Children

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Gun Violence as State Sponsored Domestic Terrorism

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

Passing thoughts on the willingness of the politicians and merchants of death who allow the unimaginable to become imaginable, allow financial gain to prevail over the lives of innocent children, and are more willing to protect guns at the expense of the lives of children.

President Trump listened recently to the impassioned testimony of parents and children who have seen their children and friends killed in gun shootings. He responded by advocating that teachers be armed and trained to have concealed weapons.

Instead of confronting the roots of violence in America, he followed the NRA line of addressing the issue of mass violence, shootings, and the ongoing carnage with a call to arm more people, putting more guns into play, and stating that violence can be met with more violence. This logic is breathtaking in its insanity, moral depravity, refusal to get to the root of the problem, and even advocate minor reforms such as banning assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, and expanding background checks.

There are 300 million guns in the United States and since the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School of 20 young children and 6 teachers a decade ago, 11,000 more children have died of gun violence.

There is no defense for putting the policies of the NRA ahead of the lives of children. Criminal acts often pass for legislative policies. How else to explain the Florida legislature refusing to even debate outlawing assault weapons while students from Majory Stoneman Douglas High School sat in the galleys and watched this wretched and irresponsible act take place. How else to explain that the House of Representatives – reduced to an adjunct of the NRA – voted to pass the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act (H.R.38) which would allow individuals to carry concealed weapons across state lines. These are the people who have the blood of thousands on their hands.

The power of money in politics has morphed into a form of barbarism in which financial gain and power have become more important than protecting the lives of America’s children.

I find it extremely difficult to watch the debates about gun violence on the mainstream media. The call for reform is so limited as to be useless. Instead of banning assault rifles, they celebrate Trump for suggesting that he raise the age to 21 in order for people to buy a weapon of war. Instead of preventing violence from engulfing the country and schools, he calls for arming teachers and the press celebrates his willingness to entertain this issue. Instead of speaking about justice and allowing people to speak who are against deregulating laws restricting or abolishing the merchants of death, the media allows an NRA hawk to speak at the town meeting and rather than calling her out for being a spokesperson for violence rather than justice, they congratulate themselves on promoting balance.

The corporate media has become a normalizing force for violence because they lack the courage to challenge the corporations that control them. They also benefit by peddling extreme violence as a spectacle. They refuse to begin with the issue of money in politics and start instead with what one parent called non-starters. Guns disappear from the conversation and appeals to fear and security take over. Young people have to lead this conversation and move beyond the mainstream media. And when they do appear they have to flip the script and ask the questions they think are important.

Children no longer have a safe space in America, a country saturated in violence as a spectacle, sport, and deadly acts of domestic terrorism. Any defense for the proliferation of guns, especially those designed for war, is criminal. This is the discourse of political corruption, a government in the hands of the gun lobbies, and a country that trades in violence at every turn in order to accrue profits at the expense of the lives of innocent children.

This debate is not simply about gun violence, it is about the rule of capital and how the architects of violence accrue enough power to turn machineries of death and destruction into profits while selling violence as a commodity. Violence is both a source of profits and a cherished national ideal. It is also the defining feature of a toxic masculinity. Gun reform is no substitute for real justice and the necessary abolition of a death-dealing and cruel economic and political system that is the antithesis of democracy.

What are we to make of a society in which young children have a greater sense of moral courage and social responsibility than the zombie adults who make the laws that fail to invest in and protect the lives of present and future generations. First step, expose their lies, make their faces public, use the new media to organize across state lines, and work like hell to vote them out of office in 2018. Hold these ruthless walking dead responsible and then banish them to the gutter where they belong. At the same time, imagine and fight for not a reform of American society but a restructuring along the lines of a democratic socialist order.

Source:

https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/henry-giroux-on-gun-violence

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Killing Children in the Age of Disposability: The Parkland Shooting Was About More Than Gun Violence

Henry Giroux

By: Henry A. Giroux

Donald Trump may have startled Republican lawmakers with his sudden and unexpected support for background checks and other gun control measures, but a closer look at his comments to lawmakers reveals his continued adherence to the core of the pro-gun script that he has been following all along.

At his meeting with lawmakers on February 28 Trump buckled down on the idea that the real problem is the existence of gun-free zones, arguing that eliminating gun-free zones «prevent [mass shootings] from ever happening, because [the shooters] are cowards and they’re not going in when they know they’re going to come out dead.»

The president’s repeated efforts to disparage the idea of gun-free zones fit with the earlier call for arming teachers made by Trump and one of his most powerful financial and ideological backers — the dark knight of gun violence, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Meanwhile, Trump has shown no interest in preventing school shootings by hiring more guidance teachers, support staff and psychologists. Trump’s call for a comprehensive gun bill may have made for «captivating» television, but it rattled NRA lobbyists and initiated a tsunami of calls to their allies on Capitol Hill. Nothing surprising to this reaction. It gets worse. Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the NRA, met with Trump a few days after Trump made his remarks and suggested in a tweet that the president had backed away from his apparent embrace of gun control.

Moreover, there is little confidence following Trump’s remarks that Republicans would even remotely endorse legislation for gun control. The NRA «paid $5 million to lobbyists last year» and there is no indication that the time and money spent buying off cowardly politicians will prove ineffectual.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders.

