A proposed amendment being debated in the Kansas Legislature would prohibit undocumented immigrants from being eligible for in-state tuition. This ammendment would deprive innocent children brought to the United States through no choice of their own the opportunity for higher education.
Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed.Now dumb people...
The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley, 2009).The new book shares the '80s generation's encounter with illicit drugs, and how they really caught on.
Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the...
As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.Joel Kellum says he's living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler...
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses...
We just hit our three hundredth video added to our Online Films section. Having watched all of these films, we can say that it's a an amazing collection of the best activist-issue films you can find scattered across the internet, all cataloged in one place. We've spent hours watching all sorts of videos, researching the issues they cover, and have done our best to include the best we've watched...
Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing. More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test.
The best way to get new ideas to take hold is to teach them to young people. School-age kids are impressionable and imaginitive, and pick up new perspectives readily. So it makes sense that a concept like "One Planet Living" -- which many of us find difficult to imagine -- would be natural to a kid. It's pretty simple, after all: we have just one planet; we have to learn to live as though we...
On January 31, 1,500 institutions will host classes, documentaries, performances, energy-saving competitions, and discussions with political leaders.In Springfield, Mo., college students are about to see quite vividly how much energy they consume. Piles of coal will be on display in proportion to what's needed each day to power their dorms, computers, and dining halls. At Radford University in...
At the forefront of economics, major changes are happening. And many of them are changes for the better. The old economics view of the world, in which everyone acts purely in his or her own self-interest, in which free markets are the solution to almost everything, has been abandoned.The list of economics Nobel laureates in the twenty-first century reflects these changes. It is largely made up of...
While a bit heady in its presentation, this book is one of my favorite books on alternative education and the need for dissembling the mass-compulsory, factory model of schooling which blights most of the modern and developing worlds. A better way for society to relate to ideas like "education" and "learning" exist, we just need to look. Many successful models already exist. Stay tuned for a film...