E Wayne Ross – Page 56 – Critical Theories in Education

Fair use vs. “libertarian” scholar’s pocketbook

From: E Wayne Ross
Subject: Re: copyright violation
Date: October 4, 2009 2:52:22 PM PDT
To: Joel Spring
Cc: Naomi Silverman, William Pinar

Joel,

I put the first two chapters of your book and the epilogue on my course blog for the students in my doctoral seminar to read in preparation for your visit to campus and meeting with the seminar on Wednesday, Oct 7.

With such a short lead time before your visit—about 3 weeks from when I heard you were going to be on campus and available to meet until next week’s seminar—I felt the most practical approach for students to have a common reading of your work was to post something to the blog.

The course blog is very low traffic (see the attached pdf of Google Analytics for Sept 3-Oct 3, 2009). The blog is for my current students and I take all posts down at the end of each term. My belief was/is that this was a reasonable and educationally justifiable approach considering the circumstances. My actions were motivated by a desire to have students engaged with your most recent scholarship and to be prepared to make the most of the rare opportunity they have to meet with you.

As long time colleague and friendly acquaintance I am disappointed by your legalistic, tattling response. (Why not a share your concern in friendly or even inquisitive way.) I wonder too just how your response to this pedagogical situation jibes your long standing scholarly interests in maximizing individual liberty and social harmony.

So, of course, I’ll take down the link; would have done so at the slightness indication of concern on your part.

Best,

Wayne

On 2009-10-04, at 8:03 AM, Joel Spring wrote:

Dear Wayne, An article in today’s New York Times about illegal sharing of books on the internet led me to do search of my books.

Unhappily your course appeared as a violator of international copyright laws for posting, for anyone in the world to download, 41 pages from my book.

Please remove link from your course website for the copyrighted material.
This is very upsetting.

Naomi will be sending link to Informa.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/ewayne/2009/09/cust-601-globalization-of-education-a-discussion-with-joel-spring/

Joel

Joel Spring
Professor
Graduate Center and Queens College
City University of New York
Series Editor
Routledge Publisher

E. Wayne Ross
Professor
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
2125 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada
604-822-2830
wayne.ross@ubc.ca
http://www.ewayneross.net

Critical Education: www.criticaleducation.org
Cultural Logic: www.eserver.org/clogic
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor: www.workplace-gsc.com

Analytics_blogs.ubc.ca-ewayne-_20090903-20091003_(VisitorsOverviewReport)

Zombie preparedness

Gainesville, FL on a typical Friday (or game day Saturday)

The University of Florida disaster preparedness web site was recently updated to include a “Zombie Attack Disaster Preparedness Simulation Exercise plan, along with the usual threats like hurricanes and H1N1.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed,

“the guide for dealing with a zombie attack includes a helpful list of signs that zombie attacks may be increasing. You should watch, for example, for “increasing numbers of gruesome unexplained deaths and disappearances, especially at night” and listen for “lots of strange moaning.”

“The guide includes an “Infected Co-Worker Dispatch Form” for Florida employees to let superiors know when a colleague exhibits signs of zombie behavior, with a checklist of such behaviors, including “references to wanting to eat brains,” “recently dead but moving again,” “lack of rational thought (this can cause problems confusing zombies with managers)” and “killed and ate another employee.”

“A footnote in the plan suggests the importance of maintaining sensitivity in a time of zombie attack: “While many people refer to ‘undead,’ practitioners in the field of Zombie Studies and zombie advocates such as PETZ: People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies, and supporters of Florida Zombie Preserve, Inc. insist that the term ‘undead’ clearly connotes deficiency; specifically the absence of both life and death. Hence, we suggest here the term ‘life impaired’ to recognize the difficulties imposed on a former person by zombie behavior spectrum disorder (ZBSD) but without suggesting the former person is somehow ‘deficient’ as a result of the infection.”

According to the Associated Press, university officials have decided that zombies are not a sufficient threat to the university community to be included on their disaster preparedness web site, which is hard to believe if you have ever walked down Gainesville’s University Ave on Friday night (or earlier Saturday morning).

Pilger: How We are Prepared for Another War of Aggression

In a piece titled “The Lying Game: How We are Prepared for Prepared for Another War of Aggression,” journalist John Pilger compares the current drum-beating for war against Iran, based on a fake “nuclear threat”, with the manufacture of a sense of false crisis that led to invasion of Iraq and the deaths of 1.3 million people.

Obama is giving us what he promised: war in Afghanistan. The expansion strategy and the public’s distaste for ware are nearly mirror images of the run-up to Bush’s fiasco in Iraq.

Obama’s “showdown” with Iran has another agenda. On both sides of the Atlantic the media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war. The US/Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal says 500,000 troops will be required in Afghanistan over five years, according to America’s NBC. The goal is control of the “strategic prize” of the gas and oilfields of the Caspian Sea, central Asia, the Gulf and Iran – in other words, Eurasia. But the war is opposed by 69 per cent of the British public, 57 per cent of the US public and almost every other human being. Convincing “us” that Iran is the new demon will not be easy. McChrystal’s spurious claim that Iran “is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups” is as desperate as Brown’s pathetic echo of “a line in the sand”.

