borderland/sidebar

One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.

A century before Reich, Mikhail Bakunin anticipated him when he argued that children “do not constitute anyone’s property: they are neither the property of the parents nor even of society. They belong only to their own future freedom” and the “rights of the parents shall be confined to loving their children and exercising over them … authority [that] does not run counter to their morality, their mental development, or their future freedom.” From this, “it follows that society, the whole future of which depends upon adequate education and upbringing of children… , has not only the right but also the duty to watch over them.” Thus, child rearing is not just a parental but a communal process, and “real freedom – that is, the full awareness and the realisation thereof in every individual, pre-eminently based upon a feeling of one’s dignity and upon the genuine respect for someone else’s freedom and dignity, i.e. upon justice – such freedom can develop in children only through the rational development of their minds, character and will.”

In reading Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind I came across a review he wrote for the London Review of Books in 2004 of Greg Granlin’s Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How could any serious examination of the reactionary mind— particularly the American reactionary mind— not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind— albeit an extraordinarily weak one— would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan’s?

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Jose Vilson: ….more importantly, it let me know on a profound level just how unready teachers are for a profound change in education. Part of the reason why education hasn’t changed is because little has changed about who we ought to listen to when it comes to education. Too many of us profess that we want to be at the forefront of what happens in the classroom, but mimic and worship college professors who have our line of thinking. It’s no disrespect to Dr. Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, and the cavalcade of experts too many of us pay homage to, but teachers who consider themselves leaders ought to recognize the fallacy of this validation / power structure. Too many of us hate overtesting and the Common Core State Standards, but ignore the underlying premise of these policies and replace them with the same power structures. We say we want the best for all children, but have a hard time using the words “Black,” “Latino,” or “Asian.” Heck, you still think those types of kids don’t come to school to learn how to make it in a world that’s not theirs.

It’s no secret in Alaska, but the state is constantly hiring teachers from Outside, especially for its rural communities, and the turnover rate for administrators and teachers is ridiculously high. WFAA-TV, from Dallas, Texas, has published a report — complete with a Manokotak dateline — about the challenges posed by Alaska education, with a focus on perennially troubled rural schools. Perhaps because the reporter actually visited the village west of Dillingham, the report turns out to be better than most Alaskans might expect. The report focuses on a Texas couple, the Cantrells, who moved to Alaska in July from the Dallas metropolitan area so that Amanda Cantrell could take a job teaching school. Texas has been cutting education budgets by the billions and laying off teachers right and left. But Alaska is always hiring. Estimates say around 80 percent of Alaska’s school teachers are from Outside, and districts are afflicted by a high rate of turnover, both in administration and in the classroom. Nowhere has that been the case more than in the rural parts of the state. Alexandra Hill, a UAA researcher, told WFAA that as many as 30 percent of the teachers in the Southwest Region leave in any given year. For students, it means investing in their own education is much harder, and there’s ample evidence turnover negatively impacts student progress. “It’d be like if you had a different mom every year,” said Larry Johnson, Manokotak school’s principal, who also arrived in July. Alaska’s overall turnover rate has been decreasing, thanks in part to new investment in teacher housing, but Hill thinks the lack of opportunity in a sour Lower 48 economy is a bigger factor. Rural teachers simply have a harder time bailing out these days. Read much, much more, here.

The town of Churchill, Manitoba — with around 900 people and located on the coast of Canada’s Hudson Bay — bills itself as the polar bear capital of the world. Tourists from all over the world visit the community each year to board the so-called tundra buggies and ride out to get a close look at the bears. But a new webcam has been set up to let people watch the bears in real time, no matter where they are in the world. The Annenberg Foundation has made a $50,000 grant to set up the webcam. For the best viewing, they say on the site to check between 4 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Alaska time. To read more about the project, check out AP’s story in the Toronto Star.

Liard First Nation Chief Liard McMillan says the federal government has ignored demands to negotiate an agreement on a gas pipeline. CBCGroups want social and economic benefit agreement Yukon First Nations warn that they’ll block an Alaska gas pipeline unless social and economic benefits are negotiated for their people. Chiefs from the Liard and White River First Nations, as well as the Kaska Dena Council, made the threats in letters to the Northern Canada Pipeline Agency in Ottawa. Chief Liard McMillan of the Liard First Nation in Watson Lake, Yukon, said the federal government has ignored demands to negotiate an agreement.

The park, like other Occupied sites across the country, is a point of integration, a place where middle-class men and women, many highly educated but unschooled in the techniques of resistance, are taught by those who have been carrying out acts of rebellion for the last few years. These revolutionists bridge the world of the streets with the world of the middle class.

I agree to a certain degree with Steve (who has forgotten more about the publishing industry than I have ever known) that the Palin book with be a best seller out of the chute. Where I part company with him is the notion that those sales will be driven only by the true believers. Sarah Palin has achieved that unique brand of American freak show singularity by becoming equal parts Paris Hilton, William Hung, and a flaming NASCAR crash. We want to turn away appalled/disgusted/embarrassed by and for her but she is so alternately amusing and then infuriating and then baffling that we don’t want to miss an episode and so we sneak guilty peeks only to roll our eyes once again.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Arundhati Roy. She’s speaking to us from New Delhi, India. She has just published a new book called Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati, why “listening to grasshoppers”? ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was the name of a lecture that I did in Turkey last year on the anniversary after the death of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was shot outside his office for daring to talk about the Armenian genocide of 1915, which you’re not supposed to talk about in Turkey. And my lecture was really about the historical links between progress and genocide. And “listening to grasshoppers” was—referred to the testimony an old lady called Araxie Barsamian, who’s the friend—mother of my friend David Barsamian, who is Armenian and who talked about how, you know, the wheat had ripened in her village in 1915, and suddenly there was this huge swarm of grasshoppers that arrived. And the village elders were very worried about this and said it was a bad omen. And they were right, because a few months later, when the wheat had ripened, the Turks came, and that was the beginning of the Armenian genocide for her. And so, I talk about—the whole lecture was really about how societies are prepared for genocide and how genocide is, you know, it’s like part of free trade, and how, you know, genocides that are acknowledged, and denied, and prosecuted, all have to—all depend on world trade, and always have done, and about how I worry that a country like India, that is poised on the threshold of progress, could also be poised on the threshold of genocide. And that essay was written in January of last year. And now, as you see, the troops are closing in on the forest areas where the poorest people live. And they will be sacrificed at the altar of progress, unless we manage to show the world that we have to find a different way of seeing and a different way of going about things. But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air.

by Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes

As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government’s actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn’t an accident. The government hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about how it’s made buckets of money available to the banking sector. When it does disclose some information—such as in July’s SIGTARP report from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve’s weekly balance sheet—it’s in the form of intimidating descriptions, accounting mumbo jumbo and technical reports that do little to illuminate just what the hell is going on.

What’s worse, banks and the establishment press have portrayed TARP as the sum of the banking industry’s federal subsidies.