Got Something to Say? Schools Matter Welcomes Your Submissions

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. --John Dewey

I am, alas, like most people in America, writing a book. The energy that I have put into the blog over the past three years as of this coming August, plus any other that I can spare, will now go into this new effort for the next while.

During the interim, I would like to keep SM alive (rather than just posting news stories) as a venue for other modern day (or postmodern day) education crap detectors here and around the world, who, following in the thoughtul tradition of Neil Postman, Charles Weingarten (Teaching as a Subversive Activity) and others, still believe that real education and real teaching is a subversive activity because it inevitably challenges the status quo and those who are intent upon preserving the status quo--or worse still, those intent upon re-instituting some past version of the status quo.

Dewey said that "anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy," and that is why, of course, many of the privileged today (and those who identify with them) put Dewey's Democracy and Education on their most hated book lists.

So if you have a large hatpin that you would like to stick into some big bag of smelly hot air that the Edu-Borg dissemblers and hacks and charlatans have launched or plan to launch, turn that urge to stab into a pointed post (with barbs if possible), along with the appropriate link or links, and send it to me at

ontogenyx@mac.com

Published and unpublished commentary or essays from educators, parents, grandparents, students, and even politicians and other bloggers will be considered, too.

Please send your post as a Word attachment, include your name (no pseudonyms, please), return email, and phone number. I will, at your request, post your entry anonymously if you indicate that is what you prefer.

Save the Republic and the Earth,
Jim Horn
Updated May 1, 2008

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. --Paulo Freire