Corporations Want Your Children's Brains

In case you haven't heard, evil corporations are grasping for control of our schools—and our children. At The Daily, Reihan Salam explains that the whole problem is that they already won that battle long, long ago:

Among public school teachers and their advocates, a new phrase is in vogue: corporate education reform.  The conceit is that advocates of choice-based education reform really want to privatize public education, to make a profit off young people and embrace the latest corporate fads. 

But history tells us that today's public schools are the legacy of corporate fads from the 1900s, when large industrial enterprises were keenly interested in securing a docile workforce that recognized and respected hierarchies. The tinkering, self-starting spirit that had been a necessity in a frontier society was snuffed out by design. We've been taught that education is this constricted, standardized and homogenized thing that happens in buildings called schools in between the ringing of school bells.

Just as aging industrial companies angle for tariffs to be protected from more nimble competitors, resistance to corporate education reform is to be expected. But there is an ugly side effect. Industrial-age schools have sapped our ability to learn in the wild.

Read the whole thing.