Neoliberal Education Restructuring
Dangers and Opportunities of the Present Crisis
Jammed into a thundering crowd of thousands of chanting people in Madison, Wisconsin, it looks like a dam has broken. The new Wisconsin Tea Party governor brazenly accelerated what has been a bipartisan agenda to undermine public education and weaken teacher and other public employee unions. His “budget repair bill”—an assault on public employee unions, schools, and low-income health care—was met with immediate, massive, determined resistance that began with a walkout by Madison public school teachers.… a sleeping giant is stirring. The broad U.S. working class has absorbed blow after blow, concessions and job losses one after the other, stagnating wages for thirty years, and two wars costing trillions of dollars.… But recent attempts at the state level to impose austerity measures may be just too much for people to take.… | more |
Subverting the Master(’s) Syllabus
Teachers who use “transformative teaching” in urban schools understand that…a generation of dispossessed youth in “urban” communities [are scathingly critical of U.S. miseducation], and that they must create curricula that are responsive to the articulated needs of young folk struggling to navigate the oppressive conditions of their everyday life. Education policies like “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” assume that what is being offered in schools is worth taking seriously, worth racing toward and not away from. However, policies like these, much like those of colonialists, aim at dispossession and dislocation; they seek the social control of young people through a form of cultural terrorism of the mind.… | more |
Cuba: Education and Revolution
In 1795, Father José Agustín Caballero presented the first project for the creation of a system of public education for all the inhabitants of the island of Cuba. It was a visionary idea, but impossible to carry out at that time. The island was a colonial possession of the Spanish Crown, and most of the population was subjected to slavery or made up of Mestizos and freed blacks, the victims of segregation and racial discrimination. Education, within the reach of a very small minority, was confined within the strict canons of scholastic philosophy.… Father Caballero was profoundly critical of that philosophy and of the pedagogy springing from it. This would be the birth of an intellectual movement having decisive importance for the history of Cuba, a movement that would reach its pinnacle with another Catholic priest, Félix Varela, who was Caballero’s disciple and the first Cuban intellectual who fought for national independence and the abolition of slavery.… | more |
The Story of Khalil Gibran International Academy
Racism and a Campaign of Resistance
This article appears in two parts. “The Story of Khalil Gibran International Academy” is Debbie Almontaser’s account of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria that was whipped up when she helped found the first Arabic Dual Language public school in New York City. Instead of backing her against the attacks, the Department of Education turned on Almontaser and forced her to resign. However, she fought in the courts, who in the end ruled in her favor. Donna Nevel’s “The Campaign of Resistance” describes the organizing campaign that emerged in support of Almontaser, which was a coalition of Arab, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant, labor, and peace groups. They engaged in extensive outreach and mounted a media-intensive counterattack in defense of the school and its principal. … | more |
Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality
In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and inequality in the United States can be solved through education. Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them.… | more |
Education is an essential part of modern economic progress, yet in recent decades, the right wing has consistently been unfriendly to public education. For example, the Walton family’s donation of $20 billion to help conservative causes was weighted toward the privatization of public education.… The economic effects of privatization will not be felt immediately. Over time, however, as a larger share of the workforce suffers the handicap of inferior education, the negative effect on all aspects of society will be unmistakable.… | more |
The story of how Helen Keller (1880-1967), struck blind and deaf while a toddler, overcame her disabilities with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, is a familiar one. William Gibson’s drama, The Miracle Worker, made into a movie, popularized that part of her story. She is remembered for accomplishments such as graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College; as an internationally famous advocate for the deaf and blind; and as a celebrity, writing books, appearing in films and on the vaudeville stage. Her friend Mark Twain described her, along with Napoleon, as one of the “two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century.” What is usually forgotten, however, is that she was also a prominent, articulate, and passionate voice for socialism. From a condition of profound isolation she grew into an inspired communicator, fully engaged with the world around her. She joined the Socialist Party in 1909 (later she’d join the Industrial Workers of the World, too) and championed her socialist vision while lecturing and writing on the issues of her day-in support of worker’s struggles, the Russian Revolution, and women’s suffrage, and against the First World War. There was no separation in her mind between her struggle on behalf of the disabled and her struggle for socialism. She attributed the greater portion of the ills experienced by the disabled, and the cause of these disabilities in many cases, to capitalism and industrialism. After 1921, she focused her energies on raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind but she remained a supporter of radical causes for the rest of her life. This essay appeared in the New York Call, a daily newspaper of the Socialist Party, on November 3, 1912.… | more |
Annette T. Rubinstein: 95th Birthday Celebration
Annette T. Rubinstein—educator, author, activist—celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday three days early on April 9, at the Brecht Forum’s new headquarters. At a gathering of more than two hundred of her devoted family, friends, colleagues, comrades, speakers regaled the audience with personal stories and memories of Annette’s fabulous life. John Mage, representing Monthly Review, suggested that she must have had previous lives because “the breadth of vision, the historical understanding, and the contents of the memory could not have been acquired in one lifetime—even hers.” Harry Magdoff, via a taped recording, reminded the audience that “Annette in personality, in her life of creativity, activity, and humanism, illustrates the ways of Socialist women and men.” He concluded by saying “I love you”—in Yiddish.… | more |