WHY the Republican vision for Education can only lead to a pandemic of blight.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein

Commodifying the American culture is highly problematic. Henry Giroux, author of Zombie Politics and Casino Capitalism calls our schools "disimagination zones." They present "a form of learning that robs the mind of any possibility of being imaginative," according to Giroux. Arts are cut out and humanities studies de-emphasized. Sure, we still need to promote the STEM fields of study, but what about music, theatre and art? "All of those things that speak to feeding the imagination."

Charter schools and the obsession (John Huppenthal) with testing both propagates and reflects that culture of disimagination. Now the state wants to shift from AIMS to Common Core. But testing is still testing. And if testing is counterproductive, then why are we doing it?

Okay, here's what got me thinking about this subject. Bill Moyers interviewed Henry Giroux for this week's episode of Moyers and Company.




Giroux even cited Arizona banning Tucson schools from teaching ethnic studies as the hard core element and that the ban is part of suffocating the capacity for imagination.

We are center stage, Arizona.