Stoning, Lashing And Execution

Islamic Olive Tree Primary School Found To Have Books Promoting Stoning, Lashing And Execution

The Campaign to Mislead the Public on Climate Change

Wyoming just became the first state in the nation to reject world-class science standards that teach our kids about climate change. Interest groups that pushed for this move would like to bar climate science from being taught in other states too.

Wyoming legislators voted to support a last-minute budget amendment that prohibits the Wyoming State Board of Education from spending funds to even consider the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) because students would learn about climate change in this fossil fuel-dependent state.

Wyoming State Rep. Matt Teeters, who authored the anti-science budget amendment, told the Casper Star-Tribune that teaching climate change as fact would "wreck Wyoming's economy...and cause other unwanted political ramifications." Governor Mead signed the anti-science provision into law.

The Board of Education could push back against political meddling and assert its authority over setting science standards, but it will take an outcry from parents and science supporters from Wyoming and throughout the country.

It is a dangerous precedent to allow those who deny climate science for ideological or economic reasons to censor the science education kids need to be ready for college, career and a changing climate. Science education standards should be written by scientists and educators, not by legislators whose concerns may be more political than educational.

Ten states have adopted the NGSS, a set of science standards for K-12 students developed by an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.But Wyoming could be the beginning of an assault on climate education in the states still considering these 21st century science standards. 

Wyoming students deserve access to high quality, world-class science standards just as much as students anywhere else in the nation. Given the stakes for our children’s future, it’s imperative that kids everywhere learn the facts of climate change so they can all become part of the solution.

Thank you for taking action for our kids and grandkids!

Sincerely,

Marguerite Herman, Advocate for Science Education, Climate Parents Member

Cheyenne, Wyoming

Common Core meeting

A Baltimore parent was forcibly removed from a school meeting and arrested on September 19 for challenging a new Common Core state curriculum. At the meeting, Robert Small voiced his concern that the Common Core standards do not prepare students for top universities and may misuse data on students. Small was escorted from the question and answer session and arrested on charges of second-degree assault on a police officer. On Monday the Baltimore County State Attorney's office dropped all charges against him.
The incident has contributed to a growing debate across the country about state standardized testing.

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School Superintendents receive an F grade for Common Core meeting
Dr. Dallas Dance, Superintendent of Baltimore County Public Schools, and Lillian Lowery, Maryland Superintendent, had the opportunity Thursday night to make minor amends at an MSDE-sponsored informational meeting after a three-plus year information blackout on Common Core, the new federal curriculum for Maryland schools.

Texas Science Textbook Review

The right-wing majority on the Texas State Board of Education wants to revise the state's standards for science textbooks to require the addition of religious pseudoscience when teaching subjects like biology. And this isn't just bad news for Texas schoolchildren, because the Texas standards will impact the textbooks used by millions of students nationwide.
The Texas State Board of Education recently invited a small group of people to review the biology textbooks that will be used for the next eight years, starting in 2014. But more than half of the reviewers are right-wing religious ideologues,¹ some of whom are even skeptics of Darwin's theory of evolution — considered one of the most reliably established facts in science, and a central tenet of biology.²
The ultimate goal of these sham textbook reviews — and Texas Board of Education curriculum reform — is to enshrine right-wing ideology into Texas textbooks. What's worse, because of the scale of production of these textbooks, the dictates of the Texas State Board of Education will be included in textbooks used by millions of students in other states.
We can't let them get away with replacing long-accepted scientific principles with religious pseudoscience and propaganda.³
Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click here to sign the petition automatically.
The most recent review of biology textbooks was a particularly egregious process considering the people who were invited to participate. Here are just a few of the reviewers who are listed in the Creation Science Hall of Fame as “Darwin Skeptics”⁴:

• Raymond Bohlin, a research fellow for an organization whose purpose is the promotion of “intelligent design” — a religious idea which seeks to cast doubt on evolution while circumventing the Supreme Court ruling that bars the teaching of “creation science” in public schools.⁵
• Walter Bradley, who helped launch the "intelligent design” movement with a book he coauthored, titled The Mystery of Life's Origin.
• Ide Trotter, a wealthy funder of anti-science organizations who has repeatedly participated in science textbook reviews advocating for the inclusion of scientifically discredited theories about the weaknesses of evolution.

Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click here to sign the petition automatically.
Textbook publishers can refuse to make suggested changes, or pull out of the state's business altogether, just as publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston did in 1994, when Texas requested over 400 revisions in five health textbooks — including the removal of toll-free phone numbers for teenage suicide prevention groups.⁶
We're not going to change the minds of some of the theocrats elected to the Texas State Board of Education. But we can pressure publishers not to compromise their science textbooks by caving to the board's unreasonable demands.
The final review of these textbooks won't happen until November, and these textbooks could be in classrooms for a decade. Now's the time to put pressure on textbook publishers to stop accepting this scientifically debunked information.
Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click the link below to sign the petition automatically:
http://act.credoaction.com/go/1587?t=8&akid=8727.5084505.bx5l8X
Thank you for standing up for science.
Jordan Krueger, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

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Learn more about this campaign

1. Dan, "Alarm Bells Are Ringing: Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review." Texas Freedom Network, July 30, 2013.
2. National Research Council. "Science, Evolution, and Creationism." Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008.
3. Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us." The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.
4. Jenny Bergman, "Darwin Skeptics." Creation Science Hall of Fame.
5. [PDF] Barbara Forrest, "Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals." The Center for Inquiry, May, 2007.
6. Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us." The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.

Automation

Sympathy for the Luddites

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 13, 2013 480 Comments

In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”

Paul Krugman

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Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

private universities

Senate Committee Report on For-Profit Colleges Condemns Costs and Practices

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: July 29, 2012

Wrapping up a two-year investigation of for-profit colleges, Senator Tom Harkin will issue a final report on Monday — a voluminous, hard-hitting indictment of almost every aspect of the industry, filled with troubling statistics and anecdotes drawn from internal documents of the 30 companies investigated.

Senator Tom Harkin, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, completed a two-year investigation.

Poetry and the Microphone by George Orwell

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D.H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but don’t share your cultural background, a certain amount of comment and explanation is unavoidable, and the formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what to put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else suggested another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different voice, preferably the author’s own. This poem naturally called up another, and so the programme continued, usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two items. For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given a certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single central theme. For example, one number of our imaginary magazine was devoted to the subject of war. It included two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s “September 1941 “, extracts from a long poem by G.S. Fraser (“A Letter to Anne Ridler”), Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and an extract from T.E. Lawrence’s REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These half-dozen items, with the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible attitudes towards war. The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronising, but its advantage is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if one is going to broadcast serious and sometimes “difficult” verse, becomes a lot less forbidding when it appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can ostensibly say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what poetry lacks from the average man’s point of view. But of course there are other methods. One which we frequently used was to set a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes’ time such and such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a minute, then fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or announcement, then the music is faded again and plays up for another minute or two — the whole thing taking perhaps five minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the programme. By this method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin without, at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in themselves, but I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused in myself and some others about the possibilities of the radio as a means of popularising poetry. I was early struck by the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet himself. One must remember that extremely little in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in England, and that many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modern times — the last two hundred years, say — poetry has come to have less and less connection either with music or with the spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling. Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. And where such a breach exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry as primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority, encourages obscurity and “cleverness”. How many people do not feel quasi-instinctively that there must be something wrong with any poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single glance? It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes normal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about except by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select the right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience HAS NO POWER OVER YOU. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty — the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one — that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It will be seen that I have been speaking as though the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost indecent, as though popularising poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like getting a dose of medicine down a child’s throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted sect. But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that in our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word “poetry” would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence, the common man becoming more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature, although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a comparatively small area of the earth. We live in an age in which the average human being in the highly civilised countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs is generally looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS act, and on the other hand is expected to right itself of its own accord as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With slight variations the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you this, and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which we live has spiritual and economic causes and is not to be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at some point or other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible within our present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the general redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the most hated of the arts and win for it at least the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one has to start by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language — all this to a very marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing this I have been listening to a couple of BBC comedians doing their usual turn before the 9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King. Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient volume of indignant letters to stop the BBC doing this kind of thing. One must conclude that though the big public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE. After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with untelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it seem NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge. T.S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of microphone and transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are actively interested in maintaining the STATUS QUO and therefore in preventing the common man from becoming too intelligent. Something of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar. More and more the channels of production are under the control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy the artist or at least to castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not that the totalitarianisation which is now going on, and must undoubtedly continue to go on, in every country of the world, is mitigated by another process which it was not easy to foresee even as short a time as five years ago.

