The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/29/copyright-cartel-indoctrinate-kindergartens

by timw6n • 13 years ago

111 59 13 years ago

joliv• 13 years ago

The doesn't seem HORRIBLE: although it may not be good that external companies are influencing the curriculum, an understanding of copyright seems like an idea that is understandable for the CSLA to want to teach in some regard.

timw6n• 13 years ago

I agree that giving kids an accurate understanding is important — the problem with these teaching materials is that they're being very selective in which parts of copyright law that they teach: According to the linked article, there's no mention of Fair Use provisions, which the record industry would much rather you didn't take advantage of, in the curriculum at all.

38252• 13 years ago

I submit that an understanding of taxation and representative democracy is more important. We cannot teach everything in school. Class time is a limited resource and wasting it on copyright and what not is a clear abomination. I'd rather kids learned more useful things like learning to read, write, and do arithmetic.

jackalope• 13 years ago

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I blew my stack when my child was assigned this worksheet from the the RIAA's Music Rules! program as homework:

http://www.music-rules.com/pdf/MusicRulesElemActivities.pdf

Part 2 is particularly egregious: "Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates."

Really?!! You want our children to compile a list of family and friends (identified by age only, but still...) that you believe are breaking the law and hand it in as signed homework? I complained immediately about this not-so-subtle indoctrination and provided the teacher with a link to the EFF's more balanced and accurate Teaching Copyright site at http://www.teachingcopyright.org/.

Songlifting. Give me a break...

mikegagnon2• 13 years ago

I find the scheme abominable because corporations are attempting to mold the unconscious minds of elementary school students to morally support specific political policies (viz. copyright). And they're using public education as the distribution method for their propaganda.

jmgrosen• 13 years ago

Brave New World, anybody?

aqme28• 13 years ago

How exactly?

lawnchair_larry• 13 years ago

We should be far more worried about religious indoctrination than this.

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

I'm not sure one is worse than the other. Politically motivated indoctrination and religious indoctrination both cripple minds.

seiji2• 13 years ago

I'd love to see people stand up to Big Religion, but... how? Religion is institutionalized mental and physical child abuse and everybody seems a-okay with all of it.

VLM4• 13 years ago

An inaccurate claim at the end given the trend toward irreligion in the united states. The wikipedia article of the same title is a pretty good summary.

ars• 13 years ago

everybody seems a-okay with all of it.

Because it's not abuse.

Since when did it become socially acceptable to be bigoted in public? If you want to be intolerant at least keep your nastiness to yourself.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

I don't live in the South so I don't really know how much that is happening. However, I would imagine that allowing well-funded corporate interests to write curriculum is far more insidious than creationism in the classroom.

Religious indoctrination (like Creationism) comes from the community, and only exists in schools in places where the community enables it (like the South). Lobbying has no boundaries.

harshreality2• 13 years ago

Good News Clubs are more invasive than that. Those clubs are not started by each community as a whole, but by a radical Christian subset of the community. They are encouraged and supported by a national organization, which gives the clubs legal support when anyone complains.

The organization seeks to rip apart secular school communities or convert all children, specifically ages 4-14 because they know children of those ages are least able to reason about what they're told (they would phrase it: "most easily saved"). They are prohibited from trying to brainwash kids during school, but the distinction between normal school clubs and Good News Clubs is essentially non-existent. They try to blur the lines between school and Good News Clubs, in some cases setting up for the club during classes, so that students associate the adults running the clubs with school. They use food, candy, games, and other fun activities to lure kids in. Kids who get indoctrinated end up pressuring other kids, outside of and even during school. This is acknowledged by the organizers of these clubs, and they're thrilled. Paraphrasing, "we can't reach kids who don't join the club, but we can't stop kids from reaching other kids."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04gTo31uLiw (Interview with the author of a book about these clubs)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13132235-the-good-news-cl...

javajosh• 13 years ago

Yes, it has angered me for many years - and has been a bitter regret my entire life - that my public school basically forced me to break the law for so many years, and never more egregiously than when I made my collages.

To all of the authors, photographers, and publishers of the many magazines and newspapers that I defaced and stole from: I am so, so sorry. I never realized that it was your work, your life blood, and your property that I was so recklessly and wantonly stealing from. My teachers never even mentioned the word "copyright" and I had no idea I had to ask your permission, individually. Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse, even for a young child, and now I have to live with the shame and the guilt every day.

There are many ways that America's schoolchildren have wronged the members of the RIAA and the MPAA. But record companies and the movie industry aren't the only ones victimized by school children. Literally millions of school papers are written every year, containing billions of quotations and materials, some quoted at length, and virtually none of those papers asked the original creator for permission.

What have we become?

foobarbazqux3• 13 years ago

What have we become?

A nation of thieves. Actually, seems we started that way.

Ygg22• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's Australia, right?

America started as land of religious zealots.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

From the Grade 1 lesson:

[Select two students who are outgoing and will be able to enjoy this activity. Send the students on a quick (30 seconds) errand before they start drawing. Example: “Please run this note to the library.” When the students leave, tell the class you want them to all copy one of the pictures being drawn on the white board. Remind the class to copy the artwork without telling the volunteer artists.]

What.

I personally think that teachers who can't/won't draft their own lesson plans need to be fired. I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out.

