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Tue, 30/08/2011
Massive Protests in Honduras against the Privatization of Education - 1 activist killed!
After four weeks secondary students continue to occupy schools across Honduras to protest what they say is an effort to privatize much of the public education system. Nahúm Alexander Guerra, a student at the Pompilio Ortega Agricultural School in Macuelizo in the northwestern department of Santa Bárbara, was killed the night of Aug. 22 as he stood by the door of the school, which the students had occupied. An unidentified man yelled "strikers," and shot the teenager in the chest and in the arm. (El Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, Aug. 23)
Just as this homicide was perpetrated by “unknown individuals”, the ex-governor of the State of Florida, Jeb Bush, was making a speech at the Regional Conference on Central America: “Quality Education and Social Development: the challenge for governments and citizens of Central America”, promoted by the Business Council of Latin America (CEAL, in Spanish)....
http://www.emancipating-education-for-all.org/education_protests_honduras_aug2011
Teachers Determined to Make a Difference in this round of bargaining.
September 1st, 2011
Source: Inside Higher Ed
By Scott McLemee
When students took to the streets in Rome last November to demonstrate against proposed budget cuts to the university system, they introduced something new to the vocabulary of protest. To defend themselves from police truncheons they carried improvised shields made of polystyrene, painted, on the front, with the names of classic works of literature and philosophy: Moby Dick, The Republic, Don Quixote, A Thousand Plateaus…. The practice caught on. A couple of weeks later, another “Book Bloc” appeared in London as students and public-sector workers demonstrated against rising tuition.
By the time an enormous anti-Berlusconi protest took place in Rome on December 14, a group of Italian faculty members had decided on a syllabus of 20 titles worth carrying into battle. It’s all over the place: The Odyssey and Fahrenheit 451, Spinoza’s Ethics and Donna Haraway’sCyborg Manifesto, Foucault and Fight Club. And so when the forces of law and order descended on the protesters, swinging, it was a visual allegory of culture in the age of austerity — budget-cutting raining blows on the life of the mind, though also, perhaps, the canon as defensive weapon.
The full list of works suggested by the wonderfully named Network of Rebel Faculty appears in Springtime: The New Student Rebellions, a collection of articles and images edited by Clare Solomon and Tania Palmieri; it was published by Verso in England earlier this year, and is appearing in the U.S. just now. Solomon was president of the student union at the University of London during the protests last year; the introduction, dated from January, has the feel of something written with the adrenaline and endorphins still flowing. Some of the pieces at the end of the book narrate and analyze the then-breaking developments in Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria. In addition to sections on France and Greece, there are documents and analyses from the student protests in California during the 2009-1010 academic year....
eta..the making of a polystyrene shield.
http://www.thenewsignificance.com/?p=3899
I have saved these links you posted to read so little time and so much to do also much useful info possted here that I also pass on to some very good friends who for them the education issue is top priority
I just came a across an interesting document if your interested heres the link
http://www.sacsc.ca/PDF%20files/Research%20and%20Evaluation/Global%20Education%20Lit%20Review-Lyons-06.pdf
“Global education must avoid the traditional confines of curriculum development” (p. 499). Apparently, there is no magic bullet when it comes to integrating a global perspective into the Global Education , “the structure of schools encourages fragmentation, mystification, simplification, and omission of knowledge for efficiency and control ). Not to be in control of the learning—being without the clarity of beginning, middle, and end—may create questions concerning prescribed outcomes. An example of this is the CIDA resource for educators: The Global Classroom Initiative. Canadian youth are encouraged to see themselves as one part of a complex and interconnected entity—our world. A transformative paradigm suggests change and change can only begin with the individual. Selby (1991) believes that “an emerging awareness of the world goes hand-in-glove with a growing level of self-awareness” essential components of global citizenship where the development of self is intricately tied to the development of social responsibility: attachment, achievement, autonomy, and altruism. Through the adaptation of Brendtro and Long’s work (1995), SACSC identifies these four Global Education Literature Review–Becoming the Change We Want to See The Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities Revised April, 2006 6 elements as essential in the creation of a safe and caring environment. Global citizenship derives from the notion of altruism, or generosity, and is cultivated through concern for others.http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/nscentre/ge/GE-Guidelines/GEgs-app2.pdf
"global education may help people realise that globalisation expresses the course of the future social development and that it depends on us all whether developments benefit only a privileged part of the globe’s population or humanity as a whole. global education (and global learning) is an answer to globalisation processes and their chances as well as risks."A Kennebecasis Valley school is starting to turn away from traditional, paper-based agendas and textbooks and offering more assignments online and electronic books.
