WTF Chinese Pedobear Sex Ed Nursery School

In today's WTF China Daily News, it has been reported that many people in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities have become quite concerned about a small privately run nursery school named "Readers" located in Zhengzhou. This small school has recently introduced a new kind of sex education class with "live versions of dolls" or toy dolls which include complete replicas of human reproductive organs.

On Saturday, September 3rd the below news video was broadcast on China's CNS TV:



The owner of the school claims that most of their sex education classes are "custom made, and others from some of the children's parents."

Also China's Ten Cent News , a subsidiary of Japan's 3Yen Daily News Organization, recently reported the following dialogue heard from within the "Readers" pedobear training center nursery school:

Hou teacher asked: "So how did you go into the womb of it?"

Girl Momo answer in a show of hands: "father's sperm to find the mother's egg, and then I had planted in the womb!"

"Her answer was right?"

"Right!"

"Well, that is how sperm find the egg it, come join us to do a finger exercise it!"



See also:

Chinese Tentacle Pink Penis Fish

How to Become A Pedobear

As if you needed ANOTHER reason to keep Michele Bachmann out of the White House!

Courtesy of CNN:

Painting herself as a "constitutional conservative" Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann told Sen. Jim DeMint's forum Monday that if elected president she would look to get rid of the Department of Education, among other things."Because the Constitution does not specifically enumerate nor does it give to the federal government the role and duty to superintend over education that historically has been held by the parents and by local communities and by state governments," she said, responding to a question by DeMint, a popular figure among the tea party movement.

So there you go voters, a vote for Michele Bachmann is a vote against providing your children with the same access to a free public education that you took for granted as citizens of the "greatest country on earth".  Try competing with China with a nation full of chronically undereducated video game addicts.

In a completely unrelated story, by no means connected to his candidate trotting out her bucket of batshit for all of America to see, Bachmann campaign manger Ed Rollins got a note from his doctor excusing him from having to work for her campaign: 

Ed Rollins is going to be stepping back from day-to-day management of the Michele Bachmann campaign, and moving into a senior advisory role, he said in an interview. 

Rollins said the reason for the change is personal — his health and the rigors of a campaign. 

“I wish I was 40 years old, but I’m not,” he told POLITICO. “I’m 68 years old, I had a stroke a year and a half ago. I’m worn out.”

Yeah I don't blame him.

I have only listened to her speak a handful of times and I am pretty "worn out" too.

The most important editorial on NCLB that I have ever read. And I urge you to do the same.

Courtesy of AJC: 

By Jim Arnold 

We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now we – and our students – are paying the price. We could have been prophets but failed the test. 

We allowed the proponents of NCLB to control the discussion from the beginning. They wrote the language, sent out the media notices and explanations, wrote the definitions of AYP, Highly Qualified and leaned heavily on the fact that none of us would dare protest anything to do with a name that implies we would be providing a high quality education for every single child in America. They were right. We chose not to speak out, not to fight against a system we knew from the beginning would set us all up for failure, and instead, in our best Dudley DoRight impersonations we set about to change the way we taught and measured and tested and graded and thought. 

We knew from the outset that NCLB and its goal of 100 percent – every child proficient in every area as determined by a single test on a single day each year – was patently, blatantly and insidiously absurd, but we took no concerted action. We knew Adequate Yearly Progress was a sham, and we literally and figuratively rolled over and tried our best to meet whatever impossible goals they set for us and our students. We knew that Federal law in NCLB was a violation of Federal law in IDEA but we went along with the insanity of testing Students with Disabilities based on chronological age rather than by IEP. 

We learned very quickly and much to our chagrin that some student scores – usually the lowest ones – were counted not once, not twice, but often as many as three times, but we went along to get along. All of us were aware that Highly Qualified, for all the high rhetoric that went along with it, only served to make certification as much of a barrier as humanly possible for Special Education teachers regardless of degree or experience. It seems the teachers we needed most were subjected to the greatest roadblocks to reaching the nirvana of HiQ certification.

We tried our best to play the game but the game was rigged from the start. When the AMO’s were low it was pretty easy for most schools. When the AMO’s went up and more and more schools were labeled “failing” we looked around in a panic for help. Surely nobody believed a school deserved the failing label because two or three kids in a subgroup didn’t pass a test? Yes they did. Yes they still do. We let them make the definitions and apply the labels, even when we realized the absurdity of it all. 

