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Our Schools Look Like Our Government printable version

22 Jul 2011: posted by the editor - United States

By David Swanson
A government that works for Wall Street and a war machine will sooner or later create schools that work for the same ends.

Here's a vicious cycle: rather than funding good schools, we fund the military and its recruiters. Then we lower the qualifications for teachers as long as the applicants have participated in wars. We funnel the same "Troops to Teachers" applicants into "public charter schools" too, even though we're paying them public dollars. And we move the whole program from the Department of Education to the Department of "Defense". That was President Barack Obama's idea. Do you like it? Pretty creative, huh? One step ahead of those teapartiers!

But there's still the problem of states having no money for schools and not getting any help from the feds or the ruined economy. What to do? According to the Wall Street Journal, our president has talked Microsoft into getting itself some huge market penetration by giving schools $15 million worth of video games. That ought to fix things, at least in the drone-pilot development area.

Also Bank of America will put $50 million into a donation to our "public" schools. That ought to pretty well cover the $1.8 billion that states cut on elementary school spending this year, huh? And we'll worry about the $2.5 billion or so being cut next year when we get there—what do you say? We're winning the future, not funding it!

Thus far, corporate funding of public schools has tended to destroy our children's educations with idiotic standardized testing starting at the youngest ages, and to privatize our public schools through charter schools. Not bad. All in a days work.

You can't do bail outs and wars and tax cuts for billionaires without making some hard choices. Shared sacrifice, people! Haven't you learned anything?

If you haven't, that works too. Prisons are becoming very profitable.

Tags: Education, prisons

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