Thursday, June 19, 2008

LA Times lies to readers -- with the help of an omission

Below this is a glowing article by Todd Gitlin on the 1960's student rebellion -- saying nothing of its nihilism and destructiveness

Todd Gitlin is what the university has become: A "well educated" man, with lots of credentials. He writes well and knows about history. What is left out is his prejudices: In 1963-64 he was the president of the Tom Hayden founded Students for a Democratic Society. The infamous SDS.

This is the group that promoted bomb-throwing radicals, supporting closing of schools and institutions. It broke the law and laughed at society. It opposed free speech, and demanded to control society through terror instead of the ballot box.

So the LA Times does not mention that the author is one of those promoting the fights and terror of 1968. It is as if he is just a historian. Instead he was a participant, closing the schools that he now speaks at.

Why did the LA Times refuse to give his background to the readers? Could it be that readers would see this as a propaganda piece if they knew the truth? How can we trust anything else the Times publishes? I seldom do.

Source

From 1968 to eternity

From the U.S., to Mexico, to Europe, revolutionaries and reformers forged our world

By Todd Gitlin

Rare are the times when the world seems to rise up in unison, energized, electrified, in outrage and solidarity, as millions of people put aside their everyday routines to obstruct business as usual, to yell and argue about a new way of life, to break rules, to conjure new ones -- to barge into history.

Only three modern periods saw such a spirit of revolt roll through much of the immense and variegated world. Between 1776 and 1789, the United States and France rose up against superpower monarchies and their "long trains of abuses," tore down existing states and established republics of very different sorts, but united on the principle that the representatives of the people deserved to rule. In 1848, Europe was swept with upheaval as liberal nationalists and democrats rebelled against the Habsburg, French, Prussian and other autocracies, and the movement spread as far as Brazil.

And then 1968, when, in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Mexico, the young denounced the institutions of their elders, declared that some sort of a different world would be vastly better, tried to jam the old ways and press a huge restart button.

Start with the patterns. The singular noun "it" has its uses: It was freedom's revolt against a fossilized culture that stifled the young, the female, the gay, the rambunctious or the just plain different. It was an uneasy amalgam of radicals who wanted a more intense, communal, argumentative way of life and reformers who wanted a more equitable, even meritocratic, order. It tended to relish sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. It cherished the virtue of youth against the fossilized ideologies of the parental generation -- not least its obsolete attachments to war and the heavy-handed state. And in the end, its affirmations of a freer way of life prevailed, for the most part, even as its explicitly political demands were mainly rebuffed.

Danny Cohn-Bendit -- "Danny the Red," once the young German leader of the French revolt in May 1968 (in those days, a German Jewish student could lead a French revolt) and now a member of the European Parliament -- recently pointed out that before the cultural watershed of 1968, a man such as Nicolas Sarkozy, with a Hungarian immigrant for a father and a Greek Jewish rabbi for a great-great-grandfather, with two marriages (and a subsequent third), could scarcely have been elected president of France. As a conservative! In a race against a woman!

It seemed to many observers 40 years ago that the rebels everywhere were virtually fused in their ideals -- and, according to naysayers, in their excess. It was as if some unheard-of conspiracy were at work. As if.

And yet, the upheavals were linked. The world was thick with reciprocal influences. Television was a bully amplification system; so was the rebels' own underground press: inspiring rebels here with images of rebellion there. But the closer you look, the more the apparently unified picture dissolves. The animating spirit played very differently depending on the local landscape and what it was up against.

The American movement marched against the war in Vietnam; "black liberation" reached a boil. The German movement demonstrated against elders who refused to come to grips with their Nazi past; the Czechs against the Soviet overthrow of reform communists; Polish students in behalf of freedom of speech, whereupon an anti-Semitic communist ruling class cracked down. In France, radical students hurled themselves against a stodgy Gaullist state and old-fashioned education; in Italy too the rebels demanded government and university reforms (and sometimes a Maoist revolution); in both nations, students were joined by workers striking not only against a conservative establishment but a stodgy Communist Party. In Mexico, the movement's target was an encrusted one-party state.

Such moments of liberation, madness and recoil have to be rare, because human beings are not infinitely adaptable, even for freedom's sake or the sake of justice, and the collective nervous system can only take so much. If upheaval took place everywhere for weeks and months on end, the everyday world would grind to a halt.

As we've seen during the 2008 presidential campaign, it takes generations to work through cultural changes -- from a pre-'68 world where, in supposedly modern post-Enlightenment nations, interracial marriage and homosexuality were illegal, and women could not open bank accounts without their husbands' permission, to a world in which the mayors of Paris, Berlin and Portland, Ore., are publicly gay, and an African American narrowly defeats a woman for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

For grizzled veterans, international conferences abound on the "legacies" of 1968. So do nostalgia, wonderment, incomprehension and all sorts of criticism of those times, much of it warranted, much of it beside the point. Some celebrants still brandish abstracted slogans not so different from the ones they shouted at the time. Some embittered conservatives still smolder with unrelieved resentment, though even they mainly do not dare propose to repeal the human rights that were secured amid the 1960s upheavals.

"Forget '68, because we live in a different world," said Danny Cohn-Bendit recently. His point was not that we have passed the millennium. His point was that a prime reason why we live in a different world is that '68 happened.

The changes, on balance, were more good than bad. The history, and the wounds, are still raw because the conflicts that exploded in 1968 and the years immediately preceding and following went to the core of modern identity. Ideas about how to live in the world collided -- sometimes in the same hearts and minds -- and sometimes they mixed together, and the terms changed, but the forces unleashed four decades ago are still rumbling down through the decades.

Source






British teachers bad at mathematics

Most just barely scraped through middle-school math

Teachers would be paid 1,000 pounds to attend week-long summer schools in maths under proposals to improve teaching of the subject in England's 17,000 primary schools. The recommendation is outlined today in a major review of maths teaching in primary schools by Sir Peter Williams, a distinguished academic and businessman who chairs the Government's Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education. Sir Peter's report, seen by The Times, exposes how poorly equipped primary schools are to teach maths, noting that the highest qualification in the subject held by most primary teachers is grade C GCSE, often gained a decade or more before they embarked on teacher-training.

Only 227 of the 10,000 trainee primary teachers recruited on to PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) courses, or 2.3 per cent, have previously studied maths, science, technology or engineering to degree level.

The review, commissioned personally by Gordon Brown amid concerns that almost a quarter of 11-year-olds are failing to meet the expected standards in numeracy, calls for every primary school to appoint a maths specialist. These would be required to develop a deep "mathematical subject and pedagogical knowledge" to masters degree level so they could coach colleagues in the subject. "We have good reason to believe that the last maths training for the average primary teacher is their GCSE maths. That does not constitute a basis for pedagogical understanding," Sir Peter said.

The review rejects the idea of raising the minimum entry requirement for a teaching degree from grade C GCSE to either A level or AS level maths. Even raising it to a grade B GCSE would prevent large numbers of candidates from applying. Instead the review says that a nominated maths specialist from each primary school should be required to attend a week-long summer school at a university or other training institution for three consecutive years. They would be paid œ1,000 each time.

During their three summer school courses, teachers would build up credits towards a masters level qualification, which they could complete after two further years of part-time study. Maths specialists attaining a masters level qualification qualify for a one-off payment of 2,500 pounds.

Sir Peter is also proposing that an incentive payment of 5,000 pounds be made to trainee teachers who undertake a maths-focused PGCE course, with half the money paid up front and the remainder when the teacher achieves maths specialist status. Similar payments already exist for those training to teach maths at secondary school. Sir Peter estimates that the programme will cost less than 20 million a year. "It should be seen as an investment in the nation's future, not as a cost," he said.

Training for childminders and nursery workers should include appropriate mathematical content so that children could start learning their numbers through play from an early age. The review also says that schools should actively engage parents in maths workshops or with maths home-work that the whole family can join in. It was essential, if children were to grow up feeling confident about their maths abilities, that schools and parents combat the pervasive "can't do" attitude to maths, that appeared to be unique to Britain, Sir Peter said.

The review concludes that the current primary curriculum should remain, although it recommends a greater emphasis on the use of maths in everyday life. Mark Siswick, joint head teacher of Chesterton Primary School in Battersea, South London, which already has a maths specialist teacher, said: "Her role is to skill up other teachers. Once you do that, if teachers are strong, confident and enthusiastic, they will transmit that to the children."

Source





Red tape choking Australian childcare industry

And it all adds to the costs that parents pay

New government reporting requirements for childcare centres are eroding the amount of attention that can be given to the children, workers in the industry say. And staff numbers are dwindling as workers leave jobs where every move is monitored, judged and reported.

Registered childcare centres now have to independently report on 708 indicators which Federal Government inspectors use when conducting compulsory inspections every two years, Childcare Queensland president (Glynn Bridge said. If a childcare centre fails to get a tick for any of the 708 boxes under the Government's Quality Improvement and Accreditation system, it could lose accreditation. "The red tape is killing us," Ms Bridge said. Fear of losing accreditation has prompted some centres to introduce monthly checklists, which include directors reporting on more than 40 workplace practices, ranging from nappy-changing and hand-washing to childcare philosophy.

The industry fears more regulations are looming under a Rudd Government proposal to introduce a grading system for childcare centres. Centre owners say they are not opposed to inspections or health and safety requirements for their businesses, but fear losing experienced staff as a result of "unreasonable processes".

Kerrie Lada, the director of Hardy's Road childcare centre at Mudgeeraba on the Gold Coast, is among those trying to juggle childcare and government paperwork. She said that would prefer to "get down on the ground" with children rather than sit in the office with piles of paperwork. "My job as director has changed over 20 years," Ms Lada said. "I'm basically doing paperwork rather than supporting staff and children and families. It's basically ticking boxes to say we have done it".

Another childcare centre director contacted by The Sunday Mail , who asked not to be named, said she had recently lost a senior employee and others had complained of stress because they feared letting down colleagues and the centre if they failed to get a "tick" on any of the criteria. "The stress levels are definitely high. What's confusing is the criteria changes every time. And you feel like you're being judged and watched," she said.

More than 900,000 children from about 700,000 families Australia-wide use childcare each year. About 10 per cent of centres in Australia failed to receive accreditation last year.

Ms Bridge said she had recently briefed Queensland Minister for Communities Lindy Nelson-Carr on industry issues and had requested a meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to discuss the complex regulation of centres.

The article above is by Paul Weston and appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on June 15, 2008.

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