Comments on: America the Illiterate?

By: Cobb

Cobb — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:51:16 +0000

Well, gee, He's Harvard educated and rich. She's Harvard educated and rich.

By: uglyblackjohn

uglyblackjohn — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:23:16 +0000

Did you learn any of the basics from “School House Rock”? We need a modern “School House Rap”.
The value of education as a sustainable need is important within the Black community. I speak with people daily (making 120k yr – with only a high school diploma) who think that they've “Made It” while they're children are being left behind.

By: blacksmythe

blacksmythe — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:41:10 +0000

I DO think that the Obama family has a unique set of hurdles. The choice of where they send their girls to school is NOT the choice that the Clinton's had about where to send Chelsea. Two very different circumstances. In fact I'd say the difference between the Obamas and every other resident of the White House also led the Obamas to bring the mother-in-law in to stay with them.

He's talking about modernizing public schools. Let's see what this looks like.

By: blacksmythe

blacksmythe — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:39:06 +0000

I agree. I was simply suggesting that we're going down the wrong road if we're suggesting that just taking the market out of culture is going to take us to some better place, as I read Arendt saying.

By: wanderer

wanderer — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:03:16 +0000

interesting post… especially the argument of the consumer turning into a “prosumer”

By: Irami Osei-Frimpong

Irami Osei-Frimpong — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:26:25 +0000

I'm waiting for the your spin on Obama choosing to send his kids to Sidwell. A few debates ago, Obama listed education as the fourth or fifth priority on his to-do list. I can tell you that if he didn't have 29k a year to spend, per kid, on private schooling, public education would shoot up to #1 pretty damn quickly.

By: cnulan

cnulan — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:23:49 +0000

...and another thing.

As you may or may not have seen in the comments at my corner, as the ride-share chauffeur to school the other morning, I was disgusted to directly observe the way in which text messaging served as an enabling technology to promote the very worst habits of adolescent normopathy. i.e., the tendency by a nuclear mass of insecure kids to isolate, shun and/or ostracize other kids for non-compliance with arbitrary standards of "normalcy".

IOW - instead of having a singular face-to-face medium of pernicious gossip and exclusionary vote-counting, these little evil twits now have multiple channels of self-talk and self-talk exteriorization over which they can reflexively and anonymously violate the golden rule at will.

My point is this Les, the resources, the technology, and every other material requirement to do the right thing collectively is somewhat readily at hand. What's missing is the discipline, the will, and the moral hygiene required for folks to get constructively busy. Given the extent of our affliction with seemingly incurable moral pathologies - all the enabling technologies in the world serve primarily as contagion vectors for what's ill, rather than palliatives and supplements for what's possible.

By: cnulan

cnulan — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:14:09 +0000

What valuable and enduring project or projects have emerged from years of afrofuturist information interchange? What valuable and enduring project or projects are you aware of that have emerged from any of the major social networking utilities? Which of the major social networking utilities have evolved from funded money-pits to the baseline of self-funded technology infrastructures?

Pausing on those kwestins for a moment, what types of major, profitable, consumer oriented commercial enterprises have thrived in the absence of madison avenue implantation of demand generation?

Pausing on that kwestin for a moment, imagine yourself as president-elect Obama. How would you go about creating mass awareness, interest, capability and action in any of the acutely necessary categories required to get the maximum number of folks unified in their efforts to make it through our pending rough ride ahead?