Pawns of Industrialists and Financiers: Anti-Democracy Movement Gripping Education?
Cloaking Inequity is back! I am now stateside from a hiatus to attend meetings at the Brazilian Senate in Brasilia. I am addicted to pão de queijo. A few photos from the signing of a new collaborative agreement Brazil and the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaking of the Senate… As young children, Americans are inculcated with an admiration of democracy— a “manifest destiny” to see democratic systems spread throughout the world. However, observing recent educational policy, it appears democracy is a good idea, except when it isn’t.
I started thinking about the anti-democratic forces invading public policy when I read an editorial published in a Michigan newspaper that argued that the power to elect U.S. Senators should given back to politicians in state legislatures— as originally stipulated in the Constitution.
This movement away from a direct democracy is in my view anti-democratic and worrisome. Why? A bit of history from the U.S. Senate Website. As you are probably well aware, the U.S. has not always directly elected Senators:
Voters have elected their senators in the privacy of the voting booth since 1913. The framers of the Constitution, however, did not intend senators to be elected in this way, and included in Article I, section 3, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the