[Marxism] Counterpunch: No Child Left Behind and the Imperial Project

["Mike Friedman" <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

February 2, 2007

No Child Left Behind and the Imperial Project
Cutting the Schools-to-War Pipeline
By RICH GIBSON and E. WAYNE ROSS

Any nation promising perpetual war on the world is likely to make peculiar
demands on its schools and impositions on its teachers and youth.

While it may seem a sideshow to war and exploitation, the sharp pressure
from the Bush administration and its liberal allies to re-authorize the No
Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, in fact, a vital part of the imperial
project.

The NCLB is the result of nearly three decades of elites' struggles to
recapture control over education in the US, lost during the Vietnam era
when campuses and high-schools broke into open rebellion and, as a
collateral result, critical pedagogy, whole language reading programs,
inter-active, investigatory teaching gained a foothold; some kids learned
they could understand and act on the world-not good in a world where the
Masters need the Slaves to deny their own domination.

In de-industrialized America, the centripetal organizing point of most
peoples' lives is no longer a factory or the union movement, but rather
school. So, securing every aspect of schooling is essential to elites.

Twinned with the NCLB, now comes the equally bi-partisan New Commission on
the American Workforce report, "Tough Choices for Tough Times".
Tough-Tough was authored by such educational experts as the director of
the militarized Lockheed-Martin, and university presidents whose incomes
are frequently dependant on grants from the military, earmarked for
"research." Tough-Tough calls for national curriculum standards as a means
of recapturing the witless patriotism necessary to get people to work, and
eagerly fight and die, for what is abundantly easy to see are the
interests of their own rulers. To resist NCLB at its choke points is to
cut the human pipeline for the promise of perpetual war. Teachers and all
school workers are uniquely positioned to do that.


[continues...]




Michael Friedman
Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior
City University of New York

Molecular Systematics Laboratory
Department of Invertebrate Zoology
American Museum of Natural History
79th Street and Central Park West
New York, NY 10024

Office: 212-313-8721


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