Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Apr 8, 2017
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses how to salvage the American education system with Nikhil Goyal, author of “Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice”. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil explores the regimentation of education spurred by the No Child Left Behind Act.
From the archives:
Chris Hedges: The Corporate State’s Assault on the Arts
The Problem is Civil Obedience by Howard Zinn
The Man From the North: Three R’s They Don’t Teach In School by Rivera Sun
Dandelion Salad 
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Brilliant. The intro says it all most succinctly. Real education is the nub of the argument for enlightened change.
Northrop Frye produced a splendid liitle book in 1964, entitled “The Educated Imagination” that was originally an invaluable series of talks broadcast by the CBC as the 1962 Massey Lectures. They are available online at http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1962-cbc-massey-lectures-the-educated-imagination-1.2946799
Since those socially fraught days, progressive educational ideas have continued to advance both dramatically and exponentially; but the straight-jacketed, myopic, cynical and blinkered US intelligentsia, seem to have completely sidelined these developments, that have been increasingly embraced by some so-called ‘advanced societies,’ or at the very least acknowledged as worthy and relevant.
The colonized ‘New World’ seems to share one heinous characteristic, an endemic flaw that separates it from so many other, more historically aware cultures: the reactionary, guilt-ridden denial of indigenous knowledge and a lack of genuine respect for natural learning. My own view is that this is largely due to forced curricular indoctrination by spiritually insane, religious bigots.
Consequently, radically feminist notions of creative education have also been utterly marginalized, or relegated as trivial at best; often ridiculed or effectively quarantined, even ‘erased’ as far too risky and therefore ‘taboo.’
My own experience of school was hellish. A religious torture. It made me deeply averse to conventional education. As a (very) mature student, I completed a ‘post-graduate certificate in education’ at Plymouth University in the UK in 2004; at the time, I found these essays quite refreshing & engaging….
https://www.tcpress.com/william-james-and-education-9780807741955
For anyone who has not yet heard it, I also strongly recommend Ken Robinson’s amazing 2006 TED talk