During the Bush years, according to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup took place in the US, and the Pentagon is now ascendant in every area of American foreign policy. A measure of its control is the number of wars of aggression being waged simultaneously and the adoption of a “first-strike” doctrine that has lowered the threshold on nuclear weapons, together with the blurring of the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.

All this mocks Obama’s media rhetoric about “a world without nuclear weapons”. In fact, he is the Pentagon’s most important acquisition. His acquiescence with its demand that he keep on Bush’s secretary of “defence” and arch war-maker, Robert Gates, is unique in US history. He has proved his worth with escalated wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. Like Bush’s America, Obama’s America is run by some very dangerous people. We have a right to be warned. When will those paid to keep the record straight do their job?

Rouge Forum Update—Campuses Rising

You’ll see a remarkable shift in the level of resistance in the US, still trailing well behind the rest of the world, but resistance rising nevertheless. At issue: Whether people will make real sense of why things are as they are.

Rouge Forum Update (Sept 27, 2009)

Now, D.C. teachers have recognized the corrupt reality of their union and targeted its boss, as well as their top boss, Michelle Rhee.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092404304.html

Good luck to us, every one.

Kindergarten as workforce training?

Both of Vancouver’s daily papers ran a story earlier this week (on their business pages) under the headline “Unprepared schoolkids cost B.C. $400 billion.” The stories reported on a BC Business Council funded report that argues “B.C. loses $400 billion in lost potential because it sends one in three children to kindergarten unprepared.”

Why would the Business Council care about kindergarteners?

Well, what we’re seeing is an intensification of the “school as workforce training” rationale pushed down from the secondary and post-secondary levels of education to kindergarten and preschool. “If children are not ready for school, they won’t be ready for the working world,” says one the report’s authors, who is a professor in Human Early Learning Partnership at UBC.

The master logic of “schools as workforce preparation” has been captured in the New Commission on the American Workforce report, “Tough Choices for Tough Times”. Tough-Tough was authored by such educational experts as the director of the militarized Lockheed-Martin, and university presidents whose incomes are frequently dependant on grants from the military, earmarked for “research.” Tough-Tough calls for national curriculum standards as a means of recapturing the witless patriotism necessary to get people to work, and eagerly fight and die, for what is abundantly easy to see are the interests of their own rulers.

Here’s a letter I sent to The Province newspaper, which was not published:

From: E Wayne Ross
Subject: BC Business Council report on kindergarten
Date: September 18, 2009 4:39:02 PM PDT
To: provletters@theprovince.com

Kindergarten as workforce training? This absurdity, found in a recent BC Business Council study, illustrates what is wrong with educational reform across North America: education for corporate profits instead of in the public interest.

The first principle of the Business Council, and the provincial government, which serves at its beck and call, is that the market rules, no matter the social damage from cutting public expenditures for social services, deregulation, and privatization. The BC Council report conceives of young students as “human capital” and reduces learning to bits of information and skill to be taught and tested.

If we leave kindergarten to these folks it will be transformed from a space of creative play and social interaction to one where the next generation of low-wage workers learn to do what they’re told.

E. Wayne Ross
Professor
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

We are working on the updates, seeking to make them easier for all to see and less intrusive.

The main issue this week is the system-wide walkout on September 24. http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=6

Down the road, we need to consider what is next. One thing is clearly next, the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, October 16, 1859.

Good luck to us, every one.

Solidarity with U of California faculty

To the UC Faculty:

We at the Rouge Forum applaud, admire, and support your efforts to respond to tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes, which are indeed, complicit with the privatization of public education.

The Rouge Forum is a group of 4500 educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice. (http://www.rougeforum.org/, http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum).

In the German Ideology, Marx submits, “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

The connection and simultaneous control of this material and mental production comes into ever-sharper relief anytime we are confronted by our corporate media. The level of discourse is less than satisfying. And, frankly, frightening. Pick the issue: health care, immigration, worker’s rights, war, education. While all of the issues are truly critical, the last is particularly problematic since control of schools is a final domino to fall in the imperial quest to completely (re)fashion our reality. Remove critical thinking, make children compete against each other for perceived scarce resources (standardized tests), use the results to reify hierarchies based on social constructions like race and gender and class status, make teachers compete against one another for perceived scarce resources (merit pay), boil dissent down to participation in (mostly) corrupt unions, excuse and/or cover-up the school to military and prison pipelines, monitor and make impotent our schools of education through if-it-wasn’t-so-sinister-it-would-be-comical accrediting bodies like NCATE, and regulate truth. This has been the agenda. And, it has already buried itself deep into our educational psyche.

