Schools have always been the site of struggle

‘Schools Have Always Been the Site of Struggle’ - FAIR

The preceding link is a collection of three CounterSpin interviews conducted between 2014 and 2020 with Alfie Kohn (author of The Myth of the Spoiled Child), education historian Diane Ravitch (author of Slaying Goliath), and Kevin Kumashiro (author of Bad Teacher: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture). Their common thread is a focus on the effects of conventional attitudes (and policy) on students, and consequently on society as a whole.

Kohn discusses reactions against perceptions that kids "aren't tough enough," etc. In particular, he suggests that this attitude is independent of politics:

The right wingers and the liberals both had the same complaints.

And he goes on to explain how this take is both incorrect and insidious.

Ravitch discusses the way that powerful "philanthropic" interests seek specifically to reduce the cost of public education, which in practice means removing the most valuable part of public education—teachers:

I refer to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and all these tech titans, and Wall Street and on and on, as “disruptors.” They have lots of ideas about how to reinvent and reimagine American education. It always involves privatization. It always attacks public control, and democratic control, of schools.

Ravitch and Janine Jackson also briefly discuss the role of media in that state of affairs. Something that goes unsaid here is how much money the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives to essentially every major media corporation, and how that money affects their reporting. (Even today, it can be difficult to find reporting critical of Gates; this can be partly explained by actual spending on public relations, but philanthropic activities have much the same effect.)

The interview with Kumashiro begins with a discussion of societal priorities—i.e., for what purpose do we allocate public funds to education in the first place?

[...] right now, the debate seems to be, how do we make education more affordable?—as if education is a commodity, where those who have the wealth can afford to buy the best.

And what I would say is, “Yeah, we could engage in that debate, but maybe the bigger debate is, should education be seen and treated as a commodity in the first place?” Right?

Education, I think many of us would argue, is so fundamentally important, not only to individual wellness and livelihood and success, but also to the health and well-being of the community and the society, right? It strengthens democracy, it strengthens participation, social relations, global health.

Submitted September 08, 2023 at 11:08AM by lewkiamurfarther https://ift.tt/cGYsDf4