Summary: The guest this week is David Blacker. A professor in the school of education at the University of Delaware, Blacker is the the author of several books including Dying to Teach and, most recently, the Falling Rate of Learning. The abstract of the book reads, in part: "As profits fall and finance rises, capitalism has at this point shifted into a mode of elimination, where human beings—and all life—are now precariously positioned as waste material undergoing managed disposal. The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education." This week I want to thank my regular subscribers for their continuing donations to the podcast, and to thank Babafemi M for his donation. If you're thinking about donating you can find the button at douglaslain.com or at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. In the next few months I hope to start a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap Tour. My novel entitled Billy Moon will be coming out in late August and I'm organizing three events in three cities. I'll be headed to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York for the Think the Impossible Diet Soap tour, and each even will be a live version of the Diet Soap podcast. Guests will include the pop philosopher Daniel Coffeen, the journalist Margaret Kimberley from the Black Agenda Report, Christ Cutrone from the Platypus Affiliated Society, McKenzie Wark author of The Beach Beneath the Street and the Hacker Manifesto, and the economist Andrew Kliman from the Marxist Humanist Initiative. As I say, I'll be raising funds on Kickstarter in order to pay for the trip and accommodations. The idea is that, once I raise enough to cover the initial cost of the trip, donors to the tour will set my itinerary, creating additional stops as I traverse the country by rail. The music you're listening to right now is Different Trains by Steve Reich, but in just a moment you'll be listening to David Blacker and I discuss the Falling Rate of Learning.
