New images of Britain

Oppression breeds resistance

But the riots also reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain, where one million people from the ages of 16 to 24 are officially unemployed, the most since the deep recession of the mid-1980s.-- New York Times

Whether it's London, Cairo, or Chicago, sooner or later oppression produces resistance. The current "riots" in London are, in large part, a response to the obscene widening British (world) gap between rich and poor, black, brown and white. For months, all we saw coming out of Britain were the images of the $60 million dollar wedding of a parasitic royal couple, living in extravagant splendor at the expense of British taxpayers. It was an image that the corporate media wanted to project as the 2012 London Olympics draw near.

That image was only temporarily shattered by November's youth and student protests. The privatization and accompanying prohibitive cost of education is making a college degree inaccessible to all but the children of the rich and cutting off the few areas of class mobility for millions of young Brits.

Then came the Murdoch scandal, projecting an image of a multi-billionaire media monarch who used wealth and power to buy off and corrupt the police, and other illegal means to build his global empire -- and it appears he will face no criminal charges.. What clearer message could be sent to a new generation, locked in poverty, but obviously unwilling to simply roll over and die or disappear in the back streets of Brixton?

The global financial collapse and following recession has further widened that gap and is creating and expanding a permanent underclass of mainly urban, black, brown and largely immigrant youth in cities around the world. The so-called London "riots" have replaced the images Kate Middleton's $100,000 designer dresses. Police shootings of local youth may have provided the spark, but the reasons for the current urban youth revolt and "riots" go much deeper.

Despite all the talk about a "post-racial" era, conditions in urban communities here in the U.S. in many ways mirror those in London. The massive redistribution of wealth from bottom to top in the past decade, an expanding two-tier school system that increasingly excludes the poor from college and the job market, the growth an underclass of millions permanently unemployed (unemployable) youth -- the chickens inevitably come home to roost.

U.K. study: Kids do better if teachers are not fixated on test results

Pupils show greater motivation, are better behaved and are more likely to be independent and strategic thinkers when teachers are not obsessed by grades, the study by the Institute of Education found. But Brit gov't. policy increasingly mirrors U.S. No Child Left Behind testing madness. .

"Our preoccupation with exam performance could be a key element in explaining the ... underachievement in secondary schools in England," says the study's author, Chris Watkins. "If there is one new thing we need in our school system right now, it is a well-developed focus on learning."(Guardian)