Creating Sustainable Learning Communities: Withdrawl From Teaching Unions
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_marshall.html
[excerpt]
"The reason our society must create a new language for learning
communities that transcends school and classroom walls is that the
dominance, attraction, and power of the current machine-based language
of schooling is not capable of generating the organic patterns of the
global learning community we now require."
Here is an example of the dominance language:
Class: A social stratum whose members share certain economic,
social, or cultural characteristics
Room: An area separated by walls or partitions
Classroom: artifact of Newtonian, mechanical approach to "teaching"
The monstrous "teachers" unions and the bureaucratic monolith of the NEA
("a 145-year old labor union") are the main purveyors of the dominance
language.
They are the specific, direct reason and cause for the current (and
past) learning crisis in the USA.
The NEA is a giant labor union. Their specific mission to advance the
mission of its due-paying members. The have congress and the Dems & Reps
in their pocket. Learners aren't even on the radar of this
hyper-political juggernaut. Parents, taxpayers and learners, and bright
new teachers, are its hostage.
That is why it is critical to force the realities of economic ecosystems
for learning onto the national agenda. It is particularly important not
to require parents to pay TWICE simply to opt-out of this failed labor
empire, for example.
Indeed, choice and vouchers are a step in the right direction to create, -
[excerpt]
"...learning culture that provides a forum for risk, novelty,
experimentation, and challenge and that redirects and personalizes
learning. We must create learning communities for learners of all ages
that can give power, time, and voice to their inquiry and their
creativity."
This is a grave threat to the NEA's monopoly, bureaucracy and political
clout. Efforts in the past have been erased and swept up in to the belly
of the monopoly. Novel ideas are routinely crushed by the corrupt NEA
and its syndicate in favor of the mechanistic, linear model that serves
bureaucracy far better.
Within these rigid NEA/union models, administrators
outnumber teachers and those involved with learning by 2 to 1.
Administrators get far more pay and rewards than teachers. This makes
sense when its singular mission is to perpetuate the union through
suppression, dominance, fear and censorship.
2:53:20 AM 
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