When classes started this year, roughly 700 Hampton High School students were given two-gigabyte USB keys - or portable memory sticks - instead of agendas. Some classes have also switched from textbooks to online assignments.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/story/2011/09/15/nb-hampton-...
Lots of post secondary courses routinely make reference to online articles and books. The trickle is becoming a flood.
However, the lucrative book industry, in which students are gouged for huge sums of money by being forced to buy the latest edition of the textbook that, once again, summarizes the theory from 500 BC to 1800 AD in the discipline of Zzz Yyy Xxx will continue. They're making too much money to stop. Although, I am happy to report that some profs will allow students to use previous editions of such texts; in one case this is a difference between a $175 text and a $50 used version of the previous edition.
There are a couple more articles in the next issue of MR available.
http://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/khalil-gibran-international-academy
It's not just buying the "latest edition", it's having little or no choice with respect to purchasing North American editions. In my student days, whenever someone went home to someplace like Egypt, Singapore, China, etc we'd all put in orders for books. Even with shipping that $100 textbook would cost $2, maybe $3.
That's great ... except when the course is Poli Sci, and all the radical theory has to be ripped out of the book before your friend goes home. e.g., I had a friend in Malaysia who had to do that ... 20 years ago. Interesting, nevertheless.
Noam Chomsky spoke at UofT about the attack on education in the U.S. since the 1970s. The elite in the U.S. are undermining public education in America and doing great harm to the future of America and U.S. economy in general. He says the rest of the Western World is not far behind.
Chomsky talks about the Powell Memorandum, and trouncing of the century-old Haldane Principle barring Government intrusion into academic research. This is real Big Brother stuff.
Ralph Nader has emphasized how wrong it is for the military and private contractors to be dealing themselves into university research. And today the Military-Industrial Complex is paying for research at university research centres like Lawrence Livermore Labs in California where they are developing the most deadly chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction ever conceived. It's so wrong.
WTO and the GATS - Why teachers should be concerned (Canadian)
Bangladesh:
Students Resist State Abandonment
of Public Education
September 2011
The government of Bangladesh introduced a new funding rule (clause 27(4)) that the Jagannath University (JnU) should generate its own funds to run its activities - without being supported by the state. It is worth mentioning that JnU is suppose to be a public institution.
Consequently the university is forced to look for funds elsewhere. Usually there are two potential sources: fees and private investors. Following this step by the state it is feared that semester fees are to be increased by 600% (previously: 3,500 BDT = 34€ = 47US$ - NOW: 20,000 BDT = 195€ = 266US$)....
http://ism-global.net/education_state_abandonment_bangladesh_sept2011
this link was fowarded to me via a good friend an hour ago
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_on_the_world_peace_game.html
an educational universal peace game with brilliant 4th graders and some very interesting perspectives
By William Lloyd George
October 10, 2011
It’s a quiet Monday afternoon in central Bogota. The usual police sirens can be heard in the distance and birds singing in the predominantly green city. Suddenly, the peace is broken. Whistling, explosions and chanting can all be heard in the distance. “Education for the masses,” chant the columns of colourful students as they make their way down to one of Bogota’s main roads....
http://www.indypendent.org/2011/10/10/colombian-student-uprising/
Just don't call her Che
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/student-protests-rile-c...
Echoing 1960s street activism, the Chilean Winter dabbled in the absurd, but with a high-tech, social-media twist.Thousands gathered in front of the presidential palace in June dressed as zombies, then broke into a choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In July, students again gathered in front of the palace for a huge “kiss-in.”
