Let’s take a little tour of the current climate in education in honor of the approaching school year. First, here’s the Texas Republican Party opposing the teaching of critical thinking in its 2012 platform:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

“Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really.” Valerie Strauss

I was pointed to this article by Terran Lane, a now-ex professor of computer science who left his (tenured) teaching position at the University of New Mexico for a position at Google.  Lane’s essay lists his many reasons for leaving. Here’s what he says about what we might call a culture of administration:

In my time at UNM, I served under four university presidents, three provosts, and two deans. The consistent pattern of management changes was centralization of control, centralization of resources, and increase of pressure on departments and faculty. This gradually, but quite noticeably, produced implicit and explicit attacks on faculty autonomy, decrease of support for faculty, and increase of uncertainty. In turn, I (and many others) feel that these attacks subvert both teaching and research missions of the university.

“On Leaving Academia”  Terran Lane

And this is from an article describing some of the material included in textbooks that will be a part of Louisiana’s newly privatized public school system.

Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America.”—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996

“14 Wacky “Facts” Kids Will Learn in Louisiana’s Voucher Schools,” Deanna Pan

I’ve watched a lot of TED videos recently, and it’ s got me thinking about revolutionaries. There’s the old-fashioned Marxist, aka Trotsky; the Central American revolutionary, Che Guevara;  the non-violent revolutionaries, Gandhi and Martin Luther King .  I can respect what the armed revolutionaries in the Middle East have had to do, but in the West, that sort of struggle seems ill-advised. Non violent struggle, though,  isn’t defeatist.

Non violent revolutions have succeeded from India to the Philippines to Poland to Tunisia, even if, sometimes, they had to fall back on armed struggle. (Here’s a great TED video on these non-violent struggles by peace activist Scilla Elworthy.)  Non-violent struggle comes in all forms and there are other sorts of real revolutionaries out there working away for radical change. The best of them fly under the radar or hide right out in the open.

(Paul Ryan is no right-wing revolutionary despite the hype; he’s  the latest iteration of David Duke, a corporate mercenary peddling ignorance and bigotry with a Facebook page.) I am particularly interested in people working where the food industry intersects the education system. The school lunch system in the U.S. epitomizes the decadence of the contemporary economy. Curious about the impact of greed? Visit the cafeteria at your child’s school.

Jamie Oliver”s Food Revolution, is show biz  revolutionary work, hidden in the open, but he effectively illustrates the stupidity of feeding school children corporate crap while neglecting to offer the education about food they need.  Oliver seeds the ground for more far-reaching, under-the-radar people like Stephen Ritz, who shows the revolutionary potential of taking the corporation out of the school. His TED video is an inspiration.