“Your Economics Professor is almost Certainly a Charlatan: A review with commentary of ‘My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics’,” a film by Mary Filippo

August 20, 2020 — Monthly Review Essays
My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics

This fifty-eight-minute film will interest anyone who has taken a college-level course in economics, especially those who were baffled by the professor’s pronouncements but too insecure or embarrassed to ask an obvious question. Filmmaker Mary Filippo began in 2004 to audit economics classes in the hope that she could “learn something about globalization. Does it really help people in developing countries? What are its downsides?” She did not learn these things. She says, “What I found in these courses was instead a difficult to understand presentation of the economy through graphic models.”(1)

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If you are reading this, you might be a Conspiracy Theorist

21 August, 2020 — Dissident Voice

by John Steppling

…a permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms . . . and it doesn’t occur.
— Susan Sontag, AIDs and its Metaphors, 1989

I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. I call this a misuse, for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not an hour’s paper. Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. I rejected these alternatives.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics, 1929

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been called a conspiracy theorist. Also you’ve been derided and shamed for questioning the “science” of the Covid debacle.

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The Virus strikes again: The A-Level results fiasco

16 August 2020 — The Good Law Project

Today we have launched legal action against Ofqual over failings in the process for awarding A Level results.

We have received hundreds of emails from devastated students, whose grades have been downgraded and who have lost their university places and job offers, lost funding and scholarships, and completely lost their faith that their Government will help.

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How Video and Online Reading Is Undermining Cognition. Protecting and Sustaining Classroom Teaching

11 August 2020 — Global Research

As the Coronavirus rages uncontrolled in the United States and elsewhere, in education we are once again relying on online delivery of courses. That of course is really the only sensible alternative we have. However, as we ramp up for another school year online, it behooves us to pause just for a moment to reflect on the serious downside of overplaying this emphasis on technology as a long-term educational method.

Is the ‘consequences room’ for our children a bit ‘Orwellian’?

21st February 2020 — True Publica

By TruePublica Editor: I was shocked to see the instructions of a “consequence Room” for school children and had no idea that even primary schools are using isolation rooms to punish pupils as young as five years old, with some secondaries admitting they are willing to put older pupils into seclusion for up to five days in a row. If you’re a parent of young children, you are probably aware of this, but I have to admit, this is new to me.

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UK National Education Union and #SchoolCuts hold Together for Education rally By Tom Pearce

4 July 2019 — WSWS

The June 21 #SchoolCuts campaign meeting at Westminster Hall in London was billed as a day to gather “together for education, a day of celebration, campaign planning and rallying.”

The main organizer was the National Education Union (NEU), with support from the Association of School and Colleges and Leaders (ASCL), National Union of Head Teachers (NUHT), the GMB, Unison and Unite.

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Education for Tomorrow Summer 2017

19 June 2017 — Education for Tomorrow

Summer 2017 – Issue 130

EDUCATION for TOMORROW is produced by people involved with education of like mind most of the time and certainly on all vital matters of education and politics.

It does not claim to represent the views of any one political party of the working class. Nonetheless its aim is at all times to speak in the interests of all working people. 

In this issue (PDF): 

  • Teacher conferences
  • Teacher shortage crisis
  • Why a socialist should support Brexit

Academy watch

  • The global battle for the soul of education

EfT 130.pdf

This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates' Education Investment Brought to You by… Bill Gates

4 September 2016 — FAIR

Bill Gates (photo: Sebastian Derungs/WEF)

Bill Gates (photo: Sebastian Derungs/WEF)

The Guardian (8/31/16) published a broadly positive report on Liberian education, which is handing over the reins of 120 primary schools to a consortium of private education companies and NGOs in a pilot program exploring privatization of the West African nation’s schools. One passage in particular was especially glowing:

The deputy minister [of Education], Aagon Tingba, is reading The Bee Eater, a biography of Michele Rhee, a polarizing educational reformist and former chancellor of Washington, DC, public schools. “She changed the lives of children in Washington, but people complained her methods were controversial. But she made a difference. So why can’t we do that here?

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The Failure of Academia: British University endorses the “War on Terrorism” by Ramzy Baroud

14 January, 2011 — Global Research

Deepak Tripathi’s most recent book, Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books) raises several issues, both within and outside of its content. It is based on research for his doctoral dissertation, the qualification for which he never received.

Tripathi, a former BBC producer, is immensely proud of his latest volume, even while it is associated with a tumultuous experience at the University of Sussex, a renowned British university.

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The Failure of Academia: British University endorses the “War on Terrorism” By Ramzy Baroud

14 January, 2011 — Global Research

The Book that Was Not Meant to Be Published

Deepak Tripathi’s most recent book, Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books) raises several issues, both within and outside of its content. It is based on research for his doctoral dissertation, the qualification for which he never received.

Tripathi, a former BBC producer, is immensely proud of his latest volume, even while it is associated with a tumultuous experience at the University of Sussex, a renowned British university.

For a while, things had gone according to plan, and the future seemed promising. Tripathi was told to prepare for his graduation by his supervisor, Dr. Stephen Burman, Dean of the School of Humanities.

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Student Protests and the Emerging Discontent of Youth By Oliver Huitson

18 December, 2010 — The Bullet Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 442 December 18, 2010

The “iPod generation” have long been written off as apathetic, pampered wasters; a collection of illiterate Nathan Barleys draining their parents resources. Yet, from the storming of Tory HQ to campus occupations across the country, it is those same youth now leading public resistance to the Coalition’s cuts. The tripling of tuition fees is unquestionably serious, but it represents only a small part of the problems facing Britain’s young. An increasing awareness of generational imbalances, inflamed by [Chancellor of the Exchequer] George Osborne‘s austerity measures, could see student protests snowball into a wider movement of youth discontent.

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Media Lens: What Happened To Academia? – Part 1

14 December, 2010 — Media Lens

Exchanges With Piers Robinson of The University Of Manchester

What happened to academia? In 2008, Terry Eagleton, formerly Professor of English Literature at Manchester University, wrote:

“By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries.” (Eagleton, ‘Death of the intellectual,’ Red Pepper, October 2008)

He added:

“The logic of the commodity has now penetrated into the sphere of human needs and nurture, breeding pathological symptoms there. In universities, as in transnational corporations, a largely disaffected labour force confronts a finance-obsessed managerial elite.”

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“Separate and Unequal school system in ‘liberal’ NYC”

14 April, 2010 – Grassroots Education Movement

If you’re a white student and you arrive at the public elementary school building on 95th Street and Third Avenue, you’ll probably walk through the front door. If you’re a black student, you’ll probably come in through the back. So reported the Village Voice on one of New York’s best-kept secrets: its public schools are some of the most segregated public schools in the country. The schools have two tiers: one for affluent white families who pump private funds into THEIR kids classrooms, and another for largely minority, poor communities— underfunded, underserved and overcrowded: 43% have severe space problems, and the recession ensures that no help is in sight. GRITtv went to Donna Nevel, an advocate for fairer schools in New York, for her take.

Distributed by Tubemogul.


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