For the United States to succeed in a new era of global competitiveness, the next generation needs to be equipped for the intellectual demands of the modern workplace. An alarming new state-by-state assessment of our nation's education system indicates that the United States is failing to prepare a 21st century workforce. The new report card, produced by the Chamber of Commerce with assistance from the Center for American Progress, finds that there is not a single state in the country where a majority of 4th and 8th graders are proficient in math and reading. The report's aim is to identify both "leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance" and to highlight the many areas needed for education improvement. The report card's conclusion is unambiguous: states need to do a far better job of monitoring and delivering quality schooling. As Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings noted recently, “The consensus for strengthening our high schools has never been stronger.” Progressives and conservatives are united around common goals for our education system -- better teaching, more innovation, better data, and better management. The report is one step in building the political will needed to upend familiar arrangements and comfortable routines" and achieve much-needed reform.The first two sentences reveal the vile and horrendous agenda (i would even go so far as suggesting "fascist") for furthering the attack on the planet resources, the failure of global capitalism to control its desired empire, and the lack of any substantive visions regarding how best humans can live on this fragile and dying planet. Curtis White, professor of English published his latest book: The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work late last year, making the point that the notion of "workforce" and capitalized labor, funded by the endless globalizing consumption of the planet's mineral and species (including human) resources is a process that is both insane and self-destructive. It is our on-going behaviors that are killing the Earth. Arguing to continue along that plane of this event horizon will only result in more and greater disparity, increased and exponential collapse of the biosphere, and more and bitter wars. But hey, self-styled progressives think that the answer is more of the same. This is about empire and colonialism; it is about maintaining a failing economic system against all hope that it is worthy of being sustained.
Right up there with this, and obviously overlooked yet part of that "common goal" of centrists and conservatives (real true progressives have much healthier and appropriate visions thank you) is the following quote from the Israeli funded ubermensch neo-conservative John Podhoretz:
"What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarf any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests? ... And as for the United States, what if we have every tool at our disposal to win a war--every weapons system we could want manned by the most superbly trained military in history--except the ability to match our exceed our antagonists in ruthlessness?"One might add "the will" to demand that those not part of the educated elite (for without the feeder system complex as proposed by the faux-progressives and their conservative bedfellows, we wouldn't have a ruling elite) be coerced and forced into fighting the wars for them. Failed educational visions are so much more damaging to our planet than war. Programming children to enlist in expansion of their own institutionalization from early ages, for longer periods of time, to be "mined" for their intellectual energies, discarded as tailings of residues of toxic and hazardous beings--is a vision that ignores the Earth and all of its species.
For the record, i just spent the last two months visiting nearly all of the schools in my region, interviewing teachers, administrators, students, at all grade levels. The proposals by pseudo-progressive, DLC-supported, veiled fascists are exactly the opposite of what is needed in order for a positive, healthy, and harmonious future for all seven generations. Creating a workforce for global capitalism is no different than enslaving massive populations. Forcing small young children into institutionalization for six to eight hours a day just to sit rigidly being told what to absorb and how to act, all under the threat of the most coercive fear based motivators, is nothing short of post-modern whippings and beatings of the future slaves of the elitists.