The deeply troubling call for eliminating gun-free zones and arming teachers comes at a time when many schools have already been militarized by the presence of police and the increasing criminalization of student behaviors. Suggesting that teachers be armed and turned into potential instruments of violence extends and normalizes the prison as a model for schools and the increasing expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. What is being left out of this tragedy is that the number of police in schools has doubled in the last decade from 20 percent in 1996 to 43 percent today. Moreover, as more police are put in schools, more and more children are brutalized by them. There is no evidence that putting the police in schools has made them any safer. Instead, more and more young people have criminal records, are being suspended, or expelled from school, all in the name of school safety. As  Sam Sinyangwe, the director of the Mapping Police Violence Project, observes:

The data … that does exist … shows that more police in schools leads to more criminalization of students, and especially black and brown students. Every single year, about 70,000 kids are arrested in school…. [Moreover] since 1999, 10,000 additional police officers have been placed at schools, with no impact on violence. Meanwhile, about one million students have been arrested for acts previously punishable by detention or suspension, and black students are three times more likely to be arrested than their white peers.

Trump’s proposal to arm teachers suggests that the burden of gun violence and the crimes of the gun industries and politicians should fall on teachers’ shoulders, foolishly imagining that armed teachers would be able to stop a killer with military grade weapons, and disregarding the risk of teachers shooting other students, staff or faculty in the midst of such a chaotic moment.

In addition, the proposal points to the insidious fact that mass shootings and gun violence have become so normalized in the United States that, as Adam Gopnik points out, «we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid’s school, there’s a plan to cope with him.» Such statements make visible a society rife with the embrace of force and violence. How else to explain the fact that, at the highest levels of government, horrendous acts of violence, such as mass shootings involving school children, are now discussed in terms of containing their effects rather than eliminating their causes.

Protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people.

In this logic the underlying causes of mass shootings and gun killings disappear and the emphasis for dealing with such violence reproduces an act of political and moral irresponsibility in its call to curtail or contain such violence rather than address the underlying causes of it.

We live in an age in which the politics of disposability has merged with what Jeffrey St. Clair has called the spectacle of «American Carnage.» The machineries of social death and misery now drive a mode of casino capitalism in which more and more people are considered waste, expendable and excess. The politics of disposability now couples with acts of extreme violence as pressure grows to exclude more and more people from the zones of visibility, justice and compassion. This is especially true for children. Violence against children in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. As Marian Wright Edelman points out,

Pervasive gun violence against children is a uniquely shameful all-American epidemic. Consider that since 1963, over three times more children and teens died from guns on American soil than U.S. soldiers were killed by hostilities in wars abroad. On average 3,426 children and teens — 171 classrooms of 20 children — were killed by guns every year from 1963 to 2016. And gun violence comes on top of other major threats of global violence that threaten our children.

A culture of cruelty, silence and indifference to the needs of children, built on the backs of the conservative media politicians and the gun industry and lobby, has become a central and ethically disturbing feature of American society. This is a culture of political corruption and social abandonment that «has a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others.» This culture of violence has a long history in the United States, and has become increasingly legitimated under the Trump regime, a regime in which lawlessness and corruption combine to ignore the needs of children, the poor, elderly, sick and vulnerable. In the age of neoliberal brutality, protecting guns and profits have become more important than protecting the lives of young people. As is apparent from its policies, our society no longer views young people as a worthy social investment or the promise of a decent future. On the contrary, as John and Jean Comaroff note in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, instead of becoming a primary register of the dreams of a society, youth have become «creatures of our nightmares, of our social impossibilities, and our existential angst.»

Viewed largely as a liability, the institutions that young people inhabit have been discarded as citadels of critical thinking and social mobility. As a result, such institutions, including schools, have become zones of social abandonment — often modeled after prisons — that appear to exist in a state of perpetual danger and fear, especially for students marginalized by race and class, for whom violence operates routinely and in multiple ways. Children are now defined largely as consumers, clients and fodder for the military or the school-to-prison pipeline. As a result, their safety is now enmeshed with the weaponized discourse of surveillance, and security personnel and police patrol their corridors. Horrific shootings boost the ratings and profit margins of the mainstream press, undercutting these news outlets’ will and ability to use their resources to address the culture and political economy of violence that now amounts to a form of domestic terrorism in the United States.

The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them.

As Brad Evans and I have argued in Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle, violence has now become the defining organizing principle for society in general. It is also worth noting that the spectacle, marketing and commodification of violence powerfully mediates how the American public both understands the relations of power that benefit from the production of violence at all levels of society and how the visceral suffering that is produced can be neutralized in a culture of immediacy and «alternative facts.»

Of course, this logic is part of the politics of distraction that has become a trademark of the Trump administration. At the same time, it creates more profits for the gun industries and makes clear that most people, including children, have no safe space in the US. The message to students is clear. They are not worth protecting if they threaten the profits of the gun industries and the purses of the politicians who have become the lackeys for them. It gets worse. Rather than engage young people and other gun rights advocates in a debate about gun control, some conservatives mimic the discourse of humiliation and lies used relentlessly by Trump in claiming that «bereaved students were being manipulated by sinister forces, or even that they were paid actors.»

As objects of moral and social abandonment, young people are beginning to recognize that the response to their call for safety, well-being and future without fear is cruel and cynical. In addition, their struggle against gun violence makes clear that the Trump administration, the NRA, and the industries that trade in instruments of violence and death, are waging a war against democracy itself. The call to arm teachers also speaks to the Trump administration’s efforts to further militarize and expand the weaponization not only of the armed forces but also of spaces in which large numbers of students congregate. In his call to arm 20 percent of all teachers, Trump is suggesting that 640,000 teachers be trained and given guns. The Washington Post estimates that the costs of training teachers sufficiently could reach as high as $718 million while the cost of providing teachers with firearms could amount to an additional $251 million. According to the Post, «the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm … creeps past $1 billion.» Furthermore, putting 640,000 more guns in schools is not only a reckless suggestion, it also further enriches the profits of gun makers by adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. Why not invest this amount of money in providing support staff and services for students — services that could meaningfully support those facing mental health issues, bullying, homelessness and poverty?

When combined with a culture of fear and a massive government investment in a carceral state, the politics of disposability eerily echoes the damaging legacy of a fascist past in the US, with its celebration of violence, concentration of power in the hands of the few, massive inequities in wealth and militarization of all aspects of society. There is no defense for weapons of war to be sold as commodities either to children or anyone else. Gun violence in the US is not simply about a growing culture of violence, it is about the emergence of a form of domestic terrorism in which fear, mistrust, lies, corruption and financial gain become more important than the values, social relations and institutions that write children into the script of democracy and give them hope for a decent future.

When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence.

A war culture now permeates American society — extending from sports events and Hollywood films to the ongoing militarization of the police and the criminalization of everyday behaviors such as violating a dress code or doodling on a desk. War has become a permanent element of everyday life, deeply etched into our national ideals and social relations. And those responsible for the bloodshed it produces appear immune from social criticism and policies that limit their power.

This debate about school shootings is not simply about gun violence; it is about a neoliberal order that has tipped over into authoritarianism, one for which the highest measure of how a society judges itself ethically and politically is no longer about how it treats its children. Violence on a grand scale certainly has produced a high sense of moral outrage within the US public at times, but not over the fate of young people.

People in the US need a new language to talk about violence in order to capture its many registers and the threads that tie them together. Under such circumstances, school violence cannot be understood outside of the deeply inordinate influence of money and power in US politics. The call to model schools after prisons would have to be examined against the rise of the punishing state and the Trump administration’s celebration of a «law and order» regime. The anger fueling what might be called white rage would have to be analyzed against the gutting of jobs, wages, pensions, health care benefits and the massive growth of inequality in wealth and power in the United States.

US society has become an abyss in which violence, disposability and the logic of social abandonment and terminal exclusion work against the interests of most children and for the interests of the rich and powerful. Weapons now operate in the service of what might be called the necro-power of casino capitalism. How else to explain the fact that there are more than 13,000 homicides a year in the United States, or that on average, seven teens are killed with guns daily. Yet the response on the part of politicians is either silence and inaction, or a more aggressive push to put more guns in circulation?

A cult of militarism has dragged extreme violence into the very soul of the US and has become a source of pride rather than alarm and anger. This depraved transformation is accelerated by a crisis of agency in which every relation is reduced to an exchange relation, one in which, as political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, «everything from learning to eating become matters of speculative investments — ranked, rated, balanced in your portfolio.» When the only self available to the public is rooted in the discourse of entrepreneurship, it is not surprising for a society to produce generations of people indifferent to the effects of mass violence, unsympathetic to the growing multitudes of disposable individuals and groups, and unmoved by a culture of deepening collective cynicism. Casino capitalism has numbed large segments of the American public into moral and political callousness. One consequence is an indifference to a society in which the killing of children is routine.

Mass shootings and gun violence in the US cannot be abstracted from what I call the death of the social, which involves the collapse of an investment in the public good, the ongoing destruction of democratic values, and the undermining of the common good. A toxic mix of rugged individualism, untrammeled self-interest, privatization, commodification and culture of fear now shapes American society, leaving most people isolated, unaware of the broader systemic forces shaping their lives, and trapped in a landscape of uncertainty and precarity that makes them vulnerable to having their anxieties, anger and rage misdirected.

The students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle.

All too often, the only discourse available for them to deal with their problems is provided by the disingenuous vocabulary of fear and security delivered in the call for gun ownership, the allure of violence as an antidote to their individual and collective anxieties, and a hateful appeal to racism, Islamophobia and demonization.

The hijacking of freedom and individual responsibility by extremists is corrosive and rots society from within, making people susceptible to what C.W. Mills describes as «organized irresponsibility» in his book The Politics of Truth. The right-wing attack on the welfare state, community and democracy functions to dissolve crucial solidarities and bonds of social obligation, and undermines mutual responsibilities. In the absence of the discourse of community, compassion and mutual respect, fear and violence have become the new currency mediating social relations at all levels of society. In a society in which the war of all against all prevails, the call for more guns is symptomatic of the shredding of the social fabric, the hardening of society, the evisceration of public trust, and a ratcheting up of a political and economic investment by the ruling elite in the machinery of cruelty, inequality and militarism.

Violence in the United States is part of a wider politics of disposability in which the machineries of social and political death accelerate the suffering, hardships and misery of children. For too long, youth have been written out of the script of justice and democracy. Gun violence, mass shootings and state violence are simply the most visible elements of a society that organizes almost every aspect of civil society for the production of terror and fear, and which views young people within the specter of uselessness and indifference.

Fortunately, the students from Parkland, Florida, are fighting back, shunning the coarse language used by apologists for systemic violence while embracing new forms of social solidarity and collective struggle. These young people are refusing to privatize hope or allow the ethical imagination and their sense of moral outrage and social responsibility to be tranquilized. They are not only outraged over the brutal actions of the defenders of gun violence, they feel betrayed. Betrayed, because they have learned that the power of the gun industries and the politicians who defend them do not consider their lives worthy of protection, hope and a future free of violence. They recognize that US society is unusually violent and that they are a target. Moreover, they are arguing convincingly that mass shooting in the United States have a direct correlation with the astronomical number of guns present in this country. But there is more at stake here than an epidemic of gun violence, there is the central idea of the US as defined by carnage — violence that extends from the genocide of Native Americans and slavery to the rise of mass incarceration and the instances of state violence now sweeping across the US.

At least for the moment, young people are refusing to live with a modern system of violence that functions as a form of domestic terrorism. Engaged in a form of productive unsettling and collective dissent, they are fighting back, holding power accountable and giving birth to a vibrant form of political struggle. The distinctiveness of this generation of survivors is clear in their use of social media, their willingness to speak out, their planned marches, their civic courage, and their unwillingness to continue to live with the fear and insecurity that have shaped most of their lives. Hopefully, this moment will transform itself into a movement.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43732-killing-children-in-the-age-of-disposability-the-parkland-shooting-was-about-more-than-gun-violence

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Pakistan: Quality education vital for progress: Tirmzi

Noticias

Pakistan/ March 13, 2018/Source: https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/

Federal Minister for Norcotics Control General (r) Salahud Din Tirmzi said that education played a vital role in economic development of the country and urged the students to get quality education so that they could contribute towards national progress and stability.

Addressing the annual prize distribution ceremony of Jinnah Preparatory School held at the auditorium of Rawalpindi Arts Council on Sunday, Salahud Din Tirmzi said that education was the only way to overcome poverty, ignorance, unemployment and extremism.

He said, “It is the need of hour that we invest in education and provide a conductive environment to the kids for education to enable them to combat the challenges of the future.”

He appreciated the high standard of education at Jinnah Preparatory School, which had provided opportunities to the students to express their capabilities and talents in an efficient manner. He congratulated the parents of students who secured positions in the annual examinations.

Jinnah Preparatory School Head Abdul Qadir Hai said that no society could progress without education and mutual cooperation of parents and teachers.

Later, the chief guest awarded prizes and certificates among the students who showed outstanding performance in different categories.

The ceremony was also attended by parents, faculty members and students. The well prepared kids of Jinnah Preparatory School presented beautiful tableaus, dramas, skits, a fancy dress show and a cultural show.

Source:

Quality education vital for progress: Tirmzi

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UNESCO: One in every five children, adolescents and youth is out of school worldwide

UNESCO

UNESCO/March 06, 2018/Source: https://en.unesco.org

New figures on the number of children out of school worldwide reveal that despite decades of efforts to get every child into the classroom, progress has come to a standstill. According to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), about 263 million children, adolescents and youth worldwide – one in every five – are out school, a figure that has barely changed over the past five years.

The new numbers are published as delegates gather in Paris for the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-Education 2030 Steering Committee meeting. The Committee is a unique body providing strategic guidance on the advancement of the Education 2030 Agenda. SDG4 includes a concrete commitment to ensure that every girl and boy is completing a good quality primary and secondary education by 2030.

The rate of progress, or the lack of it, varies by age group, according to a UIS paper released today. At primary level, the out-of-school rate has barely moved at all over the past decade, with 9% of children of primary age (about 6 to 11 years), or 63 million, out of school.

In addition, 61 million adolescents of lower secondary age (about 12 to 14 years) and 139 million youth of upper secondary age –one in every three – are not enrolled in school. These youth, between the ages of about 15 to 17 years, are four times more likely to be out of school than children of primary age, and more than twice as likely to be out of school as those of lower secondary age.

“These new figures show starkly the size of the gap that needs to be closed to ensure universal access to education,” says UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “We need much more comprehensive and targeted approaches together with more resources to reach those children and youth who are denied the right to education, with a special emphasis on girls and on improving the quality of education for all. This is the greatest urgency for unlocking progress towards SDG4.”

The UIS figures confirm that across sub-Saharan Africa one in every three children, adolescents and youth are out of school – with girls more likely to be excluded than boys. For every 100 boys of primary age out of school, there are 123 girls denied the right to education.

The new data also highlight a gulf between out-of-school rates in the world’s poorest and richest countries, with an upper-secondary out-of-school rate of 59% across the world’s low-income countries, compared to just 6% in high-income countries.

According to Silvia Montoya, Director of the UIS, “Access to education is only part of the picture. We also have a learning crisis, with one in six children and adolescents not reaching minimum proficiency levels in reading or mathematics; the majority of them are in school. Education has to deliver for every child, which requires effective monitoring to ensure that all children are in school, and that they are learning what they need to know. That is why the UIS, which is the official data source for SDG 4, is developing new indicators on equitable education and learning outcomes.”

The new figures reinforce calls for far greater global investment in education at all levels to ensure progress towards SDG 4, including more resources for data gathering and analysis to monitor the pace and equity of that progress.

These issues will be on the agenda of the fourth SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee, the main global consultation and coordination mechanism for education in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Committee meets once or twice a year to provide strategic advice on policies, financing, monitoring and reporting and advocacy. It is composed of 38 members representing a majority from Member States, together with eight UN agencies, the Global Partnership for Education, the OECD, regional organizations, teacher organizations, civil society networks, in addition to representatives from the private sector, foundations, youth and student organizations.

Source:

https://en.unesco.org/news/one-every-five-children-adolescents-and-youth-out-school-worldwide

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Schools as Punishing Factories: The Handcuffing of Public Education

Henry Giroux

By: Dr. Henry Giroux

The Nobel Prize-winning author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has insisted rightfully that «Children are the future of any society,» adding, «If you want to maim the future of any society, you simply maim the children.» (1)

As we move into the second Gilded Age, young people are viewed more as a threat than as a social investment.

If one important measure of a democracy is how a society treats its children – especially children of color, poor and working-class youth, and those with disabilities – there can be little doubt that the United States is failing. Half of all public school children live in near poverty, 16 million children receive food stamps and 90 percent of Black children will be on food stamps at some point during childhood. (2) Moreover, too many children are either incarcerated or homeless.

The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that «One in 45 children experience homelessness in America each year. That’s over 1.6 million children. [Moreover] while homeless, they experience high rates of acute and chronic health problems. The constant barrage of stressful and traumatic experience also has profound effects on their development and ability to learn.» (3) Sadly, these statistics rarely scratch the surface of the dire and deep-seated problems facing many young people in the richest country in the world, a state of affairs that provokes too little public outrage.

Teachable Moment or Criminal Offense?

Every age has its approach to identifying and handling problems. As we move into the second Gilded Age, young people are viewed more as a threat than as a social investment. Instead of being viewed as at-risk in a society that has defaulted on its obligations to young people, youth today are viewed as the risk itself. Instead of recognizing the social problems and troubles they face – ranging from poverty to punishing schools – our society sees youth as spoiled or threatening. (4) One consequence is that their behaviors are increasingly criminalized in the streets, malls, schools and many other places once considered safe spaces for them. As compassion and social responsibility give way to punishment and fear as the most important modalities mediating the relationship of youth to the larger social order, schools resort more and more to zero-tolerance policies and other punitive practices. Such practices often result in the handing over of disciplinary problems to the police rather than to educational personnel.

Children are being punished instead of educated in US schools.

With the growing presence of police, surveillance technologies and security guards in schools, more and more of what kids do, how they act, how they dress and what they say are defined as a criminal offense, regardless of how trivial the offense may be – in some cases just doodling on a desk or violating a dress code. Such behaviors, which teachers and administrators use to regulate through everyday means, are now treated as infractions within the purview of the police. Consequently, suspensions, expulsions, arrests and jail time have become routine for poor youth of color. Even more shocking is the rise of zero-tolerance policies to punish Black students and students with disabilities. (5) Instead of recognizing the need to provide services for students with special needs, there is a dangerous trend on the part of school systems to adopt policies «that end in seclusion, restraint, expulsion, and – too often – law enforcement intervention for the disabled children involved.» (6) Sadly, this is but a small sampling of the ways in which children are being punished instead of educated in US schools, especially inner-city schools. Rather than treating school infractions as part of the professional responsibilities of teachers and administrators, schools are criminalizing such behaviors and calling the police. What might have become a teachable moment becomes a criminal offense. (7)

Since the 1990s, the US public has been swamped by the fear of an alleged rise in teenage crime and what was called a superpredator crisis. This crisis was largely popularized by John J. DiIulio Jr., then a political scientist at Princeton University, who argued without irony «that hordes of depraved teenagers [were about to resort] to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience.» (8) Politicians, intellectuals and news organizations were convinced that young people posed a dire threat to the US public and not only reveled «on these sensational predictions [but also] ran with them like a punt returner finding daylight.» (9) While such chaos proved to be nonsense, the theses spawned a plethora of disciplinary practices in schools, such as zero-tolerance policies, which have turned them into institutions that resemble prisons with students being subjected to harsh disciplinary practices, particularly poor black children and children suffering from mental health problems, such as ADHD.

Policing Students in Classrooms and on Playgrounds

These harsh practices have been inflicted disproportionately on poor Black children and children suffering from mental health problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This was on full display as social media lit up with a video that disclosed an 8-year-old boy in the third grade in an elementary school classroom in Covington, Kentucky, screaming in pain because he was being handcuffed with his arms placed behind his back. (10) Standing beside the child is police officer, Deputy Sheriff Kevin Sumner, who issues the chilling message, «You either behave the way you are supposed to or you suffer the consequences.» The child, it was later revealed, suffers from a learning disability. According to the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, «Charles Korzenborn, the sheriff in Covington, Kentucky … defended the officer … claiming that the police officer, Kevin Sumner, had done absolutely nothing wrong. The sheriff said his deputy had done ‘what he is sworn to do and in conformity with all constitutional and law enforcement standards…. I steadfastly stand behind Deputy Sumner who responded to the school’s request for help. Deputy Sumner is a highly respected and skilled law enforcement deputy, and is an asset to the community and those he serves.'» (11) Allegedly, Sumner was responding to the school’s call to diffuse «a threat.» It is hard to imagine what kind of threat a 3.5-foot tall 8-year-old elementary school child posed to either the school or to the police. At work here is not only a kind of bizarre rationality in which one becomes an asset to the community by handcuffing and arresting an 8-year-old boy but also the scourge of a willful ignorance which is the refusal to know or to recognize when an act of violence is being committed against a child.

Schools are considered dangerous because they are public, not because they are failing.

The sheriff’s unhinged defense of Sumner becomes even more apparent in light of the fact that it has been revealed that Sumner had engaged in similar behavior earlier in 2014. At that time, he participated in the handcuffing at John C. Carlisle Elementary School of a 9-year-old girl living with ADHD. At one level, this case reveals why police should not be in public schools in the first place and that the targeting of children by criminalizing their behavior represents the antithesis of how a school should treat its children. It also suggests something about the low regard the public has for public schools and the lives of our nation’s youth, especially poor children of color.

While the image of an 8-year-old boy handcuffed in an elementary school classroom in Covington, Kentucky, has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention on social media and in the mainstream news, it is far from unique. In 2013, a diabetic student in an Alabama high school was arrested and beaten for falling asleep in a classroom. (12) In 2013, Bronx police falsely accused a 7-year-old boy and «put him in handcuffs and held him in custody for ten hours after a playground fight» in which he was falsely accused of stealing $5 from another student. (13) It gets worse. The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in November 2012 charging that the Meridian, Mississippi, school district functioned largely as a school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionally focusing on Black youth. According to the Justice Department’s 37-page complaint, the Meridian school district engaged in «years of systemic abuse [which punished] youth ‘so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.'» (14)

As Julianne Hing reports,

In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department’s policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency. Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations. (15)

The Meridian case makes clear what numerous reports have indicated for years: not only that zero-tolerance measures have failed, but also that they have made schools less secure, resulted in criminalizing student behavior and contributed to what has been called the school-to-prison pipeline, especially for poor youth of color. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, the school-to-prison pipeline is a «disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished, and pushed out.» (16) Putting the police in schools has little to do with improving the learning environment for children and a great deal to do with criminalizing students «for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline.» (17)

The war on youth and public schools is part of the larger assault on democracy itself.

The increasing criminalization of students of color, poor students and students with disabilities is taking place in the context of a broader attack on public schools as a whole. Like many institutions that represent the public good, public schools are under attack by market, religious and educational fundamentalists. Schools are considered dangerous because they are public, not because they are failing. State and corporate leaders are seeking to take power out of the hands of public school teachers and administrators because public schools harbor teachers with the potential to engage in pedagogies that are imaginative, empowering, critical and capable of connecting learning with the practice of freedom and the search for justice. The pedagogies of oppression – whether in the form of high-stakes testing, teaching for the test, imposing punitive disciplinary measures or the construction of relations that disempower teachers and empower security guards – are part of a broader attempt to destroy the social state and the institutions that produce the formative culture necessary for a democracy.

Students Are Not Criminals

There are no safe spaces left in the United States. As almost every aspect of society becomes militarized, the imposing apparatuses of the police state become more and more obvious, reckless and dangerous, and include more than the arming of local police forces.

As Chase Mader observes:

Even as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus? Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested. Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest, even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may be in the offing – you will be sent the bill later. Air travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules that many experts see as nothing more than ‘security theater.’ As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook him for a burglar and hauled him away – a case that is hardly unique. (18)

The rise of the punishing and police state depends on conformity, the squelching of dissent and the closing down of any institution capable of educating the young and old to hold authority accountable. More specifically, pedagogies of oppression are a central tool for dismantling critical learning and dissent and for increasing the power of the punishing state. Under the reign of neoliberalism, all things public are under attack, from schools to health care to public servants. The war on youth and public schools is part of the larger assault on democracy itself. The controlling elite view schools as dangerous to their interests. For the financial elite, right-wing ideologues and billionaires such as the Walton family, the Koch brothers and Bill Gates, public education must be defunded, broken and privatized because it contains the potential to educate young people to question authority and hold it accountable, and produce civically literate and socially engaged students and critically engaged citizens.

Schools are not prisons, teachers are not a security detail and students are not criminals. Schools should model the United States’ investment in children and to do so they need to view young people as a resource rather than as a threat. If public schools are going to improve they have to be appropriately funded. That means, raising corporate taxes, cutting the defense budget, and allocating funds that contribute to the public good. It also means closing down and defunding those financial and military institutions that produce misery and destroy human lives, especially the lives of children. Educators should be given the power, autonomy and resources to be able to work closely with children in order to provide them with the conditions for meaningful learning while providing safe spaces for them to be nourished ethically, intellectually and spiritually. Schools are a public good and should be defined as such. How the United States invests in schools will shape an entire generation of young people. The lesson these youth should not be learning is that they can’t be trusted and should be treated as criminals. That view of schooling is one we associate with totalitarian states, not with a genuine democratic society.

Footnotes:

1. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom(London: James Currey, 1993), p. 76.

2. Lindsey Tanner, «Half of US Kids Will Get Food Stamps, Study Says,» The Associated Press (November 2, 2009). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/food-stamps-will-feed-hal_n_342834.html

3. Cited from the website of The National Center on Family Homelessness. Online: http://www.familyhomelessness.org/children.php?p=ts

4. I have taken this issue up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave, 2009). See also Kenneth Saltman, ed. Kenneth J. Saltman, David A. Gabbard, eds. Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2010).

5. Joy Resmovits, «American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds,» The Huffington Post (March 21, 2015). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/21/schools-discrimination_n_5002954.html

6. s.e. smith, «Police Handcuffing 7-Year-Olds? The Brutality Unleashed on Kids With Disabilities in Our School Systems,» AlterNet (May 22, 2012). Online: http://www.alternet.org/story/155526/police_handcuffing_7-year-olds_the_brutality_unleashed_on_kids_with_disabilities_in_our_school_systems?page=entire

7. Staff, Rethinking Schools, «Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline» Truthout, (Jan. 15, 2012).

8. Clyde Haberman, «When Youth Violence Spurred ‘Superpredator’ Fear,» The New York Times (April 6, 2014). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/us/politics/killing-on-bus-recalls-superpredator-threat-of-90s.html?_r=0

9. Ibid., Haberman.

10. The video can be seen here: Ed Pilkington, «Kentucky sheriff ‘steadfastly’ defends officer who handcuffed 8-year-old,» The Guardian (August 4, 2015). Online: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/04/kentucky-sheriff-defends-officer-handcuffed-child

11. Ibid., Pilkington.

12. Alex Kane, «Diabetic High School Girl Beaten by Police Officer and Arrested – For Falling Asleep in Class,» AlterNet, (May 7, 2013).

13. Natasha Lennard, «NYPD Handcuff, Interrogate 7-Year-Old Over $5,» AlterNet, (January 30, 2013). Online: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nypd-handcuff-interrogate-7-year-old-over-5

14. Julianne Hing, «The Shocking Details of a Mississippi School-to-Prison Pipeline,» Truthout, (December 3, 2012). Online: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13121-the-shocking-details-of-a-mississippi-school-to-prison-pipeline

15. Ibid., Hing.

16. American Civil Liberties Union, «School-to-prison-pipeline,» ACLU Issues (August 5, 2015). Online: https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-inequality-education/school-prison-pipeline

17. Ibid.

18. Chase Madar, «Everyone Is a Criminal: On the Over-Policing of America», The Huffington Post. (December 13, 2013). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chase-madar/over-policing-of-america_b_4412187.html

 

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32238-schools-as-punishing-factories-the-handcuffing-of-public-education

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Analysis: How corrupt local officials kill decent education in Africa

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Africa/February 24, 2018/Author: Maty Konte/Independent

There’s no disputing that many African countries’ education systems are in trouble. Despite significant investment and some improvements linked to the push to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, children in large parts of Africa are simply not being well taught or learning what is needed as they progress through the school system.

A lot of the discussion around this problem centres on resources: people argue that teachers must be trained better. More money must be spent. This is, of course, correct.

And governance is sometimes discussed, though mostly only as it relates to central governments and their responsibilities. But the quality of local governance matters, too. Local governments – those at a regional, provincial level, district or village level – are closer to communities. They are more likely to understand particular populations’ needs. At a practical level, they are often in charge of providing or distributing goods and services. In education this would mean textbooks, furniture and repairs to classrooms.

This suggests that local governance can have a real effect – positive or negative – on the quality of learning resources in a community and, by association, on how children perform?

I set out to explore this effect by using a series of surveys conducted by Afrobarometer in 33 African countries. This is an independent and non-partisan research network which conducts nationally representative surveys in Africa measuring public attitudes on economic, political and social matters. More than 50,000 citizens have been interviewed in the selected surveys I used for this study.

My study showed a strong link between the quality of local governance and the quality of the educational resources in Africa’s public schools.

In fact, I found that corrupt behaviour by local government councilors increased the likelihood that schools would lack textbooks, have poor facilities and overcrowded classrooms, have poor quality of teaching, and would record high levels of teacher absenteeism. This finding stands no matter how much money a particular country’s central government had invested in education.

If Africa is serious about improving its schooling systems (and meeting the Sustainable Development Goal related to education), it must tackle corruption among local councilors.

What the data shows

My research was based on survey data Afrobarometer collected between 2005 and 2013. Some of the questions related to education; others to people’s perceptions of their local government councilors’ performance and ability.

Among the questions about education, interviewees were asked whether they had encountered the following challenges in their local public schools: expensive school fees; lack of textbooks or other learning supplies; poor teaching; teacher absenteeism; overcrowded classrooms; and facilities that were in poor condition.

Afrobarometer Round 5 (2011 – 2013)

For almost each of the items listed, more than 50% of the respondents had encountered the challenge in the question.

Most interviewees complained particularly about a lack of textbooks and teaching materials; poor teaching quality and teacher absenteeism. These are all key determinants of what students can achieve by the end of an academic year.

A crisis of corruption

Corruption, like low-quality education, is a real problem across Africa. In its 2017 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation warned that the level of corruption on the continent had risen between 2007 and 2016.

This is borne out by what interviewees told Afrobarometer in the surveys I studied. More than 80% of those surveyed on the subject said that at least some of their local government councilors were involved in corrupt activities. Less than 10% of those surveyed believed that their local councilors listened to their communities.

Afrobarometer Round 5 (2011 – 2013)

The study shows that a 1% increase in the measure of local government corruption is associated with an increase of about 0.4% to 0.9% in the percentage of people who face poor human or physical school resources in local public schools. This statistical evidence suggests tackling issues in local governance can help education systems in Africa.

And it matters because good local governance can ensure that textbooks and learning materials are available and that they reach the students at public schools. The behaviours and attitudes of local government councilor’s may affect the way public sector employees, like teachers, are hired and treated.

The performance of teachers in public schools depends on many factors, and their degree of accountability depends also on the degree of accountability and responsiveness of those in charge of the management of the schools that include local government councilors.

Taking action

Improving the quality of education systems will have huge benefits for Africa’s present and future generations. Part of this improvement must involve tackling people’s negative perceptions about their local councilors, whether those relate to corruption, effectiveness or responsiveness.

Central governance remains important. It should be coupled with careful plans and actions to fix local governance, make councilors more accountable and ensure they’re providing the services schools need to thrive.

Fuente: https://www.independent.co.ug/analysis-corrupt-local-officials-kill-decent-education-africa/

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South Africa: Nzimande on free higher education: ‘Where is the money going to come from?’

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South Africa/ January 09, 2018/By: Derrick Spies/Source: https://www.news24.com

Soweto – SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande has slammed President Jacob Zuma’s announcement of free tertiary education during his address at the Joe Slovo commemoration held at the Avalon Cemetery in Soweto on Saturday morning.

Nzimande, the former Minister of higher education who was in the spotlight during #FeesMustFall protests, said while the move was welcomed, there was no indication where the money would be coming from.

«It is very important the announcement made by Zuma must be clarified as a matter of urgency. If we don’t handle this correctly, a train is coming,» he said.

«Can we afford free Higher Education, as announced on the 16th of December, and at the same time have a nuclear deal? Can we do these things? Where is this money going to come from?» he asked.

«We want to say now as the SACP we are not going to allow the increase of VAT to fund this higher education, or allow fees to be taken from UIF or PIC to fund it,» he said,

Nzimande said to do so would essentially be saying the poor must fund their own children’s higher education.

He also questioned why the ANC had been quiet on the issue, saying there should be calls for registrations to be done in accordance with agreed upon, and not to allow the EFF’s opportunism to derail the issue.

«Higher education must be transformed and not destroyed,» he said.

Nzimande congratulated the class of 2017, but said it was also important that learners realise university was not the only option available to them.

«As a country we must reflect, are we not putting too much pressure on individuals? We must make sure we don’t put undue pressure on these young people,» he said.

Judicial Enquiry into State Capture urgent

Nzimande said the SACP’s position on the judicial enquiry into state capture was clear, and that the matter must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

«We want immediate decisive action to stop corruption and wide spread corporate state capture.
We are being kind in how we define state capture, it is actually treason,» he said.

Nzimande said Zuma’s appeal against the State Capture ruling compromised the integrity of the ANC.

«It is clear he is conflicted, you can’t appoint a commission to investigate yourself,» he said.

Nzimande said Zuma was only delaying the inevitable.

He also lambasted the alliance’s leadership for allowing themselves to reach a position where the judiciary was compelled to grant relief, when the leadershi could have taken action themselves.

«We are opening ourselves up for the judiciary to make decisions on our behalf,» he said.

There can’t be two centres of power

Earlier in the day, Cosatu General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali called for members to continue to support the ANC, but said that the newly elected ANC NEC had to look at how to implement the judicial commission of enquiry into state capture.

«There can’t be two centres power, there must be one president. President Zuma must step down,» he said.

ANC National Chairperson Gwede Mantashe, speaking before Nzimande, said there was a cult of personality developing within the ANC and this was killing the ANC and the movement.

«Once we start worshipping them, we can’t question them and they become bigger than the organisation,» he said.

Mantashe reiterated his call that the organisation must rid itself of corruption, saying that when this was done, they would realise that state capture was not a myth.

Calls for Zuma’s head will cause ANC to close rank

Mantashe said immediately after the election, there had been calls for Zuma to be replaced, referring to Archbishop Thabo Makgoba in particular.

Source:

https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/nzimande-on-free-higher-education-where-is-the-money-going-to-come-from-20180106

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