Weapons of Class Instruction, Part 2.

Kenneth J. Saltman's article "The Securitized Student" is useful in thinking about the security discourse as applied to educational institutions and their interactions with corporate power. Saltman deals not with the university here, but with public schools and the relationship between the commercialization of public education and what Ellen Meskins Wood calls "the New Imperialism."

Stephen Metcalfe makes fantastic criticism of crony capitalism between McGraw-Hill and three generations of Bushes. However, he misses the chance to explore the implications of how John Negroponte, who left McGraw-Hill to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a leading figure in the “War on Terrorism,” participated in the 1980s in what are regarded in the international community as crimes against humanity and U.S. state-backed terrorism in Honduras. 7 It is imperative that future work on corporatization of schools consider the relationship between the disciplining of particular populations in the U.S. through the mechanisms of capitalist schooling and how this relates to the disciplining of populations in other nations through both direct coercion and the production of consent that is largely accomplished through cultural production. It is also time for the global dynamics of discipline to be understood in relation to how the discourse of discipline, drawn from the market-based metaphor of “fiscal discipline” and the military ideal of physical and behavioral discipline, is the basis for the most recent educational reforms.

Negroponte, Yale Class of 1960 is the current U.S. advisor to the united nations. His expertise with terrorism clearly demonstrates that it takes one to know one.

(Workplace is a pretty interesting online publication about academic labor. Folks interested in the history of the Yale fight might want to look at this article by Antony Dugdale, this article by Joseph Entin, and this essay by former GESO organizer Cynthia Young.)  ¶ 6:59 PM