We actually pretended to believe that it was important for us to make sure that every child was tested on those all important test days so none could escape the trauma we inflicted upon them. We even learned in some places to game the system and hold back those kids we feared might not pass the test or might raise those student numbers to create a subgroup in areas we really didn’t want to see a subgroup or, God help us, to cheat or to make sure that we could hold out two or three or four of “those kids” on test days so their poor scores wouldn’t have a negative effect. 

Oh sure, some of you stuck your necks out and said something to the effect of “NCLB forced us to take a closer look at ourselves, and we are better off for that” in spite of the fact that it was our students that were suffering the consequences. What balderdash. What hubris. Our kids were the ones whose education was stilted by our submission to the belief that one test could effectively distill and determine the depth and extent of an entire year of a child’s education. They are the ones whose time was wasted by “academic pep rallies” and “test prep” and by the subtle and insidious ways we told them the test was “important” and put pressure on them to “do their best because our school is counting on you.”They were the ones that did without art and music and chorus and drama because we increased the amount of time they spent in ELA and Math. 

They were the ones that had time in their Social Studies and Science classes cut back more and more so schools could focus on the “really important areas” of ELA and Math. They were the ELL’s that couldn’t speak English but still had to take the test. Their teachers were the ones that were told “your grading of the children in your classes doesn’t count any more because standardization is more important to us that the individual grades you provide.” This told them in effect that their efforts at teaching were important but only if they taught using “this” methodology or “this” curriculum, then, when things started to go badly, they were the first to be blamed for the failure of public education. They were told to teach every child the same way with the same material but make sure to individualize while you’re at it. Hogwash. 

After a couple of years of this insanity, the “NI” status began to take its toll. Someone somewhere invented the term “failing schools” and, unsurprisingly, the label stuck. Students were given the opportunity to transfer to more test-successful schools, but at a price. Schools that did not meet AYP standards, oddly enough, were often those with high minority populations and high poverty. Nobody seemed to notice the zip code effect that left predominantly white schools meeting AYP standards and minority schools caught by the “failing” label. Oh surely, we reasoned, our government would not want to put public education in a situation it could not win………..or would they? 

I struggled with the rest of you as to why NCLB would go to such great lengths to make public education appear to be such a failure, to set up a system that would guarantee failure for practically every public school as we advanced toward that magical 100 percent level and provide no tangible rewards for success and such punitive actions for not meeting arbitrary goals. On top of all of that, I failed to recognize why our nation’s legislators so nimbly avoided even the discussion of reauthorization to change what everyone knew was a failed policy. One day it finally hit me. 

They didn’t want to change the policy, because the policy was designed in theory and in fact not to aid education but to create an image of a failed public school system in order to further the implementation of vouchers and the diversion of public education funds to private schools. 

I am not usually a conspiracy theory guy, but this was no theory. These were cold hard facts slapping me in the face. We failed in our obligations to protect our students from one of the most destructive educational policies since “separate but equal.” We did not educate the public on the myth and misdirection of Adequate Yearly Progress, and we allowed closet segregationists to direct the implementation of policies that we knew would result in our being the guys in the black hats responsible for “the failure of public education.” 

Now we are paying the price. AYP is here to stay in one form or another, and the vast majority of our parents and public really believe the propaganda that it actually measures a school’s educational progress. If we try to convince them otherwise we are “making excuses.” 

Vouchers – especially for private and charter schools exempt from the same restrictive, destructive policies we are forced to endure – are a part of every legislative session in almost every state. High stakes testing for all public education students is considered a necessary reality and teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Student test scores will soon determine teacher pay in some places even with no data to support the correlation. Students that do not graduate high school in four years are labeled as dropouts, even if they graduate in nine or 10 semesters. 

Only first-time test takers are considered in the grading system for schools regardless of how many students ultimately pass the test. It will take years to undo the damage done to science, social studies, fine arts, foreign languages and other academic electives. Generations will not be enough to rid ourselves and our students of the testing mania neuroses created by our attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. 

I hope the generation of teachers and administrators that follows has learned something from the failure of our generation to ward off those determined to destroy public education. We didn’t stand up to be counted, we didn’t stand in the schoolhouse door and tell them they couldn’t do that to our kids, and we didn’t educate the public about what a gigantic failure another one size fits all education policy would be. In the words of that great educator and philosopher Jimmy Buffet: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” 

We have all been left behind. 

There is no more that I can add to this amazing, and extremely honest portrayal of what has happened to public education in this country.

However I urge you to spread far and wide these very important words from Mr. Jim Arnold, who served as both a Principal and Superintendent of schools in Georgia, and is sadly very well educated on the terrible damage that No Child Left Behind has inflicted on our country, our education system, and our children.

(H/T to Alaska Dispatch.)

President Obama explains the relevance of the Constitution to children. Perhaps the Teabaggers should pay attention as well. They might learn something.

I would like to see ANY of these so-called Tea Party Republicans answer these questions with the same clarity and confidence with which President Obama is answering them. I have little doubt they would fail miserably.You can see more of these wonderful interviews by clicking here.

How come I didn't know that Clark Griswold was running for President?

Oh I'm sorry it is not Clark Griswold, it's Rick Santorum!  But you do see how easy it is to get them confused, right?

I know what you are thinking. "Oh Gryphen, you are messing with us. That MUST be a parody."

Nope, it's not.

It is the desperate attempt by Rick Santorum to mimic Sarah Palin's "highly successful" political bus tour/family vacation in order to get some national attention.  Because dammit, Rick Santorum recognizes a good idea when he sees one!

Gee I wonder if Santorum will "ride a hog" like Sister Sarah did?

By the way I also stumbled across some footage of the Santorum road trip that was not used in the political ad. (If you are at work you might want to skip this video until later, as it contains some quite a lot of adult language.)



But don't worry kids, it will not JUST be about Rick "The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" Santorum taking his children around and lying to them about American History, he will also be sharing that ignorance with the American people he meets along the way.

Santorum said he’s been criticized for saying earlier this week, “Schools indoctrinate our children.” He added, “I said ‘indoctrination’ and I meant it.”

Rick Santorum speaks earlier Thursday at a restaurant in Rock Rapids.


As an example, he said: “Sixty-two percent of incoming freshmen come into college with a faith conviction and leave without it. … I suspect if you took a control group of kids who don’t go to college, that doesn’t happen.”

“We see this humanism and secularism being pushed on our children,” said Santorum, who, with his wife, Karen, has been home-schooling their seven children through about eighth grade.

That's right folks!  Rick Santorum's message to America is "Don't allow your children to become educated. It just makes them too intelligent to buy into your Theocratic bullshit! And THAT is just bad for America!"


(H/T to the Huffington Post.)

Lawrence O'Donnell and Matt Damon take a courageous stand to defend our teachers against the unrelenting attacks coming from the Right Wing.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I am not ashamed to admit that I literally had tears streaming down my face as I watched this segment.

Lawrence O'Donnell's passion in bringing this, and other important, stories to our attention should earn him this country's undying gratitude, and Matt Damon? Well in my humble opinion from this day forward Matt Damon should be considered a national treasure.

He did his mother, his teachers, and his country proud.

Teabaggers let the cat out of the bag concerning ultimate goal for our public schools.

Courtesy of Think Progress:

In a series of e-mails and interviews, Teri Adams, the president of the Idependence Hall Tea Party Association, explains that her organization is involved in its voucher advocacy because it believes “public schools should go away.” Adams said that their ultimate goal is to “shut down public schools and have private schools only“:

“We think public schools should go away,’’ says Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea Party and a leading advocate — both in New Jersey and Pennsylvania — of passage of school voucher bills. The tea party operates in those two states and Delaware. They should “go away,” she says, because “they are hurting our children.’’ [...] Adams says the current voucher program “discriminates” against wealthier students by providing public subsidies only to inner-city children in allegedly failing schools. Her group’s e-mails pushing vouchers caught the attention of James Kovalcin of South Brunswick, a retired public school teacher who asked Adams for clarification. She responded via email: “Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.”

Well there you go, any questions about the motives of the radical right wing now?


These people are willing to completely dismantle the American public school system, which has leveled the playing field to allow those who come from humble beginnings to rise to the top through hard work and access to a good education, in exchange for ONLY providing an adequate education for those that can afford it.

Essentially they are trying to gut the very foundation of the American dream, and attempting to impose a class system in this country, where only those who are born with means can achieve success. That is certainly NOT what the founders envisioned for this country:

After the Declaration of Independence, 14 states had their own constitutions by 1791, and out of the 14, 7 states had specific provisions for education. Jefferson believed that education should be under the control of the government, free from religious biases, and available to all people irrespective of their status in society. Others who vouched for public education around the same time were Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Robert Coram and George Washington.

And these Teabaggers dare to call themselves "patriots?"

How the Republicans are destroying our public school system, right before our eyes.

This amazing article comes to us from Cassandra Vert, writing for Politicususa:

The conservative argument hinges on convincing us that private education is somehow better than aggregated public education. It’s not. The best students in the world come from state-run schools. When we had the best students in the world, it was because we made a philosophical and financial commitment that every student deserved access to the best education that we as a nation could provide. That is what has changed, and that is what we must reclaim.

I simply cannot urge you enough to read what Cassandra has written.


I have tried multiple times to write how important I find this issue, but have never distilled it down to its main points, nor defined the importance of doing something to stop the privatization of our education system, anywhere near as well as was accomplished in this article.

The picture you see above is my alma mater, A.J. Dimond High School. It is no exaggeration to say that THAT public school changed my life forever and taught me valuable lessons which STILL inform the way I conduct myself to this very day.

K-12 Korean "Shadow Education"

From: db Sent: Monday, July 11, 2011 Subject: The Daily Stat: South Koreans Spend Heavily on "Shadow Education"

South Koreans Spend Heavily on "Shadow Education"

Parents in South Korea spend up to 30% of their income on the after-school lessons, cram schools, and practice exams that are known there as "shadow education," despite government efforts to reduce family expenditures on private tutoring. In 2009, 87.4% of primary-school students, 74.3% of middle-school students, and 62.8% of high-school students in South Korea received some form of private tutoring, according to Soojeong Lee of Dankook University and Roger C. Shouse of Penn State. Parents view shadow education not only as a requirement for good careers but also as a sign of status, the researchers say.

Source: The Impact of Prestige Orientation on Shadow Education in South Korea at http://soe.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/06/08/0038040711411278

---

Another reminder of why the GOP hates teachers and their unions so much.

From CNN:

A year earlier than usual, the nation's largest teachers union on Monday endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012.

The National Education Association, which represents 3.2 million teachers and administrators, approved the recommendation from its political action committee at its annual meeting in Chicago.
Obama "shares our vision for a stronger America," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement issued by the group. "He has never wavered from talking about the importance of education or his dedication to a vibrant middle class."

Since taking office in 2009, Obama has championed education reform and used stimulus money to help keep teachers employed. Now he is calling for maintaining or increasing spending on education despite negotiating federal budget cuts.

However, not all of the Obama administration's education policies have pleased the union, particularly its support for charter schools and continued reliance on standardized testing to assess performance.

The NEA statement said the organization usually waits until the summer of an election year to endorse a candidate. This year, it did so earlier than normal "in order to provide early and strong support to help ensure the election of a candidate who is on the side of students and working families."

Of course it stands to reason that a union made up of educators would decide to throw their weight behind the candidate with the brains. Doesn't it?

I also have to add that I agree with the NEA's frustration over the fact that Obama supports charter schools and standardized testing as well, but I also know that he is our best hope for dumping NCLB, and getting our education system back to where it was before George Bush took a big steaming crap on it.

Evolution's End

¡Hola! Everybody...
Last Sunday morning I heard applause right outside my window. When I looked, I realized I had forgotten all about the NYC marathon and that its path passed right by my block. It was amazing how many New Yorkers were out there exhorting the runners: “You can do!” “You’re looking great!” Others staffed Gatorade/ water tables, and others held up signs inscribed with positive affirmations. Only in New York...

* * *

-=[ Evolution’s End ]=-

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

-- Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

I think people are under a false impression that I don’t watch TV. Actually, I watch tons of TV. My TV is on if I’m home. I watch a lot of garbage too: shit like Bones reruns!

