[lbo-talk] School Debate: Central Focus

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Wed Feb 15 14:24:03 PST 2012


On Feb 15, 2012, at 2:48 PM, James Heartfield wrote:


> Eric Beck quoted David Levine: ‘Schools were carceral institutions
> -- they were frequently justified as the best source of crime
> prevention,’
>
> In England, state schools were brought in with the express purpose
> of putting a stop to the independent Chartist and other socialist
> schools that were being set up across the country. The great
> promoters of publicly-funded schooling, Kay-Shuttleworth and William
> Forster were trying to close down institutions like the Blackburn
> Women’s Union, whose school statutes included a clause: ‘to instil
> in the minds of our children a deep and rooted hatred of our corrupt
> and tyrannical rulers’ (Manchester Observer, 26 June 1819)

England in 1819:

An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king Princes, the dregs of tnheir dull race who flow thru public scorn , mud from a muddied spring Rulers, who neither see nor feel nor know but leech-like to their fainting country cling till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field An army which, liberticide and prey, makes as a two-edged sword to those who wield Golden and sanguine laws that tempt and slay Religion christless, godless, a book sealed A Senate, time's worst statute unrepealed

Are graves, from which a glorious phantom may burst to illumine our tempestuous day.

--Shelley



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