Stay Poor Anne!

 I've never done this before but if you want to watch the video to which I will immediately refer, go to almost the end of this post. 

If the guy who seems to have trouble looking at Anna Bocca can be believed... Mate, look at her! She's young but not airhead, non-contributing, dependent-type young, she's hot but not Chekhovian cheat-on-your-husband-but-don't-divorce-him, predatory hot, she's brainy, and oh yeah, by the way, English accent? No? I'd be looking at her. Anyhoo, if the guy who has been researching wealth inequality for 15 years knows what he's talking about... and good for Anna! This is why her vids are so informative I guess and why I have learned a lot from them, trust her, and have put her on this blog before: she is brilliant at finding answers. Not data, not biased opinion, but the unvarnished truth. It's hard to get from people with political, social, or professional associations that would cause them to "varnish" the truth, so find a broke-ass intellectual who has the money to survive (maybe student loans or parental support?) and the non-affiliation to be objective. That's how this dude strikes me: he's a starving student. Maybe he's not looking at Anna cuz he doesn't have the dough to take her round to the pub. Maybe he's got a mid-term exam tomorrow and even this interview is going to necessitate an all-night cram session. But I could be wrong. What do I know? Maybe he works for GE, but I think he'd look more in his element wearing his little toque aboard the Rainbow Warrior saving whales than in a business suit and that's why Anna rode her bike over to visit him. Rode her bike. Man I love this girl!

At any rate, if this guy knows his stuff, things were unequal, then there was a short period of what seemed to be experimentation during which the royalty, robber barons, elite, less-than-one-percent, puppet masters, call them what you will, allowed a middle class to form and the gap between the few Haves and the unwashed masses of Have-nots to close a little bit. In my previous post I speculated that gratitude might have played a part in this experimentation since it happened on the heels of two world wars in which those unwashed masses saved their owners' businesses and countries in which and with which to do their businesses, but that's just me humanizing their patrician indifference to help myself try to relate to the money sickness a little better. In reality it might have just been coincidence. 

They pinpoint the start of these "golden years of capitalism" to the Bretton Woods Conference from July 1st (hey, Canada Day) to July 22nd in 1944. Much like golf rules and Bill 66 (see previous post) a LOT of things were decided for (not by) the people of the world and they, or I suppose WE were blissfully ignorant of how (disastrously) we would be affected by these new RULES. To the victor go the spoils and you can bet the American influence on victory in WWII played no small role in all these new rules heavily favouring the U.S. In fact it'd be a safe bet that a lot of this stuff was negotiated BEFORE the US entered WWII. Just look at the economic conditions that allowed the US to fight. World war is expensive. War bonds were issued, prices were controlled, and things were rationed. Regular folks made sacrifices. The Fed set interest rates low, like 3/8 of a percent, and, as mentioned by our expert, top rates of tax on the rich were up to 90 or 95%. Then after winning the war the US brought the gold standard to the world linking all money to the dollar, they thrust the IMF and the World Bank upon the world (and, if I'm not mistaken, this is what coaxed the rest of the allied countries into the central banking systems they all currently have), and true Keynesian economics were employed. What do you know? The Golden Years! 1945-1973.

People could buy a house with 2 years' salary! Labour unions were strong (and less corrupt). The economic system, banks, investments, the stock market, corporations, these were all tightly regulated by government (which was less corrupt) and the IMF/World Bank (which was less corrupt). So what happened in 1973? In a word, corruption. In two words, Reagan and Thatcher. 

It didn't JUST happen like that of course. Greed didn't just disappear for 25 years. Things were happening in the US like the Vietnam War, less competitive prices, and the soap opera saga of world oil supplies that disrupted the US gold standard and blew up the Bretton Woods economic bliss. Interest rates went up, taxes on the rich went down, unions were demonized, and along with oil, absolutely everything got much more expensive. Yeah... just like today, they had (carefully manufactured in my opinion) massive inflation. Since unemployment went up and wages stagnated, it wasn't just inflation, it was STAGflation.

