Today's Stories

September 20 / 21, 2008

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

Weekend Edition
September 20 / 21, 2008

What's the Goal of This Education System?

Leaving Every Child Behind

By JOHN GOEKLER

As we head deeper into the “silly season” of an election year, all the old position papers on education are being recycled. John McCain touts market forces for school improvement. Barack Obama endorses more accountability and higher standards. School boards speak of efficiency (to pass bond issues) while teacher unions speak of commitment (to earn higher pay).

But the simple fact is, our public school system is irretrievably broken. It doesn’t need to be tweaked. It needs to be tossed.

This system is the dysfunctional remnant of a bygone era. It is a nineteenth century model, imported from Germany, that emphasizes punctuality, obedience, and rote, repetitive work suited to turning out assembly line workers. In short, it teaches kids to fill jobs that have long since moved to China, and are now heading toward Bangladesh.

In an era in which collaboration, creativity and adaptability are vital to success, most schools remain authoritarian, banal and inflexible. They separate and alienate children from community life, even as integration and relationship are ever more important to a cohesive society. Schools remain linear and left-brain oriented, although imagination and self-direction are far more critical to problem solving. And they are competitive and elitist, separating children into “winners” and “losers” through designations such as Advanced Placement, VoTech, and Special Needs.

Despite frantic efforts by schools, districts and states to cook the books with inflated test scores, lowered standards and underreported drop out rates, all objective data says our schools are failing our children. But never mind test scores and assessments, which are all about politics and nothing about learning. The single most important indicator is as simple as it is harsh – our young people are turning their backs on school in record numbers and walking away without a backward glance.

Why?

Because we’re failing to engage them. Because they don’t see what we offer as relevant to their lives and futures. Because – despite entire libraries of data that tell us how to engage the human brain in ways that support learning – we blindly persist in teaching the wrong things, in the wrong ways, at the wrong times.

What’s the Goal of the System?

There’s a rule in systems dynamics that says to understand a system’s behavior, diagnose its purpose. If the purpose is uncertain, analyze its patterns of behavior and see what beliefs, choices and structures underlie them.

Take the typical school schedule – roughly 8:00 to 3:00, five days a week, 180 days a year, closed for summer. Why? Because it’s convenient for adults. We start and end at times that accommodate bus schedules and drivers’ contracts. We go five days because that’s the work schedule for most families. And we close for summer – originally because kids worked in the harvest, now because staff contracts say so. (And part of why we perpetually underpay teachers is, “Because they get the summer off.”)

But any neuroscientist can tell you that body rhythms of high school age teens cycle from about 9 am until midnight. (And any high school parent can tell you their kids would qualify for “legally dead” at 7:00 a.m.) A better schedule for their brains to optimize learning might be 10 to 5, four days a week. We run the schedules we do because it’s all about us – not about learning.

As to curriculum, we’re still teaching core subjects prescribed prior to World War II. That was fine in 1930, when there was only so much bandwidth in the world and knowing X percentage of it made one a literate person. (At least literate enough to work on an assembly line.) But today, there’s exponentially more information available on Wikipedia than even existed in 1930. And we live in a very different world that calls for very different skills. In an era of nuclear weapons and jihad, for example, which seems more relevant – calculus or conflict resolution?

Why do we insist on delivering content that’s largely irrelevant to students’ lives? Again, it’s all about us. We tend to believe that whatever we learned is the mark of a literate person. That's why parents and administrators consistently stonewall true reform. It was good enough for us (and we turned out OK, by golly!) so it's damn well good enough for our children.

And our pedagogical models? Same thing. It’s all about us. More specifically, it’s all about the convenience of teachers and administrators. Standing in front of a class and lecturing is largely useless for imparting information, typically providing 10 percent retention or less. But it’s easy. Using standardized tests is essentially worthless in assessing true learning, but again, it’s easy. You can grade them with a machine.

True learning, on the other hand, looks a lot like chaos. People are running every which way in their excitement to find out what they want to know. They’re building things and tearing things apart. They’re scribbling on whiteboards, walls and scraps of paper. They’re asking questions, jumping online, running to the library or the science lab or outside to make observations or run experiments. They’re bombarding teachers and each other with questions, testing assumptions, trying things out, making mistakes. It can be messy, maddening and exhausting for “command and control” teachers, but it works!

The most basic thing neuroscience tells us is that emotion drives attention and attention drives learning. The human brain is designed to learn. It wants to learn. In fact, it needs to learn. Why do we throw prisoners into solitary confinement as extreme punishment? Because a lack of contact, stimuli and curiosity is painful. It drives us mad.

So, examining what, how and when we teach, what can we infer about the system’s purpose?

Sadly, the answer is that our schooling system seems primarily intended to baby-sit our children – to warehouse them during parents’ working hours and to keep them out of an already saturated job market.

Warehousing is increasingly necessary because the share of wealth controlled by the vast majority of households in America has declined steadily since the 1970’s. In most families, both parents must now work to stay afloat. (If there are two parents.) There’s no one home to care for kids, so schools get the job by default. (Hence, a major force behind the push for schools to take on “out of school time”.)

Keeping young people out of the job market is considered necessary (though unspoken) because if the roughly two million 16 to 18 year olds in the US were to compete for employment, the already underreported jobless rate would go through the roof. Even though most modern service jobs can easily be performed by 16 year-olds with minimal training, we keep them in school because in a downsized, outsourced economy, there’s nowhere for them to work.

The third leg propping up the status quo is the desire on the part of far too many school officials to keep collecting enrollment money from state and federal governments to support an immense – and largely useless – bureaucracy. In a modern school, to paraphrase John Steinbeck, you can’t shoot a marble “knuckles down” without hitting an administrator, consultant, or “education specialist”.

