By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
My representative, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has been doing a lot of talking recently about public schools. Criticized for “softening” his tough stand on social issues, Cantor has taken to the lectern to buff up his right-wing street cred. And what better whipping boy than public education?
Take for instance this little dittie in February while speaking to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) about budget priorities even as he diverted attention from the impending sequestration mess that he helped bring about. Lamenting the lack of progress on curing diseases such as brain cancer, Cantor remarked, “There is an appropriate and necessary role for the federal government to ensure funding for basic medical research. Doing all we can to facilitate medical breakthroughs for people … should be a priority. We can and must do better …. Funds currently spent by the government on social science – including on politics of all things – would be better spent helping find cures to diseases.” As if one must exclude the other, you know.
Then, Cantor delivered the coup de grâce, traipsing out D.C. resident Joseph Kelley whose son, Rashawn, was failing miserably in a D.C. school. Singing the praises of private school and the scholarship that got Rashawn there, Cantor pitched the usual GOP line about school choice. School choice, as many know, is the conservative’s way of subsidizing private schools with vouchers funded by tax dollars. In fact, Rashawn’s scholarship, the DC Opportunity Program, is a federally funded valentine passed by a GOP Congress in 2004 to aid its allies in the private school industry.
The AEI talk was billed as a “major speech” by the congressman, thus Republicans dutifully began to rally around a bill introduced last May by then-Rep. Jeff Flake which he promoted saying, “Let me simply say I can think of few finer examples to cut than the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program.” The GOP got some unexpected support with an article published in The Atlantic, by former political scientist Greg Ferenstein, agreeing that such funding was impractical. “After four years of desperately searching in vain for how my degree could make the world a better place, the lack of real-world impact convinced me to leave a Ph.D. program in political science,” he whined. No degree makes the world a better place; that takes some post-graduate effort, my sad friend.
Cantor doubled down at CPAC this past Friday calling our schools “too dangerous,” and endorsing school choice as the fix.
In short, school choice is the answer,” Cantor said. “It puts our conservative values to work and provides opportunity for our kids. Now President Obama and the Democrats have got to see the light. We can find common ground. But as Ronald Reagan said, ‘If they don’t see the light, we’ll make ‘em feel the heat.’ The fight for the future of our country is here.
Guns, it seems, has replaced cancer as the call to arms for forking over tax payer dollars to private institutions –many of them religiously based.
It’s no surprise that Cantor was anointed by the GOP to sound the clarion on this issue. Graduating from Richmond’s prestigious (and private) Collegiate School, the nation’s highest ranking Jewish legislator attended George Washington University and then William & Mary Law School, and finally Columbia’s business school. He then settled into the wealthy suburban life of Richmond’s west end bedroom communities practicing law with his father and uncle. A protegé of former Richmond mayor and US Congressman Tom Bliley (of the infamous Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill deregulating banks in 1999 and ushering in the financial crisis of 2008) , he advanced rapidly in GOP circles aided by his father, Richmond lawyer, Eddie Cantor. Initially practicing real estate law, he abandoned that profession under Bliley’s guiding hand to rise to the position he now enjoys.
In short, a child of privilege aiding other children of privilege with tax dollars. I want what I want when I want it,” indeed. Sadly, nothing new now. It was Kurt Vonnegut who said “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Boy, was he right.
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Source: Politico and throughout
Who woulda thunk that Eddie Cantors grandson would live in Virginia and be a Congressman. And speak like a yokel.
There you go again BarkinDog, making ill of my half blind guy’s alma mater, Penn State.
School choice is important. A parent should choose a good public school district and go with the flow. If you have to send you kid to a charter school because the local public school is lame, that is because you chose wrongly when you chose your school district. If you are a parent with a kid close to Kindergarten age you must chose a good school district and get a move on.
Choose one with a good community college program as well so that you dont have to move again. The two year community college stint is very important if you want to make your kid into an adult. If you send SonnyBoy off to some four year school with frats and all that then you are asking for trouble and delaying his maturation. Let him show that he has earned his spurs for the right to go on to a four year school for the junior and senior years. Avoid catolic grade schools and high schools but consider a good Jesuit college or university down the road. Georgetown or Saint Louis University. Avoid State Penn like you would a toad with warts falling off his nose.
“It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”
In traditional families, children are raised collectively. Look at hunter-gatherer society, look at medieval europe, look at the inter-generational households that predominated until the 20th century.
For most of human history, child-rearing has been a collective enterprise.
Capitalism is the greatest threat to the family. The nuclear family is a creation of capitalism. Capitalism is now dissolving the nuclear family and replacing it with a set of economic relationships (i.e., stay on parents’ healthcare into your 20’s).
This is an ongoing process. The nuclear family was itself created by capitalism. Before that, inter-generational households were common.
Those inter-generational households were a creation of capitalism, which broke up the extended families that predominated in feudal europe. As textile factories in urban areas drew more residents to cities, the extended families that dominated european life for generations fell apart.
Capitalism is constantly re-organizing family relationships. This is nothing new.
Great job Mark. As usual, just follow the money and you will find a Republican hack.
His grand father, Eddie Kantor, was the vaudeville and movie character who sang and did skits in funny outfits and sometimes blackface.