Now, here's where we want to start asking about the RULES again. Where do they come from, who makes them, and, as they ask in the vid, why do we even play this game? Why do we put up with unpaid overtime (again see last post), rising costs, shittier jobs featuring more work for less pay? How did we get sucked into playing this game and who sucked us in? Meanwhile, businesses have had sustained record profits since the early 70's while us regular folks have been losing at this game. In short, there's more money out there and we're getting less of it. Are we just not working hard enough? Are we just not smart enough? Are we getting outwitted, outlasted, outplayed? Nope, we're getting fucked. 

If you're now thinking, "There he is again, conspiracy theorist Dave," it's because you've been carefully and expensively socialized into thinking that. The "game" to which I'm referring is Capitalism if you haven't worked that out yet. We have known that this game or system does not work for quite some time. The utter failure of the system exhibited itself in the Great Depression that gripped most of the world in the 1930's and partially led to WWII. We have known of a way to win this game for quite some time too: socialism. But, as its name might suggest, that is only good for society, which is not good enough for the rich, and since they are the ones making the rules, we have to play by them if we want to play their game. Why oh why we would want to I just don't know but here we are. 

Lest we forget, FDR implemented programs like unemployment insurance, social security, labour protections, market and bank regulation (or RE-regulation), and other such socialist policies to save America from capitalism just before WWII. I.e., the government, not the "free market" or the private sector, had pulled America's asses out of the Depression. As America goes, so go most other allied countries, so really THAT'S when we all started playing the people's game, and it was a fun 40-year long game for the people until the early 70's when the rich flipped the table and said, "We're not playing this game any more. Even though we're having fun and we like the game, we have a better game." Better only for them as it turned out.

So... how did the rich convince us to go back to playing their game? They flat out lied to us. We just covered how it was government that saved the people from the Great Depression. Then government regulation carried the people through the best years of their lives. People trusted, even LOVED the government! FDR got elected 4 times! But the Reagan and Thatcher administrations had the job of painting government as "the problem, not the solution." That, as you might expect, took some doing. 

This is when a bloody well organized propaganda campaign to bring back capitalism and funnel the money that had leaked into the public back to the top where it belonged began and the wealth gap re-widened with it. Not surprisingly, Big Oil were leading the campaign with J. Howard Pew characterizing the New Deal as a Trojan Horse for socialism, which it totally was, and that would be a BAD thing once "socialism" became a scare word. Newspapers became unsourced propaganda filled rags poisoning the minds of the electorate against the government that had given them the best years of their lives and in favour of the corporations that had led them into the Depression. How did they do it?

Rugged individualism, competition, anti-communist thought, scapegoating, blacklisting, oh yeah, it got UGLY! It wasn't just the newspapers, it got into the movies too. The message that regulating the "free market" was absolutely unconstitutional and unamerican was at the heart of most of the rhetoric. The result was socialism and/or communism and both were evil. The very American prosperity gospel replaced the Biblical idea that chasing money is NOT a virtue. It is fascinating how THAT scam was perpetrated on the American people! Anna does a great video on that too called The Big Church Grift. "If you want to be perfect sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor." Matthew 20:21. Jesus said that. Christ. I guess the verse the prosperity gospel considers to trump that is, "Nobody's perfect." Fakeziah 6:66. (The use of the word "trump" is no coincidence there. heh heh)

Corrupting religion to make Jesus into an entrepreneurial spirit rather than a loving one was bad. You might even say it was evil. But I think what was done to corrupt education was probably worse. Maybe it's my natural progression in life through religion to education that makes me feel this way, maybe it's faith vs. fact, I dunno, but it just seems diabolical to me. You see, much like pastors were paid to link money to virtue and God, academics were paid to write false studies and coerced into fudging textbooks and corrupting general education along those same lines. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US contains the Haymarket Affair and the heroic efforts of Americans in America to oppose industry and demand human rights. There's even a song! This is why it isn't used much in American classrooms. They have been controlled for over a century by the powerful corporate lobby that fondly reflects on the days when kids could work in factories for long hours with no overtime pay, no benefits, no minimum wage, and no safety regulations as soon as they were tall enough to reach the machine controls. Educating the public on the heroism of citizens who opposed such conditions and fought for human dignity just didn't fit into the aspirations of the ruling class. So they changed education. Just changed it.

You may wonder, "Well, how the hell could they just do that? Knowledge is knowledge, no?" Unbelievably, the corporate lobbyists and think tanks of the day just took people who had spent lifetimes proving that capitalism has inherent problems - like it doesn't fucking work! The "golden years of capitalism" were 4 decades of socialism. Markets don't correct themselves and businessmen just connive to take as much money from the poor as they can. The Owners can't have us knowing this so they took guys like John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith and just lied about them! I'm not making this up! Anna Bocca is an economics student and I know several more who rant and rave about how Keynes and Smith are purposely misrepresented. People sympathetic to the cause of corporate (bullshit) economics were hired to teach and fund major university economics programs despite their academic WRONGNESS. This happened only because the lobby had the money to make it happen. Like religion, education had been messed up by money. Anna's video about this is very long but very informative. Check it out. 

One of the major bought and paid for quasi-economists was a name that might be more well known: Milton Friedman. Capitalism and Freedom was his highly biased pulp fiction on economics. 

So by buying people, schools, media, churches, and (Reagan/Thatcher) government, the rich ended their experiment with surrendering a little bit of money to the other 99 point whatever percent of the world and decided to take it back. If you want to learn about the aggressive expansion of the American Chamber of Commerce and the loads of cash they poured into buying politics in the early 70's, here's the link to the video I referenced at the very beginning. 

Sorry about the ads within but I think they're worth it. Not the ones from YouTube but Anne's sponsors. 

So there you have it. This is how we got sucked into playing the game of the (less than) 1%. In the end it boils down to money. Money made it happen and to truly understand how bad it is, you need to not have very much of it. To understand how those with money always end up being the ones in control boggles many a great mind. 

"The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." J.R.R. Tolkien

It seems to me that a guy could do worse than adopting the philosophy that the amount of trust you should put into a person is directly disproportionate to the amount of money that person has. So going back to the beginning, I truly hope that the guy Anne consulted was as poor as he looked and I hope Anne does well enough with her sponsors to keep producing such informative videos... but just barely well enough. Stay strong and stay poor Anne!

It Is NOT What It Is

 "It is what it is." I've mentioned this defeatist mantra and how much I hate it in these blathering bloggages before. I've had conversations about it too trying unsuccessfully to clearly convey exactly why I despise this philosophy and the battered and bullied generations that have been forced to adopt it. "Hate" might be too strong a word for how I feel about the pathetic downtrodden population that has been securely yoked and whipped by the ruling class into trading their lives to keep the wealthy in haute couture and bon-bons. But I don't like them and I'm one of them. What exactly is it that keeps us from doing what we all want to do?

"It is what it is." It's much like "A rule is a rule." It is no coincidence that after Bryson Dechambeau was penalized two strokes for accidentally improving his lie yesterday in The Open he said, "It is what it is." I don't want to get too deep into this but listen, as long as you don't move your ball, you are not improving your lie. Dechambeau walked into tall grass, stood behind his ball to see where he needed to hit it, then hit it. Well, MUCH later it was ruled by the stuffed shirts that comprise whatever governing body is in charge at The Open that stomping down the high grass behind his ball made his backswing easier and therefore "improved his lie." No. Just no. It improved his backswing and did nothing to affect his lie. You cannot argue that logically so you need to revert to, "A rule is a rule." "It is what it is." I can't tell you how many times I have rearranged foliage on golf courses to improve my backswing and watched my fellow golf partners do the same. It never occurred to any of us that we were cheating because we weren't. Improving your backswing doesn't amount to cheating in the minds of golfers worldwide. But evidently it's a rule.