I also think people are under a false sense of security, thinking that if they don’t watch TV that they’re immune to its influence. Nothing could be further from the truth: there’s a “cultural DNA” (memes) and unless you’ve been totally deprived you’re not immune from the larger external forces that shape our culture. From a biological perspective, our neurological systems are like feedback loops and we are shaped by our relationships in ways we have yet to fully explore. I actually think keeping yourself ignorant of what goes on the boob tube is probably not a good strategy.

I mean, we all like to think we’re different, or smarter, or whatever, but we’re not, we’re just like the next person in many respects, just as prone to social pressure as the average Jane. Doubt me? Well, I’m not in the mood to get all that deeply into it, but I’m sure you throw away more shit than you’re conscious of -- whether you want to or not. As a society, we let out a collective fart that’s choking the rest of the world. You consume to a disproportionate level compared to other people in the world. For example, we rationalize purchasing gas-guzzlers because “we have to drive the kids around,” or some such nonsense.

We drive to work when we can take public transportation. We are the target of an onslaught of messages (approximately 80,000 a day) that we’re barely aware of them. And all this shit seeps in. It’s not a matter whether we buy into it or not, but rather, the degree to which we have bought into these messages.

Please don’t intellectualize/ rationalize this fact thereby forcing me to cram it down your throat, ok?

I don’t think the Television Machine is necessarily an evil thing in and of itself. It’s when we become passive observers that it becomes an issue and that’s the aim of marketing -- to make us passive consumers. It’s good for the economy.

When my son was young, I would use TV to mine learning opportunities. Buffy the Vampire Slayer became an opportunity to discuss a whole slew of interesting and relevant adolescent issues. Everything from peer pressure to the “horrors” of what it is to be a teenager in a postmodern world gone slightly mad. LOL

Watching TV, for my son became an opportunity to learn cultural studies and critical theory, except he didn’t know it. The commercials for drugs were the best. You know those commercials where there’s some woman in a filmy sun dress traipsing through a field of flowers (Claritin, maybe)? Then, towards the end of the commercial, there’s like a ten-second rapid-fire sotto voce disclaimer listing all these awful side effects? Like, anal leakage -- what the fuck is anal leakage?!!

I think what I was teaching my son (and myself) was necessary to be an active observer. I was teaching him how to form the correct questions, to be a critical thinker. In this sense, TV was a tool for learning and we were fully aware of what was going on at some larger cultural level and in that way were able to inoculate ourselves (to a degree!) from the mindless push to consume.

I dunno, maybe it’s the Tantric influence of which everything -- even what we consider negative -- can be utilized in the service of waking up. Shit, even fertilizer has its use, right? And isn’t waking up (not to be confused with analyzing, which is merely mental masturbation) -- isn’t waking up what it’s all about. Isn’t waking up evolution’s end?

Love,

Eddie

Critical Thinking: Questions 101

* * *

-=[ Questions ]=-

You see things that are and say 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were and say "Why not?
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

I have learned that questions are the very substance of who we are and what we do. I have learned that almost everything we do, every decision we make, is a response to an inner question. It’s unfortunate, I often think, that “Questions 101” is not a regular feature in our classrooms. But then again, does the status quo really want to create critical and questioning human beings?

One of my favorite sci-fi novels, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, deals with this very issue of questions. In it a massive supercomputer is designed to give the ultimate, the absolute answer, an answer that would explain “God, life, the universe, and everything.” But the computer takes seven and a half million years to come to an answer, and by that time, everybody has forgotten the question. LOL So, nobody remembers the ultimate question, but the ultimate answer is: 42.

This is amazing! Finally! The Answer! So wonderful is the answer that immediately a contest is held to see if anyone can come up with “The Question.” Many profound questions are submitted, but the final winner is: “How many roads must a man walk down?”

Reflecting about “God, life, the universe, and everything” is pretty much what my life has been about -- the unexamined life, in my book, is an unworthy one. Of course, the answer may be not as clever as “42.” Perhaps the answers deal with matter, life, mind, and spirit, and the underlying evolutionary currents that seems to unite them all in a pattern that connects. The “Web with no Weaver,” as the integral philosopher, Ken Wilber, puts it.

