Eugenics and Education

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Bill Ayers reviews Ann G. Winfield’s book Eugenics and Education in America:

Written out of the official story as quackery and the handiwork of a few nut-cases, Winfield demonstrates beyond doubt that eugenics was not only respectable, mainstream science but also that its major tenets were well-springs in the formation of American public schools with echoes in the every day practices of today. Formed in the crucible of white supremacy and rigid hierarchies of human value, American schools have never adequately faced that living heritage.

Reading Capital with David Harvey

Originally posted at The Blog and the Bullet.

There is a great online series of Dr. David Harvey’s lectures on his class at City University of New York which cover the entire book of Capital, Vol. I.

Bhupinder blogs:

Listening to David Harvey’s lectures on Capital Vol 1 not only gave me a feeling that I was re- reading Capital but also provided a refreshing enthusiasm that I had experienced when first reading the tome. Though the first three chapters are considered to be somewhat intimidating, these three chapters are also the most interesting ones. As Harvery points out, Marx follows different literary techniques in different parts of the book, and the first three are marked not only by philosophical flamboyance but also literary flourishes with copious references to Shakespeare , Schiller and Balzac (the latter, like Harvey, I read much after reading Capital).

I myself have seen the first video (which can also been downloaded in mp3 format to one’s iPod) and it’s excellent and I reccomend everyone see it.  I myself am re-reading Capital, Vol. I (I had forgotten how huge it was!!).

Image:
The Forge (A Modern Cyclops) painted in 1875 by Adolph von Menzel

Fuck LA Unified School District

Cross-posted from Double Consciousness.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Students and fellow educators are rallying behind a fired Jordan High School teacher they say was sacked for encouraging political activism among her students.

About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.

The dust-up has gone digital as well. Salazar backers have posted videos on the website YouTube. The postings, which have attracted thousands of hits, intersperse music, outraged protesters and interviews, as well as statements from the outspoken educator.

“You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual,” she told students through a bullhorn in one video. “You are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back.”

[Hat Tip: Bambu's Rants]

Students Stranded in Gaza

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Haitham blogs about the aftermath of seven students getting their Fulbright scholarships revoked, then reinstated, yet still being stranded in the Gaza Strip:

For the mainstream press, this story “moved quickly” and has now concluded with a positive ending for the Gaza Fulbright seven. But hundreds of other Palestinian students remain stranded inside the Gaza Strip, and the number is expected to rise this summer. According to data from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), almost 700 Palestinian students are still waiting to leave Gaza in order to pursue studies, and scholarships, abroad. “This number will increase within the next month, after the schools announce their exam results and Gaza students want to move onto universities” says Khalil Shaheen, a senior PCHR researcher. “All of these students are stranded inside the Gaza Strip because of the Israeli siege and closure, and they are being denied their rights to pursue their education, and their futures.”

Inner-City Schools Shut Down as Media Fiddles

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Barbara at WIMN’s Voics blogs:

The story of thousands of schoolchildren without a library and books should be front-page news. Since when did sending inner-city children to bigger schools become a positive educational step in a city concerned with high dropout rates? The story of established neighborhood schools – with acceptable school rankings – closing their doors for lack of enrollment should be a reason for investigative stories by the media. The community should be outraged, right?

Not in San Antonio. Who’s going to tell this story? Here, one Hearst chain newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News is blitzing its ads on the front page as it seeks even more profits. Corporations, according to Jimenez Reyes, are the real power behind the closing of the six schools in a balance-the-budget bottom-line mentality as the developers seek prime inner-city real estate.

Education System in Ireland: Part II

(Had to leave in middle of updating links, will finish links and formating soon)

As I stated in my previous blog post on education I would write about what some of the unions are talking about in the world of under funded and neglected education in Ireland.

There are basically three major teachers’ unions in Ireland, the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI), which is headed by experienced (and new) general secretary Peter MacMenamin; TUI members generally teach in areas that are economically disadvantaged; the Association for Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ATSI), which is headed by general secretary John White, who is opposed by a large group within the ATSI; the dynamics of the ATSI are quite complex as there is much internal dissension within the union, the union also tends to take moderate approaches and emphasizes negotiations, which has lead to it having a low profile in recent years; and then there is the large and highly influential Irish National Teachers Organization (INTO) which has a very good organizational body and can draw out numbers to its protests and industrial actions, and apparently plans them quite well.

All three unions opened up their conferences on March 25th with each union’s leader making an opening speech, mostly slamming the Minister of Education Mary Hanafin for breaking promises the unions and Irish people by not reducing class sizes or giving adequate funding (from five years ago).

The TUI:

Voted in favour of a one-day strike…unless problems of discipline in classrooms be addressed immediately…

…

While more than 120 schools applied for behavioral support services…just 50 post-primary schools around the country currently have access to those services.

As I wrote in the previous blog post ASTI Greta Harrison lambasted the government on failing its teachers and students on a wide range of issues.

The next day saw the three unions tackle a number of issues and vote on a few of them.

The ATSI stated that schools needed to be penalized for shirking their responsibilities in taking in enough students with special needs. The ATSI also tackled the issue of paper work for teachers:

Teachers are being distracted from their real work by a populist modernisation program that places bureaucratic burdens on schools involving “endless paper trials…”

The INTO tackled LGBTQI rights regarding Section 37 of the Employment Equality Acts (yeah, funny name for something that discriminates against folks) which essentially states that:

schools that promote certain religious values [can] take “necessary action to prevent an employee from undermining the religious ethos of the institution.”

Shelia Crowley, who is the chair of the INTO’s Lesbian Gay and Bixexual (LGB) teachers’ group said:

“We feel that if we live openly as LGB teachers in schools under denomination mangement, then this could be construed as undermining the religious ethos of an institution and could lead to our subsequent dismissal.”

