Reading from #adjunct, #EdBlogNet, etc blogs…featuring @PlashingVole on public #media #education

…and more from the PF blogrolls including (but hardly limited to) Dave Greene on How AFT blew it, Rich Moser on The Green Party and the 2016 Election, Bryan Alexander on How students choose majors during recessions and Steven Krause on Twitter, tenure and what students don't know (nor the general public either). All domestic...

The vole's Bye Bye Beeb takes it global, addresses #ShockDoctrine too in case anyone has been sleeping through the international news and still doesn't realize all the assaults on public education or anything smacking of the public good are happening everywhere. 

The Plashing Vole writes:

Too many depressing things are happening at the moment.... Attacks on organised labour, on healthcare, on public service broadcasting, on education… It's like the Tories, with a majority of 12, bought a copy of The Shock Doctrine and are using it as a guidebook. If you haven't read it, it traces how the CIA-supported 1973 fascist coup in Chile gave American monetarist economists (known as the Chicago Boys) the opportunity to try out all their ideas in one go, untrammelled by democracy, debate, human rights, concern for the people or any of those outdated ideas.  

....So that's what's happening in the UK (and Greece, obviously). A government is using a tiny mandate to rush through the privatisation of public services and the abolition of the very concept of the public good (here's the excellent open letter on the marketisation of Higher Education).

 Sound familiar?

Infuriating though it often is, the BBC represents the very best of British culture (despite it being Establishment, Unionist, a capitalist shill and all the other things about it I hate). It believes in equality of representation, universality, and that very old-fashioned concept, ‘public service’. Without a broadcaster committed to serving us all uninfluenced by the profit motive or chasing ratings, we are all poorer. 

The same model is being applied to education, by the way. 

* Image credit: academic blogging meme via @DoraFarkasPhD