Though the ideas came, said Giorgio Jackson, former student president of Chile’s Catholic University, from “everywhere, absolutely every local space,” the movement’s success hinged on the leadership’s ability to channel such creativity while maintaining a unified front to government and the media. The organization used a Web site to gather ideas and disseminate content for placards and posters. And it has used Ms. Vallejo’s 300,000-plus Twitter followers to quickly initiate huge “cacerolazos,” a form of dictatorship-era protest where people walk the streets banging on pots and pans.
While they vow to continue until all their lofty demands are met, the students have already scored some political victories. The government’s proposed 2012 budget has a $350 million increase for higher education, with promises to finance scholarships for qualifying students from families up to the 60th percentile in household income. Meanwhile, the year began with the naming of Chile’s third education minister in six months.
It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the movement’s focus on education began to broaden. As more support for the movement came from outside the universities, its interests changed accordingly. “This year we have already started talking about political reforms and tax reforms, and we think the students and youth in general play an important role in profound reforms in the country,” said Noam Titelman, the new student president at Catholic University.
Tax reform is, not coincidentally, now at the top of the government’s agenda. And rightly so: though it has the largest economy in Latin America, Chile is the 13th most unequal country in the world.
“Something very powerful that has come out of the heart of this movement is that people are really questioning the economic policies of the country,” Ms. Vallejo said. “People are not tolerating the way a small number of economic groups benefit from the system. Having a market economy is really different from having a market society. What we are asking for, via education reform, is that the state take on a different role.”
The movement has also begun to spread regionally. Ms. Vallejo lent her star power to Brazilian student protests in August, while in November students demonstrated in France, Germany and several other countries in support of Confech’s Latin American March for Education.
“The student movement here is permanently connected to other student movements, principally in Latin America, but also in the world,” Ms. Vallejo said. “We believe this reveals something fundamental: that there is a global demand for the recovery and defense of the right to education.”
But the students clearly have a lot to learn about real-world politics. Ms. Vallejo and other student leaders spent weeks lobbying in Parliament, only to be left out of the final budget negotiations.
Frustration with Ms. Vallejo’s strategy propelled a rival leftist, Gabriel Boric, to challenge her in the latest round of student-government elections. On Dec. 7, national TV news crews lingered past 5 a.m. outside the University of Chile to cover a stunning defeat for the world’s most famous student leader.
Yet even in her early-morning concession speech, Ms. Vallejo claimed victory, recognizing that the movement was greater than any one figure. Indeed, her rise has barely broken stride. She just left for a speaking tour in Europe, while her first book, a collection of her speeches and essays from the last year, is rising through the best-seller ranks. And she is being heavily courted by the Communist Party to run at the top of its list for the Chilean Congress in the 2013 elections.
For all its recent stumbles, the movement’s prospects of getting a woman under 26 elected to Congress would help fulfill one of its underlying aims, to kindle young people’s interest in traditional politics. This may be Ms. Vallejo’s greatest contribution: to restore faith in a discredited system by showing a new generation that politics can be responsive to the people’s demands.
Sightly off-topic, but I have often wondered why there isn't a section of Babble devoted to education issues generally (not focused, as here, on post-secondary concerns, vital as they are). I see "education" including K-12 as much more than a "youth issue" it's a societal issue of vital importance.
It's threatened by the current government which has already eliminated the Canadian Council on Learning and the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network. Must keep the proles in their place after all.
Has anyone else wondered about this?
No.
I've stopped wondering why there isn't a separate section of babble devoted to "X" issue because there are so many issues that don't have a separate section in babble. It's obviously babble policy to restrict the number of issue sections as much as possible
Canada's Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa has raised the age limit for admission to a controversial sex exhibit after dozens of complaints about the content.
As well, animated video informing children about masturbation has been removed.
The moves follow concerns raised by Heritage Minister James Moore's office and complaints about the exhibit called Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition.
"The museum has received a higher-than-expected amount of expressions of concerns from the public," spokesman Yves St-Onge told Reuters.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/05/17/sex-museum-technology.htmlSerious action must be taken against staff of a Manitoba school who stood by while students were duped into chewing moose droppings, says a U.S. consultant on bullying.
"This incident is one of the worst I've seen. If everything I've seen in the news is correct. I would be disciplining teachers and thinking about transferring the principal," said Stuart Twemlow.
