Class War University Ready! While politicians and corporate ed deformers obsess about being #CollegeAndCareerReady I want to make my students class war university ready.
[Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.] http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance
[...there is something more at stake here which points to a combination of power, money and education in the service of creating an almost lethal restriction of what can be heard, said, learned and debated in the public sphere. And one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."
The memo is important because it reveals the power that conservatives attributed to the political nature of education and the significance this view had in shaping the long-term strategy they put into place in the 1960's and 1970's to win an ideological war against liberal intellectuals, who argued for holding government and corporate power accountable as a precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy. The current concerted assault on government and any other institutions not dominated by free-market principles represents the high point of a fifty-year strategy that was first put into place by conservative ideologues such as Frank Chodorov, founder of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; publisher and author William F. Buckley; former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon, and Michael Joyce, the former head of both the Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Powell Memo is important because it is the most succinct statement, if not the founding document, for establishing a theoretical framework and political blueprint for the current assault on any vestige of democratic public life that does not subordinate itself to the logic of the alleged free market.
Initially, Powell identified the American college campus "as the single most dynamic source" for producing and housing intellectuals "who are unsympathetic to the [free] enterprise system."[2] He was particularly concerned about the lack of conservatives on social sciences faculties and urged his supporters to use an appeal to academic freedom as an opportunity to argue for "political balance" on university campuses. Powell recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was "the imbalance of many faculties."] http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/86304-the-powell-memo-and-the-teaching-machines-of-rightwing-extremists
The growing debt crisis that keeps people indentured, precarious. http://www.attn.com/stories/1002/paying-college-now-harder-paying-your-home
“The number of people with master's degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655.” http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2015/04/fast-food-workers-only-twice-as-welfare.html
[Hyung explains how business interests are driving "education reform" to turn education into a business. This is happening, he says, in the broader context of capitalism's perpetual crisis (stagnating wages, recessions, collapsing tax bases, etc.), which is transferred to the sphere of education in terms of greedy or lazy teachers. He also argues high stakes and standardized testing are used to reproduce class society and a kind of competition that is tearing American society apart.]
http://kboo.fm/content/highstakestestingasclasswarstrategy
[BUFFETT: Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html
Meanwhile class war occurs on and off campus http://www.academia.edu/5644302/Pepper_Spray_U
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/theres-been-class-warfare-for-the-last-20-years-and-my-class-has-won/2011/03/03/gIQApaFbAL_blog.html
This is why we have testocracy and high standards - in order to label the majority of students as failures. - [In a post-recession world where many once-familiar occupations continue to automate, move offshore or disappear outright, one of the most basic questions remains: ... It turns out the vast preponderance of job openings these days consists of low-skill, hourly wage work with high turnover. The current slate of "help wanted" ads overwhelmingly involves cashiers, waitresses and waiters, personal care aides, janitors, those who stock store shelves, and the likes of Hardee's and Taco Bell. It's as true in Wisconsin as in the nation as a whole: Of the top 10 "Occupations with the Most Openings," nine fall into government-designated wage categories of "very low" and "low," according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. The proliferation of bottom-rung openings casts a light on an epidemic transformation within the national economy, one that has been accompanied by a long-term contraction of middle-skill occupations that often pay family-supporting wages.] http://www.jsonline.com/business/help-wanted-most-us-job-openings-are-for-low-skill-low-pay-workers-b99460445z1-298692631.html
Academia's indentured servants - Outspoken academics are rare: most tenured faculty have stayed silent about the adjunct crisis http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134119156459616.html
Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Being Destroyed Faculty are increasingly hired on the Walmart model as temps. http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/chomsky-how-americas-great-university-system-getting
Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education - Our kids are being prepared for passive obedience, not creative, independent lives. http://www.alternet.org/education/chomsky-corporate-assault-public-education
http://www.alternet.org/how-higher-education-us-was-destroyed-5-basic-steps
Mounting Student Debt Shapes Rough Job Outlook For Young College Graduates - also think of the guy who started Buzzfeed [Cody Hounanian, 24, earned his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013. A political science major, he owes $30,000 in federal loan debt. Excited by the prospect of quickly paying down that sum, the left-leaning graduate applied for a job at a nearby public relations firm that "astroturfs" [creates the impression of public support by paying people in the public to pretend to be supportive] for corporations and developers. “I can’t believe it,” he says, looking back. “I was willing to compromise my views.”] http://www.ibtimes.com/mounting-student-debt-shapes-rough-job-outlook-young-college-graduates-1953315
Undercommoning is building a North American network of radical organizers within, against, and beyond the (neo)liberal, (neo)colonial university. http://undercommoning.org/
Thread on latest neoliberal “solutions” https://www.facebook.com/hyung.nam/posts/10154226071433598
The diversion
http://itspeoplepower.tumblr.com/post/110912995473/collegeandcareerready-and-oeib-40-40-20-exposed
Students in Chile and Quebec have been fighting back and building a broad movement. “We refuse this logic which reduces us simply to consumers who will need to pay for each use of our health, education, daycare and all other services necessary for the good functioning of a rich society.” http://truth-out.org/news/item/30037-quebec-students-solidarity-strikes-and-shutting-down-austerity-at-the-point-of-production
http://itspeoplepower.tumblr.com/post/107893064948/education-wont-fix-inequality-and-in-fact