[regional_school] Steve Nelson

  • From: "William Cala" <wcala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <regional_school@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 07:48:13 -0500

An interesting piece by Steve Nelson via Norm Scott from NYC.

 



Excerpts from Steve Nelson's The Disservice of a 'Rigorous' Education 

Tests, standards, accountability, economic competitiveness, managers,
vouchers, data, metrics... does anyone actually care about children? 

While multi-billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Eli Broad
talk about tough management and data-driven reform, real children languish
in abject poverty. That's unfair enough, but then we also rob them of their
childhoods. Everything is about money, even their small lives. Social
scientists talk about poor kids' education as an "investment" and act as
though the worth of children is in their development as resources for the
competitive marketplace. 

Jean De La Bruyère, a 17th century French moralist and philosopher, once
wrote: "Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the
present -- which seldom happens to us." In the South Bronx or in Grosse
Pointe, children are too often deprived of the present. At each end of the
economic spectrum, we are pressing children harder and harder in the service
of a "rigorous" education. It is not mere semantic coincidence that the word
"rigor" is most often paired with the word "mortis." 

As De La Bruyère wrote, the present seldom happens to us. But the present is
all that children have. 

It's heartbreaking to hear administrators and politicians talk about
children as raw material to be crafted into productive cogs in the global
economy. 

Read it all:
<http://www.feedblitz.com/t2.asp?/225080/20498591/0/http://susanohanian.org/
show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4072>
http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_atrocities.php?id=4072 



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