Gates Finds His Area of Expertise

For years we've read about how Bill Gates has planted his two cents, and billions more, into education. Largely it's pro-corporate nonsense, anything that disrupts unions, and anything that hurts working people. The small schools experiment didn't work, but Bloomberg had embraced it and so it goes on. The preposterous statements he'd make in public---principals cannot observe teachers due to contracts. The assumptions that all that mattered was test scores, or that DVDs of excellent teachers were just as good as giving every kid an excellent teacher.

I could go on, but essentially Gates has filled America with crap ideas, spending millions to push a propaganda film, and generally infecting all of us up to and including the White House. Arne Duncan seems nothing more than an echo chamber for Gates druthers, spreading the crap ideas farther and wider.  The question, then, becomes this--how do we get rid of all this crap?

It's a tough task. But the NY Times reports that Gates himself is now involved in rethinking and reinventing toilet technology. It's important, for health reasons, to get the rest of the world a system that works. This could help prevent disease and save lives. If the article is to be believed, Mr. Gates seems not to have simply invented a problem and pulled a proposed solution out of his hind quarters. In fact he's eliciting solutions that work.

So my question is this--if Mr. Gates can perform this service for our neighbors, why can't he get to work extracting the crap with which he's infected the American consciousness? It wouldn't be nearly as rough as creating a new technology. A simple admission of failure, of ignorance, of self-appointed expertise amounting to no expertise whatsoever would go a long way.

Thanks to Reality-Based Educator