Here's another: You are not allowed to ground a club in a bunker. Why not? It's about preserving the sand in the bunker and maintaining the hazard. It's much like raking the trap after you mess it up. They don't want folks practicing swings 3 or 4 times blasting sand out of the bunker and onto the grass. Understandable. So when someone grazes the sand accidentally while preparing to hit their shot, it shouldn't be a penalty, right? Logically that's right. But logic and justice so often take back seats to The Rule! Probably the worst injustice ever was Dustin Johnson in the 2010 PGA Championship who took a practice swing beside his ball that had come to rest in a strip of bare dirt with no grass growing in it. Well here come those stuffed shirts again with their crotches bulging at the prospect of being OBEYED by a celebrity golf professional. "That was a bunker!" they screamed.

This, my friends, this little patch of dirt in the picture above is not a bunker, it's groundskeeper neglect. Almost everyone, golfer or not, can agree on that but, well, a rule is a rule. It is what it is. 

You might be thinking, "Oh Dave you conspiracy theorist, they're just trying to stop golfers from cheating." Nope. I'll give you another rule that proves the rule-makers are not just punishing cheaters, they're also just punishing for the fun of it. If you make a mistake on your scorecard there are two things that can happen: 1. You can be disqualified if you write a score lower than the one you got. 2. You will be forced to keep the higher score if you (or your golfing partner keeping your score) writes down a larger score than the one you got. In the 1968 Master's Roberto De Vicenzo's playing partner Tommy Aaron gave him a 4 when he actually got a 3. This cost him a chance at a playoff to win the tournament. Obviously there was no attempt to cheat. So why the punishment? Nothing justifies it. So we have to try to mitigate the injustice with a brainless non-justification, "Well, them's the rules." "It is what it is." De Vicenzo had his own way of phrasing it, "What a stupid I am!" 

Why does nobody have the balls to change the fucking rules? Whether you think Dechambeau was breaking the rule or not, it's a fucking stupid rule. How can you avoid stomping down grass near your ball? You have to get close to your ball to shoot it! The rule should be that as long as you don't touch or move your ball, doing ANYthing to improve your backswing is NOT improving your lie. Kudos to Dechambeau for being one of the VERY few with the courage to fight stupid rules in our world. It can be done but few of us stand up to The Man.

Since returning to Canada I've noticed an outrageously gross societal wave toward this blind acceptance and obedience, almost worship of rules, no matter how stupid. If Canada were a sport, it might be golf. Here's a rule that has already cost me two jobs: If somebody is outside of Canada for 5 years, driving or not, his/her license expires and he/she completely forgets (inexplicably exactly at the 5 year point) how to drive necessitating more than just driver's license renewal, they must make their ways through the graduated driving programs of the provinces in which they reside as if they had never held a license or driven before. I settled in Sarnia hoping to get work with a friend who has a vending machine business. This requires driving around town and stocking vending machines with snacks and drinks. Pretty simple. Unfortunately, even with my clean driver's abstract and proof of 25 years with no accidents or insurance claims against me in hand, when I went to the appropriate keepers of the rules to plead for an exception all I got was, "A rule is a rule. No exceptions. It is what it is."

Here's another one: Despite our culture that is consciously forcing Canadians to own vehicles and drive, did you know there is excise tax on fuel? Excise taxes are for luxuries and dirty pleasures and they are designed to limit consumption of such products and services as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, marijuana, certain luxury vehicles, etc. You find me a Canadian who thinks gas isn't essential to their lives and I'll show you... me. I don't drive so I don't use gas. This tax does not affect me, right? WRONG. I take the bus and taxis and Ubers. I eat food that is delivered by truck. I buy all kinds of things that have gone up in price (and with Trump's bullshit war with Iran will go up in price much more) that involve oil in manufacturing, delivery, or somewhere along the supply chain. ALL Canadians are dependent upon oil and since the early days of recognizing its potential when a super rich asshole like William Knox D'Arcy could go to a poor country like Persia (Iran) and buy 30 years of land and oil drilling rights for some paltry sum like 20,000 pounds, Big Oil has been manufacturing oil addiction into cultures like Canada. If you've ever wondered why Canada sells its oil cheaply to the US then buys back the refined product more expensively, it ain't because we don't have the ability to refine it here. It's the same assholery that made William Knox D'Arcy pretend he was helping the Persians, not fleecing them. Here we add to "It is what it is," and "A rule is a rule," another euphemism that has proven quite functional in the creation of our oligarchic world, "It's just business." I could spend a long time on this but will instead refer you to this well-researched video:

