SARA ROBINSON, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The Theocratic Right's drive for willful ignorance bears bitter fruit, as this essay makes clear.
The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn’t college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?)
Amid the din, there’s a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they’re even right wing. Or saying things like, ‘The education of our children is a non-partisan issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate.’
The hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they’re talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives — because every educational conversation must start with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?
Our answers to that question could not be more diametrically opposed.
A Question of Human Nature
Our beliefs about the purpose of education are rooted in even deeper beliefs about the basic nature of humanity.
All conservative politics springs from one central premise: they believe that human beings are essentially fallen and deeply flawed. Human beings are swayed by […]
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KATHRYN GILJE, - Ground Truth
Stephan: Read this carefully, then alert friends. There is a very slick PR campaign going on in parts of the country to greenwash this terrible toxin. Click through there are lots of useful links.
The controversial pesticide atrazine, found in U.S. drinking water and linked to cancers, birth defects and low fertility, is on the big screen this weekend. And Syngenta, largest pesticide corporation in the world and maker of atrazine, is fighting with fire.
The chemical giant’s PR machine is in high gear, downplaying the risks of atrazine exposure and even claiming that its gender-bending chemical can save the day. Greenwashing at its best.
Corporate spin machine
In response to last week’s release of the film Last Call at the Oasis, Syngenta’s PR firm Jayne Thompson and Associates launched a new website, ‘Saving the Oasis.
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BARBARA EHRENREICH, - truthdig.com
Stephan: This is too polemic, but it is also too true. And it is this perceived sense of unfairness that is rotting the country from the inside.
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can […]
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Stephan: While the Right seeks to privatize what was once public education, they have also sought to strangle public schools in an attempt to create the conditions that would allow them to claim they are failing -- as increasingly they are. The result has been a lost generation. At a time when Asian students are reaching higher and higher levels of attainment, this is what is happening here.
MIAMI — Nearly half of Florida high school students failed the reading portion of the state’s new toughened standardized test, education officials said on Friday.
Results this year from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test showed 52 percent of freshman students and 50 percent of sophomores scored at their grade levels.
Students in the 10th grade must pass the exam in order to eventually graduate but can retake it if they fail.
The results came days after the Florida State Board of Education voted to lower the standards needed to pass the writing part of the test, known as FCAT. The test is administered in public elementary, middle and high schools.
The board took the action in an emergency meeting when preliminary results indicated only about one-third of Florida students would have passed this year.
‘We are asking more from our students and teachers than we ever have, and I am proud of their hard work,’ Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson said in a statement.
‘As Florida transitions to higher standards and higher expectations, we can expect our assessment results to reflect those changes.’
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STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Since only about one per cent of the U.S. population is involved with the military there is little awareness of the growing influence of fundamentalists in the military chaplain corps. Here is an example of what I mean. These people are like villains in a Marvel Comic but, in fact, they are powerful forces in what is now called Christianity, although it has virtually nothing to do with Jesus or his teachings, and is perhaps the most inappositely named social movement in American history.
Former Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, who founded lobbying group The Pray In Jesus Name Project, appeared on a progressive talk show this week to criticize President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same sex marriage
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