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  </channel><item rdf:about="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/schools-testing-accountability.html">
    <title>Opinion | The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Nostalgia Is Delusional - The New York Times</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-27T06:13:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/schools-testing-accountability.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via Audrey Watters:
https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-algorithmic-order/ 

"In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Ross Weiner argues that the calls to bring back the test-based accountability of “No Child Left Behind” is delusional. (Well, to be fair that’s the word that the headline writer chose: "delusional.") Weiner describes these policies as insufficient then and inadequate now. “Young people are placing more emphasis on purpose, relationships and contribution than on older markers of status,” he argues.

<blockquote>For a generation, the reform coalition took its validation from economists and accountability metrics, while treating parents, students and communities as mere functionaries rather than partners in a shared civic enterprise.

    Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

    Federal policy has an essential role to play in public education: protecting civil rights, funding quality data and research, and encouraging promising practices to spread. But the formative mission cannot be mandated by Washington. Belonging, the foundation of both learning and civic commitment, is relational and starts local; it cannot be standardized or scaled, but must be cultivated by schools that are responsive to the communities they serve.</blockquote>

It’s not a fully-fleshed out vision for education, to be sure, but it does gesture at something quite different from the technocratic one that schools have spent the last few decades delivering -- and delivering via education technology, via a machinery that shapes the form and increasingly the content, the curricula and the pedagogy. Funny, for all the invocation of "the future of education" from ed-tech evangelists and testing companies and politicians, they're almost always talking about the past, or at least about much older narratives of what that future might look like. (And in doing so, they ignore that computers have been ubiquitous in classrooms for a very very long time now.)"]]]></description>
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    <title>Israel’s decades-long policy of assassinating Iran’s leaders - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-21T19:00:47+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q79PKR93TNc</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Israel has been assassinating Iran's top scientists, politicians and military leaders. The policy of targeted killings dates back decades. Israeli forces have carried out covert and public operations all around the world. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh explains."

[See also:

Folke Bernadotte
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230917-remembering-the-assassination-of-count-bernadotte/

Operation Damocles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Damocles

Ghassan Kanafani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan_Kanafani
https://questdev.palestine-studies.org/en/overallchronology%3F%26sideid%3D5342
https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/43/2%20(163)/75/400513/Time-BombsGhassan-Kanafani-beyond-Life-and-Death?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.trtworld.com/article/16657983

Mahmoud Hamshari
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Hamshari
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_assassinations_following_the_Munich_massacre

Khalil al-Wazir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Wazir

Yasser Arafat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Yasser_Arafat

Abu Ali Mustafa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ali_Mustafa

Ahmed Yassin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Yassin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ahmed_Yassin

Hassan Nasrallah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Nasrallah ]
]]></description>
<dc:subject>israel assassinations 2026 history palestine iran yasserarafat nourodeh mossad folkebernadotte 1948 terrorism abductions bombings operationdamocles gamalabdelnasser 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s ghassankanafani mahmoudalhamshari mahmoudhamshari khalilal-wazir plo westbank gaza abualimustafa 2001 2004 iraq journalists artists beirut tehran hezbollah academics doctors policy 1972 ahmedyassin hassannasrallah saidhassannasrallah yasirarafat hizbullah</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-our-schools">
    <title>What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-13T05:14:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-our-schools</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["educating an entire society into prosperity is a radical modern fantasy, not "getting things back to normal""

...

"We Don’t Know If What We’re Trying is Possible

The United States has embarked on a project that is historically unprecedented: the attempt to make every student “college-ready” and to build a labor market that presumes universal higher education. The degree to which “college for all” is an explicit demand can be lawyered forever; if you’d like to say “No one actually wants college for all,” go ahead. The simple reality is that making all students college ready has long been a thinktank demand, a politician promise, and a goal of charter school networks; whether you want to call it a strawman or not, the idea that the entire labor market is going to flow through schooling, that we’re going to educate our citizenry into employability, is a central reality of modern American economics and politics. In The Cult of Smart I quoted (I believe) every president from Carter through Obama as endorsing education as the path to prosperity. And in the neoliberal era, where so much of the labor market for uneducated citizens has been dismantled, nobody has a very good idea of how people reach the good life without education. So we’re trying to educate everybody. Simple!

I need people to understand this: no society in history has ever achieved such a thing, not even the most aggressively meritocratic or education-obsessed ones. There are countries with better aggregate education data than ours (although there’s always caveats and context) and there’s countries with a higher percentage of adults with college degrees (although in some countries college-level work is similar to the high school-level work that American students do). There are no countries that have built an economy where every worker actually possesses the kind of skills that most are thinking of when they think of a college education, and there are no societies in history where education has been the dominant creator of jobs and financial opportunity in the way implied by the rhetoric we routinely hear from politicians. The idea that we can take a population of tens of millions of young people, with all the diversity of ability, interest, and circumstance that entails, and funnel them into a single academic track is a radical social experiment, and the fact that there’s still so much constant angst about education suggests that it’s not going well. Pretending that we’re just trying to get education “back to normal” is a way of laundering a wildly ambitious scheme into inevitability, as if the failure to achieve this impossible standard is a deviation rather than the natural outcome of the attempt.

To imagine that we are simply replicating the supposed good old days by demanding college readiness for all is to ignore the fact that no country’s default has ever looked like this. And the constant escalation of crisis rhetoric has consequences. By treating universal college readiness as the baseline, we set ourselves up for perpetual crisis, because the system cannot deliver what it promises. Students who do not thrive in academic environments are cast as failures, even though they may possess skills and talents that societies have historically valued in other ways. Employers, meanwhile, inflate credential requirements not because the work demands it, but because the education arms race has made degrees into proxies for discipline and compliance. The result is a labor market that is both exclusionary and brittle, built on the false premise that education can be the sole engine of economic life. To insist that this is “normal” is to deny history, and to guarantee disappointment.

If you want to go ahead and grind whatever your particular axe about education happens to be, knock yourself out. But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.ideo.org/perspective/whats-school-for">
    <title>We’re Losing the Plot on School | IDEO.org</title>
    <dc:date>2025-09-09T16:33:08+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.ideo.org/perspective/whats-school-for</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What are we really preparing young people for?"

...

"Over the past year, I’ve been on an epic world tour, sitting in rooms with education and workforce leaders, thinkers, and practitioners who are all wrestling with the same question: What is the future of education?

Among teachers and prospective employers, there’s a growing urgency to rethink what it means to prepare young people for the future, largely driven by the proliferation of genAI and its impact on the future of work. In 2024, 77% of employers globally struggled to find talent with the right skills, while 72% of high school graduates report feeling unprepared to make decisions about their next steps. With millions of U.S workers expected to shift careers in the coming decade as skill demands evolve, the labor market is shifting faster than people can keep up with.

These trends around youth workforce readiness coalesce with another problem: mental health. In 2023, 40% of high school students reported feeling so sad or hopeless for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped engaging in their usual activities. ​​Technology and a changing social fabric are deepening isolation, reshaping not only how we work but how we relate. It has left young people with fewer chances to practice the messy but essential work of being in community. Unsurprisingly, teens are now turning to AI for companionship, a concerning signal that makes teaching relational skills more urgent than ever.

The narrowing of education

In a race to prepare for the future, education seems to be reduced to a single goal: preparing students for work.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Market-driven thinking has fueled pushes toward an increased emphasis on STEM and coding over the past two, three decades. Now, as the disruption from AI becomes more visible and visceral, the response feels familiar. At a recent education conference, I saw schools branding themselves as “AI schools”… whatever that means. But in this rush to ready young people for the future economy, I worry we risk losing sight of what they need to grow into whole, healthy humans.

When I was a teacher in 2018, I watched school become an increasingly isolating experience.

Students were spending more time completing assignments independently on Chromebooks rather than collaborating with each other on group projects. As educators, we were encouraged to tailor instruction to each student’s needs, but in practice, that often meant driving students apart.

Over those years, I rarely saw the most meaningful learning happen in isolation. More often, it unfolded during band concerts, football games, and messy group projects—moments when young people came together and came alive. In working with others, navigating frustration, leaning into collaboration, and ultimately feeling pride in what they accomplished together, I saw the real growth happen. As a teacher, I came to understand that learning isn’t just about mastering a skill. It’s about building interdependence and discovering what it means to contribute to something bigger than yourself. And that makes sense—our purpose as humans isn’t just to work. It’s to care, connect, love, imagine, and live meaningfully with one another.

Schools can’t lose sight of that.

How we get it right

Last year, we partnered with a Dallas-based education nonprofit and the Garland Independent School District to co-design interventions aimed at reducing behavioral issues in classrooms. As we spent time in the hallways and classrooms listening to teachers and students, we quickly saw that the kids weren’t ok and neither were the adults. Teachers were exhausted, stretched thin by the demands of the job and the lack of resources. Students were carrying their own burdens, feeling unseen, misunderstood, and treated like problems instead of people.

Students and teachers told us the real problem wasn’t “bad behavior.” It was burnout and disconnection. Together, we mapped the everyday moments when tensions ran high, surfaced what support would actually be useful in those moments, and tested quick, low-lift ideas. Teachers became invaluable co-designers, shaping a toolkit of simple, scalable tools to rebuild trust and strengthen relationships. In the rush to get through curriculum, schools had unintentionally designed out moments for connection. The mood meter—a quick check-in tool teachers could use after moments of tension or disruption to help the whole classroom reground—was one small way we designed it back in.

Because the people living the problem shaped the solution, the tools actually worked: in the first year, exclusionary discipline dropped 36%, and teachers reported that classrooms felt more supportive and engaged. More importantly, in a system where those closest to the problem rarely have the power to shape the solutions, teachers—who most intimately understand the challenges students face— felt seen and trusted with the agency to create change.

If we want schools to prepare young people for both work and life, we can’t design the future of education for them. We have to design it with them. That means working alongside young people, their teachers, their families, and others who know their lives best. These are the communities that yes—want young people to leave school ready for good jobs— but also ready to build healthy relationships, care for their communities, and navigate an ever-changing, complex world.

Schools are the foundation of our communities. We can’t lose the plot on that."]]></description>
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    <title>Economic Nihilism</title>
    <dc:date>2025-08-04T21:41:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/06/30/economic-nihilism/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The ideology of those who believe that economic activity is meaningless is then quite understandable. At least, the type of economic activity expected of the elite class, seeing itself as too smart and productive to dirty their hands with machinery. 

Economic nihilism is then the ideology of the young, aspirant class, willing to put in two years—but only two years—at whatever firm is prestigious upon graduation. Economic nihilism is the ideology that celebrates taking shortcuts. The economy itself is abstracted away, what’s left is a salary or its equivalent in crypto payouts. 

Roy Lee told me that he thinks the future of work will be more intellectual and creative. “Standards of living will just grow and people will just spend their time fighting in the marketplace of ideas,” he said. He suggested that AI, eclipsing human productivity, may bring about a universal basic income. I thought this to be an overly-optimistic response coming from someone who made the defining product of economic nihilism. This same lackluster dole future remains the default answer given by even the most prominent tech executives such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, when asked about humanity’s economic prospects. 

When laptop jobs join stable single-earner households and good customer service in the pantheon of distant, pleasant memories of the economic past, I doubt most will celebrate their newfound ability to think rather than work. After all, the educational system that gave rise to—and then punished—Cluely is the same educational system that teaches students not how to think but how to check boxes.

Over the last few months, I’ve argued with friends about which jobs AI will automate away first. I argue that it’s the jobs of the elite aspirant class: consultants, software engineers, and big law associates. The reason is that these jobs are knowledge work, meaning that they just require intelligence—not ingenuity, creativity, or a great amount of urgency—to successfully do. Rather than worrying about Uber drivers, waiters, and telemarketers, perhaps elites are worrying about themselves. Perhaps the existential risk is one of facing the end of their work rather than the end of work as such.

And perhaps the elite class is on some level reaping what it has been sowing. While the current new generation has not created these conditions, few from it have sought to change the dismal economic and political landscape. With AI ready to replace the bulk of Ivy League knowledge work, perhaps we will finally exit the paper belt and enter what was the real economy all along. This is, however, a dangerous circumstance for society given that the history of revolution can be read as the history of frustrated aspirant elites leveraging their collective power for their own rather than general benefit. Economic nihilism, being a form of nihilism, ultimately seeks to abolish itself. What remains to be seen is what approach, if any, this elite class will use to adapt."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2STLFm4iqI">
    <title>From Lenin to Žižek: The Disgraceful End of Western Marxism - feat. Gabriel Rockhill - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2025-07-27T21:53:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2STLFm4iqI</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This interview was organized by Ottolina TV (https://ottolinatv.it/) as part of its summer festival. The original show notes appear below.

🔴🔴🔴

New Interview — Gabriel Rockhill on Western Marxism, Intellectual Complicity, and the Global Class Struggle

What if the dominant forms of Marxist theory in the West were not simply flawed, but deeply complicit with the very imperial system they claim to critique?

In this explosive new interview, we speak with Gabriel Rockhill—philosopher, cultural critic, activist, and one of the sharpest critics of Western Marxism today. He’s the author of The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry and editor of the new English edition of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, which is the focus of our conversation.

Rockhill shows that Western Marxism is not merely a geographical label, but a theoretical project born within the imperial core, shaped by the material privileges of the labor and intellectual aristocracies. It marks a historical retreat from revolutionary Marxism, and is defined by four crucial betrayals:

1. A retreat from revolutionary politics, especially anti-imperialism
2. A retreat from the working class, as theory moves into elite academia
3. A retreat from materialism, rejecting dialectics of nature and historical development
4. A retreat from real socialism, denouncing actually existing socialist states while clinging to utopian blueprints

One key focus in this conversation is the retreat from dialectical materialism. Rockhill warns that knowledge production itself is embedded in the global structure of imperialism. Intellectuals don’t float above history—they’re shaped by, and often serve, class power.

Rockhill challenges Perry Anderson’s inclusion of Gramsci and Lukács in the Western Marxist canon, showing how Losurdo offers a sharper definition grounded in 1917 as a turning point, and in the division between revolutionary and domesticated Marxism. Unlike the Western academic left, both Gramsci and Lukács remained committed to real political struggle.

The stakes of this divide are visible today. From Ukraine to Iran, Western Marxist figures like Žižek echo imperial talking points—championing “democracy” and “rights” while ignoring the material realities of NATO expansion or the asymmetric application of humanitarian standards. The result? A left that speaks the moral language of empire while turning its back on anti-imperialist resistance.

A key feature of Western Marxism has always been its opposition to actually existing socialism—from the USSR to China. Rockhill sees in this a messianic purism, rooted in petty-bourgeois detachment. Socialism becomes a perfect idea that justifies withdrawing from struggle, reducing politics to performance, and revolution to rhetoric.

This detachment, Rockhill argues, has material roots in Lenin’s theory of the labor aristocracy: those sectors of the working class in the imperial core whose relative privileges bind them to imperial capitalism. While not all workers fall into this category, many in the professional-managerial class clearly do. But as imperialism enters crisis and surplus extraction falters, new opportunities for rupture emerge—and the battle is on to prevent these sectors from being captured by actual neofascism.

All of this brings us to the core of Rockhill’s message: only a dialectical, materialist analysis can truly grasp the contradictions of theory and its place in global class struggle. Western Marxism, as commodified theory for elite circulation, must be rejected—not in favor of dogma, but in favor of a revolutionary theory rooted in praxis, history, and the global movement for emancipation."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/virtue-hoarders-and-the-rejection">
    <title>Virtue Hoarders and the Rejection of Liberalism (with Catherine Liu) | The Chris Hedges Report</title>
    <dc:date>2025-06-01T20:36:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/virtue-hoarders-and-the-rejection</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Catherine Liu details how the professional managerial class (PMC) has betrayed workers for seats within the halls of power, all while they wag their fingers at the politically incorrect working class."

[direct link to YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuIb4j_hxSw ]]]></description>
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    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In our age of certainty and dogma, we would all do well to learn from the philosophy of the ancient Greco-Roman sceptics"]]></description>
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    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["On the politics of history and genocide"]]></description>
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    <title>‘I received a first but it felt tainted and undeserved’: inside the university AI cheating crisis | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian</title>
    <dc:date>2024-12-29T00:46:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/15/i-received-a-first-but-it-felt-tainted-and-undeserved-inside-the-university-ai-cheating-crisis</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["More than half of students are now using generative AI, casting a shadow over campuses as tutors and students turn on each other and hardworking learners are caught in the flak. Will Coldwell reports on a broken system"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/07/david-graeber-optimistic-anarchist-rebecca-solnit">
    <title>‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber | Books | The Guardian</title>
    <dc:date>2024-11-13T18:28:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/07/david-graeber-optimistic-anarchist-rebecca-solnit</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["As a new collection of his writing is published, Rebecca Solnit remembers her friend, the late activist and anarchist who believed ordinary people had the power to change the world"

...

"David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with. Every time we met – from New Haven in the early 00s to London a few years before his death in 2020 – he was essentially the same: beaming, rumpled, with a restless energy that seemed to echo the constant motion of his mind, words tumbling out as though they were, in their unstoppable abundance, overflowing. But he was also much respected in activist circles for being a good listener, and his radical egalitarianism was borne out in how he related to the people around him.

He was always an anthropologist. After doing fieldwork among traditional peoples in Madagascar, he just never stopped, but he turned his focus to his own society. Essays such as Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and ‘Interpretive Labor’ and his book Bullshit Jobs came from using the equipment of an anthropologist on stuff usually regarded as boring, or not regarded at all – the function and impact of bureaucracy. His 2011 bestseller on debt reminded us that money and finance are among the social arrangements that could be rearranged for the better.

He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.

As Marcus Rediker wrote in his review of David’s posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, “Everything Graeber wrote was simultaneously a genealogy of the present and an account of what a just society might look like.” He was concerned about inequality of all kinds, including gender inequality in this society and others, and the violence that enforces inequality and unfreedom, as well as how they might be delegitimised and where and when societies might have escaped them. He focused, in short, on freedom and its impediments.

He was often credited with coining the Occupy Wall Street slogan “We are the 99%”, but he insisted on paring his credit down to having contributed the 99% part to a phrase so compelling that “the 1%” remains a widely used description of the uppermost elite. “The 99%” is a hopeful phrase, in opposition to the old layer-cake description of the working, middle, and upper classes. It’s an assertion that the great majority of us are working, and often financially struggling or precarious; that most of us have a lot in common – and a lot of reasons to oppose the super-rich.

David took joy in his work, and in how that work intersected with actualities on the ground – especially with the radical movements of the late 1990s and the new millennium, including the anti-corporate-globalisation movement that peaked with the shutdown of the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Seattle in 1999, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico that began in 1994, and the many forms of radical egalitarianism manifesting as direct-democracy experiments and resistance to unjust institutions and governments, especially 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, in which he was deeply involved.

That joy: maybe this is how everyone should feel about ideas and the ways that they open up or close off possibilities. The way that, as he wrote, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” If you truly believe that, if you perceive a world that is constructed according to certain assumptions and values, then you see that it can be changed, not least by changing those assumptions and values.

We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: “Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.” He texted back that August, a month before his demise: “Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’ which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”

In order to believe that people can govern themselves in the absence of coercive institutions and hierarchies, anarchists must have great faith in ordinary people, and David did. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: “To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.”

He had a strained academic career, despite his brilliance and originality – or because of them. In the first book of his that I read, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, a tiny book bursting with big ideas, he wrote, “In the United States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists … It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a PhD, even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class.” And then he argues that anarchism was not, by comparison, an idea created by a few intellectuals; instead, “the basic principles of anarchism – self-organisation, voluntary association, mutual aid” – have been around “as long as humanity.”

David’s recurrent rallying cry as both a scholar and an activist was: “It does not have to be this way.” Where academia can be cool and guarded, pulling away from direct engagement, he was warm and enthusiastic, wanting to see ideas lead to actions that could change the world. Taylor notes: “While he despised the tedium of academic bureaucracy, he loved activist meetings, savouring the ideological debates and revelling in various forms of planning, scheming, and mischief.” He was hopeful, not foolishly so, but due to the evidence he had amassed that human societies have taken myriad forms, that the people who are supposedly powerless can together wield quite a lot of power, and that ideas matter. One of my favourite scraps of information in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is about Madagascar’s Sakalava people, who officially revere dead kings – but these kings make their wishes known “through spirit mediums who are usually elderly women of commoner descent.” That is, a system officially led by elite men is controlled by non-elite women.

Hope is a tricky business among intellectuals and activists. Cynicism, though it’s often inaccurate about both human nature and political possibilities, gives the appearance of sophistication; despair is often seen as sophisticated and worldly-wise while hopefulness is seen as naive, when the opposite is not infrequently true. Hope is risky; you can lose, and you often do, but the records show that if you try, sometimes you win.

His essay Despair Fatigue opens: “Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?” David’s superpower was being an outsider. He did not proceed from widely shared assumptions but sought to dismantle them, urging us to see they’re arbitrary, confining and optional, and inviting everyone into the spaces this opens up (while saluting those already there). So much of his writing says, in essence, “What happens if we don’t accept this?” – if we dissect it to see its origins and impacts, or if we reject it, if we lift it off like some burden we don’t have to carry, some outfit we don’t have to wear? What happens is we get free."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.presidioknolls.org/news/news/2024/10/25/why-we-dont-use-letter-grades">
    <title>Beyond Letter Grades: PKS's Holistic Approach to Assessment — Presidio Knolls School</title>
    <dc:date>2024-10-29T00:05:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.presidioknolls.org/news/news/2024/10/25/why-we-dont-use-letter-grades</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Teachers in the PKS Middle School assess students frequently in a variety of ways, from 1:1 check ins, to rubrics, to tests and quizzes, to marginalia on their essays. We are a feedback rich program, and believe communicating clearly and directly with students about their work is the best way to help them grow. Some of the tools we use for assessment are standardized and used all around the world, others are program-specific and designed by our faculty.

One thing we never do is reduce feedback to a letter or number grade. Our commitment to eschew letter/number grades in favor of more nuanced forms of feedback is, in fact, a foundation of our approach to teaching and learning. And we are proud to be leading a broad movement [https://www.edutopia.org/article/will-letter-grades-survive ] of 21st century schools [https://mastery.org/mtc-member-schools/ ] approaching assessment from a researched-based, holistic perspective.

Why don’t we grade? 

First, grades are crude and opaque where feedback should be personalized, rich, actionable, and transparent. Teachers should have the skill and the time to explain clearly to students what they are doing well and what they need to improve. An “82” doesn’t do that. In fact, research shows [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/ ] that no matter the quality of feedback, if it is attached to a grade it is largely ignored. Students flip to the back of an essay to look at the grade and don’t read the comments, or see the number at the top of a math test and don’t analyze what they have mastered and what they must improve. Grades are reductive symbols and a shortcut around the hard work of responding individually to the work of each student, celebrating what they have achieved, and explaining to each student how his or her work can continue to progress and develop.

Second, we want a feedback system that encourages students to pursue academic rigor. Why attempt a difficult project if the result might be a B when you can do an easy project and get an A? Schools that grade see students making the rational choice to avoid academic rigor and pursue the “easy A.” Middle schoolers are like bloodhounds for hypocrisy, and they immediately sense it when a teacher or parent says, “challenge yourself!” while also saying, “keep your grades up.” Schools that do not grade can more honestly coach students to work at the edge of their stretch zone.

Third, we believe feedback should encourage a growth mindset, and grades irrevocably move students towards a fixed mindset. The “C” in 6th grade English becomes the story the child tells herself (“I’m a bad writer”). The “A” in science tells a student he needn’t strive for more (“my work is done”). When teachers do not grade and instead tell ALL students how to meet the next challenge, and do so without labels, there is no danger of a student settling on a fixed belief so early in their exploration of the world and of their cognitive development.

Fourth, grades introduce an authoritarian element into the classroom. In the Dewian tradition, we believe our work is to train our students to become engaged, effective, passionate citizens. It is the job of a citizen to think critically, to question authority, and to be suspicious of hierarchy. We believe the consequences of living the most formative years of your life in systems that normalizes hierarchy is a threat to democratic values. We will not participate in this paradigm. Our teachers are respected by students because of their humanity, their inspiring lessons, and their care, not because they have the power to reward and punish. 

Fifth, grades tend to encourage a misguided adjudication of assessment: “Why did I receive a B when I deserved a B+?” Students and parents sense the alchemy in any grading system, the inevitable arbitrary and capricious nature [https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/improving-grading-in-high-school/ ] of a grade. Teachers who are forced to grade must pour their most precious resource - time - into defending the indefensible. We want 100% of our teachers’ energies going into challenging each student, learning more about them, and engaging with them on a joyful journey. We do not want one moment wasted on questions of semantics.

Sixth, since grades communicate to students that some things matter and others don't, schools that grade end up with warped programs [https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-no-students-dont-need-grades/2018/01 ]. Math gets graded in most schools, communicating that math is important (which it is). But the way you treat your peers is not graded, communicating that whatever lip service is paid to this value, it isn’t very important. Students get it: you grade me on the things you actually want me to care about. At PKS, we actually care about student health, their moral development, their mindfulness, their ability to self-assess and choose to stretch themselves.

Seventh, there are metacognitive benefits for students when we do not coddle them by telling them exactly what to do and how to do it. At PKS, students are asked to name what they need to accomplish and receive 1:1 coaching to help them develop independent habits of passionate, creative work. We want our students to receive an assignment, head off to work, and return with gorgeous, unexpected results. Grades undermine [https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-05867-001 ] intrinsic motivation and self-regulation and are part of what has created an army of bright but timid graduates who need bosses to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. PKS graduates will leap over this millennial malaise.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, we believe that grades distract from the joy of learning. Our classrooms are celebrations of creativity, of grit, of tinkering, of struggle, of offering complex responses to challenging cross-cultural problems. We want our learning community to be one in which passionate teachers challenge, support, and inspire their students. And we want our students striving to be their best selves unencumbered by fear of (shudder!) a “B.”

Selected Resources

Alli Klapp (2015) Does grading affect educational attainment? A longitudinal study, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 22:3, 302-323, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2014.988121

Björn Högberg, Joakim Lindgren, Klara Johansson, Mattias Strandh & Solveig Petersen (2021) Consequences of school grading systems on adolescent health: evidence from a Swedish school reform, Journal of Education Policy, 36:1, 84-106, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1686540

Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. New York: Basic Books.

Pulfrey, C., Buchs, C., & Butera, F. (2011). Why grades engender performance-avoidance goals: The mediating role of autonomous motivation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3), 683–700. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023911

Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “When Rewards Compete with Nature: The Undermining of Intrinsic Motivation and Self Regulation,” in Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, Sansone and Harackiewicz, eds. (Educational Psychology, 2000).

Jack Schneider & Ethan Hutt (2014) Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46:2, 201-224, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.790480

Schinske J, Tanner K. Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently). CBE Life Sci Educ. 2014;13(2):159-166. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054

Grant Wiggins, “The Case for Authentic Assessment,” Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol 2, Article 2(1990)."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-and-genes-grab-bag">
    <title>Education and Genes Grab Bag - Freddie deBoer</title>
    <dc:date>2024-09-10T18:30:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-and-genes-grab-bag</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A common complaint among critics of a genetics-academics link is to ask, why does this matter? What can you do with this, other than provide the worst people with more justification for eugenics and oppression? The most consistent criticisms of Kathryn Paige Harden’s book expressed this concern, questioning whether knowledge of genetic propensity for better or worse academic performance could ever help achieve Harden’s stated progressive ends. Personally, I think that this conversation tends to be too fixated on the usefulness of genetic testing of individuals and not sufficiently focused on the big picture - the fact that, if every student does not actually have equal potential, the entire foundation of modern educational philosophy has been utterly destabilized. As I put it exactly three years ago, you can define the problem with blank slate thinking in four words: No Child Left Behind. The most radical and destructive piece of educational policy in our country’s history, passed with remarkably broad bipartisan report, could only have been conceived of by those who believed that students have no intrinsic tendency towards a given performance level. And the result was disastrous - there was an immense waste of resources associated with NCLB, students and teachers and schools were suddenly forced to undertake inefficient and unnecessary census testing, and teacher tenure and unions were attacked. All because of a cheery and casually destructive insistence that every child was in possession of the same educational potential.

Yes, the existence of pseudoscientific racism claims of inherent genetic superiority/inferiority of different races invites particular scrutiny in this regard. But as I will not stop insisting, it is not only possible but in fact intuitive and evidence-based to believe that individual differences in academic ability are genetically influenced while group differences like racial or gender differences are environmental in origin. And I will go to my grave pointing out that blank slate thinking is the enemy of a better, more humane education system. Once you stop insisting that the only noble outcome for any and all children is to go to a top twenty university and join the ranks of our Brahmin class, we can dramatically broaden the purpose of school and our definitions of success. If you don’t do that, though, our neoliberal system is going to continue to try to use the meritocratic process as the only tool for achieving “social justice,” with the bonus outcome that those who struggle within that system are made to believe that they deserve their sad fate."

...

"Here’s a core point. When we talk about this stuff, there’s a lot of quick insistence that these traits aren’t just genetic, but also environmental, and there’s always gene by environment interactions, and there’s epigenetics…. All true! Just as Merchant is surely right here about the influence of social interactions. But I think it’s important to say that the existence of such complicating factors can’t deny the salience of a particularly important factor. So consider height. Height is highly polygenic, it’s heavily influenced by environment, there are gene by environment interactions, all true. However, none of this means that height is not significantly heritable, and crucially if your genes don’t want you to be 7 feet tall, you’re not going to be 7 feet tall. The existence of the complicating factors doesn’t change the reality that height is probably about 80% heritable. Severe malnourishment in childhood can absolutely stunt someone’s growth, but you can overfeed a kid whose genes want him to be 5’4 and it’s not going to make him a six footer. Similarly, I could never be a chess grandmaster no matter how hard I tried; I lack the raw processing power. Because genes matter.

<blockquote>both sides are buying into and thereby furthering the larger eugenicist project of attributing socioeconomic inequality to genetic variation.</blockquote>

I am again in this position where the basic moral values I’m evaluating simply do not make sense to me. Merchant reveals herself to be a committed progressive and critic of contemporary capitalism in this essay. Good. But what is progressive about denying the role of genetic variation in socioeconomic inequality? Our genetic endowment lies entirely outside of our own control, and the fact that we are born with a given genome is a matter of pure random chance, just like being born into a rich family. The neoliberal capitalist project depends on a widespread societal belief that our system is fair and consistently gives almost everyone a decent shot to succeed. But how can the outcomes be fair if our genes disadvantage us before we can make a single choice, before we attend a single class, before we work a single job?

It’s rude and unscientific to believe that fat people are just gluttons without self-discipline. It’s rude and unscientific to believe that everyone has the same risk of being an alcoholic or drug addict. It’s rude and unscientific to believe that schizophrenia is caused by cold and distant mothers. And it’s rude and unscientific to believe that when one kid excels in the classroom and the other one struggles, that process is equitable and fair."]]></description>
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    <title>Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul - by William Deresiewicz</title>
    <dc:date>2024-05-30T16:21:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.persuasion.community/p/deep-reading-will-save-your-soul</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Real learning has become impossible in universities. DIY programs offer a better way."

...

"Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible. Besides, business is good, at least at selective schools. The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is a fantasy. As long as elite institutions remain the principal pipeline to elite employers (and they will), the havers and strivers will crowd toward their gates. Everything else—the classes, the politics, the arts and sciences—is incidental.

Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education. They just aren’t happening, for the most part, on campus. People write to me about this: initiatives they’ve started or are starting or have taken part in. These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience. The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives. 

Programs that address this discontent exhibit a remarkably consistent set of characteristics. They are interdisciplinary, integrating methods and perspectives—from, say, engineering and the social sciences—that are normally kept apart. They are informal, eschewing frontal instruction and traditional modes of evaluation. They are experiential, more about doing—creating, collaborating—than reading and writing. They are extramural, bringing students into the community for service projects, internships, artistic installations or performances. They are directed to specific purposes, usually to do with social amelioration or environmental rescue. Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”

All this is fine, as far as it goes. It has analogues and precedents in higher ed (Evergreen, Bennington, Antioch, Hampshire) as well as in the practice of progressive education, especially at the secondary level. High schools will focus on “project-based learning,” with assessment conducted through portfolios and public exhibitions. A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project). 

Again, I see the logic, it is just what many students want, but what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends. Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.

And that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense. That they hadn’t been touched. That they hadn’t been changed. That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.

I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.) They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for. Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

That student’s name was Matthew Strother. It was through Matthew—he was in his early thirties by this point, and still seeking—that I learned about perhaps the two most prominent initiatives to have sprung up off-campus of late in response to the hunger for serious study. The first is the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which was founded in 2012 and now offers dozens of courses a year both in person and online. Its seminars meet three hours a week for four weeks. Recent offerings include classes on Melville’s The Confidence Man, Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, fairy tales, and Mesopotamia. With its leftist commitments, BISR also runs courses in critical theory and the social sciences: Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, “Racial Capitalism,” “The Politics of Pregnancy.”

The second initiative Matthew alerted me to is the Catherine Project, which launched in 2020. Its vibe is very different from BISR’s. BISR was founded by a group of Columbia doctoral students. The Catherine Project was founded by Zena Hitz, a teacher at the St. John’s great books college in Annapolis, a Catholic convert, and, for three years, a resident of Madonna House, a monastic community in eastern Ontario. BISR is named for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, birthplace in the 1930s of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social thought. The Catherine Project is named for Catherine of Alexandria, an early Christian martyr, and Catherine Doherty, Madonna House’s founder.

BISR is explicitly political as well as educational; its Praxis program offers workshops and other resources to labor unions and nonprofits. The Catherine Project sees itself as being in the business of creating “communities of learning”; its principles include “conversation and hospitality, “simplicity [and] transparency.” Classes (called tutorials, in keeping with the practice at St. John’s) are free (BISR’s cost $335), are capped at four to six students (at BISR, the limit is 23), run for two hours a week for twelve weeks, and skew towards the canon: the Greeks and Romans, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Dante and Cervantes (the project also hosts a large number of reading groups, which address a wider range of texts). If BISR aspires to create a fairer market for academic labor—instructors keep the lion’s share of fees—the Catherine Project functions as a gift economy (though plans are to begin to offer tutors modest honoraria).

Add to these the Zephyr Institute, founded in 2014, which runs humanities-based programs in Silicon Valley. Add the Hertog Foundation’s humanities program, which since 2020 has conducted online seminars for mixed groups of undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals. Add the reading groups and salons that have been proliferating both in-person and online. And many more initiatives, no doubt, that I have yet to learn of.

A number of factors play into this upsurge. One, of course, is the internet, as both a medium of study and a means to publicize offline opportunities. Another is the sense that academic humanities departments have long been inimical to humanistic inquiry—a major reason college students have felt cheated of it—as opposed to political tub-thumping. A former student who did an MFA in fiction at a major public university remarked that while the program’s writing instruction was only so-so, at least the workshops afforded the chance to really read, unlike what went on in what he called the institution’s “clownish” English department.

A third is less obvious. The long-term crisis in academic employment—the shift to adjunct labor, the glut of PhDs—has created a large pool of qualified instructors only loosely attached to, or entirely detached from, the academy. BISR’s faculty, almost all of whom have doctoral degrees, include not only adjuncts (and appointed professors), but book editors, full-time writers, a university librarian, an archaeologist, and a psychoanalyst-in-training. As Russell Jacoby has noted, the migration of intellectuals into universities in the decades after World War II, which he documented in The Last Intellectuals, has more recently reversed itself. The rise, or re-rise, of little magazines (Dissent, Commentary, Partisan Review then; n+1, The New Inquiry, The Point, The Drift, et al. now) is part of the same story. 

The Catherine Project’s faculty reflects a fourth factor. If there are students who despair at the condition of the humanities on campus, there are professors who do so as well. Many of her teachers, Hitz told me, have regular ladder appointments: “We draw academics—who attend our groups as well as leading them—because the life of the mind is dying or dead in conventional institutions.” Undergraduate teaching, she added, “is a particularly hard pull,” and the Catherine Project offers faculty the chance to teach people “who actually want to learn.”

And, I’d add, who can. Nine years ago, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. … The problem is that their engagement with language … often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.” By now, of course, the picture is far worse. Last year, in an article about the plunge in humanities enrollments, another Harvard English professor, Amanda Claybaugh, was quoted as follows: “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.” And this is at Harvard. It’s no wonder faculty are thirsty for students with whom they can actually have a dialogue about the books they love.

I am involved in one of these off-campus ventures myself. My student Matthew, having spent many years searching for, then dreaming of, his ideal intellectual environment, decided to create it himself. It would marry rigorous group study of literary and philosophical texts with mindful living and abstention from technologies of communication. It would be a face-to-face community, a retreat from distraction, a school for adults. It would be small, self-governing, contemplative, and free of charge. He studied models: Deep Springs College, Plato’s Academy, Nietzsche’s experiences at Villa Rubinacci. He made copious notes. He outlined a set of principles. He purchased property in upstate New York.

But he did not live to see his plans take form. Matthew died last year, of cancer, at the age of 35, in the middle of his life’s way. But such was the beauty of his dream, and the love that he inspired, that some of us who knew him, led by his widow, Berta Willisch, determined to see it realized. Already this year, the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life is running three ten-day pilot programs for five participants each (plans are to expand to groups of ten and also offer longer sessions). The faculty include myself, Zena Hitz, and Len Nalencz, a friend of Matthew’s and a professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent.

The response to the announcement of our pilot programs confirmed for me the existence of a large, unmet desire for text-based exploration, touching on the deepest questions, outside the confines of higher education. With limited publicity, a tight deadline, and a fairly demanding application process, we received nearly 160 submissions. Applicants ranged from graduating college seniors to people in their 70s. They included teachers, artists, scientists, and doctoral students from across the disciplines; a submarine officer, a rabbinical student, an accountant, and a venture capitalist; retirees, parents of small children, and twentysomethings at the crossroads. Forms came in from India, Jordan, Brazil, and nine other foreign countries. The applicants were, as a group, tremendously impressive. If it had been possible, we would have taken many more than fifteen.

When asked why they wanted to participate, a number of them spoke about the pathologies of formal education. “We have a really damaged relationship to learning,” said one. “It should be fun, not scary”—as in, you feel that you’re supposed to know the answer, which as a student, as she noted, makes no sense. “Study or attention,” said another, “has been lodged in an institution that has its own incentives,” like sorting for “merit.” “We need opportunities for reading and exploration that lie outside the credentialing system of the modern university,” he went on, because there’s so much in the latter that cuts against “the slow way that kind of learning unfolds.” A third, a dedicated autodidact who dropped out of a prestigious institution, used the architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s notion of an “intimacy gradient” to describe his urge to enter into deeper contact with material than college courses typically allow. “For life’s significant questions,” he wrote, “like how one might choose to live, answers are to be found by moving along the gradient, not by ambling around the periphery.”

“How one might choose to live.” For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

That is why it’s crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal—and this is true of the Catherine Project and other off-campus humanities programs, as well—beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake. Which means, for the sake of whatever students want to do with it, of whomever it might make them. This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless. After college, Matthew disappeared to Europe. I didn’t hear from him for five years. Finally, I got a letter—at some thirty pages, the longest I’ve ever received. It was a spiritual diary that doubled as a reading log. He referenced Joyce, Hesse, Bellow, Camus, Lawrence, Larkin, Miller, Maugham, Hemingway, Chesterton, Salinger, Durell, Ozick, Blake, Gorky, Chekhov, Geoff Dyer, Paul Goodman, Roberto Calasso, David Shields, Gregoire Bouillier, and George WS Trow. At the end, he wrote this: “The straight river of my narrative has opened onto the wide deltas of the present, and looking out to sea there’s nowhere to go but anywhere.” Exactly."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.publicbooks.org/the-anti-revolutionary-science/">
    <title>The Anti-Revolutionary Science - Public Books</title>
    <dc:date>2024-03-24T21:04:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.publicbooks.org/the-anti-revolutionary-science/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via:
https://twitter.com/calvinjburke/status/1771422151914225761
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:66dc4010c465 ]

"This passage captures in miniature much of the intellectual character of Nasar’s book: her sense that the story of economics is primarily a story of “optimism” overcoming the fables of scarcity propounded by early economists like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo; her admiration for Marshall’s turning to empirical observation rather than mere theory; her citation of the existence of statistics somewhere that confirm the correctness of that turn to the empirical; and her sense that the ability to point to “rising standards of living” is a refutation of the Marxist critique of political economy.