The rich control our lives and how we live them. There was a short period of time after the poor fought a couple of world wars and saved the businesses (and arses) of every last one of what George Carlin calls "our owners" and they allowed the peasants to enjoy a little bit more of the wealth. Taxes on the rich were in the 70 percent area. Ordinary folks could live very well on one salary. People could send their kids to college, buy their homes outright, AND retire! We had those wonder years not just because of the greatest generation fighting in the wars, but also because they fought for workers' rights. 

Anybody know what holiday is celebrated on May 1st? If you're Canadian or American you probably don't, yet it's a big deal in over 160 countries around the world. It commemorates the Haymarket Affair during which people were wounded and killed after a peaceful protest erupted into violence. It eventually led to the adoption of the 8-hour day worldwide and where did it happen? Chicago! Ask anybody in the US - hell ask anybody in CHICAGO what the Haymarket Affair was or even what is celebrated on May 1st or the first Sunday in may in most countries and they won't know. The rich don't want them to know and, yes, after 25 years in the industry you can take it from me, the rich are even trying to control what we know. Why wouldn't they want us to know about the heroes who fought for labour rights to which we are now entitled? 

The obvious projected logic is that maybe the captains of industry and those who make the rules (which ARE the rules) might not want us to know about those rules and our rights enshrined within them because they are trying to slowly erode them, and this includes the 8-hour day. Let me give you one example from my new life in Canada. I just signed contracts to work security again and I will probably start training by the end of this week or if not, most likely this upcoming weekend. Amongst the various papers and documents I was hastily given to sign was the expected averaging agreement. I had one of these in the last security job I worked in Trail. THERE I was asked if I would sign it and agreed simply because I wasn't getting any weeks when I worked enough hours to get overtime. I don't think I ever did there. But if I HAD, I wouldn't have agreed to the averaging agreement. Here in Ontario these things were not legal until just 7 years ago when Doug Ford signed the (need I even say "euphemistic" when it comes to politics?) Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act or Bill 66 which allowed employers to bypass government regulation in this respect. 

You see, if a person works more than 44 hours in a week, that person is entitled to overtime pay which is paid at 1.5 times the worker's wage. People fought and DIED for this right ffs! With the Labour Standards Act it was expected that employers consult the Ministry of Labour and get approval for these "agreements." The approval required a bona fide reason for the averaging agreement. Here's what they are: If a worker works, say, 4 12-hour shifts in a week, that's 48 hours and that worker is entitled to 4 hours at the rate of 1.5 times their usual pay. However, if they have an averaging agreement the scheduler can give them only 3 shifts in the next week (36 hours) making the average weekly number of hours 42 for that pay period, and since a 42-hour week doesn't qualify for overtime pay, the company pretends like you didn't work overtime and asks you to play along with their gag and pretend they don't have to pay it... which they DO but be a good bitch and quiet down now. 

Now, you might be saying, "What an evil thing to do! Especially to a security guard who's only making minimum wage!" You're right! But the Ministry of Labour said, "Now hang on here, if the business has a good reason for it, we'll allow it." I can't imagine any legitimate reason for one of these averaging agreements and the employers usually couldn't think anything up, so they generally were assumed to be doing it to save money by denying workers' overtime pay to which they were entitled. This did not qualify as a legitimate reason, it qualified as greedy employers trying to squeeze the last drop of dignity and servitude out of their cattle - uh I mean chattel - uh I mean employees. Well now that Ontario has the new legislation called the Make Ontario Competitive Again Act, that now IS a legitimate reason and it sets a HORRIFIC precedent for more assholery to come. A rule is a rule. A law is a law. It is what it is. It's just business. 