"If this is not dealt with in schools - and if you want schools to be better places to learn, a better climate for learning - you have to deal with this. It's the elephant in the room and it doesn't go away if you don't talk about it."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2012/06/07/mb-moose-droppin...A Scottish council has backtracked on its decision to block a school girl from posting photos and ratings of her school cafeteria meals on her blog.
Martha Payne began posting her food critiques to the blog six weeks ago. The nine-year-old student attends school in Lochgilphead, a coastal town about 210 kilometres west of Edinburgh
http://www.cbc.ca/news/offbeat/story/2012/06/15/food-blog-scotland-stude...
Grieving Father Struggles to Pay Dead Son's Student Loans.
It's like some monstrous Kafka-esque story of collateralized debt obligations, family style. Ain't capitalism grand?
In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we turn now to Chile, where an artist’s act of protest against student debt has gone viral. Francisco Tapia, known as Francisco "Papas Fritas," or "French fries," says he burned $500 million worth of debt papers from the private Universidad del Mar, the University of the Sea. Chilean authorities are in the process of shutting down the university over financial irregularities....
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/23/exclusive_chilean_robin_hood_artis...
Show trial ends with prison for educators who wouldn't confess
MR Editorial (above)
Meanwhile in NB. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/free-tuition-low-income-1.3535261
MR has another education focussed special issue in their March 2016 publication.
I see there is an article by Henry Giroux. Giroux is, I think, the best expert on the late Paulo Freire in the world.
Give credit where credit is due: NDP 2017 candidate Jack Trovato (a former school teacher I think) calls out the barbarous Liberal regime's attempts to privatize public education in British Columbia.
While buckets of money go to their rich friends, the BC Liberals try to balance the budget on the back of school children.
The Privatization of Public Education: Are We Headed Towards a Future of Inequality?
Trovato provides a nice list of resources for investigating the issue further.
For more information on this subject, please also see:
Funding public education in BC: Challenges and Solutions http://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Public/Parents/FeedTheirMindsBrochure.pdf
Education Funding http://vancouversun.com/opinion/letters/monday-april-11-education-funding
Questions and answers about underfunding of BC public schools http://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Public/Issues/EdFinance/EdFundingQA.pdf
BCTF looking forward to opportunity to have case heard by Supreme Court of Canada http://www.bctf.ca/NewsReleases.aspx?id=38992
VSB budget cuts yet another example of Christy Clark’s education neglect http://bcndpcaucus.ca/news/vsb-budget-cuts-yet-another-example-christy-clarks-education-neglect/
Larger classes and fewer supports show that Christy Clark failed to deliver on her ‘number one priority’ http://bcndpcaucus.ca/news/7571/
Christy Clark gives record funding to private schools, pressures some Vancouver public schools to close http://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/05/06/news/vancouver-gave-province-half-billion-pay-schools-why-shortfall
Private schools getting more taxpayer dollars than ever, as public schools close http://www.news1130.com/2016/04/29/parents-group-two-tiered-education/
School Closures: Don’t close the doors on neighbourhood schools! http://bctf.ca/IssuesInEducation.aspx?id=10396 Vancouver School Board in ‘crisis situation’ over massive budget gap http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouver-school-board-in-crisis-situation-over-massive-budget-gap/article29489840/
Richmond school closures coming in 2017 http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/2016/03/10/richmond-school-closures-coming-in-2017?utm_source=addThis&utm_medium=addthis_button_facebook&utm_campaign=Richmond+school+closures+coming+in+2017+%7C+Vancouver+24+hrs#.VvDacXxrCHQ.facebook
Truly a monstrous and evil regime, making war on the most needy while laughing all the way to the bank.
This is neo-liberalism. Who needs fascists when such people do the same job at half the cost? :rolleyes:
The Tyee presents "The Future of Education: Beyond the Headlines" in an event on October 5 in Vancouver. The whole thing will be recorded and posted on their site shortly after.
Oct 5 The Future of Public Education
Crawford Killian with an interesting piece at The Tyee.
Choosing Alternate Futures for Public Education
Interestingly, he compares business shnooks with Marxist-Leninists, praises the Finnish system, and says young people need more freedom in education.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nelson-waitlist-lv-rogers...