Christmas greetings from the '08 presidential campaigns

For whatever reason most of the contenders in the 2008 race decided to put out holiday (i.e. Christmas) campaign ads.

Mike Huckabee starts off the bunch:


Rudy Giuliani tries to be funny and challenges Huckabee to a red-sweater-off:


Rudy Giuliani tries to be funny again, but verges on the unsettling:


McCain recalls some fond Christmas memories as a POW:


Ron Paul's ad brings in some song:


And the Democrats follow suit. John Edwards with a more sympathetic message:


Hillary Clinton focuses on her issues:


And Barack Obama brings out his family, though it comes off as a little awkward:


John Edwards wins the battle of the holiday ads, imo. Second place to Mitt Romney for not running a Christmas ad (although many will say that this is to avoid drawing attention to his Mormon faith). And as much as I don't personally like Senator Clinton, it's great to see universal Pre-K brought into a campaign ad.

1. Presidental hopefuls exposed by Christmas ads
2. Analysis: Christmas campaign ads

7 'medical myths'

There should be more things like this in the news. The BBC recently had a story yesterday addressing 7 common myths:

• Drink at least eight glasses of water a day


• We use only 10% of our brains


• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death


• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight


• Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser


• Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals


• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy

(All of these are false. I'd never heard the mobile phone one before, and I already knew the one ones about our brains and shaving.)

1. 'Medical myths' exposed as untrue

Night of the Meek

The best Christmas story ever told: The Twilight Zone's "Night of the Meek":

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3


There's also a remake from the 80's Twilight Zone, but the Twilight Zone without Rod Sterling is like Zelda without Shigeru Miyamoto.

Kozol on C-SPAN2

The United States has ripped apart every single thing that was represented by the famous court decision Brown vs. Board of Education. [...] Ever since the early 1990s, the Supreme Court, in virtually its present make-up, except for former Justice Rehnquist, has ripped the guts out of Brown vs. Board of Education; all of the enforcement mechanisms in Brown were taken away and indeed the U.S. Supreme Court has gone so far as not simply to end legally mandating school integration [...], its also made it almost impossible to run voluntary school integration programs. It's prohibited some states from doing this—so that we're now at the extraordinary moment when a typical black child in the United States is more likely to go to a segregated public school than at any time since 1968, ironically, the year when Dr. King died.

Four recycled essays

The fall semester is over, and I may as well give a few essays a chance to see the light of day. I'll point out, though, that all of these were written in a very short period of time—the first three more so than the last. While I'm not all that fond of any of these, I think that they are all informative. The fourth essay, I would say, is hands down the most insightful, with interesting discussions about multiculturalism, poststructuralism, and the history of literature in the educational system.

(Sorry in advance for the barrage of pop-ups from these links.. you'll get redirected to a PDF eventually. Use a pop-up blocker or, better yet, Firefox)

1. Chocolate in a Global Context (GEOG 100)
2. Realism and the Depiction of Domesticity in American Literature^* (ENGL 322: Post-Civil War American Literature)
3. The Military Industrial Complex in the United States (HIST 129: Post-Civil War American History)
4. The Shifting Canon of "American Literature" (ENGL 322)

* Essay cites course's anthology. William E. Cain's American Literature Vol. 2.

--
i. Two recycled essays

A collage

Let me ask:

Why did she measure its solitude to the hour?
The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper—
the sky above Walden's pond.

“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” hardly seems a reason,
nor does Talent.

Did the sea of her singing open its caverns
th’oo de bresh of angel’s wings?
or did the song of her singing
appear only while he watched his woods fill with snow?

—the man in the black coat that
turned and writhed in fever,
with a grave, meticulous ball beside the sea. . .
Jesus
he was a handsome man
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision
     or you had a vision or he had a vision to found out Eternity
past midnight in clear rime. . .


Before you answer, allow me to remind you:

Sugar is not a vegetable;
bonsais are inedible;
rivers are damp and
parrot-brilliant patches, indelible.


(A silly late-night poem for ENGL 322.)

Youtube "Debates"

I've been meaning to post this for a while. There was an excellent editorial in the LA Times about the CNN-Youtube Republican debates—namely about how far off the mark they are from genuine questioning by "us" when a handful of clips are carefully selected from thousands and relatively insignificant issues are given undue emphasis.