What is so odd to me is to hear this Jewish guy hype up his fake southern accent for the folks back home when he is on tv.
I am pretty sure Obama is not even liked by his staff. I heard he is smoking again. Abigail told me.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/17/sen-rand-paul-introduces-fetal-personhood-bill-to-outlaw-abortion/ He is positioning himself well to be an amalgamation of a christianist and a libertarian candidate.
If they wanted to help brain cancer, they would help Dr. Burzynski. He has had astounding luck with brain cancer, and all funded research has been ON HIS OWN. Working and actually CURING people of brain cancer, while he tries to keep his license and answer all the attacks against him.
They have no more wish to help any kind of cancer than they do to improve the schools, fix the budget, audit the fed, stop voting in unconstitutional laws, or do anything else to clean up the mess they have gotten us into. And God forbid any one of them DOES try to help clean up anything! Of course they are all WHACKOS!
As I wind down a unit on the “Legacy of the Civil War”, it is interesting to note that one of the most influential members of the GOP resides in the old capital of the Confederacy. Eric Ivan Cantor reminds me of Judah Philip Benjamin, the first Confederate Attorney General and the last Confederate Secretary of State. Ahh, one can hope that Cantor, like Benjamin, will spend his last days in exile. Affilez la guillotine, mes freres et soeurs! Over and out.
“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.” (John Taylor Gatto)
When one begins with a faulty premise, faulty conclusions are inevitable.
“It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”
I don’t know of any public schools that teach disrespect of home and parents!
*****
“We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either.”
This is what was brought to us by the school reform movement.
Our educational system in this country is broke in a bad way. Too often teachers and teachers unions do things for teachers benefits. Too often private schools are more interested in getting their hands on taxpayer money than in educating kids. There are great examples of public schools doing the right thing, there are great examples of charter schools doing the right thing. But the gulf in the middle is large and growing.
We are heading in the wrong direction. When will we turn this mega monster ship around? probably not before some other country on this wonderful planet of ours shows the U.S. for chumps by educating their kids in a way that truly puts us to shame.
Please read this and consider rethinking your position:
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
Excerpted below . . . (The full book is available online, at no cost to you: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue2.htm)
I Quit, I Think
By John Taylor Gatto
In the first year of the last decade of the twentieth century during my thirtieth year as a school teacher in Community School District 3, Manhattan, after teaching in all five
secondary schools in the district, crossing swords with one professional administration after another as they strove to rid themselves of me, after having my license suspended twice for insubordination and terminated covertly once while I was on medical leave of absence, after the City University of New York borrowed me for a five-year stint as a
lecturer in the Education Department (and the faculty rating handbook published by the Student Council gave me the highest ratings in the department my last three years), after planning and bringing about the most successful permanent school fund-raiser in New York City history, after placing a single eighth-grade class into 30,000 hours of volunteer community service, after organizing and financing a student-run food cooperative, after securing over a thousand apprenticeships, directing the collection of tens of thousands of books for the construction of private student libraries, after producing four talking job dictionaries for the blind, writing two original student musicals, and launching an
armada of other initiatives to reintegrate students within a larger human reality, I quit.
I was New York State Teacher of the Year when it happened. An accumulation of disgust and frustration which grew too heavy to be borne finally did me in. To test my resolve I sent a short essay to The Wall Street Journal titled “I Quit, I Think.” In it I explained my reasons for deciding to wrap it up, even though I had no savings and not the slightest idea what else I might do in my mid-fifties to pay the rent. In its entirety it read like this:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid. That idea passed into American history through the Puritans. It found its “scientific” presentation in the bell curve, along which talent supposedly apportions itself by some Iron Law of Biology. It’s a religious notion, School is its church. I offer rituals to keep heresy at bay. I provide documentation to justify the heavenly pyramid.
Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by
subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.” It has political allies to guard its marches, that’s why reforms come and go without changing much. Even reformers can’t imagine school much different.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education” fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.
In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are
sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling. That’s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We don’t need state-certified teachers to make education happen—that probably guarantees it won’t.
How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn or deliberate indifference to it. I can’t teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don’t have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I’ll be looking for work.
********
Public Education must be totally abolished. Instead, home schooling with Internet connections is the answer. For people who work local Churches could provide Internet connections with unskilled monitors. No school buses, no zombie teachers….
Regarding “political science”, there is absolutely nothing political about science. And there’s absolutely nothing scientific about politics. So these political scientists and hopelessly confused.
mespo:
Cantor is just another big government conservative which is really just a neo-con. If you are serious about cutting spending, then cut it all. Government funded science isnt sciene but politics in many cases.
If republicans in Richmond and elsewhere knew what was good for them, they would send Cantor and his ilk back to Dogpatch.
Mark,
Interesting post. I’d say that we have quite a few Democrats who are supporters of the corporate-driven school reform movement that puts too much reliance on high stakes tests to evaluate students’ progress and assess teachers’ competence in the classroom–and supports an increasing numbers of charter schools.
Well said. I agree completely. Cantor, to my great disgust, is my rep as well and he is an abomination.
Well Mark,
They must rebrand themselves or they might find that they are all out of a job…. This rebranding goes for the GOP and democrats as well… What’s interesting…. Christie was no invited…. Partisan hacks are intent on destroying the US over ideals versus principles….
Excellent article…