Category: Society Page 11 of 69

I’ve often founds mid-life reversals – whether personal or policy-based – rather interesting.  So that’s why I found myself reading this piece on a lifelong standardized-testing/charter-schools advocate who has decided she was wrong:

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schoolsand free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. [ . . . ]

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Maybe so, maybe not.  I really don’t follow it enough to know.  But there’s a throwaway in the story that really grabbed me:

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.

Democracy is meaningless without an educated population.  It is a basic – and essential – function of society to provide a decent public education to anyone who wants it.  That isn’t to say that private or charter schools should be excluded – if someone wants to bear the cost of sending their child to one, they should be free to have at it.  But not at the expense of a fundamentally sound public school system.  And the undermining of that public school system too often seems to be the motivating force behind so many reform and charter school advocates.  Using private and charter schools to indoctrinate, instead of educate, will only send us more quickly down the path of ruin.

Was joking earlier today, in the context of protecting ourselves from imaginary threats, about planning for zombie attacks.  And then came across this review of a zombie-centric comic series that raised a rather real question:

What makes The Walking Dead so compelling to me is the way it asks you to decide, over and over again, do you bug-out (get away with your loved ones) or bug-in (help your neighbors and let them help you), or both? I’ve always hoped that I’d be a bug-in person, that in a disaster I’d work for the mutual aid of everyone. But bugging in works best if the rest of the world does it with you — a few selfish buggers-out shatter the social bonds that make it possible for the most people to survive a terminal prisoner’s dilemma. But even for us bug-in types, Kirkman wants us to ask ourselves, how far will you go? Who gets to come inside the shelter with you, and who gets left outside to die?

This isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure exercise.  It’s much more:

This is the kind of ethical question that underpins our responses to everything from humanitarian crises like the one in Haiti to the health-care debate to immigration and refugee policy. It’s at the core of racism and sexism, at the core of xenophobia and discrimination. In its most extreme form, it can give rise to horrors like the American eugenics movement or Naziism, but who among us doesn’t have a secret kernel of it lurking in our breast?

Inspired by a couple of commenters in a previous post:

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4056644458485033927#docid=2873686299795614277[/googlevideo]

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.