Here it is in full:

By Tim Rutten

The United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

CNN: Corrupt News Network

"..." 14

"If people did not sometimes do stupid things, nothing intelligent would get done."

—Wittgenstein

Translation: If not for our failures, abuses, and misuses, we would have little need for "intelligent" endeavors. The problems that these endeavors are to solve are of our own creation.

The rising cost of college

CINCINNATI (AP) — Two college students say the high cost of tuition led them to rob a bank.

The men pleaded guilty to two charges of aggravated robbery and six charges of kidnapping. They face 20 years in prison when sentenced Dec. 27.

Andrew Butler, 20, a student at the University of Toledo, told Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Steve Martin on Monday that tuition increases outpaced his scholarships and financial aid.

Christopher Avery, 22, a student at the University of Cincinnati, said he couldn't pay for summer classes after an internship at a grocery store fell through.

"I was strapped for cash," Avery said. "I thought I had nothing to lose."

...

1. 2 Students Convicted in Bank Robbery
2. Hard way to learn lessons
3. Tuition Bandits
4. Tuition Rises at More Than Twice the Rate of Inflation

ASCII Einstein

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Carl Brutananadilewski on Mangino

Umm...

1. Huckabee brings out Chuck Norris for ad

"..." 13

"There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that "the crowd" received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in."

—Søren Kierkegaard

"..." 12

“If you’re robbing a bank, and your pants suddenly fall down, I think it’s OK to laugh, and to let the hostages laugh too, because come on, life is funny.”

—Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

As it continues, the Iraq War takes its toll

From the UDK today:

I’m terrible with birthdays. I remember only three: My dad’s, my wife’s and my son’s.

My son’s is easy for two reasons: I’ll never forget the rainy morning we brought him home and I pondered how anyone could be so small and fragile; and, he was born the day the war started in Iraq.

Being a veteran, this connection started pulling at me immediately, especially when I realized I was the same age as the average soldier serving on the front lines in World War II. The difference between the average age of a World War II soldier, 27, and the average age of a soldier in Vietnam, 20, is one factor explaining a high occurrence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam veterans. The argument holds that a 27-year-old, which happens to be the average age of a casualty in Iraq, is better equipped, psychologically, to handle war. Currently the average age for military members is 25. The average age of a soldier in Iraq could be lower, since the average infantry soldier is only 19.

Another difference between World War II and Vietnam that may contribute to a high occurrence of P.T.S.D. is the time served in combat zones. World War II soldiers experienced about 60 days of combat spread through a few years while an average Vietnam soldier saw 240 to 300 days of combat in a single year.

In the Iraq War, preliminary numbers indicate a routine similar to Vietnam. Around 50 percent of the servicemen in Iraq are on their second tour and 25 percent are on their third. This many deployments can easily add up to years away from home for soldiers. If a child was born around the time of their deployment, those soldiers would miss out on practically every major event of the child’s early development—their first words, first steps and if it had been me on my second 18 month tour, I would have missed my son’s first day of preschool.

Up to 90 percent of the soldiers in Iraq have been in a fire fight because, unlike in World War II, there are no front lines. Fighting can happen anywhere.

Dustin Crook, a KU junior, fought in Iraq for a year when he was 20. He provided security to convoys going in and out of Iraq from Kuwait. He said attacks were sporadic, with numerous close calls happening in one month and then a month or two with none. The attacks included 10 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and numerous small arm and rocket propelled grenade fire fights. He said overall he experienced 10 “really close calls.”

Crook was diagnosed with P.T.S.D when he returned from Iraq and simple activities, such as driving or smelling red meat as it cooks, began to trigger emotional episodes. This caused him anxiety at friendly barbecues when he suddenly thought of dead bodies.

The Pentagon’s current troop deployment policy deviates from a long standing, informal policy of giving soldiers two months home for every one month in combat, according to Larry Korb, former assistant secretary of defense. He said by not honoring this “social contract,” our country is failing to fulfill its moral obligation to its soldiers.

Korb said the Iraq War has depleted military resources and manpower, undermining efforts against terrorism elsewhere such as on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself.

He said the War on Terror should not include occupations of countries as large as Iraq and America should either get a bigger force or not wage war. Korb said a military draft would be one way to solve the problem.

