Then, watch this (finally found a work-safe version):
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying -- lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want -- they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They DON'T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that, that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting ****** by system that threw them overboard 30 ******' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly ******** jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
If anyone ever questions you as to why corporate interests are trying to take over American education, show them these two videos. A school set up in cubicles is the perfect place to train children to passively accept the norms of corporate culture: a culture that has led to massive income inequity and a political system bought and paid for by our aristocracy.
The rest of the world must be watching this and laughing their butts off. We are destroying ourselves; our competitors and enemies don't even have to lift a finger.
ADDING: More from Brian Page:
Pedagogy that uses technology as the primary leader in instruction sacrifice the critical social interaction that students receive with other students and teachers in promoting the goal to providing educational services at the lowest possible price. We must ask ourselves what end product do these approaches envision? Do we want graduates who can comfortably sit in front of a computer screen but freeze up when it comes to looking someone in the eye? Will graduates of schools using these approaches be able to carry out coherent conversations? Will they leave school prepared to be able to socially function in an increasingly complicated world? Our responsibility is to prepare our students for the 21st century, and as you can read in this article, many 21st century skills necessary for students to thrive cannot be learned in an online environment.Yep.