This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all part are beginning to work creakily because of their mere size and their constant growth. The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The modern state needs, for example, pamphlet-writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, bio-chemists, mathematicians and what not. The British Government started the present war with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC and even those who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a while in Public Relations or some other essentially literary job. The Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because it found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal, from the official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of “safe” people like A.P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since not enough of these were available, the existing intelligentsia had to be utilised, and the tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda have been modified accordingly. No one acquainted with the Government pamphlets, ABCA (The Army Bureau of Current Affairs.) lectures, documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been issued during the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they could help it. Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete. The striped-trousered ones will rule, but so long as they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a certain amount of autonomy. If the Government needs, for example, documentary films, it must employ people specially interested in the technique of the film, and it must allow them the necessary minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong from the bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to appear. So also with painting, photography, scriptwriting, reportage, lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of which a complex modern state has need.

The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the loudspeaker is the enemy of the creative writer, but this may not necessarily remain true when the volume and scope of broadcasting increase. As things are, although the BBC does keep up a feeble show of interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to capture five minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned music, stale jokes, faked “discussions” or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may alter in the way I have indicated, and when that time comes serious experiment in the broadcasting of verse, with complete disregard for the various hostile influences which prevent any such thing at present, would become possible. I don’t claim it as certain that such an experiment would have very great results. The radio was bureaucratised so early in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by which poetry could be brought back to the common people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain by being more of a spoken and less of a written thing. But I do urge that these possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by the voices of Professor Joad and Doctor Goebbels.

Note:
It is probable that this essay was written a year and a half to two years before it was published. It is not listed in Orwell’s Payments Book, July 1943 to December 1945. The opening words, ‘About a year ago,” refer to the ‘Voice’ broadcasts which Orwell organised and which were concluded in December 1942, which indicates that he was writing no later than December 1943. Later in the essay (paragraph nine), he writes, ‘yet after three years of war,’ which suggests autumn 1942 to summer 1943—thus the probability that the essay was written in the summer of 1943. Orwell may have intended it for Horizon (which published three reviews but no essays of his between February 1942 and October 1944), but it was not accepted—hence it does not appear in his Payments Book for this period.

The New Saxon Pamphlets, Nos. 1-3 and The New Saxon Review, Nos. 4 and 5, March 1944—47, were edited by John Atkins (1916-), literary editor of Tribune before Orwell.

The Assault on Public Education

One of America’s greatest achievements is being defunded and degraded by the dictates of the marketplace.

 
BY Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
More information about Noam Chomsky

Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.

California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: “California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot.”

Similar defunding is under way nationwide. “In most states,” The New York Times reports, “it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget,” so that “the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over.”

Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects–and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12.

“There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it’s the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,” concludes Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a trustee of the State University system of New York and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

A more accurate description, I think, is “Failure by Design,” the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy.

The EPI study reviews the consequences of the transformation of the economy a generation ago from domestic production to financialization and offshoring. By design; there have always been alternatives.

One primary justification for the design is what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called the “religion” that “markets lead to efficient outcomes,” which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.

Claims are also made about the alleged benefits of the radical expansion of financial institutions since the 1970s. A more convincing description was provided by Martin Wolf, senior economic correspondent for The Financial Times: “An out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.”

The EPI study observes that the “Failure of Design” is class-based. For the designers, it has been a stunning success, as revealed by the astonishing concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent, in fact the top 0.1 percent, while the majority has been reduced to virtual stagnation or decline.

In short, when they have the opportunity, “the Masters of Mankind” pursue their “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves and nothing for other people,” as Adam Smith explained long ago.

Mass public education is one of the great achievements of American society. It has had many dimensions. One purpose was to prepare independent farmers for life as wage laborers who would tolerate what they regarded as virtual slavery.

The coercive element did not pass without notice. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders call for popular education because they fear that “This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.” But educated the right way: Limit their perspectives and understanding, discourage free and independent thought, and train them for obedience.

The “vile maxim” and its implementation have regularly called forth resistance, which in turn evokes the same fears among the elite. Forty years ago there was deep concern that the population was breaking free of apathy and obedience.

At the liberal internationalist extreme, the Trilateral Commission–the nongovernmental policy group from which the Carter Administration was largely drawn – issued stern warnings in 1975 that there is too much democracy, in part due to the failures of the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young.” On the right, an important 1971 memorandum by Lewis Powell, directed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the main business lobby, wailed that radicals were taking over everything – universities, media, government, etc. – and called on the business community to use its economic power to reverse the attack on our prized way of life – which he knew well. As a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, he was quite familiar with the workings of the nanny state for the rich that he called “the free market.”

Since then, many measures have been taken to restore discipline. One is the crusade for privatization – placing control in reliable hands.

Another is sharp increases in tuition, up nearly 600 percent since 1980. These produce a higher education system with “far more economic stratification than is true of any other country,” according to Jane Wellman, former director of the Delta Cost Project, which monitors these issues. Tuition increases trap students into long-term debt and hence subordination to private power.

Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition remains free or nominal. That was true as well in the United States itself when it was a much poorer country after World War II and huge numbers of students were able to enter college under the GI bill – a factor in uniquely high economic growth, even putting aside the significance in improving lives.

Another device is the corporatization of the universities. That has led to a dramatic increase in layers of administration, often professional instead of drawn from the faculty as before; and to imposition of a business culture of “efficiency” – an ideological notion, not just an economic one.

One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord with the vile maxim.

Some of the most insidious effects are on teaching and monitoring. The Enlightenment ideal of education was captured in the image of education as laying down a string that students follow in their own ways, developing their creativity and independence of mind.

The alternative, to be rejected, is the image of pouring water into a vessel – and a very leaky one, as all of us know from experience. The latter approach includes teaching to test and other mechanisms that destroy students’ interest and seek to fit them into a mold, easily controlled. All too familiar today.

© The New York Times News Service/Syndicate

Education: For Whom and For What?

Noam Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist, spoke at the University of Arizona on Feb. 8, 2012. His lecture, "Education: For Whom and For What?" featured a talk on the state of higher education, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Chomsky, an Institute Professor and a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked for more than 50 years, has been concerned with a range of education-related issues in recent years. Among them: How do we characterize the contemporary state of the American education system? What happens to the quality of education when public universities become more privatized? Are public universities in danger of being converted into facilities that produce graduates-as-commodities for the job market? What is the role of activism in education? With unprecedented tuition increases and budget struggles occurring across American campuses, these are questions that are more relevant than ever.

Pinochet, may your legacy die

SANTIAGO, Chile -- The poster makes its plea from one of the pock-marked walls once splattered with blood at Londres 38, a former detention and torture center where 96 people were killed or disappeared during Chile's long dictatorship. It reads: "Pinochet, may your legacy die."

Yet that legacy is far from dead. Gen. Augusto Pinochet's loyalists on Sunday were holding their biggest gathering since his death in 2006, and it has ignited a national debate about the limits of freedom of speech as groups on the other side seek to block the event.

Police used tear gas and water cannon to try to disperse anti-Pinochet demonstrators protesting the premiere of a documentary about the run-up to his dictatorship years. The film casts him as a national hero who saved Chile from communism and who died victimized by vengeful leftists who accused him of embezzlement and human rights crimes.

The screening was organized by Corporacion 11 de Septiembre, named for the day when Pinochet seized power in a bloody 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Marxist President Salvador Allende.

"We want to set the record straight on Pinochet," Juan Gonzalez, a retired army officer who leads the pro-Pinochet movement, told The Associated Press. "We have stoically put up with the lies and cheating and seen how the story has been manipulated."

Although Gonzalez's own sister Francisca has said publicly she was tortured by Pinochet's forces, Gonzalez disputes that there were human rights abuses during the dictatorship. He says those killed and tortured were casualties of a war against leftist subversion.

"Why can't we have a documentary if they have their monument to Allende," he said, referring to a statue outside the presidential palace with Allende's last words: "I have faith in Chile and its destiny. "

The homage for Pinochet comes against a backdrop of increasing political divisions, with widespread street protests demanding more diversity in political parties as well as free education, protection of the environment and a more even distribution of the country's wealth.

Chile remains highly polarized over Pinochet and his 1973-90 reign.

Primary Connections

NOBEL laureate Brian Schmidt will use $100,000 of his prize money for a primary school science program the federal government has stopped funding. 
 
Professor Schmidt, in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics he and collaborator Adam Riess won jointly with Saul Perlmutter, has told The Australian his plans for his quarter-share of the $1.45 million winnings..

He will sign over $100,000 to the Australian Academy of Sciences to continue the Primary Connections program.

"One key thing I'm trying to promote post-Nobel prize is primary and secondary education," he said.
"Primary Connections has had very good penetration across the country -- 55 per cent of all primary schools have used it in one way or another -- and it is one of the most effective tools I have seen to help in teaching science to this age group."

Schools buy the modules for $25 each. The Department of Education has spent $9.7m on the program since 2004, but has declined further funding.

A department spokesman said the program "was always intended to be a four-stage project" and that the academy could now approach Education Services Australia, recently awarded $41m in federal funding for curriculum development.

Professor Schmidt said the academy wanted to support the science program through philanthropic, state and school-based contributions.

He will give his Nobel lecture tomorrow night (AEDT) and receive the prize on Saturday for discovering, along with US-based Professor Riess, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

The expansion discovery was established separately by Professor Perlmutter at the same time in 1998.

A Very Pricey Pineapple

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: April 27, 2012

Let’s talk about talking pineapples.
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Actually (spoiler alert!) I’m going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read about “privatization of education?” It’s hell. A pineapple, on the other hand, is something everybody likes. It’s a symbol of hospitality. Its juice is said to remove warts. And you really cannot beat the talking-fruit angle.

This month, New York eighth graders took a standardized English test that included a story called “The Hare and the Pineapple,” in which you-know-what challenges a hare to a race. The forest animals suspect that since the pineapple can’t move, it must have some clever scheme to ensure victory, and they decide to root against the bunny. But when the race begins, the pineapple just sits there. The hare wins. Then the animals eat the pineapple. The end.

There were many complaints from the eighth graders, who had to answer questions like: “What would have happened if the animals had decided to cheer for the hare?” They were also supposed to decide whether the animals ate the pineapple because they were hungry, excited, annoyed or amused. (That part bothered me a lot. We’ve got a talking pineapple here, people. You don’t just go and devour it for having delusions of grandeur.)

Teachers, parents and education experts all chimed in. Nobody liked the talking pineapple questions. The Daily News, which broke the story, corralled “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings, who concluded that “the plot details are so oddly chosen that the story seems to have been written during a peyote trip.”

The state education commissioner, John King, announced that the questions would not count in the official test scores. There was no comment from the test author. That would be Pearson, the world’s largest for-profit education business, which has a $32 million five-year contract to produce New York standardized tests.

Now — finally — we have tumbled into my central point. We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson, for whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a five-year testing contract with Texas that’s costing the state taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars.

This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when  No Child Left Behind was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would provide monster profits for the private business sector?

Me neither.

It’s not just the tests. No Child Left Behind has created a system of public-funded  charter schools, a growing number of which are run by for-profit companies. Some of them are completely online, with kids getting their lessons at home via computer. The academic results can be abysmal, but on the plus side — definitely no classroom crowding issues.

Pearson is just one part of the picture, albeit a part about the size of Mount Rushmore. Its lobbyists include the guy who served as the top White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.

An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer.

If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a diploma via the good old G.E.D. The General Educational Development test program used to be operated by the nonprofit American Council on Education, but last year the Council and Pearson announced that they were going into a partnership to redevelop the G.E.D. — a nationally used near-monopoly — as a profit-making enterprise.

“We’re a capitalist system, but this is worrisome,” said New York Education Commissioner King.

The Obama administration has been trying to tackle the astronomical costs of 50 different sets of standardized tests by funding efforts by states to develop shared models — a process you will be stunned to hear is being denounced by conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry of Texas as “a federal takeover of public schools.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has also begun giving out waivers from the requirement that children in failing public schools be given after-school tutoring. Idea sounded great. Hardly helped the kids at all. But no for-profit tutoring company was left behind.

The push back against privatization isn’t easy. We’re now in a world in which decisions about public education involve not just parents and children and teachers, but also big profits or losses for the private sector. Change the tests, or the textbooks, or the charters, or even the rules for teacher certification, and you change somebody’s bottom line.

It’s a tough world out there. Ask the talking pineapple.

food assistance

Why So Many Ph.D.s Are On Food Stamps

by NPR Staff

With the economic troubles of the past few years, it's no surprise that the number of people using food stamps is soaring. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an average of 44 million people were on food assistance last year; that's up from 17 million in 2000.

What might be surprising, though, is one subgroup that's taken a particularly hard hit.

The number of people with graduate degrees — master's degrees and doctorates — who have had to apply for food stamps, unemployment or other assistance more than tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2010, the report says, 360,000 of the 22 million Americans with graduate degrees received some kind of public assistance.

Chronicle reporter Stacey Patton spoke with Tell Me More host Michel Martin about why so many highly educated Americans have to rely on this type of aid.

One thing that is happening at universities, Patton says, is the overlap between graduate students and adjunct professors — "contingent" faculty who are working on contracts.

In an effort to cut costs, she says, universities increasingly rely on these instructors because unlike tenured faculty, they work part time, they don't have health benefits, and they can be fired or not have their contracts renewed.

"What we continue to do in graduate schools is encourage people to take master's degrees and Ph.D.s [to fill those positions]," Patton says. "But the economy has taken such a hit, and so has higher education, so they do their work and come out and don't have opportunities for jobs."

Many states have had to cut their higher education budgets, and Patton says universities defend their use of contingent faculty instead of hiring full-time faculty as a necessary way to cope.

Tony Yang received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Riverside in 2009. Since then, he's worked on and off as a history lecturer, but has had to depend on unemployment and food stamps to get by.
"One of the bravest things to do is to graduate into [the recession]," Yang tells NPR's Martin. "It's an incredibly difficult job market, and you're constantly hustling to try and get another job."

In his best year since getting his Ph.D., Yang says he made about $32,000; in his worst, about $10,000. He says there's a perception that if you have a doctorate, you automatically walk into a high-paying job.

"I have the prestige of holding a Ph.D., but that [isn't] paying the bills," he says.

While reporting her story, Patton says she heard a number of stories similar to Yang's, but many of those folks didn't want to go on the record for fear of shame.

"You go to graduate school, you get a master's degree [or] you get a Ph.D., it's a hard thing to embrace that you're also now on welfare," she says.

Though only a little more than 1 percent of graduate-degree holders are on government assistance, Patton says what worries her is that the number tripled in just three years.

"One has to wonder, is this trend going to continue to increase?" she says.

40% Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again

By Eli Ashkenazi

About 40 percent of all Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again, and 43 percent are reportedly concerned the State of Israel is in danger of being destroyed, according to a poll conducted by Tel-Hai Academic College.

The poll was conducted by faculty members in the psychology department at the college, located in the Upper Galilee.

Seventeen percent of respondents said the chance of a second Holocaust was very high; 23 percent said there was a moderate risk it could occur; while nearly 59 percent reportedly thought the risk was low.

