Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I am Not A Kook

Without reading the rest of this post, go to this website and see if you can figure out what it is.

That is the website of the ChannelOne program, owned by a compnay I've never heard of called Primedia. What do they do? They give schools AV equipment (TVs/VCRs) in exchange for the schools' commitments to put their students in front of ChannelOne's programming for an amount of time that apparently ads up to a full week of in-class TV watching. (Several hours of which are advertising). How does ChannelOne make money? Of course, the "sponsors" of the program are paying in order to get their advertisements in front of students who may not choose not to watch them! According to this source, students in ohio have actually spent time in juvenile detention centers for refusing to watch ChannelOne's programming.

My beliefs about public school have been getting progressively less and less mainstream. But, now I feel pretty confident that it isn't that I'm getting kookier, it's that I'm getting more and more *correct* in my beliefs. It's fashionable to say that school is nothing but state-sponsored daycare. But the truth is much worse than that. School is an apparatus of the state and of our centralized economy, the purpose of which is to turn human beings into consumers. This is why so much of school is built around destroying independent thought and making students dependent on authority figures.

I used to feel kooky when I said "School is for making compliant consumers!" But now, I've found there's an example of students being sent to JAIL for refusing to watch advertising supported TV during class time. So if you don't think school is a tool of our centralized economy, I accuse *you* of willfully ignoring the evidence before your very eyes.

2 Comments:

At 9:04 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great post! I've been looking around your blog--came over here from notschool.blogspot.com (my daughter's site)--and I'll have to become a regular visitor. It's always good to read the writing of someone who actually thinks rather than (1) repeating the CW of the moment (2)parroting the right wing (or left wing) talking points, or (3)taking the word of the mainstream media as absolute truth.

As a progressive, I find it incredibly disheartening to see such unquestioning acceptance that salvation lies in public schooling. It's an article of faith that is almost never examined closely by those on the progressive end of the spectrum.

Kudos!

 
At 9:58 AM, Blogger Mark said...

wow thanks for the comment. it's hard for me to find the time to post regularly, but now that I actually have visitors I might have to try harder.

 

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