?

Schools are sites of an unresolved ambiguity, the source of both alienation and–at least potentially–dis-alienation. The initial challenge for anyone interested in the creation of education that serves the public interest is to negate what has become the prevailing image of a successful school and what has come to constitute “good” learning and teaching.”Accountability”–strategies that rely heavily on measuring outcomes, especially student achievement, and attaching consequences, either positive or negative, to various levels of performance–is the prime concept driving education reform in North America.

These “reform” efforts are the ironic product of unaccountable corporate/state power that has made self-interested decisions ostensibly on behalf of the public (e.g., “No Child Left Behind”) when, in fact, the public has no meaningful say in what or how decisions are made or in what can count as legitimate knowledge for their children to learn. Coordinated control of goal setting, curricula, testing, teacher education and evaluation, works to restrict not only what and who can claim the status of “real” knowledge, but also who ultimately has access to it.

There can be no freedom apart from activity and within accountability-driven education all activity, other than the pursuit of the test score, is considered irrelevant.

Where accountability-driven educational reform prevails, teaching and learning are presented as an immense accumulation of test scores. Education that was directly experienced has become mere representation–students and teachers quickly learn that what you know or you can do doesn’t matter, only the score counts. Even assuming that the demands of these reforms could be met, this kind of education can never offer a qualitatively rich life, because its foundation is quantity, banality, and standardization.

We are now in an age in which all social relations within schools are mediated by test scores. The entirety of social activity is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends and in education, like any other aspects of everyday life, there has been a continual downgrading from being, to having, to appearing. Educational reality has been replaced by image. In the topsy-turvy world of schools, what is true has become a moment of falsehood.

Local school communities are left without the authority to bring their collective resources to bear on a matter as important as the education of their children. The people who know children best–families and teachers–must give way to tighter control over how and what they learn to people in corporate board rooms and state capitols.

In today’s “reformed” schools every moment of life, every idea, and every gesture achieves meaning only from without. Direct experience and the determination of what is taught and learned by individuals themselves has been replaced by a passive contemplation of the images of “good” schools, students, and teachers. These images have been chosen by other people and are organized in the interests of only one portion of society–affecting the real social activity of those who contemplate the images.

The real social contradiction is between those who want (or are obliged to maintain) the alienation produced by accountability-driven education and those who would abolish it. What now passes as education reform implies the continual reversing of thing and image; material reality of learning has been reduced to an abstraction.

Education, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life. In this form education constitutes the only reality in the face of the unreality produced accountability-driven education (which now seems more real than anything authentically human).

Genuine community and genuine dialogue can exist only when each person has access to a direct experience of reality, when everyone has at his or her disposal the practical and intellectual means needed to solve problems. The question is not to determine what the students are at present but rather what they can become, for only thus is it possible to grasp what in truth they already are.