From the Guardian (U.K.): Spielberg loses out at the push of a button

A concrete example of the problems with DRM; one slip of the finger, coupled with specially-encrypted discs that cannot be played in “normal” DVD players, and Steven Spielberg’s film is effectively locked-out from the awards.

But will the industry learn anything from this? Not a chance.

Listening again to this interview, originally aired on The Bob Edwards Show back in September, convinces me every K-12 teacher in the country should be required to hear this feisty woman. As a few of you know, I have deeply personal reasons to despise the educational system in this country and the “administrators” who, never being trained in anything practical and instead being products of the “education” pseudo-science, toil relentlessly to hammer our children into mediocrity. But the teachers in the trenches, at least those few who are able to encourage and motivate our children to a lifelong interest in learning, are my personal heroes, and this woman certainly qualifies.

For those who don’t know her, she was the one who, days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, devised a lesson in prejudice for her white students. She made brown-eyed students “superior,” and blue-eyed students “inferior,” using the same “reasons” used to discriminate against people of color. In her words, “I took brilliant, happy, cooperative self-appreciating children, and turned them into angry, defeated children who were unable to learn…and it happened in the space of fifteen minutes. I couldn’t believe how quickly they lived down to my ‘expectations’ of them; it was absolutely horrifying.”

This is a woman who should be showing teachers how to connect to their students, instead of those “Ed.D.” professors who have never affected anyone’s lives, and in many cases have never stood before a class since their student-teaching days. Instead of spouting all of those silly “theories” that have nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, and pigeonholing students into “rubrics” (remind me to give you the definition of “rubric” one of these days), here is a woman who decided to act in a way that, thirty years later, those students are still affected by (and appreciative for) the life lesson taught to them…and a woman who is still learning from the experience, too.

And if your local public radio station isn’t carrying Bob Edwards Weekend, this is an example of the powerful interviews you’re missing; call or write your local station and ask them to carry the show as a small way to apologize for their lack of action when he was removed as anchor of Morning Edition. Or better still, take the money you’d normally give that station, and send it to XM instead; not only will you get The Bob Edwards Show every weekday morning, but hundreds of channels of music, talk, and information.