Nasar, like most economic thinkers, is haunted by Marx, and she very much wants to believe that ideas like Marshall’s will dispel his specter forever, because the data proved Marshall right. Again and again in Grand Pursuit, Nasar wags her finger at Marx—whom she believes wished suffering upon the working classes, so that they would spring despairing into revolutionary action—while pointing triumphantly to some moment in some place or other when the “standard of living” of the poor briefly rose. It’s the most repetitive gesture in the book.

But standards of living, even construed within the restricted terms of economics, can fall as easily as they rise: just this November, The New York Times reported that wages as a portion of American GDP (a key feature of how Nasar understands “standards of living”) were the lowest they’d been since 1929. So it’s hard to treat a temporary condition of the economy as a permanent achievement of the field that studies it. The numbers belie the story arc.

The problem for Nasar’s book is worse than the numbers not turning out in her favor, however; indeed, part of the problem is with numbers. Nasar takes on faith the virtue of empiricism while never asking how the figures she imagines being able to cite (she rarely cites them) are arrived at. As the economics writer Yves Smith pointed out after the crash of 2008:

<blockquote>Even when findings are empirical rather than theoretical, economists can give them more credence than they warrant. People tend to see figures as “hard” outputs: objective, reliable, repeatable, verifiable. But a good deal of economic data, such as unemployment, inflation, and GDP growth, are statistical approximations, rather than “hard” data points.2</blockquote>

Even if Nasar were able to acknowledge that “the facts” she prizes are actually more like statistical approximations, she would still be facing a deeper problem, which is that, in the period immediately after her story ends, economics goes down a rabbit hole in which statistics begin to be significant simply because they are statistics. This problem is characterized with typically merciless wit by the gadfly economist Deirdre McCloskey in her 2002 manifesto, The Secret Sins of Economics:

It is also completely obvious that a “statistically significant” result can be insignificant for any human purpose. When you are trying to explain the rise and fall of the stock market it may be that the fit (so-called: it means how closely the data line up) is very “tight” for some crazy variable, say skirt lengths (for a long while the correlation was actually quite good). But it doesn’t matter: the variable is obviously crazy. Who cares how closely it fits? For a long time in Britain the number of ham radio operator licenses granted annually was very highly correlated with the number of people certified insane.3

Even McCloskey, though, will not take the next step and acknowledge that it’s not only the more fanciful ideas in economics, but also the central ones, that face this problem. Take, for instance, the idea of “wealth,” which Nasar’s economists universally equate with the ability to purchase commodities, especially luxury goods. For support in making this reductive equation, Nasar approvingly cites the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote in his 1942 masterwork Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.” It takes a more than a little habituation to “economic” thinking to realize that this statement conveys the essence of the profession’s idea of “wealth.”

But drawing stockings over the weary legs of a factory girl will no more make her “wealthy” than a thin scrim of romantic subplots and coming-of-age tropes will make the story of modern economics into a romance of the scientific intellect, and Nasar cannot see this. She is unable to acknowledge that economics, far from being an adventure in pure thought or a disinterested “science,” is in fact “scientific” only in the highly specific sense that it is the science of capitalism—or, more accurately, the science of defending capitalism. Through the back door, Nasar admits this thought into her story: the preface describes economics as the search for “a way to improve the lot of the poor without overturning existing society”; and in a description that applies to the vast majority of economists, she notes that Keynes “regarded instability, not inequality, as the great threat to capitalism.” Others are more direct about the managerial function of the field. Robert Heilbroner, whose 1953 book, The Worldly Philosophers, remains one of the most influential histories of economics ever published, wrote in 1995 that “[the] inextricable entanglement of economics with capitalism appears to be the best guarded secret of the profession. Indeed, one suspects that the secret is not even known to all economists.”4 He adds that “the very meaning of ‘economic’ would be unintelligible outside capitalism.”5

This entanglement is lost on Nasar, who writes as though it were economic ideas rather than capitalism transforming the world. Observers cannier than I have noticed this trouble with the book: in his review for The Wall Street Journal, James Grant writes that “economists no more set the world to producing and consuming than baseball statisticians hit home runs.”6 The real geniuses, he suggests, are successful capitalists.

And this is the crux of the problem with Grand Pursuit: the big idea lurking behind “economic genius” is the defense of capitalism, but, brought out in the open, the defense of capitalism tends to sounds heartless. Its sunny side lies in the Marshallian gospel of good times: as long as the wheels are spinning, we can all get wealthier, even if some of us get wealthier than others. Its dark side, which readers can depend on Schumpeter to provide, is that the bad times, when the poor suffer the most, are just the way of the world. Nasar quotes him with sympathy: “Like it or not, [Schumpeter] liked to say, ‘the pattern of boom and bust is the form economic development takes in the era of capitalism.’ ”

That’s an interesting phrase, “the era of capitalism”; it implies it might end. For Schumpeter, nervously gauging the possibility of a socialist East in the 1930s, this was a real concern. For us in 2012, it sounds disingenuous, as though capitalism were just something we’re all trying out while we weigh its pros and cons. But the window for such debates has long since closed, and even if it hadn’t, economics would not be the field to pursue the question of alternatives to capital. It cannot imagine society organized differently than today. No wonder it proved so difficult to write the history of the profession as a romance of the intellect: the paradise of economic theory is simply 2012 with more silk stockings.

In 2006, the economic journalist David Warsh published an enthusiastic history of the field called Knowledge and The Wealth of Nations in which he had the misfortune to focus his zeal precisely on the rise of the mathematics that would come to signify the profession’s complicity in the crash of 2008, a problem Nasar knew well to avoid. But the two books’ admiring portraits share a strong resemblance. For Warsh, until the 1980s and the beginning of the PC revolution, economics really had been the science of scarcity. But, in his story, the rise of the era of the personal computer made economists realize that the source of wealth isn’t stored up in our diminishing natural resources—but in our boundless creativity. In terms very much like the Marshallian ones on which Nasar depends, Warsh’s book tells the story of the rise of what economists have taught us to call “human capital”: the idea that the origin of value (which is seen to have an origin) lies not in material goods per se but in our capacity to recognize the infinite wealth-creating potential in technology. Warsh assigns a much later date to this discovery of abundance—it’s the PC, rather than the railroad or the automobile, that finally rescues us from scarcity—but the storyline is the same.

There is an illuminating difference between Warsh’s book and Nasar’s, though, and it lies in Warsh’s frank account of how the profession policed itself along the road to its math-driven adulthood. Throughout his book, he notes that the worst dismissal that a postwar economist’s work could suffer was that it was “literary.” He describes economists using the word as a cudgel with each other; he uses it himself. For Warsh and his protagonists, the problem with literariness lies in its un-mathematical, and therefore un-scientific nature. But since there is no shortage of commentary among recent economic writers who are willing to say in public that math does not a science make (see, for instance, sympathetic books by Robert Nelson and Jonathan Schlefer), one wonders whether the real force of the epithet is that “literary” work fails to acknowledge the hard truth behind the prosperity-messaging: the truth, à la Schumpeter, that capitalism is not an optional experiment in living, but a compulsory experience of turmoil.

 The word “literary” is particularly revealing in this context because, futile though her attempt may be to make a romantic narrative out of the history of economics, Nasar may have been on to something when she tried. She may have sensed, more thoughtfully than Warsh, that there’s something in economic anti-literariness, and in its pretensions to “science,” that calls out for remedy. But she misunderstands the problem, which is not that economics may once have had a literary soul. The problem is that there’s no resolving the conflict between capitalism and what I hope you won’t mind my calling poetry—if by “poetry” I may be permitted to mean the ability to imagine the world otherwise.

For Nasar, touchingly, economics is “scientific” not because it’s rigorous, but because it’s a product of the Enlightenment: she wants very badly to be able to tell the story of economic thinking as a tale of technical progress, in which economists drive poverty from the earth like medical scientists drove away polio. Certainly, liberal economists would like to think of their profession this way, as a prophecy of plenty; they have chafed at the epithet “the dismal science” since Thomas Carlyle first deployed it against the field’s pro-slavery arguments in 1849.

Carlyle’s coinage was, of course, a clever inversion of the idea of a “gay science”—first known to us in Provençal as gai saber, the art of writing poetry, and later, via Nietzsche, as the wisdom of a “science” that revels in not needing to defend itself by claiming to be one. But nobody who’s paying attention to economic theory could mistake it for a science. Unfortunately for economics, it isn’t poetry either. And as the art of apology for the world as it is, it never will be."]]></description>
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    <title>West Virginia University program cuts: Why students and faculty feel so betrayed.</title>
    <dc:date>2023-08-20T02:53:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/08/west-virginia-university-cuts-programs.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The student population got smaller and smaller while fancy new buildings appeared."


...

"And, predictably, Gee was wrong; WVU’s enrollment has declined. In 2023, it reached a low of 26,000. But the assumption had already been interwoven into the budgetary calculus for WVU, setting it up for failure. Certainly, the budget crisis stems from a mix of factors. Some, like inflation and pandemic-induced dropouts, are unforeseeable and beyond administrators’ control. Other causes, which administrators are handsomely compensated to monitor, include graduation rates, political shifts in West Virginia, rising interest rates, and the end of COVID-related aid. For the administration to claim they have been blindsided by these issues, despite drawing high salaries as public employees to track them and laying out more big money to consultants to provide additional data, is confusing, to say the least.

Yet, perhaps most perplexing, Gee refuses to address what seems to be the root cause of WVU’s budgetary crisis: the rapid withdrawal of state funding from the school. While Gee cited increased costs and population decline as causes of WVU’s financial issues, he notably failed to mention that overall state funding has dramatically decreased in recent years. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy posits that the majority of WVU’s funding issues are due to this decrease. But Gee refused to ask for an increase in state funding, claiming: “I have told this to the governor, I’ve told this to the president of the Senate, to the speaker [of the House of Delegates], that I’m not going to come and ask you for $45 million, because it’s a structural deficit, we have to solve that problem.”

To be clear: Gee is not solving a structural issue. He is not cutting back on administrative excess. (Students are demanding that the WVU administration face an independent audit.) One cannot help but wonder if the cuts are driven by a hostility to liberal arts education couched in the sterile ambiguity of financial considerations. WVU isn’t the first place to experience this particular impact of austerity. Rpk Group, a consulting firm that WVU employed, has previously helped to cut academic programs in Kansas and at institutions like New Jersey City University, preserving and generating revenue primarily for majors and degree programs that serve the tech industry. In the Nation, Lisa M. Corrigan describes what’s happening at WVU as “a trial balloon for doing this elsewhere.”

We can’t help but juxtapose these choices with the fact that West Virginia consistently ranks as one of the poorest U.S. states, with a median household income of $50,884 and a poverty rate of 16.8 percent. Students from West Virginia, those who unquestionably proved to be the most rigorous, inquisitive, and committed peers I met during my undergraduate career, often shared advice for navigating poverty on WVU’s campus with one another. It is not uncommon for students to work jobs at low wages without employer benefits. Many of us struggled to afford to live in Morgantown, one of the state’s most expensive places to live, without federal financial assistance. Nearly everyone closest to me met SNAP eligibility requirements for food stamps.

Meanwhile, Gee’s past appointments at American universities concluded amid controversies he incited by implementing reductions to academic programs. His expense report at OSU revealed the university spent $7.7 million on Gee’s expenses, almost equaling his $8.6 million salary. When he was president at Brown, the university spent $3 million renovating his home. Under his supervision as chancellor at Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt spent $6 million renovating the mansion where Gee lived; Gee also incurred a $700,000 tab for hosting social events.

The contrast between the lifestyle implied by these big numbers and the way the students at WVU struggle does not go unnoticed on campus. WVU maintains the state’s largest health system and is West Virginia’s largest private employer. As a recipient of Medicaid, I supported other students in need of health care access, including helping them apply. During my tenure as senator in the WVU Student Government Association, student leaders frequently shared their frustration with one another regarding Gee’s access to complimentary healthcare through WVU.

Between 2010 and 2023, the WVU administration carried out extensive new construction initiatives and refurbishments aimed at enlarging its campus presence, as Dan Bauman details in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Much of this, including various buildings for the College of Business and Economics, the College of Physical Activities and Sport Sciences, agricultural sciences, and advanced engineering research, was funded by debt and private-public partnerships.

I watched as new buildings sprang up year after year, creating an ominous undertone on campus as more and more students disappeared. My friends and I were especially disturbed by the grandeur of Reynolds Hall, which opened in fall 2022. Reynolds Hall cost $100 million to construct. It was named for alumnus Robert “Bob” Reynolds, who donated $10 million to the project and now sits on the WVU Board of Governors. This is the board that votes on whether to approve these sweeping program cuts. I echo student concerns when I say that public universities’ boards of governors should be democratic bodies, not elite bureaucratic institutions.