When the war started, I chose not to rejoin the military because I wanted my son to grow up with a father in his life. But now, my son and the war Donald Rumsfeld said would take only six weeks are both going on five year and I wonder if losing my son to a military draft in 14 years is becoming a plausible fear. President Bush said the War on Terror will take years, which if you apply the Rumsfeld coefficient equates to us fighting terrorism for decades. Factoring in that the Iraq War may be undermining the true War on Terror and that tensions are rising with Iran, I’m left wondering: Will my four-year-old son get drafted?

Foster is a Lawrence junior in journalism and creative writing.

Drawings of Darfur

1. Human Rights Watch - Darfur Drawings

Philosophical splurgings (aphorisms)

Something fundamental is left out with that which is poetry for the sake of being poetic, or that which is art for the sake of being artful.

There's nothing easier than philosophy. It ultimately boils down to the obvious or the dogmatic.

Ethics as an inquiry is strictly functional. You first ask what you want and then develop the best means to achieve them.

There is no such thing as "objective" ethics. It's a blatant contradiction.

We're in no position to contemplate ultimate ends; our vantage point won't permit it.

The question of Good and Evil is too reliant on ontological categories to be tenable. If you remove the ontology from our language, you'd soon wonder what it was that was ever being asked about it.

Subjectivity is simply a perspective on the world. (A microcosm.)

What separates ethics and wanton preferences is the articulation of reason. Mutually shared "ends" are the only things that lend ethics credibility.

"De gustibus non est disputandum." That's all you ever need know about aesthetics.

Education is necessarily biased. Constraints on time and subject content guarantee this.

Masterpieces of Modern Art

Robert Ryman. Twin. 1966.


Robert Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953.


Cy Twombly. Untitled. 1970.


Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1960-61.


Shigeko Kubota. Vagina Painting (Performance). 1965.


Yves Klein. Blue Monochrome. 1961.


Piero Manzoni. Artist's Shit. 1961. (Manzoni does a fantastic job of relating his work to that of his contemporaries.)

FreeRice

FreeRice is a wonderful idea— it's a vocabulary building game that uses advertisement revenue from page-views and donates those directly to the UN World Food Program. Since it first went online in October it has raised enough money to feed over 50,000 people for one day. If you want to improve your vocabulary while simultaneously helping the hungry you should definitely check it out.

1. FreeRice
2. BBC News - Web game provides rice for hungry
3. Wikipedia - FreeRice

The Six Traits of Writing

There's a common practice in public schools (and also, unfortunately, in my C&T 100 class) of creating lists of considerations relevant to a particular topic and presenting these as if they were themselves facts. Sometimes these are presented as the # ____ of something, or in a goal-oriented fashion as the # steps to better ______.

There was a passage from Jonathon Kozol's The Shame of the Nation that caught my interest on this topic (my emphasis):

     Educators who have read parts of this book in preparation have observed that certain of the highly formalized vocabularies that accompany the programs I've described, as well as the various lists and charts that break down cognitive activities into unusually tiny units that seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me, have their origins in academic work on learning theory on the part of scholars who would not be likely to approve of the constricting ways in which their work has often been applied.
     During one of my visits to P.S. 65, for instance, Mr. Endicott directed my attention to a poster on the wall, headed by the three words "Understanding by Design," which broke down the act of understanding into several elements that teachers were to emphasize in a specific sequence. ("Explanation," "Application," and "Empathy" were three of them. There were six in all, but I did not have time to write the others.) I remember thinking it was odd to be so confident about our knowledge of one of the greatest mysteries of life as to believe that we can subdivide the act of understanding into six established categories and then post these on the wall as a reminder to the students. I still think it's odd. The notion that there really are "six elements of understanding" does not seem believable to me.
     I mentioned this once during a seminar with educators and was told that this idea had been developed by a highly admired specialist in curriculum design who had described these elements as "the Six Facets of Understanding." I was cautioned not to be dismissive of a concept that is seen by teacher-educators as a helpful way of giving future teachers a schematic tool for thinking about education in the elementary grades. I felt reproved; I didn't like the feeling that I'd inadvertently been disrespectful of a scholar who, they told me, would not like to be identified with the rigidity and absoluteness that this classroom seemed to typify.
     The problem for me, I realized later, wasn't the theory as a framework for reflection among teachers but the way this theory had been concretized into six items posted on a wall, as if they were as scientific as the items on a periodic table. It struck me as a way of locking-down a child's capability for thinking rather than an aperture for understanding.
     On the wall of a fifth grade class in Seattle's Thurgood Marshall School the year that I first visited, there was a list of 44 sentences describing the proficiencies of language arts that children must achieve to be considered Level Threes. "I am proficient," according to one of these sentences, "in considering the six traits of writing so I can improve my work before I share it."
     Intrigued to find the number six appearing once again, I asked the teacher, "What are the 'six traits'?"
     She said she had them written down and could find them for me but could not remember all six at the time.
     I asked, "Why do you teach this?"
     The teacher answered that it was required for a writing test the class would have to take. When I later was provided with the list, I thought that most of the items it contained made reasonable sense ("good organization," "correct conventions," and "sound ideas" were three of them), although I couldn't help but notice that no credit would be given to a child for original ideas or for originality of style. The list was practical, and probably innocuous, but calling these "the six traits"—rather than six items someone had selected for convenience out of an innumerable number of such traits—was obviously arbitrary. The numbers made it possible for state examiners to judge a child's offerings empirically and not to have to look at other attributes, like charm or humor or sincerity or, on the reverse side, dutiful banality, which is unhappily the usual result of this kind of instruction.

