New Clear Vision

Resisting Militarism in Our Schools

by Harry Targ

I have been thinking a lot lately about “ideological hegemony” — how and why we think about the political world in the ways we do. I do so not to add another layer of theory to an already complex set of arguments about economics and politics. Nor am I interested in immobilizing political activists. Rather, I think progressives need to think about how to challenge the ideas that most of us are supposed to accept and believe.

Of course, the primary public institutions that transmit ideas and ways of thinking to people, from the start to the end of their educational careers, are schools. Our friends on the Right know how important it is to shape schools at all levels. Early in this century I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh say on one of his radio programs that “the only institutions we do not yet control are the schools.” With this as a goal, just the other day we read stories about Koch brothers’ money financing faculty positions at Florida State University in economics (presumably Marxist or structural economists need not apply). (more…)

Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Ban Ignites a Human Rights Movement

by Roberto Rodriguez

Learning to Resist, Yearning to Breathe Free

by Matt Meyer

What a coincidence! The day that Cathie Black steps down as Chancellor of the NYC school system, an 11×17 glossy booklet arrives in my mailbox — “Mike Bloomberg: Fighting for our kids.” Really? The message is loud and clear:

Kind, benevolent Mike Bloomberg is fighting the good fight with those up-state Albany bureaucrats to get money into “our schools,” to help “our kids” — a real hero for the working person. Never mind that the whole, fancy flyer contained — along with the misleading information — a total of four sentences (and about five additional sentence fragments). That is all, I guess, they think a working person educated in today’s school system can handle. (more…)

Labor, Solidarity, and the Future of Public Education

by Diane Lefer

Two weeks ago, I walked into an alternate universe. While the rights of American workers are under attack all over the country, I found myself at the 3rd Annual Labor, Social & Environmental Justice Fair — a whole-day event at California State University Dominguez Hills where students have been able to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Labor Studies since 1977.

Hundreds of community members and students heard speakers and live music, attended film screenings and standing-room-only workshops, and visited more than two dozen booths set up along the East Walkway in front of the Loker Student Union.

They could register to vote, learn about community gardens, protest the sale of sweatshop clothing in the university store, learn how the UFCW can fight to protect workers in the food industries, support health care for all, sign postcards to Senators Feinstein and Boxer urging a vote against the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia (where 51 union leaders were assassinated in 2010), petition the university for a Women’s Resource Center (for a campus where 70% of the students are women), and meet a beaming Madelyn Broadus who is now a proud member of Sheet Metal Workers, Local 105, thanks to the apprenticeship she was able to access through the efforts of the Black Worker Center in South LA. (more…)

And the Rise of a New American Radicalism?

by Matt Meyer

If “democracy” is understood to mean a process of inclusion, equalizing diverse peoples such that power and resources are distributed fairly, then democratic movements have a potentially positive role to play in furthering revolution, liberation, justice and peace. By any definition, though, the experiment known as democracy in the USA today is in dire trouble. Nowhere is that trouble more strikingly evident than in the national campaign to do away with public schools. After little more than 150 years of federally-mandated and coordinated schooling-for-all, the US commitment to publicly supported teachers and students is quickly coming to an abrupt end. The global corporate penchant for the privatization, commoditization, and enclosure of practically everything is having particularly chilling effects in policies that Henry Giroux suggests “seek nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.” (more…)

Youth Gardening as a Pathway to Academic Success

by Tessa James, Kalyn Janae Marab, and Sabine Parrish

Caitlin Flanagan’s 2010 article in The Atlantic, Cultivating Failure, ridicules the idea that schoolyard gardens can help children in any way become better educated.  Her principal argument is that gardens do not teach students the necessary skill sets to pass the standardized examinations required of most students across the nation:

“Here is the essential question we must ask about the school gardens: What evidence do we have that participation in one of these programs — so enthusiastically supported, so uncritically championed — improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future (especially the all-important high-school exit exam) and passing Algebra I, which is becoming the make-or-break class for California high-school students?”

Contrary to this statement, there is growing evidence that gardening cultivates not just crops but young minds. This includes teaching environmental consciousness — but gardening can also teach practical and applied lessons in science and math and is an engaging and creative way to explore natural and cultural history.  The question should not be, “Will our students pass these tests?” Instead, we might ask: “Why have we developed a system in which standardized tests determine our children’s future?” (more…)

America’s Perpetual War, and How to Stop It

by Michael True

“The same war continues,” Denise Levertov wrote in her poem, “Life at War.” Her lament is even more appropriate for 2011 than it was when she wrote the poem forty-five years ago.

Columnists and academics, including international relations professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, are finally acknowledging facts familiar to anyone “awake” regarding failed US policies, wasted lives and wasted resources during this period. Willfully ignoring such facts, as Bacevich wrote, “is to become complicit in the destruction of what most Americans profess to hold dear.”

At the beginning of the new year, consequences of “life at war” stare us in the face: the victimization of military and civilian populations and a huge national debt, including an annual military budget that is larger than all military budgets in the world combined and includes $5 billion that remains unaccounted for in Iraq, as well as aid to Pakistan that has wound up in the hands of the Taliban. (more…)