by District Administration Magazine has a feature in its April 2008 issue about corporate involvement in schools. Inside the feature is an interview with Billionaire education philanthropist, Eli Broad. I ask some questions about turning public schools into the plaything of rich folks.
Read Public Schools? Be wary of a gift that might squash the benefits of public education.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Gary,
I’ve been very slowly been making my way through a book by Dr. William J Cook Jr. called Unencorporating Education where he states “the nation’s fundamental institutions, by intent or by default, have abandoned the historical Western idea of education and thus have opened the door for a hostile takeover by corporate America.” There’s more at my posts http://tinyurl.com/5lsgk6 and http://tinyurl.com/52ohb5.
So often it seems that we (if I may jump on stage with you and a few others) think more money will solve our problems. In our exuberance, we sell ourselves to the most generous bidder. As a result we come to rely on those patrons and they get to tell us how to spend their money. We have the expertise, power, and resources to effect the changes we claim to want, but we lack the fortitude.