"Why We Need to Raise Hell"

By Jack E. White

Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it. Instead, for the past 40 years, we played a shell game with desegregation in which blacks chased after whites who would not stand still long enough to be integrated with. The result: public schools so separate and vastly unequal that Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown v. Board, might as well be the law of the land.

This sorry situation is, to be sure, mostly the fault of whites who pay lip service to equal rights but cut and run as soon as enough blacks move into their neighborhood. But many privileged African Americans are no more committed to public school integration than their white counterparts if it means sending their children to class with poor black kids. The main obstacle to integration is not race but class.

In fact, there is a good deal of integration going on among those who can afford it. Consider the small number of schools, both public and private, where something approaching stable integration exists. What most have in common is an affluent clientele and a determination to maintain a diverse student body. The well-educated black parents who can afford to send their kids to private school--or to live in one of the expensive areas with a good public system--are accustomed to dealing with whites as equals. Their well-scrubbed, well-dressed, well-mannered offspring blend right in with the well-scrubbed, well-mannered white children and pose no perceived threat.

Moreover, these "safe" black children are always in a very distinct minority. There are enough of them for blacks to feel they are not just tokens but not so many that whites feel uneasy. The poor kids who attend such schools are charity cases, gifted children carefully selected to make sure they fit in.

It amounts to a cynical bargain. White parents congratulate themselves for doing the racial right thing at no real cost to themselves. Affluent blacks get the assurance that their children will learn to get along in the white world in which they will someday compete and the status that goes with sending them to a prestigious school. Most poor black children, meanwhile, are stuck in decrepit ghetto classrooms.

What is truly dismaying about all this is the degree to which privileged African Americans--including myself--have acquiesced to the process. Just like many whites, a lot of us walked away from the fight for school integration once we made sure our own progeny would receive its undeniable benefits by enrolling them in high-priced private academies. This hypocritical approach reflects the desire to seek the best for one's own and frustration with recalcitrant whites. But it also undercuts our ability to prevail on whites to support public school integration. Why should they do what we are unwilling to do ourselves?

In cities such as Washington, it is not uncommon for black school administrators and teachers to enroll their children in private or suburban schools. If the city schools are not good enough for their offspring, they are not good enough for Chelsea Clinton or anyone else. By mismanaging the schools, the black professionals who run them have betrayed the best of the African-American tradition, which values education above all else, and have given whites who never believed in integration an easy excuse for abandoning it.

Herewith a radical proposal for breaking the impasse: revive the civil rights movement, which went into limbo long before some of its most important goals were accomplished, and aim it not only at racist whites but also at complacent middle-class blacks. All of us need a jolting reminder that integration's real purpose was not to produce Norman Rockwellish racial brotherhood. It was a strategy to ensure that black children, especially poor ones, would receive the same quality of instruction, textbooks and facilities that white children do. The genteel race mixing that goes on among the elite is no substitute for a determined national effort to include poor nonwhite children in America's bounty--and if it takes a new round of sit-ins to put the issue back on the national agenda, so be it.

