(Last semester only 2 out of over a hundred students knew what Abu Ghraib was until I showed them pictures. United States of Amnesia -- USA. In Kentucky the state leaders are currently debating whether to remove from all state testing the humanities/social sciences components and end the portfolio process/essay tests, effectively making all regulatory/assessment tests multiple choice. Even worse was my students' classroom discussions this semester of how ridiculously easy it was for them to use the
Plato Testing system, not in the sense of ease of test-taking, but in the sense of passing the multiple choice questions. Probably why it is so popular? I had a handful of students discuss how their entire last two years of high school where completed through Plato Testing? The conversation between Errol Morris, Chris Lydon and the students is amazing and Morris' film is essential viewing. The documentary is, for me, a masterpiece because it does not "tell" us what happened, instead, for one of the few times, we are encouraged to listen, to watch, and to assess for ourselves, to use our brains, to figure out may or may not have happened. It is a powerful film that encourages active thinking/meaning-making rather than passive consumption.)
Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece
Open Source (Watson Institute for International Studies -- Brown University)
Host: Chris Lydon
Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure is a shocking, depressing work of art that might tell you almost nothing you didn’t know in your bones: that the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were a perfect kernel of the war on Iraq. See the movie anyway, for confirmation or as penance. It is a blood sample of a gross policy of humiliation, emasculation, sophisticated mental cruelty and pitiless domination in the Arab Middle East. Errol Morris makes no bones about it. He says: we are looking at icons of American foreign policy.
To Listen to the Conversation
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