WHAT IS PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ALL ABOUT

What is this collection of blogs all about? It is about learning and maybe helping others learn a bit. You know all the talk about how education is so important? I agree. Only we are often encouraged not to learn and perhaps to learn only a little about a little piece of reality. This can only serve to isolate us and frankly, the capitalist system here in the United States is such a hustler system that the stupefaction of the public is in the interests of hustlers and at the end of the day investors as well.

So without going into a long essay I think we may be able to agree that the system of education in the United States is largely a system of miseducation and that while there is great strength in the public and private schools the other purveyors of information are usually peddling misinformation, disinformation, stuff that makes it easier to pull the wool over our eyes and to take advantage of us. In short, if we are dupes we are certainly led and herded in that direction by a huge system of miseducation.

Of course it is to our advantage to learn anyway and to learn how we are being lied to and deceived and how we can get to a more educated mentality rather than a miseducated mentality. It is a real challenge but it us up to each of us to do what we can to identify and overthrow whatever aspects of "mental slavery" we have internalized.

Underlying the discussion of diverse liberation frameworks is a passionate criticism of capitalism and patriarchy and above all a commitment to preventing the destruction of our one and only ecosystem, the planet earth. Capitalism and a repressive patriarchy seem to be the most destructive systems that are in the world today. Both foster war and ecological destruction.

Of course a practical and robust morality is central to all this passion. I am writing primarily about Liberation Frameworks and this includes all those leftist and liberal movements to seek a fairer and more just society.

I also am focusing on various current struggles and events as I become aware of them and engaged in them. So there is a constellation of blogs on those minutemen movement groups with a particular emphasis on the situation in the Greater Kansas City area when the Minutemen had a meeting in KCMO. This led to a broader study of those predominantly anglo anti-immigrant groups that are not overtly white-supremacist.

More recently there was a big constellation of blogs on the Bush-Cheney policies and policies. We are fortunate to still be alive after that madman was in the White House and his even nuttier Strangelovian Vice-President, Dick Who?

Then there is a cluster of blogs around the recent Presidential election of 2008. The strange world of far right politics was somewhat documented in these blogs.

Currently there a quite a few blogs on Israel/Palestine. Israel's massacres

I have bitten off more than I have been able to chew yet seem to have generated thousands of words of somewhat thoughtful commentary. As I continue I hope to return to the various liberation frameworks and to work with others who may be able to help flesh these out in some facsimile of their glory. Meanwhile I can go back to the various struggles mentioned above to see how the various frameworks contributed to the struggles for a fairer and more just society.