The findings reflect the deep impact of the Holocaust on succeeding generations in Israel, including those born in Israel after World War II, according to Prof. Shaul Kimhi, the chair of Tel-Hai's psychology department and one of the faculty members involved in the study.

"It turns out that more than a third of Israelis believe that the Holocaust was not a one-time occurrence and could happen again," Kimhi said.

"This substantial proportion [of the population] is an indication of Holocaust fears instilled in us from childhood, which are not necessarily rational, but they're part of Jewish-Israeli culture," Kimhi noted. According to Kimhi, these fears are a reflection of deep emotional and cultural sentiment that is not necessarily altered by changes in Israel's security situation or diplomatic circumstances.

The poll surveyed adults between 18 and 85, as well as 12th-grade high school students who had taken school trips to Holocaust sites in Poland. When respondents were asked to what extent they felt their lives and the lives of their family members were in danger, 55 percent rated the risk as low or non-existent. About 12 percent said they thought they were at great risk, and 31 percent rated the risk as moderate.

The opinion polling of the 12th-grade respondents was completed in stages, and included a questionnaire distributed to students before their trips to Poland, and again after their return to Israel. The results show that the visit to Poland actually improved the students' sense of Israel's strength. Before the journey, 43 percent of the 130 students surveyed said they did not believe Israel was in danger of extinction. That figure declined to 37 percent after the trip.

"Exposing young people to the horrors that took place during the Holocaust and then returning to Israel strengthens the sense among young people that they have a strong country that can face the lurking dangers," Kimhi said.

When it comes to the public at large, however, Kimhi said the threats that Israel faces - including threats from Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip - indirectly reinforce a sense of persecution and preserve the collective trauma of the Holocaust.

public relations

Kiran Karnik, the former president of India’s best-known pressure group, the National Association of Software and Services Companies, or Nasscom, was in a position to write a deep and revealing book. But he chose not to make enemies so late in his life. In fact, “The Coalition of Competitors” is largely about how Nasscom used its public relations skills to create the myth of Indian software genius and influenced government policy and journalism to favor the Indian software industry.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the slowdown of the U.S. economy in 2002, when outsourcing to India became a political issue in the United States, Mr. Karnik writes, Nasscom was involved in intense behind-the-scenes dialogues with politicians, businessmen and journalists.

“One of the aims was to move the public debate from the emotional (human interest stories about job losses that pull at the heartstrings) to the rational,” he writes in his book. He says Nasscom was disturbed by emotional stories in the American news media, “such as 35-year-old single mother, supporting sick parents, loses job — due to outsourcing — and now is unable to pay school fees for her daughter.”

Nasscom countered such reports by digging out happy stories, “for example, how a young girl’s life was saved following an accident because her X-ray could be immediately sent and analyzed by a certified radiographer in India — thanks to outsourcing.”

Mr. Karnik, who was president of Nasscom from 2001 to 2008, assumed office after the death of his predecessor, Dewang Mehta, an exuberant man who served as a bridge between politicians and software entrepreneurs.

Mr. Mehta altered, at least for a brief spell, India’s most popular slogan, a form of fervent prayer addressed to an unidentified benefactor: “Food, clothes and shelter.” He changed it to “Food, clothes, shelter and bandwidth.”

It is impossible to know when exactly the Indian outsourcing industry was born. According to Mr. Karnik’s book, however, a meeting at a New Delhi hotel in 1989 was a significant moment.

Jack Welch, who was then chief executive of General Electric, was in India to persuade the country to place an order for G.E. aircraft engines. Present at the meeting was Sam Pitroda, a technology adviser to the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

As recounted in “The Coalition of Competitors,” after Mr. Welch said what he wanted from India, Mr. Pitroda said, “Fine, but first we want you to outsource $10 million of I.T. software work to India.”

Mr. Karnik writes that G.E.’s famous boss was surprised, but he finally said, “Fine. Done.” And G.E. became the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India.

