THE EDUCATION FACTORY

    President Barack Obama was in Wisconsin yesterday marketing his education reform agenda – “the race to the top.”  As I have said in the blog many times over the last five years education reform based on high stakes testing will do nothing about erasing the “education gap” but it will increase the profit margins of corporations which sell tests, text books and soft-ware designed to implement the education reform scam.  
    Today’s Washington Post puts another light on the “race to the top” agenda.  Apparently the Pentagon types are having a hard time recruiting educated and healthy recruits.  While recruitment numbers are up due to big money bonuses and a downed economy the long-term prospects don’t look good since many potential recruits are high school dropouts and have serious health issues such as obesity.  
    The “factoid” which came out earlier this week that over 50% of US children are on food stamps sometime in the year and that among African-Americans that goes up to 90% gives one the picture that many in the current school age generation may suffer from long term education and health deficits that may make them unfit for service to their country. 
    Let me summarize what appears to be the rationale such so-called "education" reform:

• We need a global workforce who can compete with the best in the world especially from Europe and Asia.  Education reform is all about the nurturing and feeding of corporate America - filling the slots of an emergent high tech post-modern capitalism;
• We need a robust and versatile volunteer military to enable US presidents and Congresses to invade, occupy and defeat the space of “evil doers” wherever they might be.  So we need to produce able-bodied men and women who are physically and mentally equipped to be our nation’s fearless warriors;   

    The classic argument from Plato to Freire that education and good health are good in themselves and liberating has been covertly replaced by an explicit rationale that they instead are to be instruments of a strategy to fill the slots of corporate America and the Military Industrial Complex.  Testing and better nutrition are simply a “post-industrial” method of fitting square pegs into round holes.
    Educational reformers from John Dewey to Jonathon Kozol have identified the “industrial” model of schooling as the harbinger of conformity, mediocrity and failure.  Workforce education or the militarization of K-12 is not designed to educate engaged citizens but to fill the slots of our downsized economy and/or the manpower needs of an increasingly outsourced Pentagon.  
    Pass me my soma pill Dr. Orwell or Dr. Huxley.  Secretary of Education "Arne" Duncan is on the march to his own version of 1984 and Brave New World.  Now I get what “change” really means!   

    PS:  From the article (see link below):  Educators say preschool programs are one of the best ways to ensure academic success later in life.  Military officials think they're one of the best ways to ensure the country has a large pool of people who will be savvy enough to fly helicopters, drive tanks and gather intelligence.   "You can't wait until high school in order to change a young person," said Kelly, the retired major general. "It has to be done at a very early age, and that's why the need for high quality early learning is so vital."
    RAD:  To paraphrase a familiar line - "a mind [and body] are a terrible thing to waste!  Isn't that why we must bring the troops home now? 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/04/AR2009110402899.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter