The Gates Foundation Engages Its Critics

sam_handelman writes "The Gates Foundation responded to the critiques of its policies (previously discussed here) by inviting its critics at Education Week Teacher to a dialog on its own site. Edweek blogger Anthony Cody answered the challenge. The two sides negotiated a five-part series of post and counterpost, which can be viewed on both sites. Previous exchanges include Cody's question, Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?, and an answer from the Gates Foundation's Global Press Secretary, Chris Williams, Poverty Does Matter — But It Is Not Destiny. The final round of the dialog has begun, and is available for comment on the Gates Foundation's own blog. Slashdot readers may not know about Gates' sponsorship of specific edutech industry partners, such as Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation, and Pearson Education. Cody poses tough questions, including, 'Can the Gates Foundation reconsider and reexamine its own underlying assumptions, and change its agenda in response to the consequences we are seeing?' According to the agreement, the Gates Foundation will answer in the coming week, concluding the series."

Comments

Re:Isn't Gates a big lib?

[__aaltlg1547]

Did I read that wrong or did you just day that you became a conservative because you were tired of liberals telling you you were smart? If so, you're still not doing any of your own thinking.

Re:charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Not say, a proven scientific theory with decades of incredibly complex research to back it up as a model of how wealth flows and is generated.

A theory on how wealth flows - interesting. It's an interesting theory - wealth flows up - the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich fuck the poor and middle class to get richer. The rich got rich by lieing and cheating. Hard work? Everyone works hard! To get rich you have to fuck thy neighbor - up the ass.

Is Capitalism evil? Yes. Is it the worst system on Earth? No.

It's the best economic system we bald apes have. Which is fucking pathetic. After all these centuries, Capitalism is the best we can come up with?

We humans are stupid.

Re:charity

[lennier]

So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?

Or is capitalism just impossible?

Capitalism isn't strictly impossible, any more than jumping off a building is impossible. However, like jumping, it is inherently self-contradictory; it can't be sustained infinitely, and the results when the system crashes aren't pretty.

Unfettered capitalism appears indistinguishable from feudalism: every initially free market rapidly devolves into one or two winners who become the equivalent of landlords. They own the land/property, everyone else becomes a serf who works and pays rent to the property-holder. This feudal situation with "late stage capitalism" of course ends up looking nothing like the early-stage "free market", but therein lies the self-contradiction. Then eventually the landlords overreach and you get a revolution or a disruptive technology, philosophy or outside invader, and this temporarily resets the game pieces. We see this happening in rapid acceleration in the intellectual property landscape in computing, but it looks much like the same forces that have been at work for thousands of years. Marx spotted this pattern but I think he was a bit off in his prescriptions on how to fix it; replacing capital with compulsion by force seems to do bad things for everyone involved.

It would be nice if there were more intellectual alternatives to the Austrian School than Marxism. I tend towards E F Schumacher, who isn't easy to pigeonhole as "left" or "right".