I believe in white privilege in a very significant regard. The privilege that I speak of is so significant that it’s had the power to allow millions of my fellow whites to lift themselves out of a countless number of circumstances and to reach the highest levels of social, political, and economic class. For those who don’t have this privilege, it’s kept them mired in internal and external conflict, convinced that without this privilege they can never achieve the same levels of whatever class as those who have it. And the thing is, they aren’t wrong.
Tag: class
Reliable Sources
Where do you go to get reliable accounts of news, weather, and sports? I recently surveyed my students in 4 computer literacy classes regarding this information. On reviewing the results, I stressed to them that a “good” source was no better than its reliability, and furthermore its alignment with the goals of the seeker.
Privacy and Politics: The Hypocrisy of the Surveillance Statists
So long as American politicians and bureaucrats continue to put the rest of us under a magnifying glass, they deserve no sympathy when they get caught trying to hide their own actions from public view.
Why The Degree is Dying (and Being Replaced by Something Better)
What is a degree? It purports to be a bundle of goods – knowledge, network, social experience, and a permission slip to compete for certain jobs. It’s only one of these. The permission slip, or credential, intended to signal your ability to employers, is the product. That is the thing being bought and sold. The rest is window dressing.
Trump’s Americanized Fascism
Sure, Trump says: “In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. I was elected not to take power, but to give power to the American people, where it belongs.” But that cliched claptrap cannot withstand scrutiny. “The people” neither govern nor rule. Only persons act, and only certain persons rule. There is no way everyone can rule — unless all people individually rule their own lives. That’s not what Trump means.
The Meaning is in the Making
Knowing how to code doesn’t mean squat if you fail to create value with it. Being able to speak techno-geek doesn’t mean squat if you can’t keep a job or all you know how to do is lurk around at hackathons.
Self-Directed Education and the Freedom to Choose
Boston College psychology professor, and Alliance for Self-Directed Education founder, Dr. Peter Gray, writes that the freedom to quit is the most basic human freedom. He asserts: “In general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have.”
Compulsory Schooling Is Incompatible with Freedom
If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
School Should Be More Like Summer Camp
Perhaps we should look more to summer for the solutions to our school-year woes, and challenge a system that puts more emphasis on containment than freedom.
Some Refreshing Honesty about the Purpose of Mass Schooling
These school posters explicitly reveal the troubling reality that mass schooling retains its 19th-century roots as a system of social control. Originally designed to bring order to an increasingly diverse population, the industrial model of mass schooling continues to impose order by encouraging compliance, rewarding conformity and eliminating individuality.