School Readiness

Remember the Ten Ways For Schools To Confuse a Child? Well, I'm pretty sure someone from the federal government read it and took my suggestions seriously. Because they are planning on taking one of the items on the list and running with it. Here it is:

A Parenting Lesson From the Egyptian Government

"If you don't stop that Right Now, I will take away your internet access!" said President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, to his people. That should teach them to respect me and stop all this protesting, he thought as he pulled the plug on the internet for the whole country, just wait until they see how powerful I am.

Here's the problem: when you put on big, ugly displays of power over other people, it doesn't make you look good. This whole thing just made Mubarak look like even more of a jerk than the people already knew he was. The people of Egypt were rightly pissed about the whole thing, but fortunately, being cut off from the internet did not slow down the protests. How naive of Mubarak to think that it would! People were organizing protests long before blogging, Facebook, and Twitter. As this blog post points out, the social media activists of Egypt figured out other incredibly effective ways to connect with others. In fact, one protest had 250,000 people gathered together a few days after the internet went out. So it would seem that Mubarak's plan has backfired.