Original+Counter-Summit+Home+Page

//First composed and posted on 15 January 2012 by Dominic Tweedie in Johannesburg, South Africa// **Welcome to the Counter-Summit Wiki**


 * __What Summit are we countering__? **


 * We are countering the "Second International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York, 14-15 March 2012" announced by Education International (EI) on 21 December 2012. **

__ **Why** **are we countering it** __** ? **


 * Here is some explanation. **


 * The EI's announcement (read the full text here) claims that: //"the ground-breaking dialogue first started among ministers and teacher union leaders from sixteen top-performing countries and regions."// This was supposed to be at the first (2011) "International Summit on the Teaching Profession", also in New York, USA. **


 * In fact, the dialogue at that meeting was far from ground-breaking. It was rather in the range between boiler-plate and reactionary. **


 * The "top-performing" countries and regions were also no such thing. They were picked from among those who would be willing to rubber-stamp the US Department of Education's pre-written script for the bogus "summit". The Summit was the US Department of Education's initiative, under the personal direction of the US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. **


 * The first "Summit" passed practically unnoticed (view the scanty Google News results [|here]) but a funded report (Funders: MetLife and Pearson Foundations) was prepared and a PDF document of it was circulated on 21 December 2011 by the EI along with their invitation to the second bogus summit. This 1.5MB document can be downloaded[|here]. **


 * The Conclusion of the first (2011) "summit" report, and the "Next Steps" page also taken from this document, are both archived on this Wiki. They show that the Summit is not informed by any pedagogical theory, but is instead an attempt to evacuate any kind of educational theory from the field, other than tacit utilitarianism. **


 * Other announcements by the promoters of the Summit can be found on the Summit Announcements page. **

= **The Counter!** =


 * This Counter-Summit Wiki is started by people who believe that education is not the professionalised production of commodity labour-power for the capitalist labour market, but is the living process of human development. **


 * In this regard we are followers of G W F Hegel and of Paulo Freire. We are happy to be in communication with the foremost Hegel scholar of our times, who is also an educationalist and political theorist, __[|Andy Blunden]__; and the world's most outstanding continuator of the work of Paulo Freire, __[|Peter McLaren]__. **


 * We remember that ours is not the fringe of human development, but the main stream, while the "Summit" is in a dead-end street. **


 * **This original Home page is archived here**
 * **When contributions to the Counter-Summit start coming in, they will be listed on the Home Page**
 * **This is a [|Wiki], and it should work as such, with members creating and editing pages at will**
 * **Let us have a dialogue that is better than the Summit**