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Sparky! Politics at dgiVista.orgQuick, sparky political digs, crabs, and short bursts of sometimes thunderous applause.Please contact me at the email address below if you too would like to have each new blog entry emailed to you. For free, even. Archives are at the bottom. The email icon at the end of each post allows you to forward each entry to someone else. Go to town! Archives2004.04 2004.05 2004.06 2004.07 2004.09 2004.10 2004.11 2004.12 2005.01 2005.04 2005.05 2005.06 2005.07 Thursday, May 05, 2005Education Commercialization [K-12 and Post-Secondary]...the Frog in the Pot
I just got the email containing this fantastic article on corporate creep in education. Its beginning is quoted below.
Then when I flipped through this month's BC Teachers' Federation Teacher Newsmagazine and read what's becoming a regular update on commercial creep in K-12 schools, I saw too much light for my strained eyes to bear. 62% of BC high schools have exclusive marketing arrangements. Vomitous. Truly. More research into the K-12 frog in the slowly boiling pot is in the BCTF's Public Education Not for Sale site. The not-so-facetious beginning of the article below about homeschooling to keep our children from being preyed upon by cradle to grave marketing is beginning to make more than just unlikely sense. All this to say that I'm glad we've got more and more creative people finding more effective ways of teaching us frogs that we're in a pot of trouble. Sean Cook's School Inc. play is just that. Here's hoping it gets extended runs and tours the province, country and our whole neo-liberal privatization world. Corporate College By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman Believe or not, there exists a group of homeschooling parents who teach their kids at home because they believe that the public schools have been destroyed by corporations. The food is corporate junk. The street clothes and sportswear are covered with corporate logos. The curriculum is often sponsored by corporate predators. (The winner of a spelling bee sponsored by the local high school's principal last week won a choice of prizes from Wendy's, McDonald's or Dairy Queen. Can you spell diabesity?) Even the music increasingly is corporate-inspired crapola, driven largely by payola. And the morality of the schools is the morality of the marketplace. But even the most ardent anti-corporate homeschooling parents often give up the fight when it comes to college. At 18, little Johnny has had enough of being at home. And it's time to send him off to -- College. We can only guess at the extent of the corruption of academia by the corporate predators. But if we are to believe what we read in journalist Jennifer Washburn's new book, then academia is in it deep. The title of Washburn's book tells it all -- University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Basic Books, 2005). (Disclosure: an old research piece of ours is mentioned in the book.) If you listen to right-wing radio, or watch Fox News -- as we do -- then you might be under the impression that universities are dominated by left-wing professors, liberals and cranks. If you don't, you might believe that universities are independent non-profits dedicated to education and research. Not true, Washburn says. SNIP Questions, comments, feedback, gripes, thunderous applause? Email me...use the address at the bottom of the page. Please email me at the email address below if you would like to have each new blog entry emailed to you. For free, even. Archives are below these most recent posts.
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