Beyond School » video

George Carlin on Arne Duncan, Education Reform, and the American Dream

Clay Burell — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 02:24:23 +0000

It’s weird to call him a prophet, what with all the F-Bombs and other NSFW obscenities he drops, but consider that this dead jester said the below in 2005. Prophetic indeed.

(h/t to Hullabaloo)

4 Comments

At July 7, 2010, Michael Doyle wrote:
My mom grew up with Georgie--he was the only one in her NYC neighborhood who could skate faster than her.

I grew up surrounded by prophets--George Carlin on stage is the same George Carlin you met in person. No wonder I'm a misfit.
At July 17, 2010, Charlie A. Roy wrote:
@ Clay
A truly nice find.
At July 18, 2010, Jane wrote:
WOW! A couple years ago, I would have given a polite chuckle but thought it was just George's "fringe" rantings. Now with Arne Duncan and Bill Gates staking their claims over everything in my classroom...I get it! Thanks for the profound clip.
At July 20, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
What's interesting is that a lot of serious political-economic academics have said the same thing for years. Carlin's an interesting guy. Was.

“Gasland” — Poison for Profit

Clay Burell — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:50:02 +0000

Gasland is one to watch:

Anybody want to place bets that we’ll be buying oxygen at 7-11 within the next 20 years?

No related posts.

Riveting Video: 2000 Global Nuclear Tests

Clay Burell — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:49:47 +0000

MAD=Mutually Assured Destruction. A serious Cold War joke. Don’t have students read about this in textbooks. Show them the below instead. Amazing.

From Zero Hedge:

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories – now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear “tests” conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998. Based on public data, the world’s peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind – the fallout does not just miraculously “disappear.” Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip. Anyway, as Idealist.ws asks, “How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?“

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

Shiny New Ed 2.0 Video with Gratuitous Sex and Violence

Clay Burell — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:15:35 +0000

From the YouTube blurb:

[Stanford Psychology] Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

Interesting all the way through, but the gallery below previews parts that should interest educators. See the full vid below the fold.

The blurb doesn’t mention Zimbardo’s segue into education (at the 5.40 mark) and the allegedly re-wired brains of teens. Nor does it mention that Zimbardo also designed the fascinating Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. (Hover over that link to see a popup video via my Apture plugin.)

Ed 2.0 geeks may find little new here, but the RSA Animate production values package the ideas with more bling than usual. This may be useful for tech evangelists who haven’t resigned themselves to the similar inertial laws governing schools and glaciers .

The vid does raise a question for me, though only half-serious. To wit: Okay, so the addled minds of our 10,000-hours-of- gaming-and-XXX-addicted teenage boys now find “analogue” classrooms boring. If we’re to compete with that, what’s the guidance? And how realistic is it to think that rigorous thought about, say, Confucianism can come close to WoW killing and W-o-P0rn [redacted]-ing?

Yes, I have issues with the edu-tainment imperative. Handle with care.

Now the vid:

–your thoughts?

h/t Decrepit Old Fool

Too Cute Video: Sleepy Chinese Student

Clay Burell — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:36:42 +0000

They call him “Pretend Awake Brother” in China, I hear. The video is viral there, and gives a whole new meaning to both “Drill and Kill” teaching and “Chinese Water Torture.” Just look at the poor little thing trying to survive his classroom.

(h/t ChinaSMACK)

1 Comments

At June 23, 2010, bill farren wrote:
Ahh, just twelve more years of this. Comparatively speaking, he will think he's died and gone to heaven once he starts working at Foxconn. Or wherever. There's a method to their madness. (And ours.)

William Burroughs’ “Thanksgiving Prayer”

Clay Burell — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:49:26 +0000

Lots of film-making skills to learn from — ironic soundtrack, archival footage editing, lighting and superimposition, on and on — in this staggering video. Oh, and the writing’s not shabby either: William Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer”:

.(h/t Hullaballoo)

Education as “Aversion Therapy”: Watchmen Author Alan Moore

Clay Burell — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 07:06:46 +0000

Alan Moore, author of The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and so many other comic book masterworks, has this to say about education:

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we’re really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. [A]fter a hard day’s toil, instead of relaxing with a book they’ll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process.

Bingo. Such a tidy summary of the Business Roundtable vision of education as preparing workers for the workforce.

Moore has more to say about how, for him, the counterculture and independent reading were his education. He was apparently expelled from secondary school for experimenting with mind-altering drugs other than alcohol, television, and consumerism, and never went to college either.

He seems to be doing okay despite that.

(I taught V for Vendetta in a literature class a couple years ago. It was a great counter-piece to Animal Farm, except this time dark regime was on the far right. So many connections to current events in the Bush-Cheney-Rove era, you’d have never guessed it was written in reaction to Thatcher’s England.)

Switching gears, check out this fantastic Moore video. From its YouTube page,

A comic strip film noir featuring hardboiled gangsters, double crosses and dead blondes. Written and animated by Alan Moore and Lloyd Thatcher. Music by The Sinister Ducks. Edited by Vile Balloon on a overcast Saturday as the rain pounded on the ground like a meaty fist into a face.

(Hat-tip to One Good Move for the video.) Reminds me of Tom Waits (the son of two school-teachers, I just learned by clicking on the link. Follow it for both a Wikipedia entry and a whacked video of his song, “God’s Away on Business”. I love Apture plugins!).

Article, without video, cross-posted from Education.Change.org
Photo by acb