In yesterdays Irish Times LGBTQI teachers at the ATSI conference stated they:

faced problems in their staff rooms, classrooms and with their management of their schools

…

“Form many gay, lesbian, and bisexual people an Irish school can be a very chilling place to work.” [said an anonymous delegate]

Ireland has quite the history of LGBTQI persecution and to be openly gay in much of the society is still a risk.

At the March 26th INTO conference Seán Flynn reported:

Sub-standard conditions are still the norm in many primary schools, the INTO conference was told…

These conditions have gotten so bad in certain school distracts that it has caused parent’s to rally together and protest the government to fully fund their schools.

The TUI also covered racism in its agenda that day:

Racism in schools is a crisis waiting to happen unless appropriate resources are invested now…

The union said that language training was not up to snub and that some schools didn’t even provide proper language training, or other support services for that matter, for their immigrant communities. Assistant general secretary of the TUI Annette Dolan said:

“If we are to work against the development of racism in our schools, teachers must be trained and equipped to impart respect, tolerance and understanding between Irish and non-Irish students in the classroom.”

These are just some, of the many, problems that students, parents, and teachers are facing in Ireland’s schools. And until these problems are seriously addressed, all of the talk about a “modern” Ireland and the “Celtic Tiger” boom years is all for naught.

Education System in Ireland: Part I

Originally written on March 27, 2008.

As I mentioned in the previous article Ireland’s government is hell bent on cutting social programs that help uplift its people due to economic downturns.  One of the programs that might be hit, and hit hard, is education.  The editorial board for the Irish Times wrote:

The core problem remains the relative lack of investment in education by the Government.  The Republic is close to the bottom of the OECD league table when it comes to education spending relative to wealth.  Indeed, as the OECD points out, the proportion of GDP we invest in education has actually fallen from 5.2 per cent in 1995 to 4.6 per cent in 2007…The Republic has some of the largest class sizes in Europe.  It has one of the lowest levels of computer use in schools in the EU and a deplorable lack of modern facilities for science teaching.  In the area of special needs, parents – who cannot afford to got to private – must often wait for psychological assessments.  Other parents feel they have to go to the courts to vindicate their child’s right to a full education.

As the economic picture darkens, the Government faces an important choice.  It can retrench and impose real cutbacks to education services – or it can boost educational spending.

In today’s newspaper, the new general secretary of the Teachers Union of Ireland, Peter MacMenamin, makes a persuasive case for the latter option.  The Government, he says, should learn from the lessons of the 1980s, when cutbacks proved counter-productive.

In a section in the next days’ Times (on the 26th) about the teacher union conference for the three major teacher’s unions in Ireland, the Times states:

Ms Hanafin [the Minister for Education], who has received standing ovations in the past, was jeered and heckled during her address – especially on the issue of overcrowded classrooms.

…

Ms. Hanafin said the Government had not abandoned its commitment to reduce class size progressively over the lifetime of this Government.

However long that may be due to the whole Sterling scandal with Ahern.

But then, after the jeers from the teachers, she has the gall to say:

“Yes I would like to have done more on class size – but these are more difficult economic times.”  When some delegates heckled, she responded; “Unfortunately we do have to listen to the facts.”

Now talk about arrogance!  Ireland has one of the lowest budgets per capita on spending for education than almost every single country in the European Union, has shabby classrooms, inadequate English training, and is cutting teaching staff, and she has the nerve to say “Unfortunately we do have to listen to the facts.”  Jesus!

In another article the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) general secretary Peter MacMenamin said:

In a hard-hitting inaugural address to the TUI annual congress…Mr MacMenamin criticized the lack of investment in education…[and] called for special needs resources to be available to all second-level schools…

“To translate…We in this private secondary school don’t want the trouble of dealing with your difficulties…we only want the privileged so we can perpetuate this privilege.”

And on education not being a priority due to hard economic times, John Downes reports:

Education is strategically important and as a result should get more priority in the national budget, even in an economic downturn, the president of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland said…

School is strategic for every economy because the greater our schools our at creating opportunities for our children and in (truly) teaching them (critical) knowledge the more active they will be in their society, feel needed, empowered, and thus, in turn, create jobs, benefit the society as a whole, and create a stronger economy.

ATSI president Patricia Wroe continued:

“Be assured, Minister…this is not a rant born of us teachers wanting a cushy number, but based on the concern that education…has to get more priority in the national budget even an economic downturn.

“You and we are aware, in spite of the billions of euro spend you quote on many occasions, that Ireland still experiences below-average funding in education compared to other countries…”

I will cover more on three main conferences from the three main teacher’s unions during this Easter Sunday week.

Steps to Success: Step One, GET ENSLAVED!

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Karnythia blogs at The Angry Black Woman on a recent blog post by Pat Buchanan:

It’s this deliberate misinformation that bolsters the idea that black people are somehow magically getting ahead without merit, and fosters the resentment you see so often from whites that argue so vociferously against the concept of white privilege and against affirmative action. Never mind that the main beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women. No, let’s just scream about that one time a POC “stole” a job that you really wanted/needed/preferred and ignore the part where you weren’t entitled to that job above all applicants.

It doesn’t help that even in school the history books skim over what Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, The Black Panthers, the NOI and others were doing in support of the black community. Aside from the actual Civil Rights Movement marches and demonstrations that are discussed, there is very little mention of day to day life in black communities.

Black History Box

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

The newest blogger, Sara Rosell, of Double Consciousness blogs about Black History Month:

We definitely need to teach what contributions blacks have made, but before we teach about that we need to first talk about what it means for those contributions to be absent when it comes to the teachings of History itself. The problem is that our Anglo-centric educational system boxes “Black History” into a month, separating it from “U.S. History.”