Re: Logic and Care Be Damned

[James Horn <ontogenyx@gmail.com>]

Tom,

I appreciate your search, but I am more than a tiny bit skeptical  
about giving all the credit for our demise to a handful of union  
prosituits or to a single institution. There are a couple of heavily  
marked up books on my shelf that I would recommend to anyone on a  
search for the source of these long shadows now cast across our corner  
of civilization.  Not definitive books by any stretch, but provocative  
and suggestive in ways that leave an interesting taste long after they  
have been consumed.  The first, We Make the Road by Walking, makes the  
clear case that the problem can't be located like a missing WMD,  
something isolatable in time and space with clear dimension, but  
rather in the fundamental structures that created and are created by  
our political economy.  In the system, itself, not in the individual  
institution or individual hides of men and women.  The blame rests in  
the system within which we all participate.  The other book that comes  
to mind is by Morris Berman, who in the 1980s was writing beautifully  
about energy, information, the noosphere, etc.  His attention since  
has been turned quite abruptly by the manifestations of what he views  
as the likely return to a Dark Age, and thus the title, The Twilight  
of American Culture.  Neither book is technical, the first being a  
conversation between Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, and the second I  
would describe as a well-written angry meditation by a top-notch  
intellectual bent upon not going gently into that good night.  I  
appreciate both, and I hope you will as well.   Merry Christmas.

Jim
On Dec 14, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Drummond, Tom wrote:

> Well, a couple of thousand posts to ARN have well established the  
> fact that
> we have 99.44% agreement: the current dominant discourse on public  
> education
> isn't about truth, validity, veracity, congruence, or shared values.  
> The
> destruction of public education and the limitation of all means for  
> 'a loud
> shared voice for common good' proceeds at a rapid pace, at an almost
> accelerating pace, for some other reason than not being able to read.
>
> I think that reason is the Fed: the Federal Reserve System.
> <http://www.federalreserve.gov/>
> I am working on learning about the chain of behind the scenes of the
> external control of the USA by a group with ultimate wealth and  
> power who
> late at night created a private bank that is unconstitutional and  
> dominating
> everyone, including Obama. So far, I think that what happened in  
> 1914-1916
> stopped democratic action and continues on and on and on to stop  
> public
> education. Especially public education.
>
> I know many of you know more about this than I do. (I am hoping this  
> is not
> a Dan Brown fantasy.) I think demonstrations like Kent State brought  
> major
> forces into action that led to Reagan's election and a systematic de- 
> funding
> of Federal support for local initiatives in education (the kind of
> initiatives that educated me and employed me initially) that Reagan  
> himself
> could not understand.
>
> Today we have daily evidence of some dark cloud stopping logical, data
> driven, empathic centeredness and care for justice, welfare and  
> education of
> everyone, and especially stopping discourse about how we address the  
> plight
> and hope for the poor.
>
> It seems to me this dark force is thinking that if enough of our  
> populace is
> under-informed they will acquiesce to sound bites (a few union  
> leaders are
> destroying our education system), accept the loss of creative music  
> like the
> 60's revolutionary music, be attracted to push a button each night  
> to see
> mesmerizing TV, and remain accepting of the coercion in full force  
> our many
> social institutions, religious and secular. That unseen and tacitly  
> accepted
> coercion was what John Dewey was sounding the alarm for to awaken  
> our public
> consciousness at that very time.
>
> If anyone has leads here, I would love to pursue this more.
>
> Tom
>
>
> > From: Brian LeCloux <neaguy@hotmail.com>
> > Reply-To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
> > Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:11:34 -0600
> > To: Assessment Reform Network <arn-l@interversity.org>
> > Subject: [arn-l] The Long-Distance Test Scorer
> >
> >
> > Remember Todd Farley?  (Making the Grades, 2009)
> > Here's another similar experience from the world of test scoring.
> >
> > A question DiMaggio raises at the end:
> > "Why would people in their right minds want to leave educational  
> > assessment in
> > the hands of poorly trained, overworked, low-paid temps, working  
> > for companies
> > interested only in cranking out acceptable numbers and improving  
> > their bottom
> > line?"
> >
> > http://www.truth-out.org/the-loneliness-long-distance-test- 
> > scorer65845
> >
> > Brian
>
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