Your willingness to confront this reality on September 24 is an illustration of the work we will all have to do to protect public education toward the creation of a more whole and healthy society. Where Rouge Forum members are affiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to join you. Where Rouge Forum members are unaffiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to take part in campus wide discussions relative to the status of higher education, academic freedom, and the importance of public education.

We stand in solidarity with you and offer the graphic, created by Rouge Forum member, Bryan Reinholdt, an elementary performing arts teacher in Louisville, Ky.

Sincerely,

the Rouge Forum Steering Committee

Rouge Forum Update—UC walkout, Grenanda 17, unions and more

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

The main thing in the brief period ahead: Spreading the September 24 University of California walkout to campuses of all kinds, all over.

We need to do all we can to spread the UC walkout which so far, has not linked the massive attacks on the UC system to the wars and bankster bailouts.

From what I hear back, other than at Berkeley, the sponsors of the walkout are worried about turnout in the UC system as a whole. It may well be that more students will walk out than profs, which would be ok, even fine if the campuses are shut down.

Since the UC profs called for this, it is going to be used as a measure of what all kinds of resisters can do, by all sides. We have a big stake in trying to make this succeed.

Besides, schools closed by strikes or civil strife, matched by some kind of freedom school where people actually discuss why things are as they are, are much better than open schools.

Why is the UC system, with help of AAUP, able to have this walkout while the huge CSU system just sits still, after taking even more egregious hits than the UC?

Because the UC tenured profs have no union contract.

The CFA/NEA which represents the CSU has a bargained contract–sold out as it may be. That contract includes a no-strike clause, the traditional union trade-off for guaranteed dues collection, the check-off. That contract means the CFA union bosses are duty bound to halt official strikes for the duration of the contract. That is, unless they are real unionists in the best sense of the word, and that they are not. The practice of the union as a bank rules over the idea of the union as an agent of direct action solidarity. In other words, union has not meant union for many years.

Of course, one might ask just what kind of a union is that? And the answer would be, just like all the rest of them—corrupt to the core. That is what every major union in the US does.

Now, to be fair, the UC lecturers are represented by AFT. They did not have to take some of the cuts that the tenured profs did, but they started out in a deep hole anyway. To go further, the reason the UC profs do not have a union is not because of their leftist critiques.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda. That connection needs to be made in the walkout. It is not made now, not in the formal publications I have seen.

The likely to be $3 trillion plus wars are part of the reason the education system is under attack at every level. Another is the $12.9 trillion given to finance capital, no strings attached, and the untold billions given to industrial capital which continued to dump workers. But the president of GM was fired, finalizing the move to the corporate state behind the demagogue, Obama.

20,000 teachers lost their jobs in California this year, and every school just got notified of another $900 per child cut—as well as further structural cuts that are, right now, hard to add up.

There is a direct line: regimented curricula=high stakes exams= militarization=merit pay=perpetual war. And the other way around too. Maybe someone can make a graphic of that logic.

One Million Homeless Kids Hit the Schools

Stim Money Does Not Stop Massive School Cuts California Lays Off 20,000 teachers. What does CTA do? Nothing.

Oakland University in Michigan went on strike for two weeks. The strike is over now. Note that they are represented by AAUP, far less likely to destroy a strike from within than NEA or AFT.

Suggested video: Judgement Day, Intelligent Design on Trial—With this episode, the popular “Nova” series examines the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a controversial legal battle sparked by a group of science teachers who refused to comply with an order to teach intelligent design. Through scene re-creations, interviews and expert testimony, the program presents the arguments of both sides and illuminates the conflict that thrust the people of Dover into the worldwide spotlight.

Class comment of the week from a Marine Afghan war vet, “I had a choice, either dealing drugs and killing people in a street gang or the Marines and Afghanistan.” The real choice is community or barbarism.

Banksters, Industrialist, and Their Economy:

Daniel Yergin: Why Oil has a Future

Baker: Reverse Bank Robbery

Americans are Poorer and It’s Going to be Worse

How Did Bernie Steal $50 Billion? Thank the SEC

One More Time on the Terror Wars:

US Terror Bomb Kills 70 Afghan Civilians

TomDispatch: Measuring the Terror Wars, Afghanistan by the Numbers

Free at Last!

The last seven of the Grenada 17 were released from prison on Saturday, September 5. While in prison, they set up an education program that competed favorably with the nation’s best schools.
Photos here.

And Wither the Unions?

AFL-CIO Boss Abandons EFCA as the bankrupt body meets in Pittsburgh as they prepare to give up on single payer. Maybe a refund from Obama?

Thanks to Adam and Gina, Tony H., Bob (happy release from the hospital and speedy recovery), Joe L, The Susans, Donna, Kate, Sue H, Sandy H, Kim B. Good luck in BC to OR and I. More thanks to Wayne and Abraham, George, Jack G., Don A, David R, Kenny and Cheri, Mark, Sheila, Bryan, the newly forming RF Steering Committee, Amber and the gang of courageous teachers.

Good luck to us, every one.