As education becomes more and more privatized, the more the intellectual property concerns of education services companies become a problem for a publicly accountable system of education. Mark Garrison explores the consequences of the “user agreements” public school teachers must sign before administering Common Core Standards testing – a commitment which poses problems for public assessment of the tests themselves, curricular planning, due process and transparency of democratic government. My cartoon above provides some comic relief — but Mark’s a cranky, funny writer, so don’t stop with me. Worth a read.

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Here is a caricature of Emile Durkheim for the Cranky Sociologists blog. You can see more of these at the gallery of the Cranky Sociologists blog, with commentary by SocProf. Durkheim is one of the Big Three of sociology, along with Max Weber and Karl Marx. He did a great deal in defining the unique subject of the discipline – the social – and in developing rigorous standards of study, proof and argumentation to establish sociology as a real science.

This illustration shows Durkheim railing against two social forces, individualism and anomie that he felt were destroying traditional social fabric and undermining modern attempts at social cohesion. So naturally Thing One and Thing Two sprung to mind.

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