For some time now, I have tried to embody this spirit of questioning. I guess part of my personal mission is to prod others to question, to look for the unasked questions and to try to understand who decides what questions will be asked and why. I think that’s part of my motivation -- I want people to ask, to question, to investigate their lives. If I were to die today, I would like to believe that I made some difference in the lives of the people I touch. I would want people to say something along the lines of, “He was a crazy motherfucker, but he cared, and he touched my life (or some private parts ::wink::) in a special way.” Or something like that.

In this crazy world all we can be sure of is the punch line to this grand Cosmic Joke we call life -- death. In the midst of all this uncertainty, we grope for meaning or something that gives us a foundation of sorts. Sometimes this clinging is the core of our pain, sometimes having no meaning in one’s life is a key component to pain. So then, this is my meaning -- my mission: to rattle the cage a wee bit, to ask the unasked question and to ask you, dear reader and friend:

Why not?

My endeavor is to be part of a an ongoing process where the curious, the apathetic, the wounded and fragmented, the lonely and the happy can meet to create meaning together. Where we can all come together and tell our stories without censure and to ask the questions that need asking and then support each other somehow when the answers are too harsh or too painful to bear.

I remember a time when that was called community…

Love,

Eddie

On Education

¡Hola! Everybody...
Almost all my thinking on education owes a huge debt to Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy . If you ever read anything on education, read him. Most of the following is shamelessly glommed from Freire.

* * *

-=[ Critical Thinking ]=-

Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man... It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

-- Paulo Freire

Thinking is an action. Critical thinking is a subversive action.

For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts are the laboratory where one poses questions in the search for answers; it is the intersection where visionary thinking and theory and external action meet. For me education is about freedom, it is the practice of freedom. At the very core of critical thinking lies the longing to know -- to understand how life works. Children are naturally predisposed to be critical thinkers. Children arrive into the world of wonder and language literally consumed with the thirst for knowledge. As any parent can attest, sometimes they are so eager for knowledge that they become relentless -- demanding to know the who, what, when, where, and why of life. In their search for answers, they learn almost instinctively how to think.

It’s unfortunate that this passion for thinking is often stifled by a world that often confuses education for conformity and obedience only. Too often, children are conditioned early on to perceive thinking as dangerous. Tragically, these children cease enjoying the process of thinking and learn instead to fear and loathe the thinking mind. Whether in homes that teach by way of punishment that to obey is more valuable than self-awareness, or in schools where independent thinking is not acceptable behavior, most of our children are forced to suppress the memory of thinking as a passionate and pleasurable activity.

By the time children pass into adolescence and adulthood, they have come to dread thinking. Those who have escaped the dread of thinking will instead fall prey to the assumption that thinking will not be necessary; that all is needed is to retain information and to regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. Those that enter higher education similarly find themselves confronted by a world where independent thinking isn’t encouraged. Fortunately, there are some classrooms in which individual professors work to educate as a practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking, and more importantly critical thinking, is what matters.

While thinking is natural (organic), critical thinking isn’t and students do not become critical thinkers through osmosis. First, they must embrace and experience the joy and power of thinking itself. Critical pedagogy (pedagogy being the science of education) is a teaching strategy whose aims are to restore or empower students’ will to think and to become fully self-actualized. The main focus of critical pedagogy is to enable students to think critically. For me, critical thinking is the ability to see both sides of an issue, of being open to new evidence that challenges previously held notions, of being able to reason and to demand that claims be backed by evidence, and being able to deduce and to infer conclusions from available facts, solving problems, etc.

Simply put, critical thinking involves first discovering the who, what, where, when, and how of things and then using that knowledge in a way that empowers you to make the determination of what matters most. This ability to establish what is important is essential to the practice of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with the aim to improve it.

Most of all, critical thinking is an interactive process demanding participation from all involved. Critical thinking is a way of approaching ideas that aims to understand essential, sometimes hidden truths and not simply the obvious and superficial. Most participants will resist critical thinking. After all, they’ve been taught to be more comfortable with passive learning. But it is this demand for initiative that critical thinking calls for that’s most exciting. It invites students to think passionately and to share ideas in a passionate and open manner. When everyone involved realize that they are responsible for creating a learning community together, learning is at its most meaningful and useful. In such a setting, everyone leaves knowing that critical thinking empowers all of us.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Education]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m running late... looking forward to seeing those who will be making today’s picnic. For details, click here.

