Paul Horton: The Technocrat's Revolution: Progressivism's Dark Side
Guest post by Paul Horton.
The rhetoric of the Education "Reform" has become truly Orwellian. Those who claim to serve "students first" are funded by corporate and financial interests who seek to profit from opening new product lines in the rapidly growing educational market place. Most of those who call themselves "reformers" seek to further entrench the notion of the validity of standardized testing to cloak a seemingly well intended extension of what Nicholas Lehman has called a "moral equivalent of religion" (The Big Test) that covers up a crude Hobbesian Social Darwinism: the best test takers will rise to the top. "Radical," the title of one such "reformer's" new book about her exploits, is truly reactionary. Stalinists and Fascists referred to themselves as utopian "radicals."
The methods of what could only be described, as a "New Class" of Education technocrats are anything but democratic. The chief characteristic of any "New Class," political theorist Alvin Gouldner tells us, is the attempt to control critical discourse. Party line propaganda is carefully orchestrated. Bill Gates invests hundreds of millions of dollars in creating a Common Core Curriculum and his Foundation constructs an ideology of "buy-in" using the pronouncements of duped teachers (who welcome any and all extra dollars to feed and educate their kids), leading "experts" from the Hoover and American Enterprise Institutes, a bunch of governors, Wall Street fat cats who see investment opportunities in charter school companies (who have their kids in Horace Mann, Dalton, Collegiate, or Trinity), and big donors to the Obama campaign. This scary cauldron is straight out of Macbeth!
The push is top-down, nothing short of an educational putsch! Our Education Secretary, who plays basketball like he is straight out of an Updike Rabbit novel, claims to be "old school" when it comes to education. He tutored kids at his mom's school. He has seen the impact of poverty and violence Paul Horton: The Technocrat's Revolution: Progressivism's Dark Side - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: