Stuff about Stuff

Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff Project: “We amplify public discourse on a series of environmental, social and economic concerns and facilitate the growing Story of Stuff community’s involvement in strategic efforts to build a more sustainable and just world.”

Season One: The Story of Stuff

Season Two: The Story of Citizens United v. FEC (2011) 

Under Seige

Very few, if any, urban public school systems have been spared from the pompous neo-liberal mentality of today’s education reform cabal.

Beware: Do NOT confuse the term “neo-liberalism” with “social liberalism.” There is NO connection.

Neo-liberalism is an economic theory that outlines a set of policies which support and promote the economic system of capitalism. According to CorpWatch, the main points of neo-liberalism include:

• THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government [Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights].
• CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care [In the name of reducing government's role and supporting government subsidies and tax benefits for business].
• DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits.
• PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water [Usually done in the name of greater efficiency].
• ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" and replacing it with "individual responsibility."

If you've been following the arguments for today's school reform movement, all these principals will sound familiar.

Americans usually associate “reform” with a movement that will make things better, for example, reforming child labor laws. However, this is a case where U.S. citizens need to be much less naive!

The ultimate outcome of today’s public education “reform” is the elimination of our children's schools as a public institution, followed by a rebuilding where all schools will be operated privately. This time, reform isn't going to mean any type of improvement which the trusting, average person is likely to have in their mind.

In the 19 months since I started this blog, I’ve connected with parents, teachers, and community members in Boston, New York City, Albany, Baltimore, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Portland, Oregon. In each of those cities, people are experiencing the same neo-liberal siege of their local public school system. In some cases, the condition is at a very advanced stage.

Recently I had an exchange with the authors of Seattle Education 2010, a blog that focuses on charter schools as well as the presence of the Broad Foundation within Seattle public schools. They display the following quote from Albert Einstein at the bottom of their website:

‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

The rational mind beams brightly from the minds controlling public education reform today. Think about places like Harvard Business School and about all those now-interested-in-education MBAs. Think about Milton Friedman who designed the blueprint for the total corporate privatization of Earth. He was originally a mathematician and statistician who became an economist. And think about the billionaires who are suddenly devoted to "improving" public education. Eli Broad was a precocious Certified Public Accountant (the youngest ever in Michigan at the time) who became a corporate CEO. Bill Gates was a precocious computer scientist before he became a corporate CEO and the wealthiest, and thus the most powerful, person who has ever lived on this planet. There would be little balance in the minds of today’s education reform leaders; they are weighted down by their strategic business-minded rationality.

The danger of today’s education “reform” movement is that the arguments which defend it are so damn logical. That logic – potentiated by the billions spent on developing and pushing it – may be what is giving it so much strength. But might doesn't necessarily make right.

Unfortunately, their logic wins, especially when so many people don’t view propaganda with a critical eye, don't know that they need to be skeptical about grand claims, have absolute trust in “philanthropists,” and want the ugly problems which chronically exist in inner-cities to simply disappear.

They think to themselves, why not fixate on data? What's wrong with testing children a little bit more, and a little bit more? Why aren't teachers to blame when their students have trouble absorbing information in the classroom? Why not replace teachers with smart, analytically-minded, Ivy League-trained, 22-year-olds, even if they've only had six weeks of summer training? Why wouldn’t the KIPP model work for every single child, it makes them so obedient? What's wrong with calling students, their teachers and their schools "failures" when test scores don't measure up? What could possibly go wrong if our nation's public schools were replaced with those that are privately-run?

I really liked the Einstein quote, so I looked it up and found more great quotes about rationality and creativity.

On Rationality...

Being rational does not necessarily kill creativity, but it can very easily do so. This is because we are not rational, even though we think we are. Psychologists call it ‘bounded rationality' because although we have a deep need to appear rational, the world is simply too complex for us to fully understand.

Quotes:

‘Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour germinates no more.’ — Henri-Frédéric Amiel

‘No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.’ — Niels Bohr

‘Sir, we must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.’ — Winston Churchill

‘Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.’ — Lord Dunsany

‘Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.’ — Albert Einstein

‘Rules and models destroy genius and art.’ — William Hazlitt

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ — Martin Rees

‘Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.’ — James Harvey Robinson

‘Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.’ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

‘The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.’ — George Bernard Shaw

'People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.’ — William Butler Yeats

The Latino "Problem"

America has always been dependent on, and addicted to, the products and services that extremely cheap labor has provided for us. Our addiction started when we acquired, and enslaved, millions of African men, women and children.

Among other things, these slaves produced a range of pleasant commodities for our ancestors to enjoy -- tasty sugar for cakes and rum, lovely soft cotton for bed linens and clothing (sometimes dyed to a beautiful blue color with the indigo that the slaves had also grown), and heavenly tobacco for our ancestors to smoke and snort. Along the way, America became powerful and rich by delivering this stuff to the rest of the world, and in doing so we helped everyone else get hooked on all of these marvelous things.

By the time the Transcontinental Railroad needed to be built, slavery had been abolished and most slave descendants were kept “slaving away” in barely-paying, back-breaking jobs such as sharecropping. Ever inventive, American businessmen imported laborers from China, the province of Canton in particular. These workers were highly valued for a number of their qualities, including the fact that they were small -- so they did not eat as much as other types of laborers would -- but they were still incredibly hardworking and strong.

When the Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869, the Chinese simply weren't needed anymore. We made up our minds to decide that they were a threat to us and had our Congress pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This blocked further Chinese immigration for the next sixty one years.

We shunned the Chinese until World War II, but then, because they hated the Japanese at least as much as we did, we decided they could be our friends. Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, and a select number of immigrants from China were invited into our country once again.

America has a long existing pattern of extreme dependency on cheap labor, but also an inevitable, resulting resentment towards those who provide it for us. Our current tension about Latino immigrants and the love/hate relationship we have about our outsourcing to labor markets around the world (“It’s soooo irritating to try to talk to those Indians for tech help!”) are just two more examples of our famous modus operandi.

From the upper class to the very poor, we Americans are addicted to the "high" we get when we consume the products and services that cheap labor provides to us. We have a four-hundred-year-old history of this habit -- in evidence today with the tons of crap that we feel compelled to buy and our insatiable lust to indulge ourselves in personal services, not to mention our massive out-of-control credit card debt and a planet that we have damaged. We just can't stop.

Our demand for cheap things and services that we require in order to find “happiness” is more than enormous. For example, there was a time only a couple of decades ago, that nail salons did not exist on every corner in our cities and suburbs. Even among upper middle class women, having a professional manicure was done fairly infrequently. Now, all social classes can afford frequent professional manicures from, and are dependent on getting them done by, mostly young Vietnamese women who file nails and inhale the stinky dust for cheap. Walk-in closets in the bedrooms of modest homes, once built only in mansions, are becoming standard features because they are essential to so many of us. We have to store all that stuff somewhere!

With our intense cravings, we are on a perpetual search to find a new substance (provided by cheap human capital) that will supply our "fix" and give us that blissful high. As with drug addictions, I am certain that brain scans would reveal that this response is an actual chemical phenomenon. I can feel it when I shop.

We constantly need to keep the “drug” cheap enough so we can buy it and still afford to overeat the way we like to do. We absolutely must have cheap labor. With our current set of social values, it is non-negotiable.

The problems arise when we have to face the fact that our cheap labor is human, and that they actually have human needs that have-to-be-met. Then we end up feeling resentful and pissed off towards them!

Those of us in mainstream America are perpetually ambivalent about the cheap laborers on whom we are dependent -- yes, we love them, and yes, we hate them. We just don't want to talk about this ambivalence in an honest way. If we did, we would have to face the unpleasant fact that we are the ones who have actually created the problems that we’re complaining about! Few people want to admit their shortcomings and confess their sins.

Since we’ll always want someone to clean our toilets and sew the $10 shirts that we "absolutely must have,” and I personally don't think we'll be able to tap into a labor source of little green aliens from outer space anytime soon, cloning might eventually provide the answer for us. We would need to create a smart enough -- but still sub-human -- species that could do all our dirty work like taking care of our homes and our precious offspring for dirt cheap pay.

Other than relying on cloning to solve our problems, there is hope in the efforts of Japanese companies which are developing robots that might do the trick. I saw a piece on TV recently which showed how they’ve created robots that can play the violin! Hopefully they’re also trying to develop robot maids like Rosie who lived with the Jetsons. My kitchen floor is really filthy and it’s way overdue for a good soapy scrubbing.

I recommend that you go to http://www.storyofstuff.com/ and watch the video.