Learned watching cable news, #1

Week of January 9, 2012

1.  Mitt Romney and I have one thing in common (CNN).  Neither of us cares about his family dog.

2. Libertarian Ron Paul and I have one thing in common (Maddow, MSNBC).  We are against the regulations we don’t like and for the ones we like.

3.  According to O’Reilly and Ben Stein on Fox, Republicans are ridiculed by talk show hosts because Hollywood is biased against Republicans, not because Republican talking points are easy to ridicule.

Democrat talking points are easy to ridicule, too; but Democrats aren’t as disciplined, unified, and uniform as Republicans.  You gotta love Republican discipline — following the orders of Rove, Cheney and Norquist for eight years, culminating in the crash of the American economy.  Republican presidential candidates are now claiming they know how to improve the economy.  I must have missed their knowledge about how to build and maintain a thriving economy, when they were in power between 2000 and 2009.

4.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Maher, HBO) thinks urination-gate reflects poorly on her belief that we are “the greatest country in the world.”   She condemned the Marines’ act, saying  she wants the world to know she represents many fine 18-year-olds in her Florida district.  Did she look at other countries and determine that they have fewer fine 18-year-olds or more corpse urinators?  Or is her belief that “America is the greatest country in the world” just a belief?

The Power of Purpose

Here is an editorial on the documentary, “Waiting for Superman.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/opinion/30collins.html?emc=eta1

(Sarcasm alert!) I love all the editorializing. I love “Waiting for Superman.” I love John Stossel’s claim that schools are bad because public education is a monopoly. And I love the belief that chartering, vouchering, magnetizing, marketing, or profiteering will improve public education.

Cut the Crap

The point of my book is that none of this will improve education, if our purposes remain the same. So, let’s cut the crap. Without an inspiring, useful definition of what it means to be educated, education improvement efforts will fail for the same reason they have failed for 60 years — our purposes do not inspire teaching and learning. Continue reading →