{"id":34972,"date":"2012-01-05T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-05T14:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=34972"},"modified":"2012-01-05T07:33:05","modified_gmt":"2012-01-05T14:33:05","slug":"the-new-tower-of-babel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2012\/01\/the-new-tower-of-babel\/","title":{"rendered":"The new Tower of Babel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Emanuele<\/a>

Emanuele Corso<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201c(H)uman community depends on language,\u201d say the authors of the language chapter in the book Deep History<\/a> (Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Univ. of California Press, 2011). The authors use the lesson of Babel described in the Bible as an example of the power of language.<\/p>\n

According to the Babel story, everyone spoke the same language until someone had the bright idea of building a tower so tall they could reach heaven. Their idea didn\u2019t sit well with the proprietor of heaven, so he \u201cconfounded\u201d their language to prevent the project from proceeding.<\/p>\n

In short, control language and you control people.<\/p>\n

Deliberate inversion of language has always been a favored tool of propagandists and demagogues. Consider just for a moment the current revulsion for and fear of the term \u201cclass-warfare\u201d on the part of the 1 percent class. Another gem is referring to public education as \u201cgovernment education.\u201d \u201cCowabunga Battyman, th\u2019gummint\u2019s after the kids!\u201d In Orwell\u2019s novel 1984 the users of \u201cNewspeak\u201d employed \u201cdoublethink\u201d to manipulate the residents of the country.<\/p>\n

A strategy to set up schools to fail<\/h3>\n

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies \u2013 all this is indispensably necessary.<\/p>\n

Newspeak and doublethink are now the \u201cindispensably necessary\u201d staples of the venality and political agendas sweeping across the United States in the guise of education reform. By deliberately employing language contradictory to common usage and understanding, these interests are confounding the public narrative.<\/p>\n

The best example on a national scale is No Child Left Behind, which uses carefully contrived testing to leave not only children behind but teachers as well. In these so-called reform programs teaching becomes testing and failure is all but assured. In New Mexico we have the ABCDF Schools Rating Act to insure failure \u2013 failure as defined by interested parties leading ultimately to privately run schools, online course work and what the act itself refers to as \u201ccyber academies\u201d which, interestingly enough, are not included in the required ratings under Section 3 of the act.<\/p>\n

The objective truth here: Testing is not pedagogy; it is not curriculum and instruction; it is a strategy to set up public schools to fail and machine learning to prosper.<\/p>\n

If you have any doubts about this strategy, read the story in the Washington Post<\/a> about a fellow who is a school board member, a corporate executive with a bachelor\u2019s degree and two master\u2019s degrees. He took the 10th grade reading and math tests required for students in his school district. He said he managed to \u201cguess\u201d the answers to 10 out of 60 math questions and scored a \u201cD\u201d on the reading test.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder then that these innocuous sounding rating and testing programs like ABCDF and NCLB are condemning public schools to failure? We must rightly ask, why? What\u2019s in it for the perpetrators? What do they stand to gain?<\/p>\n

Potential profits<\/h3>\n

Minions of wealthy business interests<\/a> have moved across the country installing themselves into state governments and sundry \u201cfoundations,\u201d spreading the idea that public schools are a failure and they have the solution \u2013 privatizing public schools, privatizing teacher education and installing high-tech teaching devices. Why? Because people like Rupert Murdoch<\/a>, the Koch boys, Bill Gates and a host of others, having financed politicians as a down payment, are salivating over their potential profits.<\/p>\n

Rupert puts that potential at $500 billion<\/a>!<\/p>\n

The Dec. 6 New York Times had two editorial pieces on education. One piece offered a \u201chow to\u201d as in \u201cHow To Rescue Education Reform\u201d that sounded a death knell for teachers, describing \u201cTechnology as a Passport to Personalized Education.\u201d In both articles, what I found more interesting than the standard hollow circular arguments debasing public education and human teachers was that the three authors are all affiliated with Stanford University, as is the New Mexico secretary-designate of public education.<\/p>\n

Coincidence? Perhaps, perhaps not.<\/p>\n

A form of collective suicide<\/h3>\n

A viable democracy requires educated citizens capable of critical thinking and a strong sense of community. There is no social dimension to cyber or any other form of machine learning. Machines, by their nature, isolate learners from the social context provided by public schools and from the democratizing influences of that community.<\/p>\n

The 21st Century Tower of Babel has been constructed and the intent clearly is to confound the narrative in order to dismantle the finest, most democratic and enabling institution this country has ever had, public education. At what price?<\/p>\n

Henry Giroux, in Education And The Crisis Of Public Values<\/a>, (Peter Lang Publishing, 2012) writing about what he calls the politics of humiliating teachers, public schooling and marginalizing youth put it this way.<\/p>\n

Despite these grave circumstances, we seem to lack the critical language, civic courage, and public values to recognize that when a country institutionalizes a culture of cruelty that takes aim at public schools and their hard-working teachers, it is embarking on a form of self-sabotage and collective suicide whose victims will include not only education, but democracy itself.<\/p>\n

Emanuele Corso has been a New Mexico resident for over 30 years. Prior to that he taught at the\u00a0University of Wisconsin-Madison\u00a0in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, where he received his doctorate in\u00a0educational policy studies. He taught \u201cSchools and Society\u201d and \u201cSchool Reform\u201d to graduates and undergraduates. He holds three master\u2019s degrees and a bachelor\u2019s in mathematics. He is currently working on a book, \u201cBelief Systems and the Social Contract,\u201d which he started when he was teaching at\u00a0Wisconsin. You can find him online at\u00a0siteseven.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 21st Century Tower of Babel has been constructed and the intent clearly is to confound the narrative in order to dismantle the finest, most democratic and enabling institution this country has ever had, public education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2094,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,209],"tags":[125,107,116],"class_list":["post-34972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-corso-columns","tag-education","tag-roundhouse","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2094"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}