In the 1980s, Mr. Gandhi tried to computerize the vast and numerous departments of the Indian government, but senior bureaucrats were initially reluctant to accept the technology. “The personal computer was seen — and largely used — as a typewriter and, surely, no ‘officer’ wanted to play the lowly role of a typist,” Mr. Karnik writes.

But, following the economic overhauls of 1991, urban India began to transform at a rapid pace. Nasscom helped persuade the government to adopt policies that would make it easy for foreign companies to outsource work to Indian firms. There were hundreds of thousands of engineering and science graduates in the country, and the software industry sucked them in at various rungs, offering them unprecedented salaries and a chance to work in the United States.

The brightest Indians joined the industry, and they made it appear that India had a deep pool of exceptional software talent. Nasscom, says Mr. Karnik, played a crucial role in promoting the idea of a republic filled with young geniuses.

After the happy 1990s, when the world changed suddenly and the Indian software industry faced hostility in the United States, Mr. Karnik writes, Nasscom was tempted to open an office there, but decided against it reasoning that this could become a political bull’s-eye.

Nasscom took a more surreptitious tack, trying to convince influential Americans that Indian outsourcing was valuable to the U.S. economy.

There were problems at home, too, which persist. A country that has not invested in education cannot sustain the myth of its talent for long. Beneath the surface of what is considered gleaming Indian talent is an ocean of unemployable graduates. Even a habitually inoffensive man like Mr. Karnik does not hide the fact that India’s software industry found the quality of Indian graduates so poor that they considered only 25 percent of engineering graduates and 15 percent of other graduates employable.

Also, in the past decade, the Indian software industry has lost considerable political support because politicians have realized that millions of rural voters, who are not direct beneficiaries of the software boom, are repulsed by all the fuss around information technology. A chief minister who often posed with his laptop lost power and is no longer seen with his computer.

When top IT businessmen in Bangalore criticized the Karnataka state government for the pathetic state of infrastructure in that city, local politicians began to harass them in various ways.

Mr. Karnik’s history of the good and the bad days of Nasscom and the Indian I.T. industry comes as India’s supremacy is being threatened by more efficient countries, like China and the Philippines. Some Indian companies themselves now outsource work to the Philippines.

Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men.”

rating of the film "Bully"

For a bullied kid, school can be torment.

Daily taunts and physical abuse turn into feelings of hopelessness when teachers won't help.

School bullying has already made too many young lives painful and frightening. It's going to take a huge effort to put a stop to it – from schools, parents, politicians, and cultural icons.

That's why I am extremely disappointed that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to give a new documentary about bullying an "R" rating, making it nearly impossible for most schools to screen the film or for kids and teens to see it on their own.

Our partners and allies have already delivered over 200,000 signatures asking the MPAA to amend their decision – and now it's up to us to keep the pressure on by flooding their inboxes.

Help us keep the momentum up with another 100,000 letters TODAY. Tell the MPAA: Amend your ruling and give Bully a PG-13 rating so that we can start putting an end to bullying.

Ratings are there to help parents and families make the best decisions about what their children should see, but in this case, the "R" rating does the opposite – keeping a huge part of the target audience away from the film.

What's more, Bully was only given an "R" rating due to profanity, and the MPAA has made exceptions for swearing in the past.

In fact, the MPAA gave a 2005 documentary about the military a PG-13 rating even though it had 36 more instances of the f-word than Bully simply because they thought it was important for young people to see the film.

Arnulfo, you and I agree: bullying is far more harmful to kids than a little coarse language, and over 200,000 of our friends and allies have already spoken out asking the MPAA to change the ruling. Will you send a letter now to keep the pressure on?

Tell the MPAA: Kids need to see this film. Reverse the decision to give Bully an "R" rating.

This documentary has the potential to change – or even save – lives. But we’ll never know its full impact if kids and teens are kept away.

With your help, we can make sure the MPAA does the right thing here. Thanks for standing up for our kids.

Sincerely,

Joe Solmonese
President


Katy Butler appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show while Ellen gave her support for Katy's petition on Change.org urging the MPAA to lower their rating of the film "Bully" from R to PG-13. You can sign Katy's petition at http://www.change.org/bully