NM's blog

I want to mention briefly some of the educational methods used today which in effect further discourage original thinking. One is the emphasis on knowledge of facts, or I should rather say on information. The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality. Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking. To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it. —Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom , 1941

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. — Albert Einstein

Budapest: Anti-Orbán protests

Scotland It’ll be entirely dependent on the stock exchange, and various investments that go into our pension, so you could retire at the age of 66 and find that your pension is several tens of thousands less than you’d been anticipating. What you’ve got up to now is preserved; what you earn from now on will be subject essentially to the vagaries of the stock market, and that’s obviously going to hit younger academics, with more of their career ahead of them, more than it does older ones like me. University College Union strike An interview with Neil Davidson

How treating students as customers turns the idea of meritocracy into a joke

" Mainstream economics is not fatally flawed — but would achieve much more of its potential by questioning itself and listening to other fields." Of course it is not flawed. It just teaches and trains students how to manage capitalism. Yes, there are some malfunctions of the system from time to time, but mainstream economics should justify that and find solutions not to question the functioning itself. Does mainstream economics teach students that there are intrinsic relationships between profit-making as a driving force of capitalism and how 8 people own more than half of the world population, uneven-development, wars, and other crimes? Or, does it teach how to have entrepreurial spirit and business ambition, i.e. individualism, promoting NGOs to massage power relations rather than challenge them, "free-market" as a universal recipe, and "balancing the relationship between labour and capital to serve capital"?

A project "to eliminate" trade unionism at the University of São Paulo

Students movements on Lebanese campuses