You see how these things happen? This is not legitimate, honest, natural, evolutionary, or anything like that. These things happen when greedy rich people arrange things so that they can steal more from the poor.

We have to stop acquiescing to Draconian, Machiavellian, Gordon Gecko, Greed is Good rules, laws, and customs. We're already reverting and if we don't watch ourselves we'll be back to the era when kids could work 18-hour days in the fucking coal mines! 

It ISN'T just business; A rule is NOT a rule; and it is NOT what it is! Thank God for people who question these 1984isms like Bryson Dechambeau and others like him. If we were all like that we'd have a far better world. Leastaways, that's what I reckon.

Have You Seen This Man?

 All but one of the courses in my abandoned master's studies featured group projects. There were good things about them, but they were generally more bad than good for the simple reason that probably should/could have been anticipated: people are far less accountable while they are wearing their online personas. The progressive ed ideas of collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, are often encouraged in group projects. Sometimes they actually happen - even in online group projects. But, while it was interesting to interact with fellow students from all over the world, the projects more often than not took the form of aggressively dominant students bullying others into control of the projects to assure that no dummies negatively affected their GPA's. And without a doubt the project bullies only got away with that because they didn't have to be the type A dickheads face-to-face and field the push-back of the other group members in person. Kudos to the university for trying, but I think they're pulling back on this educational strategy and I think an online conversation thread I had with a member of the university administration describing what I just typed may have even played a part in my final class (11 of 12) NOT having a group project. 

Nevertheless, while doing these projects I was in contact with many of my fellow students and occasionally we got off topic in our communication. The topics unrelated to our projects were what you might expect - where we were located; what inspired us to get MEds; what age and subjects we taught; what time it was; and the like. But another popular topic was the school. More specifically its legitimacy. They advertise as tuition-free but we all paid money for our courses. That was surprising to a lot of students. One of the other surprising things was the accreditation. Most of us read all the claims of accreditation in the school and course descriptions not knowing that REGIONAL accreditation was the big one and they didn't have it, although they DO now. They got regionally accredited somewhere around my 9th or 10th course. By the same accrediting body as Berkeley and Stanford don't you know! So I guess that would be good... if you finish the degree.

On THAT note, there was a hugely popular topic that we discussed and I was not aware of until late in my studies, like about 10 courses in. I had mentioned the thesis course, or what the school calls the "capstone" course to several people and we discussed what we were planning to write our theses on. I had all but settled on Paulo Freire early in the course (like probably before I was done my second course) when I first heard of this guy who should be a household name all over the world, but isn't. He was a popular choice but since his educational niche was adult linguistics - and so was mine - the choice seemed an especially suitable one for me. None of the students I talked with ever mentioned the fact that this course was NOT a thesis course. Absolutely nothing in what any of us had read about the course prepared us for the final two courses, which was when we all found out, and which consisted of preparing and writing one of those boring, statistical, almost mathematical, scientific educational studies in which we try to quantify something unquantifiable. In the upcoming video, Bruno della Chiesa provides us with the word "quantophrenia," which is the obsession in social sciences with treating numerical data as the only valid form of knowledge. I have needed that word countless times in this blog and probably in about 50% of my research papers during my M.Ed. studies! Thank you Bruno! 

Anyway, believe it or not, the school actually provides a list of the topics they want us to study. On that list are things that have been researched to death and anyone who has taught for 5 minutes, hell, even non-educators already knows. They NEED to be things that are well researched already because NOW it has to be SECONDARY research meaning that we have to somehow (and as explained in a previous blog post, the university and its professors haven't quite figured out the details of HOW) read lots of previous papers on our topic and relate them to our research???, personal opinion???, fake research??? or whatever, on the same topic. 

