Published online 26 December 2006. Part one of a two-part series.  This diary will examine Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the context of American educational debate to show how difficult it is to teach according to a pedagogy that avoids “expedient purpose,” and about what the alternatives to NCLB are.  Here I will… Read More educational politics and the dialogic classroom

Published online 27 December 2006. Part Two of Two Parts.  In this diary, I will suggest that one of the main difficulties with making a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (a la Paulo Freire) possible in an American political context is the situation with American political economy.  Americans have a difficult time imagining themselves as being… Read More Political Economy, Education, and the Future: More Paulo Freire

Published online 1 January 2007. The main social developments in the world over the last thirty years or so have been 1) the imposition of neoliberal economics over nearly every one of the world’s economies, and 2) the fantastic growth in slums that have accompanied the explosion of urban capitalism in the neoliberal era.  Using… Read More For a movement to defend the right to live off of the land

Published online 21 January 2007. This diary will be a dramatization of the IPCC’s forthcoming report, as well as a short discussion of Mark Lynas’ (2004) ethnography of global warming titled HIGH TIDE.  No, I’m not a scientist; but I do try my best to put two and two together on the global warming issue,… Read More global warming/ six degrees/ Mark Lynas

Published online 28 January 2007. This diary seeks to question: why haven’t we heard any more analysis about how the war against Iraq is being paid-for out of a situation called “dollar hegemony,” wherein the US manufactures dollars and the rest of the world manufactures the things dollars buy.  My guess is that if dollar… Read More Iraq and Dollar Hegemony: my analysis

Published online 19 May 2007. This is my set of recommendations for summer reading for DKosers.  The reviews published here will take the perspective offered by Paulo Freire in his “On The Right And The Duty to Change the World” where he argues: The future does not make us.  We make ourselves in the struggle… Read More Some recommendations for summer reading for DKosers

Published online 28 June 2007. I know there are a lot of diaries on the Supreme Court’s decisions today — but one particular decision of theirs, Parents v. Seattle, deserves a very close reading, as the precedent it appears to set may affect the quality of public education our children will obtain.  What I will… Read More The rhetoric of Parents v. Seattle, part 1

Published online 2 September 2007. The Los Angeles Times, a subsidiary newspaper of Tribune Corp., has as its lead editorial in today’s Opinion section a denunciation of “Peace Studies” departments: “The Peace Racket,” by Bruce Bawer.  This piece reveals many of the core assumptions of anti-peace neoconservative propaganda, so it’s worth a line-by-line examination. Today’s… Read More Tribune Corp. propaganda arm: “Those evil Peace Studies departments!”

Published online 18 September 2007. This is a short diary about personal goals, and political goals, under capitalism. In a really antsy mood, while blabbing with a friend on the Internet, I made a list of things I was “waiting for”: — a job doing something I don’t dislike — somebody to respond to all… Read More Of goals personal and political

Published online 24 September 2007. Crossposted at Docudharma This is a defense of OPOL’s diary “Why I Am A Radical.”  Some of the respondents thought that OPOL wasn’t “really a radical,” others thought that   our “solution” to present-day political problems should focus on the election of Hillary or Obama or Edwards or whomever, more… Read More Marx/ Prashad/ OPOL: Radicalism in a neoliberal age