"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Monday, April 29, 2024

60 Minutes "Last Minute" Out of Touch

Last updated May 2, 2024

In a final mention of the growing number of campus protests against the murderous war on Palestinians, CBS featured Bill Whitaker in the "Final Minute" segment.  CBS seemingly thinks that the student and faculty protests can be resolved by more Dartmouth U programs that bring together both Jewish and Arab students to share their disagreements in the collegial space of a classroom.  

If the growing protests were about disagreements among Arab and Jewish students, I would agree. But it's not, and methinks CBS knows that.  

In case CBS doesn't know, the civil disobedience spreading across American universities is aimed to put pressure on politicians here and abroad to end Netanyahu's genocidal war machine and the occupation of Gaza. The source of the protests is not Jewish and Arab disagreements on campus.

So when a smarmy Bill Whitaker closes with "American education could benefit from a few more Dartmouths," the effort to place blame for campus disruptions on the colleges, themselves, is clear. Were CBS not such an intricate cog of the military-industrial complex, perhaps we would have more CBS investigations into how and why our own government continues to enable the strategic slaughter of innocents. Instead, we have CBS's misleading and bad-tasting pablum offered as a closing bit of wisdom.

Postscript:

It seems that talk works pretty well in the classroom, but police rot remains police rot--even at Dartmouth.  From WaPo:

At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, police said they arrested 90 protesters. A Dartmouth professor said in an interview it had been “a peaceful, inclusive protest” and that the police response was disproportionate.

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