Saturday, October 8, 2011

Stop the Plunder of Public Education


New World Notes News
Vol. 4, No. 41 -- October 8, 2011

To download an audio file (save it on your hard disk): Click on this link for instructions.

This week in New World Notes, radio program #188, October 11, 2011

Stop the Plunder
of Public Education

Parents protest marketing products to children on school buses.

In brief

Want to destroy quality public education? First underfund it. Then open schools up to milking by corporate marketing departments. Then--by force of law--privatize public schools--in the process busting teachers' unions and replacing experienced, well-trained teachers with inexperienced, poorly trained, and ill-paid ones.

The result? Increased corporate profits and citizens/workers incapable of critically questioning (let alone fighting back against!) The System. It's a win-win situation!--at least for the corporate greedheads.

From the documentary Corporations in the Classroom we'll hear about two notorious schemes to market products to captive audiences of U.S. schoolchildren: Bus Radio and Channel One TV.

Journalist/commentator Chris Hedges discusses the Oligarchy's project of privatizing schools, destroying Liberal Arts education, and training young people only to serve as cogs in various parts of the economic engine. This project is a century old--but it has made great gains under Bush II and Obama.

Fr. Guido Sarducci offers some comic relief. He presents his plan to offer a quality college education in only five minutes, at a cost of $20.

Channel One brags to potential advertisers about
its captive audience of young people in school.

Notes, credits, & links

Thanks to Uprising Radio for the Hedges talk, to Unwelcome Guests for the audio of Corporations in the Classroom, and to Tereza Coraggio for the Sarducci routine.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "average quality") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

You can listen to any installment of New World Notes online or else download it (as an mp3 audio file) for later listening. The show is archived at both radio4all.net and (from #90 onwards) The Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chrono listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page, and each page has links to the recorded audio. See the gray sidebar on the right ("CONTENTS [Links]") for a table of contents.

Series overview:
Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want ... and what they're trying to make us settle for.
Never too young. (Note: the link doesn't function here.)

Coming soon (Tuesday air debut date shown)
  • October 18 -- John Pilger: Democracy comes to Venezuela.  (WWUH only: Pilger plus LIVE segments in an hour-long broadcast for Pledge Week.)
Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):

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