The grade 5 materials are more reasonable, suggesting reliance on resources like creative commons or voluntary sharing, and using real-world examples of people who work in the arts not getting paid. These are just factual; a lot of indie movies only get made because the cast & crew workf or free in exchange for an ownership interest. As pointed out below though, they don't include any discussion of fair use or the notion that copyright should exist for limited times.

mikegagnon2• 13 years ago

Yes, that lesson plan is outrageous. But no, it's not outrageous that lessons plans exist and are shared in general.

VLM4• 13 years ago

Not as simple as "can't/won't". There's also "not allowed to". If the only purpose of education is to teach to a test, and the board selects the book which was written for the test... it does kinda destroy teacher's individuality, but since that seems to be a goal...

Some other examples of rather finely defined lesson plans nearly to the point of reading a teleprompter are "human growth and development" which is finely crafted to keep the religious nutcases under control, and "nutrition" which is pretty much whatever the farm lobby wants to sell and anything related to illegal drugs/tobacco/alcohol.

There is very little point in firing a teacher for teaching to a lesson plan if the board that hired the teacher very nearly dictated exactly what to say. Any replacement would simply be somewhat less rebellious and more authoritarian, not exactly an improvement.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

I should have included school boards along with teachers in that broadside. I don't think the 'state as laboratory' idea has worked out well wrt education.

Natsu2• 13 years ago

I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out.

Pointless busywork is pointless. If they can't find the answers, you're better off addressing the root cause, not driving anyone semi-skilled away from teaching. And just how many times have you graded 50 1st grade math tests, anyhow? Especially when they come up with a new edition every year.

Very sad when we should be able to do more in the way of open source textbooks (and exercise generators), but your gripe is not well-thought out and insulting to decent teachers, of whom I have known many.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

It's neither pointless nor busywork. Being able to work the problem or know the material well enough to accurately assess the quality of students' homework submissions is a baseline requirement for effective teaching.

mav3r1ck• 13 years ago

I know javajosh would agree, but seriously, is no one else extremely disturbed by the clear implications of this 'plot'?

So basically, a group of corporations can't get people to behave the way they want them to. So their idea is to literally influence the educational curriculum in the hopes that future generations will behave exactly the way they want them to.

This is probably just the tip of the iceberg on our already extremely broken education system. This is what we publicly know. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if oil companies are inserting into geology class that global warming is a hoax.

In much the same way we have separation of church and state, perhaps we should consider having a separation of corporation and state. The government's interest should solely rest with the electorate. Although we legally consider corporations people, they most certainly cannot vote and therefore they should have no influence whatsoever on government.

I know I am speaking from an idealist point of view, but the government's interests should never be aligned with corporations at the expense of the voting electorate. Which is exactly the problem with what the copyright cartel is doing.

WalterBright• 13 years ago

I am speaking from an idealist point of view,

The government point of view of schools is hardly ideal. There are plenty of examples of those in power in government using the schools to push their own agenda.

Not only that, even the notion of a common curriculum can be injustice. One good for one group of people can be injustice for another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation_of_Native...

38252• 13 years ago

How would we enforce a separation of corporation and the state? From what I know, the separation of the Church and the state is to stop the government from interfering with matters of the Church.

We don't even have a mechanism to restrict the Church from interfering with the state besides taking away a privilege of tax-exempt status. I am not restriction is a bad idea. I am just not sure how it is achievable.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"

This is a protection from an official state religion. Lobbying for near-monopoly positions, favored status, and regulatory capture might be a sort of "establishment" of special corporate status over the people.

tpainton• 13 years ago

religious indoctrination? from the California teachers union? Now that is funny.

IvyMike• 13 years ago

This will probably work just about as well as D.A.R.E. did to convince Californians to not take drugs.

seiji2• 13 years ago

Don't Copy That Floppy

gojomo• 13 years ago

Yep. DARE: widely recognized as ineffective, maybe even increases drug use:

http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/03/dare-americas-most-famous-...

jackschultz• 13 years ago

I'm actually impressed at how slanted the title is. Using the words "cartel" and "indoctrinate" hits on two major scare points and we don't even have to read a word of the article. Very tough for me to trust what they have to say since they didn't think the words themselves were convincing enough.

emiliobumachar2• 13 years ago

"Cartel" seems like a distortion to me, too, but "indoctrinate" seems like a perfectly valid label for the attempt to systematically teach small children to support a political stance. If you wouldn't call that true indoctrination, what would qualify?

rayiner• 13 years ago

Respecting a widely acknowledged property right isn't a political stance. Nor is it indoctrination to teach kids to respect other peoples work.

jlangenauer• 13 years ago

Remember, though, that article titles are often created by sub-editors to be short and pithy, not by the original author of the piece.

AmiiJewels• 13 years ago

I am going to flip this around... we should be teaching children the basics of research, citation, fair use and permission at a young level.

By encouraging children to go off and research and create I hypothesis that they will naturally lean towards simple, creative commons and other "free" or "libre" licenses and start to actively seek these out in favour of more tightly controlled, restrictive, corporate licensing schemes.

Teaching them how to cite, what fair use is and how to ask seek permission from content authors gives them the tools to fight overly restrictive copyright laws - and hopefully, one day, abolish them in favour of sane, time bounded licenses

Ygg22• 13 years ago

I find this appropriate http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9_hWoGrxWg

arh68• 13 years ago

Comedy gold:

Artists are “graded” or valued by how many people buy their work.
We hope others will respect our work ... And we ‘play fair’ with their work too.

No mention of Melchior Rietveldt, Patrick Robin, of course. And certainly nothing like Courtney Love Does The Math.

The copyright cartel's plot to indoctrinate California kindergartens

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