Thursday, April 07, 2005

Mutant progeny is a better term

So it seems to me Spellings is proud as all heck of the newest shedding of her beast. Read her speech and WSJ oped yourself.

And it's a new approach this time with shades of Lakoff. Spellings likens NCLB to a child and invokes all sorts of mothering analogies. But applying the Lakoffian nurturant mothering labels doesn't work when the core narrative is so punishing. It just comes off creepy to me.

If anything, if you want to bring up the child analogy, I would say NCLB is more like the Alien progeny, bursting out of the chest of the school districts everywhere, ready to devour and destroy anything in sight. In fact, the analogy fits to the T when you consider the Alien as the ultimate Corporate tool, as is NCLB.

Sorry: trying to spin NCLB as a child to be nurtured doesn't work, no matter how many words you use to imply nurturance. The narrative of NCLB is still punitive, with punishments for the baaaad states and love and kisses for the good states.