Such a campaign would be disruptive and strongly opposed, but then so was the battle to desegregate lunch counters. America has never made progress on racial issues unless there was enough agitation to force society to take action. Just as it did in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court is again defending the racial status quo--and it always will in the absence of intense political pressure.

Black economist Glenn C. Loury makes a powerful case for the rediscovery of black racial honor. He believes progress toward racial equality depends on acknowledging and rectifying the dysfunctional behaviors in the black community. This is usually taken to mean the underclass must clean up its act before it can move into the mainstream. But there are dysfunctional behaviors outside the ghetto that could also stand re-examination: the white notion that the country has already done enough to secure racial equity, and black middle-class complicity in the deterioration of inner-city schools. In both cases, honor depends on rediscovering our commitment to treating all children fairly. If it takes new turmoil to bring that about, that is a price we should be willing to pay.

1. Why We Need to Raise Hell - Time

General Ed. 101

I'm seated and
slides pass by
line by line
to which I
and we record.

In diligence, but
never of our
own accord,
we earn points
and write, and
sometimes read

but mostly sit
in stupor and
absorb these
facts we know
or never need.

Or we sleep.
Sudoku, facebook,
or sleep. Or don't
come at all. In time
our efforts will matter,
we're told. All this
money and wasted
time...

The next slide is
overflowing; the
back row cannot
see. "W.T.F.?" I say.

...will grant us
a letter, we're told.
And enough of these
in enough hours
will nab us a job
with good pay.

And so we sit back
and scribble, and
take everything in.
Day after day.


But look:
here we are,
another day, and
there is panic
and rustling,
and sharp number 2's.

Heads are heavy
and scouring notebooks—
imbibing every
bullet, underline,
and star
like weekend booze.

Here come the
bubble sheets. "Fill in
your ovals completely,"
you say.

"I am not a number,"
we say.

But you continue anyway.

You push your papers,
your parlance, and
ambulate with a grin.

We compose a matrix
of ovals, choosing
A, B, C,
D,
none of the above,
two of the above,
A and B,
true or false.

Asking:
Why does this matter?
   A) It's required, or
   B) It does not at all, or
   C) It'll make us
   well-rounded, or
   D) This answer is wrong.


At last,
we turn it all in,
all of the above:
the culmination of
our learning, once
and for all.

I walk out of class,
the door ajar and
final done, and
never again venture
into the world of
General Ed. 101.

"..." 11

“I think a good scene in a movie would be where one scientist tells another scientist, ‘You know what will save the world? You’re holding it in your hand.’ And the other scientist looks, and in his hand are peanuts. Then when he looks up, the first scientist is being taken away to the insane asylum.”

—Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey

WTF, Andrew Jackson?

I was studying for an American history test and looking at the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Wikipedia mentioned that it was brought up in Andrew Jackson's State of the Union Address from the previous year, so I thought I'd have a look.

It's not quite as racist and insensitive as I would have guessed, but it's still pretty disgusting.


State of the Union Address, December 8, 1829:

The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. A portion, however, of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection.

Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions. The Constitution declares that "no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State" without the consent of its legislature. If the General Government is not permitted to tolerate the erection of a confederate State within the territory of one of the members of this Union against her consent, much less could it allow a foreign and independent government to establish itself there.

Georgia became a member of the Confederacy which eventuated in our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802. Alabama was admitted into the Union on the same footing with the original States, with boundaries which were prescribed by Congress.

There is no constitutional, conventional, or legal provision which allows them less power over the Indians within their borders than is possessed by Maine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.

Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.

Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race. As a means of effecting this end I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this Government.

This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population.

What's equally upsetting is that, despite this, Jackson is recognized on the $20 bill, taking Grover Cleveland's place from 1928 onward, despite his distaste for paper currency.





1. Wikipedia: United States twenty-dollar bill

Disconcerting signs

...and just to emphasize, these are not photoshopped.





1. In pictures: Silly signs
2. More silly signs: Your pictures
3. Your pictures: Signs in 'Chinglish'

Senate Iraq Hearings

Nothing new. What's so inappropriate about saying "kicking ass" that ass needs to be spelled out?






Hooray for actual questions!