How’s this working? Well, we’ve spent roughly $3 trillion on “school reform” over the past four decades and not gained any traction, so you make the call.

Creating New Models

Bucky Fuller observed that we don’t create real change by fighting existing structures, but by building new structures that are more attractive and functional. Then the old ones die of simple neglect.
So what kind of model would be more attractive and functional? And, more importantly, what kind of model would protect, foster and engage our children and young people while effectively preparing them to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world?

First, it would be a “whole child” model, based on a goal of making sure every one of our children is safe, healthy, loved, affirmed and fulfilled. It would not separate economic, social and educational arenas, but view each of those as essential pieces of a whole system whose goal is whole children.

It would embrace Einstein’s observation that, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” So this new system would have a new mission – helping families and communities raise and educate healthy, capable young people. It would be a locus of child advocacy and its loyalty would be to the well-being of kids, families, communities and the planet, rather than to administration, curriculum or political correctness. It would be an integral part of the community, not a separate entity.

Because the work of raising healthy children begins long before the commencement of structured learning, it would start with making sure every child is welcome and wanted. (That’s a polite euphemism for effective and accessible family planning and reproductive health care.)

To make sure every child is ready to learn when “schooling” does start, prenatal care, and child and maternal health care would be universally provided, along with education and mentoring to instill and expand parental skills. Nutrition programs, environmental health programs, and affordable, accessible day care and preschool for every child are also vital.

To make sure schools are ready to receive kids who are ready to learn, they would employ a very different model from today. First, it would start at a later age, typically about seven, when children become neurologically capable of abstract thought.

Contrary to trends in the US, where academics and testing now begin in kindergarten, studies show that starting children on academic studies at an early age generally does not increase performance. All too often, the opposite occurs. Children who are not cognitively capable of logical thinking tend to self-identify as being “bad at school” when they cannot meet the demands unfairly placed on them. That self-imposed (and system reinforced!) label often follows them right through school until they bail out.

Anyone concerned that a “delayed” start on academics will limit a child’s later performance need only look around the world for reassurance. Finland, which is consistently rated as the most creative society in the world and regularly scores highest of any OECD country on international academic tests, starts formal schooling at age seven. Prior to that time, kids are in pre-school and quality day care.

The focus with those younger children should be on reinforcing their love of learning and helping them develop social skills. Just as anti-social behaviors in young children are associated with later learning difficulties, acquisition of “pro-social” skills is closely associated with later success.

The pre-school ages are a time to identify physical, neurological and emotional deficits, and remedy those to the greatest extent possible through interventions from nutrition, counseling, movement and play therapies, to visual and hearing correction.

Once formal learning commences, it should be student-directed, immersion or “expeditionary” based and community-centered. And it should occur in safe, comfortable, environmentally benign settings. Facilities must be well lighted and toxin-free, with child-friendly proportions and high indoor air quality, all of which have been shown significantly to increase learning, and student and staff health.

“Teaching” in these whole child contexts would not be “stand and deliver”, but more on the lines of facilitating each learner’s success. That means helping them identify strengths and weakness, connecting them with mentors and coaches, helping them find things that fascinate them and gain the skills necessary to pursue that attraction.

And we absolutely have to avoid trying to instill what learning we value based on our own experiences. The US Department of Labor says students in school today will have between 10 and 14 jobs – by the time they're 38! The jobs we tend to train them for likely won't exist by the time they're ready to fill them. The jobs they will hold likely haven't been invented yet. (Ever know anyone 10 years ago who was training to be a biomimeticist, paleo-astronomer, nanotechnologist, podcaster or eBay marketer?)

Instead, we can help them gain the necessary social, emotional and intellectual skills to move seamlessly through the overlapping and often messy realms of their future – work, play, partnership, citizenship, parenting, health, service. We can help them learn to make sense of the world and their place in it.

We can help them understand complex systems, envision their desired futures and facilitate change. We can help them gain the interpersonal skills necessary to initiate and maintain healthy relationships, and the intrapersonal skills necessary to sustain themselves through times of uncertainty and struggle. Most important, we can help them become proficient at thinking, learning, unlearning, relearning and communicating.

Core content would support all the above, and might include environmental science and sustainability, yoga and meditation, travel and adventure. Kids can still learn calculus and chemistry if they choose, along with how to bake, dance, play music, make movies, write poems, build fires, sew clothes, use a compass, design a fort or tree house, nurture a garden, raise critters, build and program a computer, navigate in the wilderness, create a business . . . In the process, they’ll acquire the math, reading and communication skills all those demand. And because they’re invested in it – because it’s theirs – they’ll be good at it.

Throughout, we need to re-envision who our learners are. Because in times of drastic change – which will be the rest of our lives – “students” will be everyone. We must all gain, enhance and maintain those skills if we are to succeed in living the lives and creating the futures we hope for.

Schools must become centers of community to support this. They are already the most extensive (and expensive) pieces of public infrastructure in most communities, and are generally the least utilized. So why not integrate pre and post-school care, family health services, adult education, community technology access, cultural activities, sports and nearly any other content needed by the community for its well-being?

We are in a stage of human history where vision, compassion, communication and creativity are far important than traditional literacy. Re-envisioning what learning is about and redesigning our schooling system around that provide the single most powerful avenue available to help us navigate an uncertain future. And to begin to create the kind of future our children and grandchildren deserve.

John Goekler is the founder of Change Factors, a training and consulting firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work is applying complexity science to help individuals and organizations learn to act with greater clarity and effectiveness to create a better future for our children, our communities and the planet. www.changefactors.com

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont