I know javajosh would agree, but seriously, is no one else extremely disturbed by the clear implications of this 'plot'?
So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to.
This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax.
In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government.
I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.
The government point of view of schools is hardly ideal. There are plenty of examples of those in power in government using the schools to push their own agenda.
Not only that, even the notion of a common curriculum can be injustice. One good for one group of people can be injustice for another.
How would we enforce a separation of corporation and the state? From what I know, the separation of the Church and the state is to stop the government from interfering with matters of the Church.
We don't even have a mechanism to restrict the Church from interfering with the state besides taking away a privilege of tax-exempt status. I am not restriction is a bad idea. I am just not sure how it is achievable.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"
This is a protection from an official state religion. Lobbying for near-monopoly positions, favored status, and regulatory capture might be a sort of "establishment" of special corporate status over the people.
[Select two students who are outgoing and will be able to enjoy this activity. Send the students on a quick
(30 seconds) errand before they start drawing. Example: “Please run this note to the library.” When the
students leave, tell the class you want them to all copy one of the pictures being drawn on the white
board. Remind the class to copy the artwork without telling the volunteer artists.]
What.
I personally think that teachers who can't/won't draft their own lesson plans need to be fired. I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out.
The grade 5 materials are more reasonable, suggesting reliance on resources like creative commons or voluntary sharing, and using real-world examples of people who work in the arts not getting paid. These are just factual; a lot of indie movies only get made because the cast & crew workf or free in exchange for an ownership interest. As pointed out below though, they don't include any discussion of fair use or the notion that copyright should exist for limited times.
> I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out.
Pointless busywork is pointless. If they can't find the answers, you're better off addressing the root cause, not driving anyone semi-skilled away from teaching. And just how many times have you graded 50 1st grade math tests, anyhow? Especially when they come up with a new edition every year.
Very sad when we should be able to do more in the way of open source textbooks (and exercise generators), but your gripe is not well-thought out and insulting to decent teachers, of whom I have known many.
It's neither pointless nor busywork. Being able to work the problem or know the material well enough to accurately assess the quality of students' homework submissions is a baseline requirement for effective teaching.
It's pointless because if you can't do it, you're not qualified to teach and it's busywork because doing 30 students' 30 first grade math problems takes a lot of time that can be better spent doing things that actually benefit the class.
It sounds like you've had bad teachers, for which I pity you. I had many good ones, as my mother was a teacher and my parents made sure we got a good education, both at home and at school. Perhaps you've only known people who were made to teach subjects they were unqualified to teach. That is sad, then, if you haven't known good teachers.
But that says more about you than teachers in general. You have something against teachers, as I've seen this axe ground before.
Not as simple as "can't/won't". There's also "not allowed to". If the only purpose of education is to teach to a test, and the board selects the book which was written for the test... it does kinda destroy teacher's individuality, but since that seems to be a goal...
Some other examples of rather finely defined lesson plans nearly to the point of reading a teleprompter are "human growth and development" which is finely crafted to keep the religious nutcases under control, and "nutrition" which is pretty much whatever the farm lobby wants to sell and anything related to illegal drugs/tobacco/alcohol.
There is very little point in firing a teacher for teaching to a lesson plan if the board that hired the teacher very nearly dictated exactly what to say. Any replacement would simply be somewhat less rebellious and more authoritarian, not exactly an improvement.
I should have included school boards along with teachers in that broadside. I don't think the 'state as laboratory' idea has worked out well wrt education.
Don't forget common core is about 40 of about 50 states, so you've got state and almost national standards all deserving broadsides. The whole system is completely messed up, top to bottom. One PR distraction method over the past decade or two to keep the scam running has been to pretend the problem is a matter of taking aim at just one or another failed level, where $failed_level varies from year to year.
One interesting thing rarely discussed about "classes over the internet" is its always assumed it'll be Americans taking classes from Americans. I think it interesting to contemplate that since local USA .edu is bottom of the barrel, "going to school online" to almost any other country in the world would be a net win. Perhaps the end result of online .edu, is my kids will graduate from a Canadian high school.
I am going to flip this around... we should be teaching children the basics of research, citation, fair use and permission at a young level.
By encouraging children to go off and research and create I hypothesis that they will naturally lean towards simple, creative commons and other "free" or "libre" licenses and start to actively seek these out in favour of more tightly controlled, restrictive, corporate licensing schemes.
Teaching them how to cite, what fair use is and how to ask seek permission from content authors gives them the tools to fight overly restrictive copyright laws - and hopefully, one day, abolish them in favour of sane, time bounded licenses
I'm actually impressed at how slanted the title is. Using the words "cartel" and "indoctrinate" hits on two major scare points and we don't even have to read a word of the article. Very tough for me to trust what they have to say since they didn't think the words themselves were convincing enough.
"Cartel" seems like a distortion to me, too, but "indoctrinate" seems like a perfectly valid label for the attempt to systematically teach small children to support a political stance. If you wouldn't call that true indoctrination, what would qualify?
Respecting a widely acknowledged property right is a political stance when widely acknowledged exceptions to that right are left aside. There's also the controversial subtopic of draconian policing of violations of those rights in recent years.
Copyright is not a topic for small children. Adults are barely grown up enough to discuss it.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the also controversial subtopic of expiration and lack thereof.
If I remember correctly, on the last day of student senate my junior year of high school(the only day I have been to it), they described their plan for the first one or two days of the next year using the term indoctrinate wrt "school spirit".
They didn't seem to see anything strange about that.
It's possible they used a slightly different word, but I am probably more than 90% sure that at the time I thought they had just said indoctrinate.
(note:I am only a senior in highschool, just in case that is useful in explaining why I think things or why I don't have as much experience with things, etc.)
Yes, it has angered me for many years - and has been a bitter regret my entire life - that my public school basically forced me to break the law for so many years, and never more egregiously than when I made my collages.
To all of the authors, photographers, and publishers of the many magazines and newspapers that I defaced and stole from: I am so, so sorry. I never realized that it was your work, your life blood, and your property that I was so recklessly and wantonly stealing from. My teachers never even mentioned the word "copyright" and I had no idea I had to ask your permission, individually. Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse, even for a young child, and now I have to live with the shame and the guilt every day.
There are many ways that America's schoolchildren have wronged the members of the RIAA and the MPAA. But record companies and the movie industry aren't the only ones victimized by school children. Literally millions of school papers are written every year, containing billions of quotations and materials, some quoted at length, and virtually none of those papers asked the original creator for permission.
Everyone loves to forget that America was also a British penal colony[1]. They also love to forget that America also has the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world[2].
Stop with the "Australia is a penal colony" bullshit.
Australia was a penal colony... Botany Bay was a penal colony...
I'm confused by your asking to stop spreading ... truths? Sure, people don't mention that America was also a penal colony, but that doesn't mean Australia wasn't, too.
And, Australia was sort of the British replacement for their American penal colonies.
The people who were here thousands of years before Puritan nutcases started getting dumped here to get them away from the civilized people, would beg to disagree, if they hadn't mostly been genocided away. Thats probably what OP was referencing.
America started as a bunch of vaguely Asiatic foragers crossed over more or less in Alaska a couple thousand years ago. The noob bible thumpers arriving a couple centuries ago wiped out the first wave pretty effectively but they hardly "started it".
I'm pretty sure that "America" was being used to refer to the United States, not the entire New World or even the particular portion that the United States happens to sit on.
"America started as a bunch of vaguely Asiatic foragers crossed over more or less in Alaska a couple thousand years ago."
It was more like 18,000 - 12,000 years ago, and perhaps earlier, well before civilizations, or even their agricultural precursors appeared anywhere on the planet. You're talking about walking across the Bering Straits a solid 10,000 years after the last ice age ended.
Mostly, we started as a land of commercial opportunists taking advantage of royal grants. The religious zealots just played better in the history books of 100+ years ago, so they get most of the attention.
If you ignore the fact the various tribes stole from each other. Native Americans weren't a single, homogenous mass, and they certainly weren't Noble Savages ignorant of the ways of war.
If you steal a quarter from Bob, and Bob steals a marble from you, are you saying it isn't theft (morally) for me to come along and take your quarter and Bob's marble and all your other toys while I'm at it?
Is it stealing to exchange a grain of sand for your quarter? The Dutch bought Manhattan for around $1000 adjusted.
I don't live in the South so I don't really know how much that is happening. However, I would imagine that allowing well-funded corporate interests to write curriculum is far more insidious than creationism in the classroom.
Religious indoctrination (like Creationism) comes from the community, and only exists in schools in places where the community enables it (like the South). Lobbying has no boundaries.
Good News Clubs are more invasive than that. Those clubs are not started by each community as a whole, but by a radical Christian subset of the community. They are encouraged and supported by a national organization, which gives the clubs legal support when anyone complains.
The organization seeks to rip apart secular school communities or convert all children, specifically ages 4-14 because they know children of those ages are least able to reason about what they're told (they would phrase it: "most easily saved"). They are prohibited from trying to brainwash kids during school, but the distinction between normal school clubs and Good News Clubs is essentially non-existent. They try to blur the lines between school and Good News Clubs, in some cases setting up for the club during classes, so that students associate the adults running the clubs with school. They use food, candy, games, and other fun activities to lure kids in. Kids who get indoctrinated end up pressuring other kids, outside of and even during school. This is acknowledged by the organizers of these clubs, and they're thrilled. Paraphrasing, "we can't reach kids who don't join the club, but we can't stop kids from reaching other kids."
I'd love to see people stand up to Big Religion, but... how? Religion is institutionalized mental and physical child abuse and everybody seems a-okay with all of it.
Religions that appeal to and demand fealty to a false/unverifiable authority or concept as the truth, rather than encouraging rational discussion and criticism.
Religions that push rules based on those appeals to authority into the political realm, and attempt to force others to live by them...
Believers who seek to proselytize under the flag of a false/unverifiable authority (typically explicitly supernatural) to non-believers...
Parents who pass down the mind-virus of such religions to poor defenseless children...
Labeling criticism of any of those bigotry is a panicked attempt to invoke the strong cultural taboo against narrow-minded discrimination, but the criticism and discrimination against those is hardly narrow-minded.
To me it seems like calling that the fault of "religion" seems roughly analogous to blaming the concept of "government" for the actions of a specific city or state/province government? (that is, either 1 or 2 levels below a national government , though I might have made a mistake with the analogy there)
Not all religions/versions of a religion are the same.
I acknowledge that an analogy is not always a particularly strong argument, but it was the first responce I thought of, and it seemed an acceptable responce to me.
Also, it might have made more sense to respond a few levels up, not sure what would have made the most sense to reply to.
It isn't a bad analogy. My counterargument is that local government policy can usually be changed a lot more easily than religious dogma, especially dogma surrounding who to demonize. Maintaining a strong notion of who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group seems to be an important mechanism in maintaining tribal cohesion.
My point is that religions seem prone to demonizing people as a quick and easy way to define themselves and maintain cohesion. Look at all the really nasty doctrinal splits through history.
An inaccurate claim at the end given the trend toward irreligion in the united states. The wikipedia article of the same title is a pretty good summary.
The doesn't seem HORRIBLE: although it may not be good that external companies are influencing the curriculum, an understanding of copyright seems like an idea that is understandable for the CSLA to want to teach in some regard.
I agree that giving kids an accurate understanding is important — the problem with these teaching materials is that they're being very selective in which parts of copyright law that they teach: According to the linked article, there's no mention of Fair Use provisions, which the record industry would much rather you didn't take advantage of, in the curriculum at all.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I blew my stack when my child was assigned this worksheet from the the RIAA's Music Rules! program as homework:
Part 2 is particularly egregious: "Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates."
Really?!! You want our children to compile a list of family and friends (identified by age only, but still...) that you believe are breaking the law and hand it in as signed homework? I complained immediately about this not-so-subtle indoctrination and provided the teacher with a link to the EFF's more balanced and accurate Teaching Copyright site at http://www.teachingcopyright.org/.
I submit that an understanding of taxation and representative democracy is more important. We cannot teach everything in school. Class time is a limited resource and wasting it on copyright and what not is a clear abomination. I'd rather kids learned more useful things like learning to read, write, and do arithmetic.
I find the scheme abominable because corporations are attempting to mold the unconscious minds of elementary school students to morally support specific political policies (viz. copyright). And they're using public education as the distribution method for their propaganda.
So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to.
This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax.
In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government.
I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.