Sept. 11, 1973

There was a very good opinion piece in the UDK today (which rarely happens):

By Patrick de Oliveria

Exactly 28 years before terrorist attacks claimed 3,000 lives in the United States, an event took place that would symbolize the terror endured by South American countries for decades to come.

On Sept. 11, 1973, a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically-elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende and installed a brutal military dictatorship. The military and right wing of Chile opposed Allende because of his Marxist positions.

Similar events happened in several South American countries around that period. In Brazil, a military coup had already occurred in 1964 under similar conditions, and in 1976 a military junta took power in Argentina.

Because of the Cold War, the United States supported these right-wing military dictatorships and was involved in many ways. The United States recognized these authoritarian regimes, provided intelligence to them, trained various militaries—who would latter engage in torture and death squads—at the School of the Americas and, if ever needed, would’ve provided military support. All of this despite the human rights abuses and authoritarian measures taken by these governments.

Although I was born two years after the dictatorship ended in Brazil, the horrors of that period are still in the public consciousness. Several figures in my life were affected by it, and South America as a whole is still scarred.

My high school history teacher had a sister who was tortured. My dad’s friend was “asked” to leave the country. My friend’s dad had to hide a student militant in the countryside.

Students and artists were specifically targeted because of their leftist tendencies and calls for democratization. Student leaders would disappear and be tortured or killed. These were people around my age now. Some of the torture methods included driving needles under fingernails, whipping the feet with bamboo sticks and electric shocks.

Throughout high school I heard about Victor Jara, a Chilean musician and activist who was arrested, tortured and then gunned downed because of his political views. And about Stuart Angel, a Brazilian student militant who, after being tortured, had his mouth tied to the exhaust pipe of a jeep and dragged behind it until his death. Every year there would be news about the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo weeping for their thousands of children who disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War.

The healing process is still going on, especially since new information about that period is still surfacing. Distrust towards the military and police still exists, and anti-Americanism in the region is related with American involvement during that period—especially the hypocrisy of rhetorically supporting democracies and human rights, but in practice doing the exact opposite.

That dark period has now passed, but it shouldn’t be forgotten. However, it shouldn’t be remembered only by the people who suffered it. The process of suffering, mourning and healing should be a global one if we truly want to avoid tragedies like this in the future.

It may sound hopelessly utopian, but the prospect of a better world is deeply interconnected with the ability to sympathize and empathize with other people’s suffering. Although we may disagree with everything else there is one thing we all have in common: we suffer. Only when we start valuing this human connection more than ideologies, politics and power struggles­—whether they be colonialism, capitalism verses Communism or the War on Terror—will a more peaceful condition be possible.

So, when we remember Sept. 11, 2001, let us also remember Sept. 11, 1973.

1. De Oliveira: Sept. 11 should spark memories of other events

"..." 10

"If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at how much glow-in-the-dark stuff we have, and how we take so much of it for granted."

—Jack Handey

"..." 9

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

—Einstein

Philosophy

Poem 25

skipping stones . .  . (
across a glossy sheen
 
) rising to a brim
inside-out, it expands—
plummets, and expands—
 
pouring and pushing,
lush and ringing,
 
inflated and saturated, but
not overbearing—   slowly smoothing into
 
glass-patterned surges;  cleft into channels
 
and broken)     with debris,

World population growth through history

Sadly, this is the best graph I could find on Google. It does its job though. (Click to view it in full-size.)


It's crazy to me that just over 200 years ago someone could say, "Wow, there are over a billion people! Isn't that ridiculous?—so, so many of us, more than there's ever been." And at the end of this century there may be as many as eight or twelve times that number.

Poem 24

Vermillions and cobalts dive over rectangles
       behind the screen
into a pot-blanket of ivory black.

The horizon careens amid poles
       affixed to bright yellows,
and now the sky's height is turquoise.

Few roving reds scroll through
       tracing lines through dark umber
rectangles as they sprout with leaves.

But behind curtains, this I've seen
       every night. Seen all the blacks,
the reds, and tinged titanium whites,

but there is no canvas,
and soon there'll be morning and again night.

Umm...

...





Here it is again in transcript form:

Q. Recent polls have shown 1/5 of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?

A. I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. And I believe that our education, like, such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere, like, such as... and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq, and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Why do people still hold beauty pageants? And why do they care what the contestants think about serious issues?

