Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed.
Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.
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The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009).
The new book shares the '80s generation's encounter with illicit drugs, and how they really caught on.
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Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world.
Two Dates: Tues May 26th at 7pm and Sat, June 20th at 10am.
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As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.
Joel Kellum says he's living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor's degree in history.
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How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?
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We just hit our three hundredth video added to our Online Films section. Having watched all of these films, we can say that it's a an amazing collection of the best activist-issue films you can find scattered across the internet, all cataloged in one place. We've spent hours watching all sorts of videos, researching the issues they cover, and have done our best to include the best we've watched, while importantly, not including any films that are misleading, contain disinformation, or are simply not that great.
We hope this collection provides a resource for getting informed on so many of the issues that are ignored by the mainstream media, and a way to raise awareness and spread the word to your friends. Just tell them, "Films For Action dot org". Cheers!
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Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing. More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test.
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The best way to get new ideas to take hold is to teach them to young people. School-age kids are impressionable and imaginitive, and pick up new perspectives readily. So it makes sense that a concept like "One Planet Living" -- which many of us find difficult to imagine -- would be natural to a kid. It's pretty simple, after all: we have just one planet; we have to learn to live as though we understand that.
Classroom education around environmental responsibility is much more complex today than it was ten or twenty years ago. When I was in grade school, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" was as far as it went, augmented occasionally by a tree-planting ceremony on Earth Day. Now in addition to literacy, we have ecoliteracy; we're developing math lessons for calculating a school's carbon footprint, and health education that explains the nutritional benefits of local, organic food. Ideally, the engaging, hands-on way in which schools are now teaching these ideas will lead kids to more easily form good habits as they grow up.
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On January 31, 1,500 institutions will host classes, documentaries, performances, energy-saving competitions, and discussions with political leaders.
In Springfield, Mo., college students are about to see quite vividly how much energy they consume. Piles of coal will be on display in proportion to what's needed each day to power their dorms, computers, and dining halls. At Radford University in Virginia, students may stumble upon a mock fight between a windmill and a smokestack...
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At the forefront of economics, major changes are happening. And many of them are changes for the better. The old economics view of the world, in which everyone acts purely in his or her own self-interest, in which free markets are the solution to almost everything, has been abandoned.
The list of economics Nobel laureates in the twenty-first century reflects these changes. It is largely made up of scholars who have worked outside the traditional Rational Economic Person, free market paradigm.
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While a bit heady in its presentation, this book is one of my favorite books on alternative education and the need for dissembling the mass-compulsory, factory model of schooling which blights most of the modern and developing worlds. A better way for society to relate to ideas like "education" and "learning" exist, we just need to look. Many successful models already exist. Stay tuned for a film screening at Liberty Hall presenting these ideas in 2008. In fact if you're a teacher in Lawrence and would like to help out with this upcoming campaign do get in touch! - Tim
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