Bill Gates has been blasted for meddling in the US education system, with an Occupy movement group protesting the use of his wealth to encourage reforms.
Occupy activists conducted a protest against reforms being advocated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a group confronting spokespeople about proposed reforms.
"Gates Foundation, you will fail! Education is not for sale!” was the chant made to Bill Gates’ organisation. In what was compared to a high school debate by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian, three Gates Foundation employees were taken to task over its role in education poicy making.
Hagopian claimed that the will of the Gates Foundation is to encourage elitism in schools, while the Occupy Education movement advocated a right for ”education for the 99 percent”.
Gates Foundation employees were grilled over issues which have come to the fore in US educational reforms, such as the backing of chartered schools and standarised testing.
Standarised testing has proved to be particularly divisive, and the Occupy movement is adamant that wealthy individuals should not be allowed to push through legislation that critics claim the majority of parents and teachers are against.
”Occupy Education made it clear that day that we will not allow billionaire flunkies to remake our schools in the image of a production line,” Hagopian said in his account of the demonstration.
Gates has also shown support for a revolution in remote learning such as the Khan Academy, which promotes learning through video outside the classroom. Non profit organisation TED also announced it would be releasing regular videos on its TED-ED YouTube channel, with lessons from top teachers intended to promote learning. MIT recently announced that it would be starting an online only course for a remote study degree.
In the eyes of the Occupy Education movement, more needs to be done to increase spending in the classroom to create closer interaction with teachers, with greater funding diverted into the schools system.
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These two issues - the Gates Foundation's advocacy for Monsanto's GMO policies in the developing world, and its push for charter schools in America - place Mr. Gates and his Microsoft money squarely into the arena of political advocacy. Gates comes out looking like a Medici who's only read book two of More's 'Utopia' while skipping the problems and lessons of the real world from book one.
What are the common threads here? Charter schools ultimately benefit a narrow segment of students through a process of exclusion and cherry-picking. Terminator seeds combined with glycophosphate (Roundup) benefit Monsanto, and the promised benefits to farmers end accrue to a few at the expense of the many.
Neither Monsanto nor Charter Schools seem sustainable, but that never seems to stop the insatiable desire for quarter-on-quarter profit. I only hope that this underlying pattern doesn't reflect the entire reality of the man, his family, the foundation, and the company.
FTR I live between Redmond Campus and the Gates estate. I implement MS technologies day in, day out as one of many players in the tech world. Sure, they help a lot of people...what about everyone else?
Second, you can't control what you can't measure. How can education quality be assessed without testing? And using non-standardized tests is akin to no testing at all. The teacher designs the test? Gee, what do you think the results will be?
On your other rant, you complain that "promised benefits to farmers [of seeds with weed-killer] end accrue to few at expense of many." What are these promised benefits? How do they benefit just a few, and who are those few? Who are the many who are "harmed", and how are they affected? You make a bald statement of opinion as if it were a well-known fact and expect readers to accept you pronouncements as "gospel". That is the sign of an uneducated, ignorant leftist whiner who doesn't understand why people don't recognize his "obvious" greatness and bow down to his "obvious" superiority.
Mr. Seendat and his friends on the Indian subcontinent have some insights in the matter:
“Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient.”
― Vandana Shiva
P.S. if everyone ate "organic" Whole Foods style we could produce enough food with current land devoted to agriculture for 3 billion people.