A fool who thinks that he is a fool is for that very reason a wise man. The fool who thinks that he is wise is . . . a fool indeed.—The Teaching of Buddha, DHAMMAPADA 63.
Abstract
No longer can teachers in the US simply close their classroom doors and isolate themselves, their classrooms, their students; that is, if they ever could. More than ever before, larger political, sociocultural and ideological forces find their way into the classroom on the backs of so-called educational reforms. But not every educational reform results in school improvement, and precious few educational reforms benefit teachers and their work life. Educational reforms have wrought tremendous change on the classroom and on the teacher. Public schools and the teachers who inhabit them are bleeding out in a death by a thousand cuts. Support for public education is dwindling. Accountability, high-stakes tests, prescriptive ‘teacher-proof’ curriculum, and more, serve to stifle creativity, quash innovation and otherwise eat away at teachers’ professional discretion, independence and autonomy.
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Notes
“Kool-aid-drinking” is a colloquial term, a vestige of the murder-suicide precipitated by Jim Jones, an erstwhile religious cult leader, in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, when he convinced his followers to drink poison-laced Kool-aid. Nearly one thousand people died as a result.
These data bits can and have been used, through analysis, analytics, and assignment of probability, to profile you: who your ‘friends’ are, what their preferences are, what your political leanings are, your gender and even your sexual orientation (are you gay or straight), and more.
Entry-level teachers in the US can earn anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000, depending on where they are employed (National Education Association, http://www.nea.org/home/2011-2012-average-starting-teacher-salary.html).
As an example, in Egypt the state bureaucracy is referred to as ‘the deep state,’ and widely acknowledged as being a formidable impediment to any type of change (McEvers 2013).
Two friends of mine, one who served as a US Marine and the other as a Catholic priest, have each told me separately that there is no such thing as a ‘former priest’ or, the other, that there is no such thing as a ‘former marine’: once a marine, always a marine. This speaks to a high degree of indoctrination and of personal, psychic attachment (and identification).
See http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/ for Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Perception Index.
There is, to the contrary, ample historical evidence of smaller communal groups, often more hunter-gathers or of a subsistence-level economy, that have, in today’s terms, a flatter organizational structure and enjoy more egalitarian relationships among the members (Wilkinson 2005); so a tendency toward corruption may be a function of hierarchy and the size of the group, community or country. Patriarchy and culture almost certainly play a role; but just what their part is, we can’t say at this time.
Compare Transparency International’s index (fn 6 above) with per capita figures, for example: http://www.econguru.com/heat-map-of-worldwide-gdp-ppp-per-capita-2008/.
A quick (virtual) tour of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and the treasury of the Ottoman sultans provides ample evidence for my assertions about gifting in social hierarchies. A representative sample can be seen on this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if0ohSTZorQ.
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Waite, D. Of Charlatans, Sorcerers, Alchemists, Demagogues, Profit-Mongers, Tyrants and Kings: Educational Reform and the Death by a Thousand Cuts. Urban Rev 48, 123–148 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0348-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0348-3