Strange Love

As Junk Bond felon Michael Milken attempts to transform public education on the model of the HMO, he is hailed in the mainstream press as having “done more to help mankind than Mother Theresa.” Even as BP Amoco, a notorious U.S. polluter, is charged with funding and arming paramilitaries in Colombia, it freely distributes science curricula that portrays itself as a loving protector of citizens from a dangerous and 'out of control' nature. These as well as many other examples abound as Professors Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman take on the corporate educators, media monopolies, and oil companies in their new book Strange Love: How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market. Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so Goodman and Saltman reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy.