Cookie: Free Will

In a thread on F-book the other day, stimulated by this image:

The protestations of one correspondent about the confusing love of "god" drew from me the following reply:

"Free will" is a mind-game the Oligarchs introduced into the public mind a couple of milennia ago as a way to get people to accept their fates and blame themselves for failing to negotiate the traps and snares the Bosses set before them to hold them in durance.

You may reliably know when they're pulling that crap when somebody's excoriating you, piously, yet ferociously: "You HAD choices. YOU just made the wrong ones."

One may gauze it up with such trappings as suit one's exalted sense of value or purpose, as much as one might wish; it does not change the fact that, in reality, the best anyone can HOPE to achieve is a limited amount of local, private autonomy. With "when to end it" being the ultimate act. That is, or ought to be, enough, and it is or ought to be unnecessary--and unbecoming--to bedeck it with some sort of quasi-spiritual, but trans-material 'will-to-power.'

Free will, the advocates/believers will always say, is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals, thererby willfully (?) ignoring the fact that THAT--the whole "Us" versus "them" thing with the rest of the living world--basically IS the problem.

Folks in that space have a really annoying way of belittling their contradictors, imputing to themselves "levels" of "development" unavailable to or "beyond" those held by the unenlightened.  My interrogator deprecated MY "limited view."

Using "limited" as if it were a bad, or diminished or reduced, inferior thing.  It's to laugh!

Ed Abbey, legendary, proto-environmentalist/advocate/warrior thought 'endless growth' at the cellular level was the 'ideology of the cancer cell.'

I am increasingly of the opinion that "limitlessness" with respect to human aspiration echoes that same mortal, debilitating, ultimately self-destructive trope.

WWH/CJE Soapbox: Stop Me If You've Heard This

Stop me if you've heard this before:

There's a poster/"meme" floating round among my crowd on F-book which features a memorable passage from an Aldous Huxley book (for the number and sagacity of which he was quite rightly honored and renowned) to the effect that "there will be in a generation or two, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude..."

I contend that Huxley dreamed too small. There is, indeed, now such an opiate, but it is not produced in any pharmacy: It's called "commercial television." And it doesn't need additional pharmacological components; just the flickering, blue screen. It is quite mesmerizing, and the messages--called programs and commercials--crafted for it convey such an array of clever and subtle propagandas wiuth such care and attention and at such expense at so MANY levels of awareness that it is QUITE impossible to resist all of them.

I almost wish it were as simple as giving us all a potion to swig or a cocktail of them. Bring on the Soma.

But it's all done, quite simply, with the glowing screen, before which children are stationed from their very first breaths, and from which they do not EVER stray far--a lock-grip now,  with all the portable devices, made all the easier to exert and all the LESS unusual..It's pharmacological to the extent that it's neuro-chemical.  If you watch 'em, though, people consulting their Ipads/pods/etc are just as furiously pursuing a fix as any junkie chasing down a needle and a nickel bag.

Well, shout the scolds who are now just starting to notice that things are NOT as rosy as they had been led their lives-long to believe and cherish, you let it happen! WE let it happen!

No, "We" didn't "let it happen." That's a filthy canard. In a class with free will. It's exactly the way  rapists can blame their prey for being there to be raped. The "You could have stopped it!" meme requires US--the victims--take the blame for what was done TO us. Consciously, with forethought and premeditation. And with terrible resolve.

We gotta understand what "we" would have had to have prohibited. To do that we gotta go back about 100 years, for practical purposes--though the story really begins with the 'discovery" of the "Masses" bu sociologists a generation or so before. Guys with names like Weber and Durkheim. Directly and indirectly, they influenced Sigmund Freud, and Freud changed everything--especially later.

Freud had a nephew in America named Edward Bernays, one of that generation of Americans who were to Wilson what the vanguard intellectuals were to Lenin, with whom they were all contemporaries. Bernays took an interest in his uncle's insights about human motivation--sex and death, the centrala ones--and he recognized in that insight a clue to controlling the Masses which were quickly and soon burgeoning and clamoring for influence. But he was also an eclectic reader and man of letters, He had an European university education, so was fluent in several languages and conversant in many fields.

I admit that this point is speculative on my part. I haven't done the digging to irrebuttably support the claim I'm about to make, but it seems irrefutable to me that Bernays saw the connections and implications among Pavlov's work in what we now call "operant conditioning," and he would certainly have been fluent in the instrumentalist ethics of industrial "Taylorism"--what is now called "scientific management"--and he was already versed in his uncle's "eros" and "thanatos" understandings. He mumbled a few words, in about 1919, and invented the Public Relations industry which has, in various forms and constellations, controlled the destiny of the planet for the next, now almost a century.

"We" had no more possibility of resisting tha onslaught than an ant colony can resist a flood.

And , No, "we" didn't try to "stop it" or to "prevent" it.
But hat again is a canard.
Stop what? Prevent what? The most extravagant spree of national consumption in history?
There were folks who foresaw it: Ed Abbey, for one.
But the appeal was overwhelmig.
It rode--fuck, it exploited--the euphoria of the USer/Allied victories in WW II. It was part of the "American Dream."
The new cars, and the rituals that attended their annual unveiling?
The television?
How old were you, when they sat you down the first time. If you were born after 1955, you were a captive of the flickering screen before your first birthday. The genius of the thing is the flickering screen. Human vision began its evolution in the water, where you must pay attention to flickering because that's how most predators look when they're fixing to have you for dinner. Our eyes evolved to be perfect receptors for the (first) motion picture and then the seemingly now endless permutations of the blinking pixel. It's bloody mesmerizing. Watch a room where there's a tv screen on but no images on it. People keep checking over there, checking that they're not missing something
 
And don't make the BIGGER mistake of claiming to be immune. You're not.
If you think there's a difference between Bud and Coors, or Nike/Puma, or Dodge/Ford, then you've been recruited, brother.

Ed Beat: Raving; Semi-Breaking Scandal; Another "Fix" In; The Common Corpse

Mini-Rave! From "Dr. Woody'z Little Known Facts from the Archives of Educational Statistics":
This usually comes as a grave shock to the system of the drill-n-skill, test-score mavens: In the "science" of psychometry--intelligence testing, in plain terms--there is NO statistically significant difference between IQ scores between 85 and IQ 115.
The "mean" is 100, and one Standard Deviation--about 15 points--in either direction can MORE easily be, MORE LIKELY (probabilistically )to be, a matter of chance than of superior or inferior aptitude. Almost 70% of all 'test scores' will fall between those points. 
The first Standard Deviation (on both sides of the Mean) accounts for about 68% of all variance. The next, on both sides account for another 28%. That's a total of 96% of ALL variance inside the first TWO Std. Devs. Third and beyond: only 4%, top and bottom (and turtles all the way down).
The best book ever written about the 'science' of psychometry, its history, and its manifold and manifest failings, foibles, and fabulists is Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. If you only ever read one book about the rat-trap and cess-pool of educational statistics, it should be this one.This is the book which answered--hell, it demolished--the controversial, 1994 book, The Bell Curve, a decade before the latter was written.

Hot Off the Presses:  According top published reports, administrators in a highly-publicized, much-admired CorpoRat-private/charter school ordered teachers to delete failing grades from reports of student progress in order to bolster the claims by the school of its superiority, effectiveness, and efficiency.
No, really.

A for-profit school that was hyped by Republican lawmakers as a solution to Tennessee’s education problems recently admitted deleting bad grades to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.”
A December email obtained by WTVF showed that Tennessee Virtual Academy’s vice principal instructed middle school teachers to delete “failing grades” from October and September.
“After … looking at so many failing grades, we need to make some changes before the holidays,” the email says, adding that each teacher needed to “take out the October and September progress [reports]; delete it so that all that is showing is November progress.”
“If you have given an assignment and most of your students failed that assignment, then you need to take that grade out.”Raw Story (http://s.tt/1zHPg)

I, for one, am SHOCKED. SHOCKED, I tell you!

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CorpoRat Closures? In Philadelphia, school officials are turning over authority to close "non-performing" schools--invariably in poor and marginalized neighborhood--over to a private corporation, and infuriating many parents. At least 15,000 students in 44 schools city-wide will be affected by the decision, according to reports on the blog, TruthOut.

 Overall, 44 schools will be affected by the shakeup: Of the 37 to be closed, three will relocate by merging with other Philadelphia schools. Beyond this, seven other schools will face major restructuring – i.e., though these school programs will remain intact, the schools themselves will be uprooted and moved to other buildings, merged with other schools, and/or forced to add or subtract grade levels. About 15,000 students will be affected by the proposed changes. And though official numbers have not been released, hundreds of teacher and staff layoffs are also expected.
There is nothing democratic about how this happened to the City of Brotherly Love. Though officials gave lip service to the idea of “parental empowerment” through “school choice,” in the end, parents had no role in deciding what policies would be enforced. Everything was outsourced. As a Pew study reports, the city consulted with “URS Corp., a California-based engineering design firm, and DeJong-Richter, an Ohio-based company that specializes in school-closing issues” to come to its final consensus. Though town hall meetings were organized between 2010 and 2012 to hear citizen concerns, the closures, relocations and reconfigurations  were ultimately decided by the consulting firms, with no serious input from locals.

In other words, the fix was in, from the start, and the kabuki of "community inbolvement" only served to cloak the design.
~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~+~ The Stinking Cor(ps)e: To start a jolly donnybrook, praise the "Common Core Standards" in a room full of teachers with more than five years experience.
The Common Core Standards are the fruit of yet another effort by the "one-size-fits-all" education reformers to "regularize instruction, nationally," in pursuit of higher test scores--which are wrongly hyped as indices of improved student "achievement."
These efforts (most stimulated originally by some ALEC-affiliated organizations like the Gates Foundation) have some harsh critics, not only of the standards themselves, but also of the way they were forced onto State Boards of Education.
One such former State Superintendent is Robert Scott, of Texas, who unleashed a scathing critique of the process recently:

My experience with the Common Core actually started when I was asked to sign on to them before they were written. … I was told I needed to sign a letter agreeing to the Common Core, and I asked if I might read them first, which is, I think, appropriate.  I was told they hadn’t been written, but they still wanted my signature on the letter. And I said, ‘That’s absurd; first of all, I don’t have the legal authority to do that because our [Texas] law requires our elected state board of education to adopt curriculum standards with the direct input of Texas teachers, parents  and business. So adopting something that was written behind closed doors in another state would not meet my state law.’ … I said, ‘Let me take a wait-and-see approach.‘ If something remarkable was in there that I found that we did not have in ours that I would work with our board … and try to incorporate into our state curriculum …

Scott excoriated the backers of the Standards for lacking candor and transparency.

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At last report, the scrappy members of the Seattle Teachers Union are still holding firm and gaining support in their District and elsewhere against administering as meaningless, functionless, but "required" State assessment exam, the "MAP." Marchant!
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Ed Beat: Un-Critical Thinking; Real "Reform"; Michigan Sell Out; Caveats; Reforms.

The Daddy-Party: Legislators in Texas have abandoned all pretense of the appearance of sanity. They have flatly legislated that "Critical Thinking Skills" should NOT be taught in Texas schools: Why?

The Texas GOP spells it out for us: critical thinking challenges fixed beliefs and undermines parental authority.Their concern is understandable. Every culture wants to pass on to its children its own values and one of the most effective ways of doing this is through parental authority. Schools help reinforce social values through indoctrination. The fear is that education designed to have students think critically undermines society by questioning the very values upon which it is based.

Were I still in the professing binness, I'd have special provisions--tests, thinking games, etc.-- for students from Texas, Louisiana and Alabama.

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Long Distance: From a Seattle schools source comes this interesting piece about mis- and mal-feasance under the regime of the cryptio-fascisti running MICHIGAN schools. There is every appearance that the State School Supt has acted officially to endorse and enrich a political ally and person fiend:

Utica (MI) has been a wealth of potential for multiple facets of education, art and culture and many of those programs have been decimated to cater to the special interest of profiteers and politicians.
The Broad trained superintendent was hired with the goal of destroying successful educational opportunities and replacing those with opportunities that will benefit private interests.  Christine Johns is one of the most highly compensated Superintendents across the state.  Carol Klenow, who hired Superintendent Johns, will directly profit by running the Oakland County Virtual Learning Academy Consortium.

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Counter Examples: Meanwhile: From that historical, miasmatic educational swamp, New Jersey, there are encouraging signs:

WHAT would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have.

Then, there's this, from Canada, but still promising. Inquiry learning. What a novel idea. Have kids learn the "basics" while pursuing information/knowledge of personal interest and concern? Why, I never...

It’s one man’s vision for a new school in tune with the 21st century. Jeff Hopkins, the outgoing superintendent of the Gulf Islands school district, says there’s no school like the one he will add to Greater Victoria’s array of independent high schools: The Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry, scheduled to open on Fort Street in September.
For one thing, there won’t be any textbooks, or classrooms of same-age students facing a teacher for set periods of instruction. Instead, students will pursue “personal learning plans” while attaining competency in math, history, sociology, politics and more.
There will not be a teacher telling all of the students to “turn to page 110,” Hopkins says. “Our job would be to help nudge the student into those subject areas as it relates to their inquiry.”

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Sobering: A former high school educator has words of warning for the NEXT level of educators who ill have his former students.His words should be alarming.

 "For more than a decade now we have heard that the high-stakes testing obsession in K-12 education that began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind 11 years ago has resulted in high school graduates who don’t think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests. Here, an award-winning high school teacher who just retired, Kenneth Bernstein, warns college professors what they are up against. Bernstein, who lives near Washington, D.C. serves as a peer reviewer for educational journals and publishers, and he is nationally known as the blogger “teacherken.” His e-mail address is kber@earthlink.net. This appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors."

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The Education Beat: Commodities Exchange? Fight Fiercely; Color Lines; ALEC strikes again and again

Education Isn't A Commodity: The money changers, banksters, cut-purses, and loan-sharks are lining up to feed on the US School System, and Prez LowsBarry is in full sympathy:

Events this week revealed how market-driven education policies, deceivingly labeled as “reform,” are revealing their truly destructive effects on the streets and in the corridors of government.
From the streets, we heard from civil rights and social justice activists from urban communities that school turnaround policies mandated by the Obama administration’s education agenda are having disastrous results in the communities they were originally intended to serve.
From the corridors of government, we were presented with irrefutable evidence that leaders driving the reform agenda are influencing public officials to write education laws in a way that benefits corporate interests rather than the interests of students, parents, and schools.
These events, in tandem, reveal an inconvenient truth of education reform that should make anyone who promotes these policies question, “Whose interests are being served here?”

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 A Black Eye For Hahvuhd:  Harvard has an honor code, which apparently they ENFORCE. Who gnu"?
This may be the only time when the scions of the Coordinator Class actually have to be accountable to their 'superiors' for their actions. And don't feel badly for 'em: they can always finish at Brown or BC, or some other, second tier school, and they'll STILL get into Wharton:

Students Disciplined in Harvard Scandal
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Harvard has forced dozens of students to leave in its largest cheating scandal in memory, the university made clear in summing up the affair on Friday, but it would not address assertions that the blame rested partly with a professor and his teaching assistants.
Harvard would not say how many students had been disciplined for cheating on a take-home final exam given last May in a government class, but the university’s statements indicated that the number forced out was around 70.
The class had 279 students, and Harvard administrators said last summer that “nearly half” were suspected of cheating and would have their cases reviewed by the Administrative Board.
On Friday, a Harvard dean, Michael D. Smith, wrote in a letter to faculty members and students that, of those cases, “somewhat more than half” had resulted in a student’s being required to withdraw.

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Color lines: Melissa Harris-Perry Buries The Lead Story on National Wave of Public School Closings

Thu, 01/31/2013 - 10:37 —
Bruce A. Dixon and the Black Agenda Report are on thsi stuff like white on snow:

When print or broadcast news outlets grab a compelling story, only to distract attention away from what the public needs to know, that's called “burying the lead.” That's what Melissa Harris-Perry did in her Jan. 26 segment on whether the nationwide wave of public school closings were “racist” or not.

Melissa Harris-Perry devoted an eight minute segment of her January 26 MSNBC show to the question of whether the current wave of public school closings, indisputably concentrated in poor black and brown communities across the nation, was racist. She had four panelists on the segment, only one of whom seemed connected to and knowledgeable about the issue, a New York City parent.

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An ALEC "Two-fer": ALEC never sleeps. And don't you believe reports of their demise. NOT TRUE, as the following stories demonstrate:

Three States Pushing ALEC Bill to Require Teaching Climate Change Denial in Schools

By Steve Horn, DeSmogBlog

31 January 13 

he American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - known by its critics as a "corporate bill mill" - has hit the ground running in 2013, pushing "models bills" mandating the teaching of climate change denial in public school systems.

January hasn't even ended, yet ALEC has already planted its "Environmental Literacy Improvement Act" - which mandates a "balanced" teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms - in the state legislatures of Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona so far this year.

MEANWHILE:

Published on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 (coincidentally by Black Agenda Report:

Obama's Race To The Top Drives Nationwide Wave of School Closings, Teacher Firings

by Bruce Dixon

A nationwide epidemic of school closings and teacher firings has been underway for some time. It's concentrated chiefly in poor and minority communities, and the teachers let go are often experienced and committed classroom instructors, and likely to live in and near the communities they serve, and disproportionately black.

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 Wanna Feel Good? Here's a good piece from the heart of the benighted, god-blighted bible-babbling Belt:

How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana’s creationists

"For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana. We recently spoke to him to learn more about how he's making a difference..

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http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/17920483-452/for-insiders-community-group-unos-charter-schools-pay.html

Until Feb 27, Watch "The Revisionaries" Here

Watch The Revisionaries on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

The Ed. Beat: On-line Hype; Common Corruption; Gahhhd! Texas!

 Techno-Hype!: Richard D. Wolff, the most popular Marxist in the USofA, writing in Truthout, dissects the latest flatulence from the Tom Friedman, The NYTimes' Moustache of Punditical Masterfulness, on the subject of what costs are concealed behind the "Wonders" of the electronic classroom:

Thomas Friedman's latest column touting online education "is another exercise in (1) finding a potential positive dimension of capital's latest profit-driven move, (2) hyping it and (3) ignoring its contradictions, especially those that are negative."  No doubt such exercises comfort and distract many of his readers who might have entertained the suspicion of something important lost in the proliferation of online "education." They can relax in the secure feeling that critics of that proliferation are enemies of progress, while promoters of that proliferation are overcoming poverty. If this sounds more like TV soap opera morality than social analysis, you may be right.

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The Common Corpse Curriculum: MUCH needs to be said about the burgeoning efforts to force all USer schools into the same box, the so-called Common Core Curriculum. To say it is controversial, at least among most educators, is a HUGE understatement; a fate shared by how it is speciously misrepresented by its advocates. A case in point, here, a dialogue between an advocate and a detractor, on the blog of that red-haired, educational gad-fly, Susan Ohanian. It's long but needs to be read in whole:

What I am against is Common and Core, that is, the same standards for all students and a few subjects (currently math and English language arts) as the core of all children's education diet. I might even love the Common Core if they were not common or core.

Tucker disagrees. He argues it is both possible and necessary to predetermine and impose upon all students the same knowledge and skills and America is immune to the damages of such efforts that have been experienced in China and other similar East Asian countries."

There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The huge sums of money budgeted for standards and for tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty, the real reason so many students struggle in school...It is simply not true that the Common Core will prepare our children for the future. To conclude, I quote a comment left on my Facebook page by one of my personal heros, former president of America Educational Research Association (AERA) and widely respected educational researcher Gene Glass: "Common Core Standards are idiots' solution to a misunderstood problem. The problem is an archaic, useless curriculum that will prepare no child for life in 2040 and beyond."

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"Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Texans!": A bunch of ignorant, hyper-biased, white supremacist, cretinous, Christard/dominionist fucknozzles, peckerwoods, asshats and douchewaffles with the average IQ of dust mites, and the social sensitivity of steel-wool, controls the content of school textbooks from a back room in Austin, Tx. That, alone, SHOULD be cause for alarm. But these shitwhistles also dictqte the content of more than HALF of the rest of the nation's school books. A documentary on the subject, the Revisionaries, recently appeared on PBS' program, The Independent Lens.


What are the consequences, you might ask? Well, some Texas schools have revived the biblically-founded canard about the theologically inspired theory about the inferiority of blacks:

A new  report put out by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund revealed that Texas Public School books are filled with flawed Biblical theories, including the idea that Jews practice a ‘flawed religion’. The classes, which are supposed to be about the impact of the Bible on history, are basically right wing propaganda classes.
The students are being taught that the world is only 6,000 years old and that blacks were descendants of HAM, while students are taught that whites are descendants of Japheth, and Jews are descendants of Shem.
The report found that the textbooks adopt a right wing nationalist ideology, and even pass off lies about the Founding Fathers:

And if that weren't bad enough:( A recent) report by Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, reveals that at least 57 school districts and three charter schools in the state taught courses about the Bible in 2011-12. That's more than double the 25 school districts teaching such courses in the 2006-06 school year. In 2007 the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1287, which included guidelines designed to improve the quality of such courses while protecting the religious freedom of students and their families.The new report shows that state agencies and many local school districts have largely ignored those guidelines.

http://freakoutnation.com/2013/01/28/in-texas-public-schools-the-bible-gives-scientific-proof-that-the-earth-is-6000-years-old/.

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Last week we told you about the brave, Seattle teachers who have organized behind their refusal to administer yet another, meaningless, but required, standardized exam. Apparently, the movement is spreading!

A boycott of Washington state’s mandated standardized test by teachers at a Seattle school is spreading to other schools and winning support across the country, including from the two largest teachers’ unions, parents, students, researchers and educators.

The decision by teachers at Garfield High School to boycott the state’s Measures of Academy Progress because, they say, the exams don’t evaluate learning and are a waste of time is fueling a growing debate about the misuse of standardized tests in public education.

The Garfield teachers have now been joined by some teachers at a few other schools in Seattle, including the alternative Orca K-8 school. Colleagues at other schools have sent letters of support, as have groups including the Garfield PTSA, the Seattle Student Senate and a group of more than 60 researchers, educators and education activists, including Diane Ravitch and Jonathan Kozol. "...

...Almost all of the teachers and staff at Garfield High are boycotting the test because they say it is not aligned with curriculum and is inappropriately being used by administrators to evaluate teachers, a purpose for which it was not designed. District administrators have defended the test.

The presidents of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which collectively have more than 4.5 million members, issued separate statements supporting the Garfield-led boycott."

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