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ancianita

(35,812 posts)
Sat Dec 5, 2020, 06:16 PM Dec 2020

Education For Whom and For What?

1. Background conceptions
-- of Walter Lippman on the thinkers and the meddleome herd, the manufacturing of consent (called "progressive essays on democracy," the Creel Commission, the UK Ministry of Information, Edward Bernays ),
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson on the discouraging and frightening purpose of mass public education,
-- James Madison and Aristotle on marginalizing the public re "land reform,"
-- originalism of the U.S. Constitution and David Hume
-- Jonathan Rose on The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
-- 1930's workers' education and high culture
-- Enlightenment concepts -- the empty, leaky vessel, the string trail
-- John Dewey's views

2. Implications
-- Journal of Science endorses science education as imitative of scientists' experience, because high concepts, taught too early in schooling, lead to memorization, spoils the joy of learning, presents science as rote, boring and a pointless game, now called "no child left behind"

3. Unfolding History
-- higher education, mass education after WWII motivated by wealth, work transition forces
-- "new spirit of the age" pressures of Adam Smith's "vile maxim"
-- erosion of Magna Carta's charter of the preservation of the Commons
-- commodification and consumerism "to keep people from our throats"
-- can an education revival eliminate the "new spirit of the age"
-- The American Century changes in state sector economies, universities, the IMF system, massive funding of the Pentagon's research, socializing cost & privatizing profit, higher education, K-12 (and the null set!)
-- 60's enriches society & 70's activism, reacted to by Lewis Powell (Chamber of Commerce) and the Trilateral Commission ("liberal internationalists) the dire threat of individual freedom coming from corporate funded universities and too much democracy from "special interests", both sides demanding the restoration of "order" which have led to attacks on education
-- today, low cost vs for profit higher education, and $1 Trillion debt as a result
-- corporate threats of defunding higher education warp the range and depth of curricula; corporate practices in universities of passing costs to society (class size, personnel contracts)
-- public school assaults based on human mutual care, colleges of arts & science humanities studies, history studies, violates the "new spirit of the age" corporate values

Forces to diminish education cannot progress very far in isolation from the freedom and justice that's already been achieved in the world.







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Education For Whom and For What? (Original Post) ancianita Dec 2020 OP
You reminded me of a video I watched a few times... fleabiscuit Dec 2020 #1
A good one, new info to most of us at the time, but Chomsky tells how old the idea actually was. ancianita Dec 2020 #2

fleabiscuit

(4,542 posts)
1. You reminded me of a video I watched a few times...
Sat Dec 5, 2020, 06:27 PM
Dec 2020

"Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media - Feature Film"

ancianita

(35,812 posts)
2. A good one, new info to most of us at the time, but Chomsky tells how old the idea actually was.
Sat Dec 5, 2020, 07:43 PM
Dec 2020

Thanks!

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