1. Wikipedia - Beauty Contest

C&T first assignment

It doesn't flow as well as I would have liked, but it's the best I could do given the length:

C&T 100 (TuTh)
25 August 2007
“Why Teach?”     I’ve been in school for the greater portion of my life, and during that time I have consistently seen problems to be corrected and triumphs to be lauded. I believe that education is a necessary institution for democratic societies and that without it democracy cannot achieve all that it sets out to. I believe that every individual has a natural curiosity and a capacity to do great things, that each should have access to high-quality schooling, and that an individual’s socioeconomic status should not be the determining factor in his or her intellectual development.
     With regard to the aim of education, I agree with Mary Warnock that “the essence of teaching is to help people see the world as intelligible (and therefore perhaps to see themselves in the world not as mere passengers, carried along by hidden and mysterious forces, but as able to intervene, to change things and to control).” Our current school system (in my experience) does this rather poorly. It does little to encourage independent thinking and self-study. It does not encourage critical thinking; it becomes an unavoidable rigmarole in the lives of most students. Too often, students become passive receptacles of miscellaneous facts rather than free thinkers.
     I believe that many of the shortcomings in our methods of instruction arise from not making subjects relevant to students. All too often, classes become pedagogic hurdles rather than a means to address modern problems. The current system is excessively bureaucratic and this often interferes with its efficacy. It is also seldom clear in communicating its objectives.
     In short, I’ve seen too many ineffective teachers in my day, and too many students that suffer as a result. I’ve seen a system that is plagued with problems. No individual should be deprived of the opportunity to grow and self-actualize. I’d like nothing more than to spend the rest of my life working to correct the shortcomings of our educational system and improving the lives of students.

The final frontier

BBC News had an interesting forum on the importance of space travel, asking "Is manned space travel still relevant in the 21st century and worth the cost? Is the risk involved in space missions worth it? Why does space still hold a strong fascination? Would you pay to go on a space flight?"

1. Have Your Say: How important is space travel?


Some, including myself, think space exploration is a ridiculous waste of money and resources:

I don't mind sending a probe up into space every once and a while, but I'd like to see the vast supermajority of work concentrating on useful applications for humans back on Earth. If the travel is in that context, great, if not, I don't want to be funding it. "Feel good" projects like moonbases, the international space station, a visit to Mars, etc. are just big wastes of money and energy.

Perhaps nothing underscores more effectively the crass stupidity and total ignorance of the more "highly-developed" part of the world than the mis-directed spending of billions on space (not to mention other areas of budgetary absurdity) for no essential purpose, when vast numbers of mankind do not have sanitary conditions under which to live, nor sufficient food and potable water to sustain them. A mere fraction of annual spend could give real benefit to the lives of real people - our fellows.

$10,000/ lb to get into space.
how many kids could that feed? jUst that one pound?

Space travel is a waste of money. Man will never be able to colonize another planet nor will he be able to travel en masse through space. Earth is and will be our only home, and mankind will never be able to achieve the level of technology capable of leaving it. So, it's extremely important to preserve what we have because it's all we will ever have.

Is space travel necessary? I think not, but I could be wrong. But one thing I am certain of is that the massive amounts of money spent on it would be better spent in trying to solve the lack of water and food that causes people such hardship around the world. If the human has a need to explore let us go under the seas. We really do not know wholly what is down there. I doubt that under sea exploration would cost anywhere near that of exploring space. Space can wait. Our fellow men cannot.

Manned space travel is a waste of money. The Shuttle and the Space Station simply exist as justifcations of each other. Neither is really necessary.

It's most unlikely that man will ever leave earth's orbit again. No nation is likely to have taxpayers willing to support the eye-watering cost of returning to the moon, let alone going to Mars.

In a few years we'll be struggling to put fuel in our cars, so burning tons of the stuff to go into space will not be popular!

There is a place for space exploration; science and discovery are a wonderful aspect of human nature. But I do feel that in terms of time and money spent, it should never take priority over matters such as health, education and welfare. The regularity of missions should be reduced, for the sake of putting money where it's needed most and to make the missions themselves more eventful, rather than costly and routine.

Others justify it for what can learned from it and the technologies that can be discovered:

You'll never guess what space exploration has brought to you that you use to this day. Your cellphone contains space-stuff, your own PC even in your kitchen there is material that was invented because of the space programs.

