Reich: Totally Spent

Re: Robert Reich, Totally Spent, February 13 2008:

Reich says, “...inequality can be reversed only through better schools for children in lower- and moderate-income communities.

Nonsense. The US will not educate itself out of inequality. Schools and the gargantuan inflationary war budget, the wreckage of our industrial base, the massive foreign debt, the mortgage and credit crises, the destruction of the social safety net, all of which underpin the boom in inequality, have little connection. Schools, however, can deepen inequality as we witness with the perseveration over high-stakes exams which measure nothing but parental income, race and subservience–yet off a bogus form of science to explain away structural economic inequities. Elites’ decrees will not reverse inequality. That can be achieved only via a mass based social movement, perhaps initiated on campuses, but a movement which must sweep into the factories, on the docks, the roads, and even into the military.

Dr Richard Gibson
Emeritus Professor
San Diego State University
College of Education