I even knew a guy in Gongju, where I did the first few courses in the degree, who was on his 11th course and he didn't tell me this very important, game changing information. I think he might have caught things early on when the project was still PRIMARY research and was able to use HIS class as research subjects. I didn't keep in touch and don't know if he ever finished. In fact the only time I talked to him was at a noisy pub in Gongju and neither of us was interested in talking shop at the time. I think it would have made a difference. Shoulda, coulda, woulda...

What I believe happened, (and this is based on communication with the administrator) was the university was running into problems with students not having classes to use for their research, (My 11th class fell during the summer semester during which students were on summer vacation and if I remember correctly, this was why I initiated the dialog with the administrator) as well as liability issues in which master's students had to get permission from parents, teachers, students, and it became too difficult. So I was assured that I wouldn't need to worry about it, the course was changing from PRIMARY to SECONDARY research. And, thankfully, the 11th course was without a group project. I say thankfully but I am now thinking that if we HAD a group project, maybe we could have ironed out exactly how the hell we were supposed to DO this primary study using secondary research. It is literally impossible and I tried until I was unable to try anymore. I explain the details better here.

I have since been contacted by the university and asked why I abandoned my course right at the finish line and told them that they need to fix it before I can finish it. And if they had allowed me to write a "No, you're wrong and here's why" thesis, the very kind Noam Chomsky describes as the type they expect MIT students to write, thereby qualifying that institution as progressive, why, I would have my M.Ed. today. However, my institution, while training me in all kinds of educational progressivism, was like most and refused to practice what they preached. 

Aye, there's the rub! Why can't universities practice the kind of education their education departments educate about? This brings up the topic to which Freire devoted his singularly out-fucking-standing life and career, and the topic on which I would have written my thesis if I hadn't mistakenly assumed my uni was going to be forthcoming about the course format from the beginning. Schools, and maybe most particularly American schools need to choose between education and industry and despite what Howard Gardner calls at least 300 years internationally and at least 100 years in America of articulate critique of this view, the choice of industrial education remains dominant. 

I have watched, re-watched, and re-re-watched this video in which Gardner says they'll come back to that, but they don't come back to that! However, some fascinating points are brought up about the elite protectionism and its not-so-well-known but enduring presence in the constitution, government, and culture of America since it was established. I love the point about Ralph Waldo Emerson saying that if the poor are educated too much, they'll come for our (ruling class) throats. One of the framers of the Constitution, James Madison, said virtually the same thing at the Constitutional Convention when he argued for the protection of the minority of the opulent against the majority (of the peasants). But, unlike Freire, they don't really state unequivocally that the solution, as I think every educator knows from all the critique Gardner mentioned, is the pedagogy of the oppressed. We must educate the poor, not oppress them. But the ruling class considers this a threat to their positions of power so they call it radical and revolutionary. It's still valid, probably more relevant than ever, and people are still being oppressed as much as ever. We just need educators with the balls to challenge the oppressors and implement proper education.

I think here we need a little background on THE MAN. When you talk about education, you might think Dewey or even Chomsky is the main man, but I have no doubt they'd both defer to Freire. In fact Chomsky talks of attending a Deweyan school when he was young that had the very Freirean dialogical, formative - not summative assessment style. He says he skipped a grade but had no idea he was a good student cuz the school was not obsessively comparing him with other students. Bruno mentions the PISA standardized tests that are probably the best example of this educational evil that is LITERALLY (and I don't use that word in its modern watered down form) killing 14 and 15 year old students and the careers of teachers the world over because we MUST have these evaluations. Why? Higher evaluations = more money. It's as simple as that. It's nothing like this:

Trust me! GOOD teachers have been teaching to the tests and prioritizing the comparative, competitive curriculum at the expense of real education because they could lose their jobs if they don't. Students have been climbing to school rooftops, holding hands, and jumping to their deaths because of failing their families, schools, and countries through mediocre PISA scores. We all know the horrors of the industrial education methods, every Ed. degree course including even Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches of their evils, we are consistently taught that each student's personal progression is what is most important, and then the prof says, "This will be on Tuesday's test which is worth 30% of your final grade. Those who fail will stand a good chance of having to repeat the class. Check the rubric in the group chat for what will be covered on the test." Victor Weisskopf's "It doesn't matter what we will cover, it matters what YOU will DIScover," is just a wonderfully pithy quote, but it happens only in educational La La Land, am I right? Well not entirely. It happened in Brazil in the early 1960's because one man had the cajones to do what so many teachers are scared to do. He got put in jail, kicked out of his country, and effectively cancelled from a lot of educational cultures because of it, but boy did he get results!

That man was this man, Paulo Freire. 

Don't recognize him, do you? He took his native Brazil from having a literate population that, as near as makes little to no difference, excluded the poor (and oppressed) to almost total literacy by teaching peasants to read. He did this by getting to know his students intimately, teaching them words that were particularly relevant to their daily lives, (generative vocabulary) studying syllables and forming new words with them, analyzing pictures of everyday scenes and discussing them, and prioritizing (almost weaponizing) dialogic, interactive, highly political, and emotionally bonding conversation. He was teaching illiterate adults who were highly affected by their political surroundings but, because of their illiteracy, were not allowed to vote. So, if we allow the students' trust in political power, or at least some form of increased personal agency being attached to the Brazilian vote, these were highly motivated students and statistics illustrated their success. It is said that many were taught to read (Portuguese) in as little as 30 hours! 

Things were going swimmingly and by 1963 Paulo Freire was appointed to director of the Brazilian National Literacy Program due to his phenomenal successes in regional programs in his area. The government wanted all of Brazil to be literate I guess. THAT government needed to go it was determined, perhaps BECAUSE of that, by the heads of the military coup (incidentally they were backed by the US in case you believe their war on education was strictly domestic) who overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964. They blatantly declared Freire's empowering education a form of subversive, revolutionary, and radical action and imprisoned him for 70 days after which he was exiled for 15 years. Well, if you watch the video, at least he wasn't murdered like the Jesuit teachers and their daughters and housekeepers in El Salvador. So he had THAT goin' for him...

Freire developed his educational and consciousness raising philosophies while in exile in Bolivia, Switzerland and primarily Chile. He even taught at Harvard for a while in '69/'70. It was during his exile from Brazil that he wrote the sadly inaccurately titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It should have been called the Andragogy of the Oppressed since he wasn't teaching little kids, but never mind.

When I first learned about Freire, read his book and learned his educational philosophies I immediately found in him more than just agreement but, although I will never suffer like he did for education, a kind of brother... a FRERE if you will. That means "brother" in French. 

Before I ever heard of him I formulated my own opinions and philosophies on the marginalization/oppression of the poor in almost every country and the duty of those of us who have experienced this injustice, and are in positions to educate young minds and old about it, to do so. I always preferred active, participatory learning to the passive vessel "banking" model Freire criticized in so much of our "traditional" education. Teamwork, problem-solving, and, indeed, group projects were always integral parts of my curricula. Though I experienced failure with them online during the Covid 19 epidemic. Becoming critically conscious, thinking deeply about it (praxis), and dialoging about it were strongly encouraged in my classroom. 

I was much like Bruno who hadn't heard of Freire but who found that he had been exposed indirectly to a lot of his ideas and educational philosophy. Learning about Freire for me was like learning that word quantophrenia from the video. "WHERE have you been all my life?" I immediately asked and thought of all the times I could have used that knowledge.

I suppose the reason I wanted to write my thesis on Freire, and maybe even one of the reasons why I am writing this today, is so that I can give one or two other people that overwhelming feeling of support. Freire and many of the other educational giants who I read about in my master's studies, gave me a kind of attaboy from the grave and made me more confident that I wasn't the only one clinging to the hopeless hope of proper education in this world.

A hope I have almost given up on. I'm still volunteering a couple hours a week educating for free but I think my final job on this earth is destined to be in security. A great waste of a good teacher to be sure, but at least I'm not as likely to be assassinated by American anti-intellectual militants working as an industrial security guard in Sarnia.

So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice...