sorry no blogging of late. for me, i've been kind of furiously busy. 

at any rate i like the idea that obama's telling kids they are responsible for their own education. seems obviously true, and bizarrely out of keeping with his educational program and the entire discourse about education in our culture, but there it is. really our whole idea is to interrupt or actually destroy any taint of individual responsibility or identity in our children. on this, we are unanimous.

you can't be non-stop gung-ho for keeping people in an utterly authoritarian context, and then also hold them responsible for the results. if you wanted to inculcate individual responsibility, you needed to reverse direction entirely a hundred years ago or so.

surely schools are good at absolutely anything compared to their ability to teach individual responsibility. they're more effective at nurturing an extreme ethic of concealment, even as they try to encourage a culture of anonymous denunciation of others etc. and of course what you're subjected to in terms of actual subject-matter is standardized across all individuals, and the behavioral goals are uniformity, silence, and detailed control over people's movements and expressions to achieve homogeneity. 

if you then come back with "and you are responsible for your own education," you must be speaking...ironically?