Via an Occupy event, Occupy Sesame Street<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/14/rupert-murdoch-heckled-at_n_1011358.html>, hosted by Jeb Bush in San Francisco, I learned more about privatization of public education in America.
Speaking at the event, Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of News Corp, owner of Fox News, said "We need to tear down an education system designed for the 19th century and replace it with one suited for the 21st".
"You don't get change by plugging in computers at schools designed for the industrial age," Murdoch said. "You get it by developing technology that rewrites the rules of the game by centering learning around the learner."
According to the Huffington Post in August, New York's comptroller rejected a $27 million contract with the educational technology company because of the phone-hacking scandal <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/phone-hacking>involving News Corp.'s British newspapers.
Murdoch describes the K-12 education 'market' as a 500 billion dollar opportunity<http://www.good.is/post/can-rupert-murdoch-speed-the-coming-of-online-learning/>and the NYC Charter School Chancellor Joe Klein has joined News Corp<http://www.good.is/post/can-rupert-murdoch-speed-the-coming-of-online-learning/>to develop this online education business at News Corp.
Surely, this is a bad joke? Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Minken, as educators? Or more correctly, content providers for packagers of educational content ? But, this must be a pipe-dream, a long-shot ?
Well, although CMO's or Charter School Management Organizations (the equivalent of HMO's for healthcare) might not currently be the major institutional arrangement for education in the USA, the financial and business communities have long been planning for it and are using the current funding induced crisis in public education, what Noami Klein describes as the Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine>.
Although Governor Jeb Bush hosted Murdoch for the the Occupy Sesame Street publicity stunts, it may be useful at this stage, to introduce the educational tech entrepreneur Neil Bush, son of President Bush Senior and brother of President Bush Junior.
Neil Bush owns one of the businesses that he will use to smash the old model of education, Ignite!. According to the Washington Post, "Ignite! is designed, Bush said, to make learning fun for "hunter-warrior" kids<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35297-2003Dec27?Xlanguage=printer>who don't like reading. It's a computer curriculum that uses music, graphics and animation to teach middle school kids".
News Corp has the content - Fox News (Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly et al) 20th Century Fox (Simpsons, X Files, South Park, Married With Children, Team America World Police).
The Bush Family has the presidency and the delivery platform. So, the hunter-warrior kids, who don't like to read, will be getting their education, soon enough from the synergy of News Corp and Ignite Learning.
So, in the charter school coming near you, the stressed-out, underpaid, untrained, non-teacher/teacher, will get be plugging students and letting them be hunter-warriors having fun. Presumably killing people.
>From the Washington Post "Ignite! has been attacked by other educators for
dumbing down history. Among its controversial aspects is a lesson that
depicts the Seminole Wars in a cartoon football game -- "the Jacksons vs.
the Seminoles" -- the animated Indians smashing helmets with animated white
settlers."
So, in conclusion, the Teaching Presence of a merger of Murdoch and Bush is designing an educational system for hunter-warriors, with a distorted cartoon view of history, an ultra-right politics, a fundamentalist and apocalyptic vision of the future.
The atrocities of Nazism was possible because of a generational program of propaganda via the media and eventual coordination throughout all the institutions. What completed and provided the foundation for a war or genocide was the Nazi Youth educational process for hunter-warriors, which didn't like to read, and made learning fun.
Hitler's Teaching Presence was embodied in Nazi Germany and the Nazi Youth and created a world war. In many ways, the project continues.