“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being valued members of the public schools.” ~ Professor Henry Giroux
For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.
Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens. The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on. Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.
2 comments:
And people wonder why parents are homeschooling or sending their children to private schools; they know what is being taught to their children.
It only gets better Joe:
Today all the teachers in Wicomico county got an e-mail, from Margo Handy, Stating that Mary Ashante of the NAACP was upset because teachers were sharing their political views with students, during classroom debate about the upcoming elections. Personally my political views have no place in the classroom. However I should be able to engage the students in debate on the subject and if lies are being reported as facts then we should be able to expose them. What if students share their own views on the subject should we shut down the discussion?
But the bottom line is this for me, since when do we allow a group to dictate to the board of education, what is and is not allowable in the classroom.
I see no chatter about having to stand for the pledge, which some teachers ignore all together, but insist on standing for the school song. As a teacher they would hang me from a tall tree with a short rope for letting you know this information. Many teachers are upset, some students are upset, but Margo Handy who is not unbiased (believe me toward all races) can set a policy such as this. Keep in mind this was the Boston years and many who were incompetent were put in positions of authority, and feel the need to rule not as a leader but as a dictator. That is the facts Joe I am sure you will be finding the actual e-mail in your in box soon.
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