Hi Huw, My difficulty with the Gates Foundation is similar to many of the corporate sponsors pouring money into foundations in attempts to influence education policy. The worst among them is probably the Broad Foundation which I believe has been highly detrimental in the corporate administrators that they are training and then bribing impoverished school districts (with tip money to them) to put them in power. I think they've been failures everywhere, but of course when you have backers like that you fail upwards. Anyway I see many of these "foundations" as attempting to instill a strong neo-liberal ideology in our schools. It is part of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine." These foundations are turning our school systems into the Chile of 2011. Sorry for the rant, but this is one of my many peeves (so many I can't even claim they are pets anymore). Michael ________________________________ From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Huw Lloyd Sent: Sun 10/30/2011 4:56 PM To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity Subject: Re: [xmca]schools-without-computers-by-choice-and-conviction-that-they-dont-help-kids On 26 October 2011 13:03, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote: > [...] > There is also the idea of who is actually interviewed in the article and > quote in the blog post. The head of e-bay isn't really that much of a > technology person, more of a businessman, and I believe a strong > libertarian. Don't assume the Silicon Valley people have that good a grasp > of education. Remember Bill Gates (I know, he's Seattle) and his > foundation are in my opinion doing more harm than good to open and > progressive education. Hi Michael, Out of interest, what flavour of objection do you have to the Gates Foundation? My thoughts were about the cautionary ideas exemplified by Ivan Illich (secondary problems introduced by institutionalising monetarily poorer countries and the like), though I'm currently fairly ignorant of what they're actually doing. Huw __________________________________________ _____ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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