Never say "we do not see anything in return" before you know where normal things you use are made from. You won't see a "Invented by NASA" sticker on it, but "look inside" and explore the web. You'll never guess what was invented in space or because of the space program.

Space travel is vital. Why shouldn't we learn about the universe and our place in it?

But manned space travel is no longer necessary. It was big news in the 60's and 70's, but now it is impractical.

Until a new propulsion source is discovered that doesn't need rocket power, it's a waste of time and money.

The human need to explore is a trait we have evolved, this has led to the survival and success of our species.
Manned exploration of space will lead us to improving and perfecting the technology that allows us to survive in space and on other planets, this will be the only way our species will continue to survive in the long term.

Yes the space program is still relevant. The medical advances alone that have and continue to come out of this program make it worthwhile. If my health permitted and I had the money I most assuredly would take a trip into space.

Still others consider it necessary for the survival of the human species, although I find that proposition ridiculous:

Manned space travel is THE most important endeavor for the human species. It is the only way to ensure longevity of humanity. It is also the only way to top up resources on this planet that get used up..ie metals, fuels etc. The reasons are many and varied. If mankind had started out on the British isles & had stayed there & not proliferated the planet, we would not be a dominant species. We would probably still not have the wheel or have discovered fire. To be all we can be we must expand.

Without manned spaceflight mankind will share the fate of dinosaurs.

It will be a VERY long time in the future but we can`t live on our planet forever: One day our sun will die and we would die with it if we haven`t left our nest by then. Space travel is risky and it is expensive but it is necessary not only for our survival but also for our growth as a species.

I think it's important to note that the amount of funding NASA receives is slightly less than 17 billion dollars. That is out of a budget of 2.8 trillion dollars. If we as the human race wish to truly reap the benefits of space exploration, spending must be increased.

While the benefits of manned space flight may seem unhelpful or unimportant, or even difficult to categorize, ultimately, humans will need to learn how to live in space for our species to survive. Unmanned space flight has been far more beneficial in information gathering and technical achievement, but doesn't mean that manned missions are a waste of time and money. Even if manned missions serve only to inspire future scientists and astronauts to explore, it's still worth doing.

Space travel is just as relevant today as it was when it first started. The era of the explorers may be written in the history books, but truly as humans we are never finished exploring. This isn't about egos, this is about the betterment of humankind.

Our president sides with the third group of remarks...

2. President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program (2004)

Pedagogia do oprimido and the "banking" concept

From the foreward by Richard Shaull:

There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education neither functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

In fact, those who, in learning to read and write, come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to transform the society that has denied them this opportunity of participation. Education is once again a subversive force.

Chapter Two:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem.” The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Para is Belem,” that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors of cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

The raison d'être of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive toward reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction*, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

The solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

(a)  the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
(b)  the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c)  the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d)  the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
(e)  the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f)  the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g)  the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h)  the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i)  the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students
(j)  the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, responding to the essence of consciousness—intentionality—rejects communiqués and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian "split"—consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors--teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations—indispensable to the capacity of the cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object—are otherwise impossible.

Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher.

The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student: he is not "cognitive" at one point and "narrative"at another. He is always "cognitive," whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own.

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.

Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying men their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take man's historicity as their starting point.

Chapter Three:

Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated. Thus, the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks himself what he will dialogue with the latter about. And preoccupation with the content of dialogue is really preoccupation with the program content of education.

For the anti-dialogical banking educator, the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will discourse to his students; and he answers his own question, by organizing his own program. For the dialogical, problem-posing teacher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition—bits of information to be deposited in the students—but rather the organized, systematized, and developed "re-presentation" to individuals of the things about which they want to know more.

We cannot simply go to the laborers—urban or peasant—in the banking style, to give them "knowledge" or to impose upon them the model of the "good man" contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized. Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their action) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.

For the truly humanist educator and authentic revolutionary, the object of action is the reality to be transformed by them together with other men—not other men themselves. The oppressors are the ones who act upon men to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched.

* "As used throughout this book, the term "contradiction" denotes the dialectical conflict between opposing social forces. —Translator's note."



1. Pedagogy of the Oppresed by Paulo Freire, Chapters 1-3