Students

This article is part of a project that critically analyzes the historical and present day purposes of U.S. public education.

As a researcher and writer largely focused on Canadian foreign policy I was surprised to be profiled by a right wing US magazine and downright amazed when the story was tweeted out by renowned French imperialism apologist Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)

These are some of the news headlines that appeared when searching for “charter schools” in GoogleNews in June 2017:

Rather than complaining about fidget toys and banning them from schools, we should look more closely at what the toys reveal. Children and adolescents are bored and they're frustrated by the irrelevance of mass schooling. Fidget toy mania is a reaction to their craving for freedom and autonomy.

(MPN) A newly released investigative report from the Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA) based in Washington, D.C. details what they have referred to as “one of the biggest terrorist threats against the United States homeland.”

In a Connecticut State Superior Court decision on September 7, 2016, Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher ruled that while the state of Connecticut is providing adequate funding for its school districts, the methods by which those funds are being distributed violates the state’s constitution. According to Moukawsher, “Connecticut is defaulting on its constitutional duty to provide adequate public school opportunities because it has no rational, substantial and verifiable plan to distribute money for education aid and school construction.” Moukawsher went on to claim:

All over America, school children are completing another academic year before their summer vacation. This invites the questions, what did they learn and what did they do with what they learned?

On Tuesday thousands will gather to celebrate the most aggressive ongoing European settler colonialism. Organizers of Montréal’s annual Israel Day rally claim it is the largest event of its kind in the country.

New Orleans is the nation’s largest and most complete experiment in charter schools.   After Hurricane Katrina, the State of Louisiaana took control of public schools in New Orleans, and launched a nearly complete transformation of a public school system into a system of charter schools.  Though there are