I never played myself--wrong generation. But he really spells it out beautifully. Play is the mother of many skills and much wisdom. That's why all mammals play for hours on end while growing up.
Of course, "more work, less play" pretty much sums up the "consensus" on education reform, 'cause we're not quite stupid enough as a nation yet.
But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it deserved more than a comment--a lot more. Obama's education policy is, quite frankly, atrocious. And this article is a great little piece of outside-the-box truth-telling that can help us see why, help us see what's lacking, and maybe even help us feel inspired again to start fighting for something dramatically better.
In my diaries yesterday, "Hello! President Pragmatism! Over Here!" and "Obama's Anti-Pragmatic Ideology vs. Universal Health Care", I focused attention on how Obama's neoliberal ideology clashed with professions of "pragmatism" by favoring market-based "solutions" that don't actual solve the problems they face-problems involving public goods, such as health care (even though there certainly are components of health care that qualify as private goods). I argued that movement conservatives opposed to the welfare state were out of step with their base, which (as General Social Survey data shows-see table on the flip) favors maintaining it. The solution was simple: don't dismantle the welfare state, but instead repurpose it to support economic patrons of movement conservatism, vast non-competitive oligopolies or monopolies rationalized to their base under fraudulent "free market" rhetoric. Thus, I wrote:
They didn't stop public spending on these important public goods, but they did start privatizing that spending in every way they could conceive of. And every step of the way that they did this, they created more and more of a private infrastructure that benefited from the arrangement--a vast array of insider special interests, who were very, very much like the British East India Company, the archetypal Crown Corporation against which the American colonials revolted, and against which Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.
This happened first with the military industrial complex, but has become increasingly widespread across different sectors, of which the "health care industry" is a prime example, which the neoliberals are now aiming to vastly endow in turn, following the movement conservative pattern, without really grasping the implications-at least in some cases. Rather than benefiting the alleged beneficiaries-the American people-the neoliberals will actually benefit the health care special interests, as is transparently obvious, given who is included in the discussions. In this endeavor, the reformers were all but entirely excluded from the process.
Things are quite different, however, in the field of education, where the special interests are not nearly so well established at the primary and secondary levels. For that reason, looking at education can provide a useful contrast, which I am going to do in Part 2 of this diary, drawing on several recent columns by leading education myth-buster Gerald Bracey, published at Huffington Post. But first, in the remainder of this diary, there is groundwork to be laid, so that the full ramifications of Bracey's criticisms can be understood.
Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration's most intense scientific and environmental controversies....
In June 2007, Obama told reporters in Reno, Nev., that he would not hesitate to reverse many of the environmental policies Bush has enacted by executive order.
"I think the slow chipping away against clean air and clean water has been deeply disturbing," Obama added. "Much of it hasn't gone through Congress. It was done by fiat. That is something that can be changed by an administration, in part by reinvigorating the EPA, which has been demoralized."
But it hardly gets to the heart of the matter: What we have here are not just policy differences, which the Bush Administration dealt with by playing keep-away from Congress and the American people. What we have is a radical break with both past precedent and reality-based sound scientific practice--not to mention the statutory purpose of the agencies involved.
In fact, the proper lens for viewing the Bush legacy at EPA and Interior is the same one laid out by Henry Waxman's staff back in August 2003, in the report Politics and Science in the Bush Administration, which is well worth recalling now, as it says so much about the entirety of the Bush Administration, and the conservative movement more generally. It's not "ideology" that's the problem here--it's ideology that is staunchly opposed to truth, integrity and openness.
This final installment to this series was delayed because of a domino effect set in motion when I had to cover a 6-hour Long Beach Harbor Commission meeting on Tuesday. For a refresher on the earlier installments, just click the links below
In this diary set, I've worked with the notion of historical cycles, or waves-specifically, three differently scaled waves all of which converge on this November's election, and in doing so, confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, The second part dealt with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. The third part dealt with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
Now, I look at the wall those waves are crashing up against...
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