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New World Notes - Plundering Public Education
This week on New World Notes: radio program #188, October 11, from 12:00 to 12:30 PM, host Kenneth Dowst spotlights the concerted attack on public education.
Want to destroy quality public education? First underfund it. Then open schools up to milking by corporate marketing departments. Then--by force of law--privatize public schools--in the process busting teachers' unions and replacing experienced, well-trained teachers with inexperienced, poorly trained, and ill-paid ones. The result? Increased corporate profits and citizens/workers incapable of critically questioning (let alone fighting back against!) The System. It's a win-win situation!--at least for the corporate greedheads.
From the documentary Corporations in the Classroom we'll hear about two notorious schemes to market products to captive audiences of U.S. schoolchildren: Bus Radio and Channel One TV.
Journalist/commentator Chris Hedges discusses the Oligarchy's project of privatizing schools, destroying Liberal Arts education, and training young people only to serve as cogs in various parts of the economic engine. This project is a century old--but it has made great gains under Bush II and Obama.
Fr. Guido Sarducci offers some comic relief. He presents his plan to offer a quality college education in only five minutes, at a cost of $20.
From Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (2002):
"[F]ast food chains are now gaining access to the last advertising-free outposts of American life. In 1993 District 11 in Colorado Springs started a nationwide trend, becoming the first public school district in the United States to place ads for Burger King in its hallways and on the sides of its school buses. Like other school systems in Colorado, District 11 faced revenue shortfalls, thanks to growing enrollments and voter hostility to tax increases for education...
"The fast food chains run ads on Channel One, the commercial television network whose programming is now shown in classrooms, almost every school day, to eight million of the nation’s middle, junior, and high school students – a teen audience fifty times larger than that of MTV."