I love James Baldwin and if you ever get a chance, pick up some of his non-fiction. It’s some of the most powerful socio-political writing around... The following is an excerpt.

* * *

-=[ The Paradox of Education ]=-

A Talk to Teachers, by James Baldwin

Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child -- His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

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Love,

Eddie

The Shame of a Nation

¡Hola! Everybody...
This morning, as I was waking up, making coffee, I was overhearing an interview with former education “Czar,” William Bennett. This was the guy who wrote several books on virtue (for children, no less) and was later found to be an inveterate gambler. Now, I’m not one to judge, but if I’m going to get on a bully pulpit, I’d better have my own shit together. Imagine setting myself up as an addiction "expert" and all the while doing drugs. My question is so: why are conservatives like Bennett still considered relevant? Why is he on TV giving “expert” testimony on Obama’s presidency? Why aren’t the media asking Bennett about his own indiscretions?

I want to thank the people who were nice enough to subscribe to my blog and respond: thanks Sabi, Saynt, Dana, Rippa, Will, Kenny and Ellen!

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-=[ A Savage Disgrace ]=-

Not too long ago, I attended a conference in which one of the panelists related a story that to me is more horrifying than any slasher movie. A child in kindergarten class was asked to draw a picture showing how he saw himself in the future. It’s an innocent enough exercise, one given in kindergarten classes across the nation. The child drew an elaborate diagram. In it he drew his school. From his school, he drew a tunnel that wound its way through a rather sophisticated landscape. That tunnel led to a prison.

Now, the teacher was horrified. She called in her superiors, who called the parents, and so on. When asked why he would draw such a picture, he responded in the typical honesty only children can muster. He said he drew it because it was true.

And he’s right...

After watching that blustering fool, William Bennett, CNN gave some lip service to a report on the US prison population. We incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. We have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. There are currently 2.3 million men and women behind bars in the USA right now. Add to that the 5 million on probation and parole and you have an epidemic.

The vast majority of those in prison are young people of color. You might say that this is so because people of color are more prone to crime, but you would be wrong. The Sentencing Project has shown that all other factors controlled a black youth is five times more likely to be sentenced to prison than his white peer -- even when the crime and criminal histories are the same.

You might say that, hey, prison is fucked up, but we need to lock up criminals in order to stem the tidal wave of crime. Again, you would be wrong. There is no correlation between incarceration and crime rates. In fact, New York City’s record crime drops occurred during a decade in which the prison population was decreasing.

You might say that the collateral damage done to these individuals is justified if it keeps dangerous criminals off the street and again, you would be wrong. The majority of those currently incarcerated are non-violent, first time offenders -- often low level drug dealers who are addicted. Our criminal justice system is full overburdened, that if everyone currently fighting a case would choose to go to trail, the system would implode. As a result, plea-bargaining -- giving up the right to a fair trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence is the norm rather than the exception.

In other words, the vast majority or people in prison didn’t even have the benefit of a fair trail.

Finally, you might not give a fuck because you think this doesn’t affect you, but, again -- you would be wrong. Where do you think our government gets the money to build and maintain these prisons...?

They get if from money that would’ve other wise gone to education, health care, and community revitalization projects that, in the long run, do more to prevent crime than anything else we could think of. The money comes from your child’s school, from your community, from your pockets. In other words, we have transformed ourselves from a nation that envisioned a Great Society, to a prison nation. Our responses to addiction, poverty, lack of access to opportunities all rolled into one: incarceration.

And for what? For an expensive way to destroy a life? Here in NYC, we would rather spend over $70, 000 a year to lock up a black youth, than to spend a fraction of that to send him to a decent school.

So, considering the above, how wrong was that child? We call it the school-to-prison pipeline. In the coming days, I’m going to tie all this together and putting to rest, once and for all, the notion that we live in a post-racial anything. It’s all connected, folks...

Love,

Eddie