Jajuna

I have been reading a number of blog posts regarding the March 4 day of action protests against the privatization and de-funding of public education across the United States. There is a broad ranging and passionate and often substantive conversation being had amongst students, faculty, and concerned citizens about how to effectively and democratically re-appropriate the educational sphere for the common good. March 4 proved that this issue has the power to unite a wide swath of divergent social elements and actors as hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the US to demand autonomy and justice in education.

Below is a provocative piece called “We are the Crisis” written by an anonymous blog collective that I think captures the sense of malaise and political possibility within the student movement:

We are faced with an eruption that no one can yet explain, an eruption that does not yet have a name. But we need to stop and ask ourselves: how did we get here? And now that we are here, is what is happening at universities across the world something real, a true rupture with the present order?

The 00’s destroyed our dreams. The horror of September 11th in New York was quickly translated into the global horror of the neoconvservative agenda. We saw wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that could not be stopped by millions of people marching in both Washington D.C. and Tehran, in Islamabad and Mumbai, in Palestine and Israel, in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Lagos and Istanbul. The anti-war movement became our iconic moment of revolt and the living nightmare of defeat.

With environmental devastation looming, no health care and the temerity and fear we learned in the Bush years, the future seemed a grey haze. At the same time, the housing market was booming, invincible. Credit flowed freely. Gas prices decline from the near $4 a gallon we’d seen earlier in the decade. Students had the promise of finding, if not equal prosperity as their parents, something approximating the middle class life they’d grown up in, or seen generations of Americans fight for.

We had two options.

One, we could try to get jobs that might secure that kind of life. But the only people making money were the ones who knew how to cheat the very system that promised a fair chance for all. That’s what the guys at Enron proved to us, what Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion investment scheme proved to us. That’s what real estate agents making a quick buck off of loans they knew would fall through proved to us. And that’s what the CEO’s of banks who gave themselves raises in the midst of the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression proved to us.

Playing by those rules revolted us.

So we chose to go to school, more because we thought we should than because we knew what we were doing. Some of us went to develop our love of the sciences, the arts, philosophy, politics, and literature. But we knew that these degrees — even in the sciences — didn’t mean we would find a fulfilling job where our skills would be put to their full use. Our degrees held no promise of economic stability or anything more than a stamp on our way towards the next round of education, skills training or a new career.

The economy no longer needed just our bodies, or even a specialized set of knowledge or “intellectual” skills. It needed us to become highly adaptable, more professional, yet more relaxed, more personable, ready to work with people in different parts of the company, newly emerging companies, companies in different countries. This economy needed us to switch careers when jobs moved overseas, shut down or became obsolete to those who hoped to make a profit from us.

It required us to learn how to design web pages in a week or become a “leader” in our office. Fewer of us became the workers caught in the cogs of the machines. We became the baristas who had to smile while we spilled espresso on ourselves, graphic designers who checked our email in between the digitalized images we mistook for our own art, restaurant servers who knew the ins and outs of organic wines we couldn’t afford, dotcomers who worked twelve hour days in our “casual-fun” offices.

To learn the new skills in the university would mean more loans, more work-study jobs or shit jobs in the world and more checks cut to the university itself. It would mean more time in limbo, between the comforts of youth and the promise of a joyous transition into adulthood.

And then in September of 2008 the economy went into freefall.

We lost our jobs, our friends or our parents lost their jobs. We didn’t know how the fuck to pay back credit card debt we’d accumulated in the delirium of the housing bubble. For those of us in school, or thinking of going to school, the cuts to public education annihilated our last illusions of so-called prosperity. The crisis took away all ideas that our generation had a future comparable to that of the last generation.

In 2009 those cuts to public education symptomatic of the 00’s became monstrously visible. In the past few months, we have seen library hours reduced, writing programs shut, tuition raised, cultural services destroyed and schools go on furlough for weeks at a time while funds continue to pour into stadium and police station renovations, the business schools and executive pocketbooks. We have seen office workers on furlough, custodians and service workers laid off.

We are angry but many of us feel powerless. As we have said, the defeat of the anti-war movement and the consequences for those who have had to flee — or stay behind — in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute the fundamental trauma of our generation, acknowledged or not. Traditional activism: marches, rallies, signing petitions, calls to Congress did nothing to stop the right-wing agenda. And while we may have put momentary hope in Obama, and stood in awe as America elected an African American president, we have become increasingly disillusioned by his refusal to fight for health care, environmental standards, for ending the wars abroad, indeed for a better world. (more…)

My friend Paul just wrote this terrific piece on debates over the Canadian national anthem and the “deflective” politics of the right wing government.

As some of you may know, the Canadian Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, has suggested this week that it might take a look at revising the lyrics of “O Canada” in order to make them more gender neutral. Specifically, they are looking at replacing Robert Stanley Weir’s line “in all thy sons command” (to my recollection, this line is often rendered as “in all our sons command”), with the line from Adolphe-Basile Routhier’s original poem “thou dost in us command.” I think that in our ongoing effort to recognise the centrality of music and popular culture in social and cultural life, this deserves comment.

This, of course, is a pretty valuable discussion to have, and one with at least a twenty year-old history. Indeed, why should patriotism only be associated with sons and not daughters? While we’re at it though, we ought to take it further and ask important questions about the music that is supposed to represent the people of this country. Let’s look at the French version, and begin the process of eliminating its gender specificity (“nos aieux” = “our forefathers”). Moreover, let’s ask ourselves whether a country whose indigenous population was largely polytheistic, and whose contemporary population is a grand mixture of people of many religious and non-religious backgrounds, needs an anthem that so prominently features the Christian deity, in both languages—they are, after all “His” sons. One step further. Let’s acknowledge the troubled history of national anthems themselves as emerging out of a violent, colonial, oppressive nationalism, a violence that is reflected in “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée” (“As in thy arm ready to wield the sword”). And finally, we might just take this opportunity to re-examine the term “patriot” itself, and acknowledge its Latin and Greek roots: pater =  father.* I’d say that this is one way to harness the debate and hold the Harperites to the letter on this move. Then we can have a proper discussion about the notion of national political and cultural representation.

In a move sure to cause a vivid debate, I certainly don’t take this as a signal that the Harper government has all of sudden put gender issues on the table as part of its message. No. This is the same party and leader who have objected to same sex marriage and benefits for same-sex couples, who advocated disallowing women to appeal for pay equity, oppose national childcare, cut funding to Status of Women Canada, who wage a vicious war on the poor that disproportionately affects women, and who generally espouse conservative “family values”…the list goes on. Changing a word is unlikely to have material effects on the lives of Canadian women or anyone else.

But what is perhaps most subtly disturbing about this is that it comes at the very same time as a federal budget. As politicos are fond of calling it, this is an example of “deflective” politics. DeBord called it spectacle. The idea is to seed a story so perfectly well-suited for “person on the street,” populist “analysis” that members of the mainstream media simply cannot help themselves; they simply HAVE to cover it, it’s news. It’s also much easier to get a reporter out on the street with a microphone to ask people if they think pronouns** ought to be replaced in the national anthem than it is to ask people what they think about, say, a $3.25 a week increase in Child Tax Benefits ($3.25!?), continued promotion of “corporate welfare,” increased efforts in securitisation (which is, interestingly, also  included in a chapter about “Supporting Families and Communities”)…and this list goes on. Especially after the Olympics, this is the perfect topic to deflect attention away from the budget; it is downright entertaining to see people speak passionately about “owning the podium” and how much it meant to “us” to have the national anthem played more times than any other host country had theirs played. It’s significantly less entertaining to have dry economists point out the failings (or successes) of a budget.

By nature a deflective tactic is also presumed to be less important than the issue from which it is supposed to divert attention; one wouldn’t deflect with something more crucial, that would draw unwanted attention. There is rarely any intention to move forward on the actual substance of the deflection. In this case, I think it would be fair to say that there will be a 50/50 split amongst those people polled who care about the issue, it will gain no real political traction, and it will thus have served its purpose as an entertaining piece of theatre.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is not actually important, in fact, I argue the opposite. Using gender as a deflection is further evidence of this government’s contempt for progressive social issues. They have cravenly manipulated the intense feeling of pride held by many who live in this country over the great successes of hard-working, talented athletes; they have instrumentalised the supposed sanctity of the national anthem; and they have trivialised gender issues as a means to deflect attention from a budget that appears at first to be business as usual, but which I am sure, upon further inspection, will yield further damages for people, and further gains for corporate Canada. For me, this shows ultimate disrespect for each of these important issues. In addition to playing classic divisive politics (they are ignoring people affected by the many other problematic issues in the anthem’s lyrics), it seems to me a typically chauvinistic approach to suggest that issues affecting women could be addressed by paying attention to “aesthetics” rather than to material concerns.

* thanks to Valérie Savard for bringing up this point.

** interestingly, this is probably one of the only times we’ll see debate over grammar occupy a front and centre position in the mainstream media!

This is from today’s New York Times. Conservative education scholar and former Bush I assistant secretary of education, Diane Ravitch, has performed an about face on neoliberal school reform. Along with such neocon market fundamentalists like Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and others, Ravitch has been a champion of corporate school privatization, high stakes testing, and union busting. That is until recently. In a new book, Ravitch has discovered that these kinds of policies are not only poisonous for schools but for the health and promotion of a substantive democratic culture and polity. In the past, I have not found myself in agreement with Ms. Ravitch who has made a career off of bashing left progressive educators, but I take this reversal as a positive development. In the realm of school policy discussion, this a major ideological about face by a key player in what has become a lock-step ideological consensus on school reform represented by a democratic party establishment under Obama and Arne Duncan that unflinchingly promote a radical corporate agenda in education. Ravitch’s voice may lend crucial support to an opposition who oppose instrumental market-based solutions to socio-educational problems on the basis that they undermine learning and threaten the public good.

Scholars U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up the Debate

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. (more…)