Fighting the privatization, financialization and corporatization of education is a daunting task. It is made so by one, separating the struggle behind K-12 from the struggle to stave off the authoritarian insects of reactionary revolution and the struggle in higher education to do the same.
We have focused too much on standards and have not tied the economic realities of schooling under capitalism to the real issues of financialization, Wall Street and the $650 million dollar industry called “education”.
Standards are important, do not get me wrong. I personally worked with many authors to put out an Encyclopedia of Standards more than a decade ago, two volumes which can be found on Amazon. But we have focused on standards at the expense of organizing students, teachers, community and parents to see that schooling under capitalism is not education under liberty.
Facebook, Internet, twitter etc. are all important but nothing is more important than getting out into the community and knocking on doors, handing out flyers, talking personally face to face with people – old school style organizing. We must couple both.
Voters in SF, CA thought they were voting to give $79 dollars per parcel in taxes to save SFCC from the ruthless exigencies of the ‘free (unregulated) market”. Their money now seems to be on the way to the privatizers safe and the community knows little about this.
The corporate press will not tell them, Facebook is good but looking at your friend’s dog pictures and then swiveling to the news won’t make it
