Subjects Archives: Education

  During my teaching career I’ve worked under nine different superintendents.  I’ve taught for nearly 30 years, so the average reign of a Milwaukee superintendent has been a little over three years, about normal for big city school districts. While some people, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, decry these short tenures as a […]

  The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture, School of Oriental and African Studies University of London, 2009 I feel both honoured and gratified to be offering the 7th Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture.  This gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Tony for his unwavering support and friendship over the years.  When I […]

  Dear Friends, The Defenders will be co-sponsoring an event this evening with the Richmond Peace Education Center.  It’s a Teach-In, Richmond’s contribution to the Oct. 17 national day of actions against wars and sanctions.  This event consists of a film screening and presentations by local activists and individuals concerned about the militarized path the U.S. […]

If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native, and his having delivered on his promises.

  We have the power to stop the catastrophic budget cuts, fee hikes, and layoffs — but to save public education in California requires coordinating our actions on a statewide level. We invite all UC, CSU, CC, and K-12 students, workers, teachers, and their organizations across the state to participate in and collectively build the […]

  On Thursday, September 24, an unprecedented coalition of UC faculty, undergraduates, grad students, postdocs, lecturers, and staff will engage in a system-wide walkout.  As UC Davis graduate students and lecturers concerned with the quality of all UC students’ education, we write to clarify the reasons for this walkout as we understand them. This summer, […]

US workers’ real wages (money wages adjusted for the prices workers actually pay) have not risen from their levels in the 1970s.  Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirm that real wages continued to stagnate through 2009.  Across the same 30-year period, the productivity of labor kept rising: the average worker produced ever more output […]

  Chris Rumford, ed. Cosmopolitanism and Europe.  Studies in Social and Political Thought.  Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.  272 pp.  $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-046-1; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84631-047-8. Rebecca L. Walkowitz.  Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.  248 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13750-8. These two explorations of cosmopolitanism from quite […]

  Natan Sznaider.  Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus; eine jüdische Perspektive.   Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008.  153 pp.  EUR 16.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89942-692-2. As Europe moves into the twenty-first century, its search for a shared identity continues to occupy academic journals, the feuilleton pages, and Eurocrats eager to underwrite a by-and-large successful administrative […]

  In the Beginning I am a child of the cold war.  I was born in 1940, was an adolescent in the 1950s, and devoid of political consciousness when President Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” in 1960.   I was modestly inspired by the young President Kennedy’s […]

  Andrew Hartman.  Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.  x + 251 pp.  $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]

  A controversial facility at Ft. Benning, Ga. — formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas — is still training Honduran officers despite claims by the Obama administration that it cut military ties to Honduras after its president was overthrown June 28, NCR has learned. A day after an SOA-trained army general […]

Chavez is an indefatigable educator. He does not hesitate in describing what capitalism means. One by one he takes apart all its lies. He is relentless.

“Hello President” began broadcasting on May 23, 1999. That day this year, Chavez was in Ecuador celebrating the 187th anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha. Tomorrow the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the program will begin.

On Sunday, while putting the finishing touches to the Reflection on Haiti, I was listening to the television report on the ceremony commemorating the Battle of Pichincha that took place in Ecuador on May 24, 1822, 187 years ago. The background music was beautiful.

“Serbia is one of the few European countries with a protracted refugee population.  More than 90,000 refugees from Croatia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina remain there, victims of wars that erupted after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in 1991.” — UN High Commissioner for Refugees Serbia: Dreams of a Better Life Serbia: Far from […]

  Students and community members near the UC Berkeley campus were surprised one weekend to see a series of bus shelter billboards asking, “What country uses live ammunition against unarmed children?”  Below a photo of identically dressed schoolboys in front of a barbed wire fence is the answer: Israel. The guerrilla ads replaced ads which […]

Our world is not only threatened by the cyclical economic crises which are ever more serious and frequent. Unemployment, bankruptcy, and the huge losses in goods and wealth are inseparable companions of the blind market laws which govern the world economy today. Neo-liberalism proscribes any interference by the State, considering it a disturbing element for the economy, as if the domestic order, the army, health, education, culture, science, the courts, the judges, and many other activities could exist without the State and its laws.

Tomorrow is International Workers’ Day.

Karl Marx called to unity: “Workers of the world unite”, although many of the poor were not workers. Lenin, who was even more far-reaching, made a call to the peasants and the colonized peoples for them to struggle together under the leadership of the proletariat.

Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1.  Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]