Will you stink up the privatization garden party with me?
The fix is in folks. We need a war against the ultra wealthy who believe they have a right control everything our government does in education and elsewhere.
At the Cambridge Forum lecture that I gave in Harvard Square at the First Parish (Unitarian Universalist) on March 8, 2015 I discussed the role of wealthy in education reform and the privatization of education (See the post Julian Vasquez Heilig @CamForum to Discuss The Health of Democracy and Privatizing Education). The Director of the Cambridge Forum let me know that the radio program which will be syndicated on NPR across the nation will go to stations via satellite on April 17. Here in Sacramento, KQED airs the Cambridge Forum at 6:30 p.m. on Sundays. Thus it is likely the lecture will air either Sunday April 19 or the next Sunday.
The Cambridge Forum Lecture:
First, I want to thank you for inviting me here today for the Cambridge Forum. If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should go to YouTube and check out the archive of past lectures on the Cambridge Forum feed. As I was preparing for this talk, I watched several previous lectures on YouTube and was inspired by Professor Lessig, Garrison Keillor, the Onion, several MacArthur Genius award winners and many others who have given this lecture in the past.Thank you again for having me.
Also, I am glad to be here in Boston. I spent a summer here in Massachusetts in the 1990s when I was a fellow at theEducation Development Center. I fell in love with the New England summer. So much so that I did end up applying to Harvard for my masters and doctorate. Even though I was admitted, I decided not to come to Cambridge for three reasons: a) it was about 70 degrees colder than Stanford California b) Myplane coming into Logan took enemy RPG fire and c) because Boston was awar zone at the time. Now to be honest, only one of those three was a reason I never ended up at Harvard, but it seems these days that public speakers have been exaggerating a little— so I went with it.
If you are here in the audience or listening at home or elsewhere I hope that you will Tweet from today’s conversation to @ProfessorJVH. My Twitter profile is Professor then my three initials J-V-H. I would like to write a post for my popular education blog Cloaking Inequity by integrating your Tweets and audience thoughts at a future date. I’d also like to publicly thank the hundreds of thousands Cloaking Inequity readers who hail from 181 countries around the world.
I’ll begin with a story about the US Constitution
As young children, Americans are inculcated with an admiration of democracy— a “manifest destiny” to see democratic systems spread throughout the world. However, in preparation for this lecture, I pondered the anti-democratic direction of education reform today. I began to ponder the aristocratic forces seeking to invade and pervade 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.
As you are probably well aware, the U.S. has not always directly elected Senators. Let me share a bit of history from the U.S. Senate Website.
The framers of the Constitution did not intend senators to be directly elected, 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 legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.”
However, the election of US Senators by politicians in the state legislatures got out of hand. Again, from the US Senate Website:
Intimidation and bribery marked some of the states’ selection of senators. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. In addition, forty-five deadlocks occurred in twenty states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating senators. In 1899, problems in electing a senator in Delaware were so acute that the state legislature did not send a senator to Washington for four years.
Muckraker journalist, the bloggers of the early 20th century, (I actually just recently changed the tag line of Cloaking Inequity to “Muckraking since 2012”) Muckraker journalist pushed for direct democracy for the election of U.S. Senators in late 19th century. Again from the US Senate:After the turn of the century, momentum for reform grew rapidly. William Randolph Hearst hired a veteran reporter, David Graham Phillips, who wrote scathing pieces on senators, portraying them as pawns of industrialists and financiers. As the pressure built from muckrakers and the public, the Senate and then the House advanced the 17th Amendment. The states ratified and the Will you stink up the privatization garden party with me? | Cloaking Inequity:
