Category Archives: Video

Schools are Becoming Privatized Prisons

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A lot of interesting analysis has been coming out recently about the problematic education system, and it’s not just on obvious longstanding issues such as lack of funding and overcrowded classrooms. Peter Gray of Salon.com wrote in his article “School is a Prison – and damaging our kids”:

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Read the full article here: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/

David L. Kirp of Slate.com writes about three new books which pick apart arguments for charter schools and vouchers in his article: The Wrong Kind of Education Reform

Today at Truthout there’s an op-ed by Marion Brady which critiques the Common Core State Standards program: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18638-a-quiz-on-americas-core-curriculum

Jan Irvin and Clint Richardson discuss Common Core in great detail in this lengthy but well-researched conversation at Gnostic Media:

mp3 link: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/podcast/GnosticMedia_PC_173_ClintRichardson_pt8_CommonCOREeducation_md.mp3

For more great information about the history and problems of compulsory education, check out John Taylor Gatto’s site: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

From the BBC series “Monkey Dust” (NSFW):

Exploiting the Dream

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Black Agenda Report recently posted two excellent commentaries on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. More specifically, the hypocrisy of the corporate media’s treatment of King and his ideas after his death, and the Obama administration’s desecration of the commemoration on the eve of another war.

From “Dr King was a Man, ‘The Dreamer’ is a Zombie”:

The week spent commemorating :”the Dream” is a great way to forget the real past, ignore the real present and avoid responsibility for the future. It’s a great excuse to assemble stars and celebrities and politicians, to pretend that the rise and prominence of the black political class was the foreordained outcome of the historic Freedom Movement in which the real Dr. King lived, worked and died. It’s a great distraction from the fact that apart from their own careers, the black political class, right up to and including President Obama, have achieved very little in the way of substantive victories for our people in the last four decades.

For me, one of the lessons of Dr. King’s career and that of “the Dreamer”, who was born after the flesh and blood man was murdered, is the willingness of establishment media to rewrite history even as it’s being made, to blunt popular consciousness, to erase past sins, to stunt and limit our vision of the better world we know is possible. The Dreamer is a zombie, immortalized in a monumnet paid for by Wal-Mart, Boeing, Bank of America, British Petroleum and other corporate criminals. The folks I ran with four decades ago, and run with today disagreed with Dr. King, but we admire him. We never had much use though, for “The Dreamer.”

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dr-king-was-man-%E2%80%9C-dreamer%E2%80%9D-zombie

From “The Dreamer With a Kill List”:

Just before launching yet another unprovoked war to preserve the empire, Barack Obama stopped by the Lincoln Memorial to star in the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington. He was joined by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the men most responsible for pulling the Democratic Party deep enough into the corporate camp to afford the billion dollar elections that brought Obama to power. The pretense was that the presidents were there to show solemn respect for the Movement that defeated official American apartheid. The truth is, they came to take possession of the occasion – a gift from their minions in the Black Misleadership Class, who believe nothing has value until it is blessed and possessed by Power.

…It is inconceivable that Dr. King would share the stage with a president who was at that moment preparing a savage and illegal attack on a sovereign country. Dr. King’s voice has been censored and his dream vandalized, repackaged and presented as a gift to a corporate agent with a Kill List.

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dreamer-kill-list

Black Agenda Report also just posted this episode of Black Agenda TV, an example of a independent journalism far superior to corporate cable TV in terms of substance and professionalism. One of the highlights is an in-depth interview with Dr. Cornel West.

NSA Paid Big Data Millions to Spy on Us

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No wonder they’re after the whistleblowers. Each new leak further proves government/corporate criminality and lies with documented evidence. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine NSA agents working for tech companies, just like how the CIA infiltrated news media in the Operation Mockingbird campaign.

Via The Guardian:

The disclosure that taxpayers’ money was used to cover the companies’ compliance costs raises new questions over the relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA. Since the existence of the program was first revealed by the Guardian and the Washington Post on June 6, the companies have repeatedly denied all knowledge of it and insisted they only hand over user data in response to specific legal requests from the authorities.

Read the full story here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid

To be fair Obama, like all modern presidents, are just the salespeople for institutions committing such crimes against American citizens and the world.