West Virginian students and faculty do not choose their programs and specialties in a vacuum. Today, I am a labor historian and am studying the exploitation of Black people by the West Virginia coal industry. My research led me to the discovery of the Mining Extension Service of West Virginia State College, which provided mobile classroom education to rural Black West Virginian communities. This program was established in 1937 and discontinued in 1957 by an act of the state Legislature in the name of integration, abandoning Black West Virginians who had the greatest potential to benefit from education. Almost all records chronicling its existence were transferred to WVU’s library, until they were ordered to be destroyed in 1971 with officials alleging that the documents constituted a fire hazard.

West Virginia’s political elite have had a long-standing interest in denying people like me access to higher education. The loss of academic freedom extends to both student and faculty capacities to speak about the budget cuts. A current student stated, on the condition of anonymity: “Students like me can’t afford to go anywhere else. I can’t get this kind of education anywhere else in the state. The administration is telling me I’m only allowed to learn what they decide not to discontinue.”

A former member of the WVU Student Government Association also anonymously expressed: “I’m a student leader, and I don’t know what I can and can’t say. [The WVU administration] affects my future in West Virginia, and that’s all I’ve ever had.” It is hard for students to read the administration’s recent announcement that “the next item for review in the academic transformation will be the more than 450 organizations that support student life” as anything other than a thinly veiled threat.

These comments speak to the chilling effect WVU’s actions have had on campus conversation about these changes. Amid the possibility of further budget cuts, WVU is also requiring all faculty to pledge to “accept and encourage change that is for the greater good” and “avoid conduct that reflects adversely on the image of the University”—a requirement which the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression describes as “unconstitutionally vague.”"

...

"This, perhaps, is the ugly truth we’re learning through WVU’s budget controversy: Gordon Gee plans to retire in 2025. I have no doubt his grandchildren will benefit from a private education similar to his own, consisting of a thorough liberal arts education with access to subjects now increasingly reserved for the elite, such as math and foreign languages. They will have their choice of careers in the arts, humanities, government, finance, security, diplomacy, business, or tech. Those who decide what is worth learning, what is worth teaching, what counts as a “structural deficit,” will never bear the brunt of their own choices.

West Virginians, trapped in the clutches of economic hardship, find themselves mercilessly shackled to a state most can ill afford to abandon, left to suffer the full weight of the WVU administration’s harrowing decisions. We will learn only subjects aligned with the preferences of the rich, driven by their financial motivations. We will work for the oligarchs for the rest of our lives, just like our parents and our grandparents did for the global coal industry. We will continue to amass inconceivable riches for the nation’s privileged elite until our last breath, and we will find our resting place in unadorned cardboard coffins beneath West Virginia soil.

And those condemned to languish within the husk of WVU, who would excel within a capacious and intellectually coherent university, will only find it harder and harder to access avenues of social and economic mobility."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.sfu.ca/~egan/Difficult-article.html">
    <title>Why education is so difficult and contentious</title>
    <dc:date>2022-09-09T06:36:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.sfu.ca/~egan/Difficult-article.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas--that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.

Introduction 

It is onerous to think about our ideas because they are the things we think with. They serve us like lenses that can greatly effect the image that we see. Mostly we take our lenses for granted and assume we see the world directly. We don't, of course, and it is useful frequently to try to reflect on our fundamental ideas. I will argue that thinking about education during this century has almost entirely involved just three ideas--socialization, Plato's academic idea, and Rousseau's developmental idea. We may see why education is so difficult and contentious if we examine these three ideas and the ways they interact in educational thinking today. The combination of these ideas governs what we do in schools, and what we do to children in the name of education.

Our problems, I will further argue, are due to these three ideas each being fatally flawed and being also incompatible with one other.

I will take them one at a time and try to show that each is fatally flawed, and that in combination they undermine the effectiveness of educational institutions.

The fatal flaws in each of the foundational ideas have been pointed out, one way or another, before -- usually by proponents of one or two of the ideas trying to undercut the value of the third. Educational practice in the twentieth century generally went forward under the assumption that the flaws in each idea would be compensated by the other ideas -- that is, three wrong ideas can make a right idea. Alas, it doesn't work, and hasn't worked, that way.

Socialization is a great idea for hunter-gatherers

...

The academic ideal and asses loaded with books

...

The ideal of development

...

All together now!

...

Conclusion

We have inherited three foundational ideas about education. Each one of them has flaws, at least one flaw in each being fatal to its ambition to represent an educational ideal we might reasonably sign on to. And the worse news is that each of the ideas is incompatible with the other two. These warring ideas hovered around the cradle of the public schools, proffering their gifts. The schools eagerly took them all, and so education remains difficult and contentious."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://twitter.com/darkfinance/status/1532395659180924933">
    <title>[Peter James Hudson] on Twitter: &quot;I find myself in the invidious position of having to come to the defense of the New York Times, a newspaper I stopped reading regularly after 9/11, when they started running lifestyle articles justifying torture.&quot; / Twitt</title>
    <dc:date>2022-06-05T18:03:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://twitter.com/darkfinance/status/1532395659180924933</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I find myself in the invidious position of having to come to the defense of the New York Times, a newspaper I stopped reading regularly after 9/11, when they started running lifestyle articles justifying torture.

They have given cover to every US military adventure since then and of course, their coverage of Haiti has traditionally been horrible, reactionary, and racist.

To give but one example, their Current History supplement published the racist City Banker John H. Allen’s "An Inside View of Revolutions in Haiti" in 1930.

In the article, memorial of the the beginnings of the US occupation of Haiti, Allen gives us a typical view of Haiti's supposed atavism and backwardness and attributes to William Jennings Bryan the unfortunately immortal line, “Dear me, niggers speaking French!”

Yes, of course, their citational practices have been awful. When a NYT reporter wrote history of US interventions and occupations of Haiti, it seemed to borrow heavily from an article on the subject that Jemima Pierre and I had just published in The Black Agenda Report.

Yet while the claims to “newness” of their series on Haiti’s debt are overblown, they are not entirely wrong. Jonathan Katz has outlined what is new, so I won’t rehearse his analysis.

But I would add that what is new, and important, about the series is its stitching together of the debt's history over a period of time fragmented by many historians. The 19th century is rarely connected to the occupation years, the occupation years to the Duvalier era, & so on.

This synethetic but granular approach is important, especially as it allows us to make political-economic claims on and of the present. We make a big deal about following the money, they have done just that.

I was approached by two of the writers about a year ago and had a number of conversations with them. I was more than willing to share what I could as I thought what they were doing was important, precisely because it was for the NYT.

For many years, I’ve published on Citibank and Haiti for The Black Agenda Report, Bloomberg, Haiti Liberte, Radical History Review, Boston Review, the LSE Blog, and in my book, Bankers and Empire.

But all of these publications combined over a decade did not have the audience this times piece has had in less than a week.

If that means that folks who don’t buy academic books or have access to paywalled, academic journals begin to think critically, or differently, or extend their knowledge about, debt, banking, Haiti, imperialism, and Citibank in particular, I’m happy about that.

And if the piece leads readers to other sources, which I think it has, that’s great, too. Moreover, while they used some of my research, they also built on it in some important ways that I did not, which is, I think, all one can hope for when you put your research out there.

(They also consulted with and named Guy Pierre, the Haitian economic historian whose work on banking I have always drawn on, but who rarely if ever get cited by North American anglophone historians.)

Would I have liked to have seen more radical conclusions, more calls for direct actions, a manifesto censuring Citibank, an outline for Haitian reparations from France? Of course.

But it’s the NYT. However, surprisingly, as the NYT they actually provided us with a surprising ballast to support claims more radical than they have made: like, let’s go after Citibank. Or, what about Puerto Rico? Or England and the West Indies.

Yet unfortunately -- but perhaps typically -- it seems that opportunity was quickly lost. The debate over the series became not one of the ethics of debt and reparations or a critique of the role of Citibank et al in US imperialism and Caribbean underdevelopment, but citation.

Historians effectively hijacked a potentially critical conversation to make the story about how they were not part of the story. Why were we, asked the North American historians, not the subject of this story about Haiti?

It's a little disgusting, this response. But what can one expect from an academy that is structured by the same racist and imperial forces that have shaped Haiti's history.

And the proprietary nature of Western knowledge production about Haiti is, at the end of the day, part of the regimes of extraction that have made Haiti "the poorest country in the hemisphere."

For once, the NYTimes, with all it's problems, wrote against those regimes of extraction. It's too bad the historians fucked it up."]]></description>
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    <title>Interviews: Aneil Rallin and Kartika Budhwar - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2021-10-20T15:26:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHuolyg4WZE</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[""Along with scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Susan Griffin, I want to reject the notion that academic scholarly writing has to be pedantic, or that it can't be playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative. There seems to be a distrust in academia, of playfulness and creativity, it's not seen as serious or critical or important. But, I like bringing together lots of different forms, critical writing and anecdotes and notes and analysis and snippets of conversations and fragments and juxtapositions." 

Literary theorist and author, Aneil Rallin, in conversation with SAAG Senior Editor Kartika Budhwar."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://groundings.simplecast.com/episodes/joy-james">
    <title>The Plurality of Abolitionism | Groundings</title>
    <dc:date>2021-01-02T21:37:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://groundings.simplecast.com/episodes/joy-james</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“EPISODE SUMMARY
Dr. Joy James joins the show to discuss the current state of the prison abolition movement, academia co-opting revolutionary organizing, the ‘captive maternal’, and why we must learn from children. 

EPISODE NOTES
Professor, writer, and activist Dr. Joy James joins the show to discuss her work around abolition. More specifically, we look at what Dr. James calls “academic abolitionism”, the role that academics play in halting or co-opting revolutionary organizing, the current state of the prison abolition movement, and why it is revolutionary to start our political organizing with one simple question: what do Black children need?

Felicia Denaud joins as co-host.”

[also here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-plurality-of-abolitionism/id1346441867?i=1000504088837 ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/in-the-wild/12993300">
    <title>In the wild - The Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National</title>
    <dc:date>2020-12-19T09:38:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/in-the-wild/12993300</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“For centuries, “the wild” has been thought of as the place where humans rarely or never go. Our cities are meant to be refuges from the wild, and the policies that govern our lives are intended to impose order on chaos. But climate change is showing us that the wild and the urban environments are closely intertwined – and as Indigenous communities know well, policy is beset with incoherences and cruelties that make it anything but rational. Is it time to rethink “the wild” for the 21st century?

Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention
by Tess Lea, Stanford University Press (2020)
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32384

[”Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly ‘wild people’ of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy: policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political interests and their erratic, irrational effects, and by the less obvious protection of long-term interests in resource extraction and the liberal settler lifestyles this sustains. Wild Policy argues policies are not about undoing the big causes of enduring inequality, and do not ameliorate harms terribly well either—without yielding all hope.

Drawing on efforts across housing and infrastructure, resistant media-making, health, governance and land tenure battles in regional and remote Australia, Wild Policy looks at how the logics of intervention are formulated and what this reveals in answer to the question: why is it all so hard? Lea offers readers a layered, multi-relational approach called policy ecology to probe the related question, ‘what is to be done?’ Lea’s case material will resonate with analysts across the world who deal with infrastructures, policy, technologies, mining, militarization, enduring colonial legacies, and the Anthropocene.”

Planning Wild Cities: Human-Nature Relationships in the Urban Age
by Wendy Steele, Routledge (2020)
https://www.routledge.com/Planning-Wild-Cities-HumanNature-Relationships-in-the-Urban-Age/Steele/p/book/9781138917927

[“This book critically engages with the contemporary challenges and opportunities of wild cities in a climate of change.　

A key focus of the book is exploring the nexus of possibilities for wild cities and the eco-ethical imagination needed to drive sustainable and resilient urban pathways. Many now have serious doubts about the prospects for humanity to live within cities that are socially just and responsive to planetary limits. Is it possible for planning to better serve, protect and nurture our human and non-human worlds? This book argues it is.

Drawing on international literature and Australian case examples, this book explores issues around climate change, colonization, urban (in)security and the rights to the city for both humans and nature. It is within this context that this book focuses on the urgent need to better understand how contemporary cities have changed, and the relational role of planning within it.

Planning Wild Cities will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies, and sustainable development, and for all those invested in re-shaping our ‘wild’ city futures.

Table of Contents
1. Weather of Mass Destruction 
2. Finding Homo Urbanis 
3. Through the Security Glass Darkly
4. Seeking the Good City
5. We are the Wild City
6. Planning in Climate Change
7. Can the Wild City be Tamed?”]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.4.0049?seq=1">
    <title>The Arts and the Liberal Arts at Black Mountain College on JSTOR</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-11T19:16:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.4.0049?seq=1</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[pdf: https://www.are.na/block/9459000 ]

[See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apbl6Iuqkvc ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djbj-kts_04">
    <title>Munir Fasheh on radical approaches to learning - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2020-10-29T18:09:05+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djbj-kts_04</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In this talk, leading Palestinian educationalist Munir Fasheh discusses the theme of radical approaches to learning with political economist Mayssoun Sukarieh (King's College, London).  Drawing on six decades of teaching and experimenting with pedagogical practice in Palestine, Munir Fasheh reflects on some of the limitations of institutional education and explores how alternative methods of learning can be a force for individual and collective freedom."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://proferogelio.blogspot.com/2020/10/mafalda-y-la-escuela.html">
    <title>Mafalda y la escuela.</title>
    <dc:date>2020-10-03T22:36:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://proferogelio.blogspot.com/2020/10/mafalda-y-la-escuela.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["La maestra, señalando un pizarrón repleto de letras, repetía, una y otra vez, “mi mamá me mima”. Después de un momento, Mafalda se acercó a ella para felicitarla por tener una madre excepcional. La niña volvió a su butaca y, desde ahí, con seriedad, le dijo: “y ahora, por favor, enséñenos cosas realmente importantes”, provocando que en el rostro de la docente se dibujara una mirada notoriamente desconcertada. Así como ésta, diversas anécdotas en la vida escolar de la niña invitan, a través de un humor cargado de una aguda mirada social, a repensar los medios y los fines educativos.  
El pasado 30 de septiembre, en su natal provincia de Mendoza, Argentina, murió a los 88 años Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, mejor conocido como Quino, caricaturista creador de Mafalda, la niña de las tiras cómicas que, con su curiosidad infantil, reflexionaba sobre diversos asuntos de la vida humana. Uno de los temas que el humorista argentino tocó en sus producciones fue la educación, transmitiendo mensajes que, si bien simples, destacan por su potencia y vigencia más allá de los años y la geografía.

La obra de Quino dibuja a una escuela alejada de los intereses infantiles, enajenada en la transmisión de conocimientos desarticulados e inertes para los educandos: su sentido es difícil de encontrar por los alumnos, convirtiendo la asistencia a las aulas en una experiencia muchas veces desagradable. La de Mafalda es una escuela que trata de negar a los niños su esencia para convertirlos en consumidores de saberes.  Así pues, cuando la pequeña va camino a su escuela, se da cuenta que ha mojado sus zapatos con lo que inicialmente parecería una gran fuga de agua pero que, posteriormente, descubre eran las lágrimas de todos los niños que, metros adelante, lloraban desconsoladamente al tener que ingresar al plantel. La escena invita a preguntarnos si hacemos lo suficiente por propiciar que nuestros alumnos sean felices al interior de los muros de las escuelas.

Las aventuras de Mafalda frecuentemente la motivaban a reflexionar sobre la pertinencia de los conocimientos que adquiría en la escuela. No sólo eso, también le preocupaba la abrumadora cantidad de aprendizajes que tendría que asimilar: en una ocasión, tomando un listón para medir el perímetro de su propia cabeza, la niña se preguntaba “¿cabrá aquí todo lo que en la escuela me van a meter en la cabeza?”. Tal como lo advertía Mafalda desde hace algunas décadas, el enciclopedismo no se ha ido de las aulas. Qué pregunta tan profunda y vigente de una inocente niña, sobre todo a la luz de un currículo que en tiempos recientes ha demostrado su saturación y fragmentación, que ha propiciado dificultad para afianzar aprendizajes elementales que incluso son difíciles de distinguir entre el complejo pajar de exigencias. El de Mafalda es un llamado a la mesura en cuanto a las expectativas académicas que se ponen sobre los hombros de las escuelas.

La crítica de Quino se centra en muchas ocasiones en aquellos conocimientos intrascendentes desde la perspectiva del niño, que cobran relevancia sólo en la mente de los profesores.  Así pues, Manolito, el compañero de Mafalda, en una ocasión se ve tan satisfecho por haber escrito “América” sin “h”, pero no advierte que en su trabajo escolar dibujó al revés el mapa del continente. ¿Cuántas veces la escuela se preocupa, por ejemplo, porque sus alumnos sepan escribir justicia con “j”, aunque no los haga conscientes de situaciones de despojo y de afectación a sus derechos, ni los prepare para propiciar o exigir dignidad y bienestar colectivo? ¿Cuántas veces la escuela se conforma con conocimientos huecos y descafeinados? ¿Cuántas veces es suficiente, volviendo con Manolito, saber escribir correctamente América, pero no entender América?

Mafalda, con una singular inocencia, también cuestionaba la infraestructura educativa. Un día, cuando su maestra abrió la puerta de su salón para que el grupo saliera al recreo, la niña observó la pintura descarapelada del techo del pórtico, el tubo del desagüe minado, muros erosionados y agrietados. Ante este lamentable paisaje, la pequeña advirtió: “es notable cómo los decoradores del Ministerio de Educación han logrado darle el mismo estilo a toda la escuela”. ¿Cuántos niños, décadas más tarde, se estarán preguntando lo mismo en las escuelas a las que asisten? Qué reflexión tan oportuna de una pequeña, sobre todo cuando para regresar a clases después de la pandemia, uno de las preocupaciones es que no exista agua potable en los planteles. Es pues el mensaje de Mafalda un llamado de atención ante la incongruencia de aquellos que en los discursos ensalzan el poder transformador de la educación, pero simultáneamente permiten la existencia de escuelas en condiciones por demás indignas.

La desconexión entre la escuela y los niños se muestra de manera contundente en una de las tantas tiras de Quino: ante la invitación de la maestra para que aquellos que tuvieran preguntas levantaran la mano, Manolito lo hace de inmediato y, cuando la profesora le cuestiona qué es lo que no ha entendido, responde sin dudar: “desde marzo hasta ahora, ¡nada!”. ¿Será que el alumno no entiende a la escuela o que la escuela no entiende al alumno? El escandaloso problema de abandono escolar de nuestros tiempos hace pensar que es la escuela la que se aleja de las necesidades de sus estudiantes.

Como se observa, el mensaje de Quino sobre la realidad educativa invita a no perder de vista elementos que, si bien parecerían simples, son fundamentales para hacer de la escuela un lugar mejor. Destaca el llamado por permitir que los niños sean niños, que sean felices y que encuentren experiencias de aprendizaje placenteras. Además, hacer de la escuela un lugar digno materialmente. El humorista argentino también llama a replantear el acontecer pedagógico: erradicar el enciclopedismo, para, en lugar de la pesada carga de conocimientos que se busca verter sobre la cabeza de los estudiantes, se incluyan de manera mesurada aprendizajes con sentido para la vida. Las tiras cómicas de Quino son un material valioso para la autocrítica del acontecer educativo: a más de medio siglo que Mafalda asistía a estudiar, ¿cuántas de sus exigencias se habrán cumplido en la escuela de hoy?

 

*Rogelio Javier Alonso Ruiz. Profesor colimense. Director de educación primaria (Esc. Prim. Adolfo López Mateos T.M.) y docente de educación superior (Instituto Superior de Educación Normal del Estado de Colima). Licenciado en Educación Primaria y Maestro en Pedagogía. 

Twitter: @proferoger85"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/higher-ed-in-crisis/">
    <title>Higher Ed in Crisis - The Dig</title>
    <dc:date>2020-09-12T19:36:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/higher-ed-in-crisis/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Dan interviews Tithi Bhattacharya, Daniel Bessner, Simon Torracinta on the manifold crises engulfing higher ed as covid exposes and exacerbates decades of austerity and neoliberal iniquity.

“House of Cards: Can the American university be saved?” by Daniel Bessner https://thenation.com/article/society/gig-academy-meritocracy-trap-universities-crisis

“Extinction Event: Given what is to come, schools of every kind are now at risk” by Simon Torracinta https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/extinction-event/

“After 2020, There’s No Going Back to the Old America” by Dan Denvir in Jacobin https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-imperialism-trump-america "]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-314-anja-kanngieser">
    <title>Son[i]a #314. Anja Kanngieser | RWM Ràdio Web MACBA</title>
    <dc:date>2020-09-06T17:51:24+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-314-anja-kanngieser</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to them tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. 

Anja Kanngieser’s work involves a close, critical, uncomfortable, political listening in which they both explore sound governance and seek to creatively amplify indigenous struggles for social justice in times of climate change. In doing so, they do not for a moment lose sight of the  complexities and contradictions inherent in carrying out field work in the context of white academia, no matter how much anti-colonial theory and how many good intentions go into a project. Listening, affects, orality permission, recompense, exchange, recording, silences, pauses, natural disasters, and an awareness of when it’s time to leave, are thus key tools in their field research. These prerequisites challenge the protocols and formalities of academic work and resist encapsulation in its language. Anja Kanngieser draws on many strategies to resolve these tensions: from a personal and compulsive archive of field recordings and orality, to documentary essays, sound walks, sound maps, sonification, radio pieces, lectures, workshops, podcasting manuals, and academic literature, always attuned to any possible cracks in the academic corset. 

In this podcast, we become the listeners as Anja Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in  sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.

Sounds from Anja Kanngieser's archive. This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Produced in collaboration with Sonic Acts.

00:01 Making imperceptible things and sounds perceptible. What does it mean to bring this into audability? What violences do we do in the translation of these sounds into languages?

01:55 Intro

05:15 I spend a lot of time lying in the ground, listening.

08:55 Sound and geography: how spaces sound.

11:31 Expanded listening: beyond the ear-oriented understanding of listening and the human-anthropocentric perspective.

14:45 Sound and affect: affecting and moving bodies. Weaponisation of sound. Control and security.

17:25 Sonic governance: control of public and private spaces through sound, eavesdropping.


23:35 Understanding what it means to try to do anti-colonial research as a white person, in a region that is literally colonized by the country that you come from.

35:30 Normality in front of a disaster (from personal experience there)

41:34 Being the only white person in a space: naming your position and redistribution of resources.

48:17 Framing a project and respecting what communities decide

57:55 Climate justice

69:34 Creative practice, sound art, radio and academia"]]></description>
<dc:subject>anjakanngieser 2020 sound perception allthesenses listening space sounds eavesdropping geography climatejustice permission orality affects silence silences pauses naturaldisasters ethics fieldrecording soundwalks documentary documentation sonification radio academics academia anthropocene anthropocentrism governance fieldresearch fieldrecordings</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://twitter.com/BuildSoil/status/1292245577925709824">
    <title>BuildSoil by planting one million edible chestnuts on Twitter: &quot;I've been thinking a LOT lately about the pedagogy of garden and ecological education. I'm not going to go that deep right now but i think this is going to be a topic i'll be touching on in a</title>
    <dc:date>2020-08-09T06:50:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://twitter.com/BuildSoil/status/1292245577925709824</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I've been thinking a LOT lately about the pedagogy of garden and ecological education. I'm not going to go that deep right now but i think this is going to be a topic i'll be touching on in an ongoing way soon.

I've had experiences of educational frameworks that are situated within a learning community with open-ended interdisciplinary questions where I have seen that what usually is considered "expert knowledge" built from the ground up through facilitation, observation, & dialog

furthermore this situated community-derived knowledge can draw from traditions, academic or not, but noticeably lacks an ongoing deference to hierarchy because it can reassemble itself to serve unique circumstances.

I think the process of learning to garden, to design, to address climate change all can be generated in this way.

trying to strip away some of the jargon: groups, can be served by people with training who are willing to be students themselves but they MUST create settings where we go out, learn our own stories about our observations and interactions with the world, and return to share them.

something to always keep in mind is that institutions of expertise have the tendency to ensure their own continuation (all systems do this really) and that means they will strongly resist the releasing of their own authority. They will ALWAYS prescribe more of their own domain.

even if they confirm benefit they ultimately will cause dependency. Which means they must overstate the value of their own investment & the necessity of only operating in the domain with the hoops. Passage through the training becomes more important then the process.

ex: i have a higher education in botany. but i have heard scores of people tell me "oh well I've just been into plants for 20 years but I'm no botanist because i never went to school. What do you think happens in botany school?

for only a couple years, you read a few books, you look closely at some plants, you might watch a few lectures, depending on the program you may or may not have direct guidance. But all of that is just a container for going out and looking at plants and talking to others.

now the experts will say "well people can be mislead and i see it all the time with bad identifications online or people spreading plant myths." sure but that's because your profession builds walls rather then advocates for overall botanical literacy for those who want it

i see gardening "experts" making things harder for gardeners. turning having a relationship wplants to be a thing you have to constantly ask others about. Relationship w your surroundings is innate in humans. but deferring to experts is like needing cyrano de bergerac for a date

you'll be awkward, you'll make mistakes, you'll stress out your plants, but please stop following recipes and scripts after you've looked at the basics

what you need is supportive community and culture building, and experts who have rejected that title.

But I want to go beyond “garden education” and propose this is also true for the rebuilding of a stable climate.

so it's time to star talking with groups of friends about your observations and experiments"]]></description>
<dc:subject>2020 experts authority unschooling deschooling elitism education lcproject openstudioproject highered highereducation learning howwlearn community communities informal informallearning practice plants gardens gardening process training dependency prescription continuation jargon observation hierarchy academia academics knowledge understanding dependence</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8f4R9l1Pg8">
    <title>Manu Prakash // Finding Sublime in the Mundane - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2020-07-07T16:16:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8f4R9l1Pg8</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["https://wondercollaborative.org/our-films/

Manu Prakash always yearned to know the why and the how of things. As a boy in India, he spent endless hours playing outside with animals and making flammable artifacts in an abandoned lab in the basement of his home. Having the chance to explore his surroundings with open-ended curiosity, he learned to find the sublime in the mundane. Today, as a world-renowned researcher and inventor at Stanford University, he continues to be inspired by these childhood lessons, and is creating low-cost tools to empower people around the globe to go on their own journey of science and discovery."]]></description>
<dc:subject>manuprakash 2019 unschooling observing science children childhood microscopes india learning howwelearn highschool schooling education discovery experimentation experience academia academics observation understanding creativity curiosity citizenscience microscopy experientiallearning lcproject openstudioproject</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/politics/spadework/">
    <title>Spadework | Issue 34 | n+1</title>
    <dc:date>2019-05-28T23:48:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/politics/spadework/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["By the time I started organizing so much that it felt like a full-time job, it was the spring of 2016, and I had plenty of company. Around the country there were high-profile efforts to organize magazines, fast-food places, and nursing homes. Erstwhile Occupiers became involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign and joined the exploding Democratic Socialists of America, whose members receive shabby business cards proclaiming them an “official socialist organizer.” Today’s organizers — not activists, thank you — make clear that they are not black bloc participants brawling with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of professional revolutionaries, by Lenin’s exhortation that “unless the masses are organized, the proletariat is nothing. Organized — it is everything.” Organizing, in other words, is unembarrassed about power. It recognizes that to wield it you need to persuade untold numbers of people to join a cause, and to begin organizing themselves. Organizing means being in it to win.

But how do you win? Historical materialism holds that crises of capitalism spark revolts, perhaps even revolutions, as witnessed in the eruption of Occupy and Black Lives Matter; uprisings in Spain, Greece, and Egypt; and the British student movement against tuition fees. But there’s no guide for what happens in the long aftermath, as the left has often learned the hard way.

In previous moments of upheaval and promise the left has often turned to Antonio Gramsci, who sought to understand why working-class revolts in Europe following the Russian Revolution had led to fascism. Gramsci concluded that on some level people consent to subservience, even take it for granted, when the order in which they live comes to seem like common sense. Hegemony was subtler than outright coercion, more pervasive, permeating the tempos of daily life.

It was hegemony, Stuart Hall argued in 1983, that was key to understanding the disappointment of his own generation — why Thatcher and the new right had triumphed in remaking common sense after a decade of labor union revolt. Hegemony shaped how people acted when they weren’t thinking about it, what they thought was right and wrong, what they imagined the good life to be. A hegemonic project had to “occupy each and every front” of life, “to insert itself into the pores of the practical consciousness of human beings.” Thatcherism had understood this better than the left. It had “entered the struggle on every single front on which it calculated it could advance itself,” put forth a “theory for every single arena of human life,” from economics to language, morality to culture. The domains the left dismissed as bourgeois were simply the ones where the ruling class was winning. Yet creating hegemony was “difficult work,” Hall reminded us. Never fully settled, “it always has to be won.”"

…

"The Thatcherite project was since then much advanced, and we had internalized its dictates. For our whole lives we had learned to do school very well; in graduate school we learned to exploit ourselves on weekends and vacations before putting ourselves “on the market.” Many of us still believed in meritocracy, despite learning every day how it was failing us. The worse the conditions of academic life became, the harder everyone worked, and the harder it became to contest them. Plus, we were so lucky to be there — at Yale! Compared to so many grad students, we had it good, and surely jobs were waiting on the other side for us, if for anyone. Who were we to complain? Organizing a union of graduate students at Yale seemed to many like an act of unbearable privilege — a bunch of Ivy League self-styled radicals doing worker cosplay."

…

"Realizing that it was not enough for people to like me was revelatory. I had to learn to be more comfortable with antagonism and disagreement, with putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it instead of smiling away tension and doing the work myself. I had to expect more from other people. With other organizers, I role-played the conversations I feared most before having them; afterward, I replayed them over and over in my head. I struggled to be different: the version of myself I wanted to be, someone who could move people and bend at least some tiny corner of the universe.

It’s not easy to be the site of a battle for hegemony. It’s not a beatific Whitmanesque “I contain multitudes”; it’s an often painful struggle among your competing selves for dominance. You have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now. You may not like your own answer. Your inner Thatcherite will raise its voice. You can’t kill it off entirely; you will almost certainly find that it’s a bigger part of you than you thought. But organizing burrows into the pores of your practical consciousness and asks you to choose the part of yourself that wants something other than common sense. It’s unsettling. It can be alienating. And yet I also often felt I was finally reconciling parts of myself I’d tried to keep separate — what I thought, what I said, what I did. To organize, and to be organized, you have to keep in mind Hall’s lesson: there is no true or false consciousness, no true self that organizing discovers or undoes. You too, Hall reminds us, were made by this world you hope to change. The more distant the world you want to live in is from the world that exists, the more deeply you yourself will feel this disjuncture. “I’m not cut out for this,” people often say when they struggle with organizing. No one is: one isn’t born an organizer, but becomes one."

…

"The relationality of organizing is maybe the hardest thing to understand before you’ve done it. But it is the most important. This is not because people are governed by emotions instead of reason, though they sometimes are. It’s because the entire problem of collective action is that it’s rational to act collectively where it’s not to act alone. And you build the collective piece by piece.

Organizing relationships can be utopian: at their best, they offer the feminist dream of intimacy outside of romance or family. In the union, I loved people I did not know very well. In meetings I was often overcome with awe and affection at the courage and wisdom of the people there with me. I came to count many of the people I organized with as my dearest friends. When I needed help, there were always people I could call, people who would always pick up the phone, people I could and did talk to about anything. These relationships often served as a source of care and support in a world with too little of those things. But they were not only friendships, and not only emotional ballast. The people I looked to for support would also push me when it was called for, as I would them; that, I knew, was the deal.

Our relationships forged the practical commitments to one another that held the union together. They made us accountable to each other. They were difficult and multifaceted, often frustrating, intensely vulnerable, and potentially transformative but no less prone than any other relationship to carelessness, hurt, and betrayal, and always a lot of work. We were constantly building them and testing their limits, pushing each other harder the closer we got. They had to bear a lot of weight. In more abject moments, I wondered whether they were anything more than instrumental. More often, though, I wondered what was so menacing about usefulness that it threatened to contaminate all else.

The word comrade, Jodi Dean argues, names a political relationship, not a personal one: you are someone’s comrade not because you like them but because you are on the same side of a struggle. Comrades are not neighbors, citizens, or friends; nor are they any kind of family, though you might call them brother or sister. The comrade has no race, gender, or nation. (As one meme goes: “My favorite gender-neutral pronoun is comrade.”) Comrades are not even unique individuals; they are “multiple, replaceable, fungible.” You can be comrades with millions of people you have never met and never will. Your relationship is ultimately with the political project you have in common. To many noncommunists, Dean readily admits, this instrumentalism is “horrifying”: a confirmation that communism means submitting to the Borg. But the sameness of the comrade is a kind of genuine equality.

Being an organizer is like being a comrade in some ways but different in others. The people you organize alongside may be comrades, but the people you are organizing often aren’t; the point of organizing, after all, is to reach beyond the people who are already on your side and win over as many others as you can. So you can’t assume the people you organize share your values; in fact, you should usually assume they don’t. This means that unlike comrades, organizers aren’t interchangeable. It matters who you are. McAlevey’s theory of the organic leader is that people have to be organized by people they know and trust, not by strangers who claim to have the right ideas. The SNCC looked for “strong people” — not necessarily traditional leaders, but people who were respected and trusted among their peers, on the logic that people would only take risky political action alongside people they trusted. When organizers reflect the people they organize, they win: when women of color organize other women of color, a 2007 paper by Kate Bronfenbrenner and Dorian Warren shows, they win almost 90 percent of elections. This cuts both ways: when women and people of color led the organizing in my department, we often struggled to get white men to take us seriously.

Yet the comradely element of organizing can also open up space for building relationships with people beyond those boundaries. It’s not that class and race and gender disappear, transcended by the cause — but the need to work together to achieve a shared end provides a baseline of commonality that makes it possible to relate across difference and essential to figure out how. That’s why you meet people one-on-one and talk about what you both care about, why you open up to someone you only know as a colleague or share with a stranger things you hardly even discuss with your friends. It’s why I cried about the humiliation of the grad-school pecking order with my organizer when I wouldn’t admit to anyone else that I was struggling. One-on-ones are countercultural: the conversations you have in them challenge your default expectations of who you can relate to, force you outside of the demographic categories that organize most of your life and the scripts you’ve learned for interacting with people accordingly. You build trust with people you have no prior reason to trust not simply by affirming your commitment to the shared project, your devotion to the Borg, but by coming to understand what brought someone else to it."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://daily.jstor.org/what-makes-a-fair-college-admissions-process/">
    <title>What Makes a Fair College Admissions Process? | JSTOR Daily</title>
    <dc:date>2019-03-31T23:07:26+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://daily.jstor.org/what-makes-a-fair-college-admissions-process/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Move Away from Meritocracy
Nadirah Farah Foley

Especially in the wake of the recent news of a coordinated bribery scheme, many people seem to agree our selective college admissions process is broken. There is far less consensus, however, about why we think it’s broken, and what a better, fairer admissions process would look like. Some think that the process would be fair if it were conducted without special considerations for legacy students, development cases, or athletic recruitment. Others go further, focusing on the myriad mundane ways—aside from bribery and donations—that the system allows privileged people to leverage their resources to secure and perpetuate their advantages. But I contend the process is inherently unfair because it is based on meritocratic principles designed to produce unequal outcomes. A truly fair system would reject meritocratic logics and instead operate on the principle that high-quality education is not a reward for the few, but a right of the many.

Our current process, in which applicants are stratified into a hierarchical higher education landscape, takes a meritocratic ideology as its foundational premise. Meritocracy, the term popularized by British sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy, is typically imagined as a system in which all have equal opportunity to compete on a “level playing field” on the basis of “talent” and “ability,” and all are rewarded equitably based on their “merit.” While this system sounds fair at first blush, a meritocratic ideology poses two problems, either of which should be sufficient cause to critically question it, and perhaps abandon it entirely.

First, upholding meritocracy necessarily entails accepting and upholding inequality. In the case of college admissions, we currently have a system in which some schools have more resources, are more prestigious, and are deemed “better” than others, and those schools have limited seats. We try to allocate those seats “fairly,” on the basis of demonstrated past success and evaluations of future potential. It’s far from a perfect system, but we can rationalize it as ideologically consistent with a meritocratic ideal of equal opportunity and reward for individual talent, effort, and ability. But perhaps, rather than focusing on who “deserves” the “best” schooling, our societal commitment should be to making a high-quality education available to all. Such a commitment would require a rejection of the stratification and inequality presupposed by a meritocratic system and lead us to question whether a stratified society—and assignment to places in an unequal education system—could ever be just.

Second, even if one were inclined to find inequality and stratification acceptable, the reality is that we are so far from the ideals of equal opportunity and a level playing field that the unfairness is glaringly obvious. As sociologist Jonathan Mijs argues, opportunities for demonstrating merit are far from equally distributed. In the United States, where racial residential segregation and local control of schools combine to disproportionately relegate nonwhite (especially black) students to underfunded schools, the claim that anything approaching equal opportunity exists is laughable. Our emphasis on standardized tests, which have roots in racist, ableist, eugenicist science, evinces a narrow understanding of what intelligence is or could be. Holistic admissions evaluations, which provide necessary latitude to consider students’ contexts and lived experiences, also provide privileged applicants another opportunity to show off well-filled extracurricular profiles and essays carefully coached and edited by counselors and consultants. In sum, our current admissions process is—top to bottom—built to misrecognize privilege as “merit,” and thus advantage the already advantaged. To say wealthy white applicants are gaming the system belies the fact that they’re really just playing the game—a game in which only they have full access to the equipment. Perhaps the way to fix this is not to try to change the rules, but to stop playing the meritocratic game entirely.

If that seems a drastic proposal, let me try to convince you it’s a necessary one. We could try to work within the current system, striking the policies that are most obviously and egregiously unfair: legacy, donor admissions, early decision, recruitment of athletes in country club sports. While an improvement, this does nothing to address the fact that even with those components stripped out, the process still falls far short of fairness, because our very metrics of merit are skewed toward privilege. We could try to calibrate for disadvantage, but that’s essentially what holistic evaluation tries to do now—and it’s not enough. Meritocracy is an arms race, one in which the privileged are always better equipped.

We could, as many scholars have proposed, move toward a lottery, which would go a long way toward making explicit the role of luck in college admissions. But I’m concerned by the way some thinkers discuss a potential admissions lottery. Proponents of a lottery often suggest that there should be some baseline level of “merit” in order to enter the lottery. Such a formulation of the lottery doesn’t entail a rejection of our metrics of merit, meaning it would likely reproduce existing inequalities. To avoid that, a lottery would need to not use simple random selection, but instead be carefully calibrated to ensure the resulting class is not just representative of the pool (in which wealthy white students are overrepresented), but of graduating high school students. That could be achieved by assigning different weights to students depending on their background, or by using a form of stratified random selection, in which the applicant pool would be divided into smaller pools based on, for example, demographic factors, and a certain number of students would be accepted at random from each pool.

The lottery is an exciting idea, but one likely to run into legal challenges. And beyond that, it doesn’t do enough to address the unfairness inherent in our unequal education system. I think we need to go a step further than asking what constitutes a fair admissions process, and instead ask what constitutes a fair society. We should recognize that our college admissions process is merely holding a mirror up to our society, reflecting how competitive, individualistic, unequal, and unfair the United States is. A truly radical solution would require the reorganization of our entire class structure and the redistribution of resources, thus obviating the need for such a high-stakes college application process.

It seems that we cling to meritocracy as a way of clinging to some hope of a better life in an increasingly unequal world. But rather than investing our hope in a fairer admissions system, I think we should dream bigger, and invest our hope in a more just society—one in which we live in community rather than competition. That might look like taking up Harvard professor Lani Guinier’s call to emphasize “democratic merit,” or it might look like dispensing with merit—and its attendant acceptance of deserved inequality—entirely.

Everyone deserves access to education. A fair admissions system would have that as a core premise and reject ostensibly just, “meritocratic” inequalities."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P97r9Ci5Kg">
    <title>Marxism 101: How Capitalism is Killing Itself with Dr. Richard Wolff - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2018-11-06T03:46:24+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P97r9Ci5Kg</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Despite a concerted effort by the U.S. Empire to snuff out the ideology, a 2016 poll found young Americans have a much more favorable view of socialism than capitalism.

Though he died 133 years ago, the analysis put forward by one of the world’s most influential thinkers, Karl Marx, remains extremely relevant today. The Empire’s recent rigged presidential election has been disrupted by the support of an avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders, by millions of voters. 

To find out why Marx’s popularity has stood the test of time, Abby Martin interviews renowned Marxist economist Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at UMass - Amherst, and visiting professor at the New School in New York. 

Prof. Wolff gives an introduction suited for both beginners and seasoned Marxists, with comprehensive explanations of key tenets of Marxism including dialectical and historical materialism, surplus value, crises of overproduction, capitalism's internal contradictions, and more."]]></description>
<dc:subject>richardwolff karlmarx academia academics capitalism accounting us inequality communism socialism marxism berniesanders labor idealism materialism radicalism philosophy dialecticalmaterialism humans systems change friedrichengels slavery automation credit finance studentdebt poverty unions organization systemschange china russia ussr growth 2016 power democracy collectives collectivism meansofproduction society climatechange environment sustainability rosaluxemburg militaryindustrialcomplex pollution ethics morality immorality ows occupywallstreet politics corruption</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1053692745800269824">
    <title>Carol Black on Twitter: &quot;I'm sorry, but this is delusional. If you don't read the book the first time for rhythm and flow, just *read* it, you haven't read the book. You have dissected it. This is like the vivisection of literature. There is no author ali</title>
    <dc:date>2018-10-21T02:58:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1053692745800269824</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I'm sorry, but this is delusional. If you don't read the book the first time for rhythm and flow, just *read* it, you haven't read the book. You have dissected it. This is like the vivisection of literature. There is no author alive who would want their book read this way."

…

"Look, the reality is that most people do not want to analyze literature. It's a specialty interest, a niche thing. There is absolutely no reason all people should have to do this. By forcing it we just create an aversion to books.

[@SOLEatHome "Would you consider someone re-reading a book they love and noticing things they missed the first time analysis? It at least fits what has come to be known as "close reading""]

Kids who become writers (or filmmakers, or musicians) re-read, re-watch, re-listen to their favorite things repetitively, obsessively. They internalize structure, rhythm, characterization, language, vocabulary, dialogue, intuitively, instinctively.

Close reading & analysis is a separate activity, it requires a whole different stance / attitude toward the book. It can enhance this deeper intuitive understanding or it can shut it down, turn it into something mechanical & disengaged.

I think it's a huge mistake to push this analytical stance on children when they are too young. I was an English major, & I don't think I benefited from it until college. Younger kids  should just find things they love & process them in ways that make sense to them.

This is one of the many delusional things about the way literature is taught in HS. The reality is you have to read a book at the *bare minimum* twice in order to do meaningful analysis. But there is never time for this. So we just club the thing to death on the first reading.

One of the principal things a writer does is to work incredibly hard at refining the way one sentence flows into the next, one chapter springboards off the last. To experience this as a reader you have to immerse yourself, turn off the analytical brain, just *read* the damn book.

To insert analysis into this process on a first reading is like watching a film by pausing every couple of minutes to make notes before continuing. It's fine to do that in later study, but if you do it the first time through you've destroyed everything the filmmaker worked for."

[@irasocol: How a teacher destroys not just reading but culture. Can we let kids experience an author's work without dissection? How I tried to address this in 2012... http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-do-we-read-why-do-we-write.html "]

…

[This was in repsonse to a thread that began with:
https://twitter.com/SOLEatHome/status/1053338882496958465

"This thread details a real school assignment that was asked of a high school student to do while reading a book they hadn't read before. I assure you this is is not something isolated to one school:

Annotate.

Inside front cover: major character with space for...

...character summaries, page reference for key scenes or moments of character development. Evidently these are enormous books.

Inside Back Cover: list of themes, allusions, images, motifs, key scenes, plot line, epiphanies, etc. Add pg. references or notes. List vocab words...

...if there's still room. (big books or small writing?)

Start of each chapter: do a quick summary of the chapter. Title each chapter as soon as you finish it, esp. if the chapters don't have titles.

Top margins: plot notes/words phrases that summarize. Then go back...

...and mark the chapter carefully (more on these marks to come)

Bottom and side margins: interpretive notes, questions, remarks that refer to the meaning of the page (???). Notes to tie in w/ notes on inside back cover

Header: Interpretive notes and symbols to be used...

...underline or highlight key words, phrases, sentences that are important to understanding the work
questions/comments in the margins--your conversation with the text
bracket important ideas/passages
use vertical lines at the margin to emphasize what's been already marked...

...connect ideas with lines or arrows
use numbers in the margin to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument
use a star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin--use a consistent symbol--(presumably to not mix up your doo-dads?) to...

...be used sparingly to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book.
Use ???for sections/ideas you don't understand
circle words you don't know. Define them in the margins (How many margins does a page have?)
A checkmark means "I understand"...

...use !!! when you come across something new, interesting or surprising
And other literary devices (see below)

You may want to mark:
Use and S for Symbols: a symbol is a literal thing that stands for something else which help to discover new layers of thinking...

Use an I for Imagery, which includes words that appeal to the five senses. Imagery is important for understanding an authors message and attitudes
Use an F for Figurative Language like similes, metaphors, etc., which often reveal deeper layers of meaning...

Use a T for Tone, which is the overall mood of the piece. Tone can carry as much meaning as the plot does.
Use a Th for Theme: timeless universal ideas or a message about life, society, etc.
Plot elements (setting, mood, conflict)
Diction (word choice)

The end. ::sighs::"]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwYpaDj913U">
    <title>The University of California: 150 years of being boldly Californian - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2018-05-14T01:09:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwYpaDj913U</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What does it mean to be boldly Californian? For 150 years, the University of California has embodied an imaginative, audacious and pioneering spirit. And our 10 campuses, 5 medical centers and 3 national labs continue to lead the country towards a bright future - for everyone.

Explore our interactive timeline capturing UC's vast history and commemorating its astounding accomplishments, distinguished academics, artists and athletes: https://150.universityofcalifornia.edu "

[See also: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/what-it-means-be-boldly-californian ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-teach-art-kids-mark-rothko">
    <title>How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko</title>
    <dc:date>2018-02-23T02:37:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-teach-art-kids-mark-rothko</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["If you’ve ever seen Mark Rothko’s paintings—large canvases filled with fields of atmospheric color—and thought, “a child could do this,” you’ve paid the Abstract Expressionist a compliment.

Rothko greatly admired children’s art, praising the freshness, authenticity, and emotional intensity of their creations. And he knew children’s art well, working as an art teacher for over 20 years at the Brooklyn Jewish Center. To his students—kindergarteners through 8th graders—Rothko wasn’t an avant-garde visionary or burgeoning art star, he was “Rothkie.” “A big bear of a man, the friendliest, nicest, warmest member of the entire school,” his former student Martin Lukashok once recalled.

Rothko was a thought leader in the field of children’s art education. He published an essay on the topic (“New Training for Future Artists and Art Lovers”) in 1934, which he hoped to follow up with a book. Though he never completed the project, he left behind 49 sheets of notes, known as “The Scribble Book,” which detailed his progressive pedagogy—and from which we’ve taken five lessons that Rothko wanted all art teachers to know.  

Lesson #1: Show your students that art is a universal form of expression, as elemental as speaking or singing

Rothko taught that everyone can make art—even those without innate talent or professional training. According to the painter, art is an essential part of the human experience. And just as kids can quickly pick up stories or songs, they can easily turn their observations and imaginings into art. (Similarly, he believed, taking away a child’s access to artmaking could be as harmful as stunting their ability to learn language.)

For Rothko, art was all about expression—transforming one’s emotions into visual experiences that everyone can understand. And kids do this naturally. “These children have ideas, often fine ones, and they express them vividly and beautifully, so that they make us feel what they feel,” he writes. “Hence their efforts are intrinsically works of art.”

Lesson #2: Beware of suppressing a child’s creativity with academic training

As Rothko saw it, a child’s expressiveness is fragile. When art teachers assign projects with strict parameters or emphasize technical perfection, this natural creativity can quickly turn to conformity. “The fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic,” Rothko explains. “We start with color.”

To protect his students’ creative freedom, Rothko followed a simple teaching method. When children entered his art room, all of their working materials—from brushes to clay—were already set up, ready for them to select and employ in free-form creations. No assignments needed.

“Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey, and presto!” Rothko describes. “Soon their ideas become visible in a clearly intelligent form.” With this flexibility, his students developed their own unique artistic styles, from the detail-oriented to the wildly expressive. And for Rothko, the ability to channel one’s interior world into art was much more valuable than the mastery of academic techniques. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he once wrote.

Lesson #3: Stage exhibitions of your students’ works to encourage their self-confidence

“I was never good at art,” recalled Rothko’s former student Gerald Phillips. “But he…made you feel that you were really producing something important, something good.”

For Rothko, an art teacher’s premier responsibility was to inspire children’s self-confidence. To do this, he organized public exhibitions of his students’ works across New York City, including a show of 150 pieces at the Brooklyn Museum in 1934. And when Rothko had his first solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum a year earlier, he brought his students’ works along with him and exhibited them next to his own.

These exhibitions gave Rothko’s students a newfound excitement about their work, while educating the public about the potential of children’s art. “It is significant,” Rothko writes, “that dozens of artists viewed this exhibition [of student works at the Brooklyn Museum] and were amazed and stirred by it.” Rothko wanted critics to see that fine art only requires emotional intensity to be successful.

Lesson #4: Introduce art history with modern art (not the Old Masters)

When teaching young students about art history, where do you start? For Rothko, the answer was clear: Modernism.

With 20th-century art, children can learn from works that are similar to their own, whether through the paintings of Henri Matisse, Milton Avery, or Pablo Picasso. These iconic artists sought pure, personal forms of visual expression, free from the technical standards of the past. “[Modern art] has not been obscured by style and tradition as that of the old masters,” Rothko explains. “It is therefore particularly useful to us…to serve as an interpreter to establish the relationship between the child and the stream of art.”

But while exposure to modern art can help boost children’s confidence and creativity, it shouldn’t interfere with the development of a unique style. Rothko discouraged his students from mimicking museum works as well as his own painting practice. “Very often the work of the children is simply a primitive rendition of the creative ends of the artist teacher,” he warns. “Therefore it has the appearance of child art, but loses the basic creative outlet for the child himself.”

Lesson #5: Work to cultivate creative thinkers, not professional artists

In addition to fanning students’ creative instincts, great art teachers can help students become more self-aware, empathetic, and collaborative—and this generates better citizens in the long run, Rothko believed. At the Brooklyn Jewish Center, he hardly cared whether his students would go on to pursue careers in the arts. Instead, Rothko focused on cultivating in his students a deep appreciation for artistic expression.

“Most of these children will probably lose their imaginativeness and vivacity as they mature,” he wrote. “But a few will not. And it is hoped that in their cases, the experience of eight years [in my classroom] will not be forgotten and they will continue to find the same beauty about them. As to the others, it is hoped, that their experience will help them to revive their own early artistic pleasures in the work of others.”

And, in turn, Rothko’s own creativity was revived by his students’ unabashed expressiveness. When the artist began teaching, his works were still somewhat figurative, depicting street scenes, landscapes, portraits, and interiors with loose brushwork. Upon retirement, his style had transformed to complete abstraction, taking the form of vivid, color-filled canvases that he hoped would intuitively resonate with adults and children alike.]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-research-barking-up-wrong/">
    <title>How Successful Valedictorians Are After High School | Money</title>
    <dc:date>2017-05-30T03:02:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-research-barking-up-wrong/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What becomes of high school valedictorians? It’s what every parent wishes their teenager to be. Mom says study hard and you’ll do well. And very often Mom is right.

But not always.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed 81 high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives.

But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.

Commenting on the success trajectories of her subjects, Karen Arnold said, “Even though most are strong occupational achievers, the great majority of former high school valedictorians do not appear headed for the very top of adult achievement arenas.” In another interview Arnold said, “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Was it just that these 81 didn’t happen to reach the stratosphere? No. Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.

So why are the number ones in high school so rarely the number ones in real life? There are two reasons. First, schools reward students who consistently do what they are told. Academic grades correlate only loosely with intelligence (standardized tests are better at measuring IQ). Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules.

In an interview, Arnold said, “Essentially, we are rewarding conformity and the willingness to go along with the system.” Many of the valedictorians admitted to not being the smartest kid in class, just the hardest worker. Others said that it was more an issue of giving teachers what they wanted than actually knowing the material better. Most of the subjects in the study were classified as “careerists”: they saw their job as getting good grades, not really as learning.

The second reason is that schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise. The real world, however, does the reverse. Arnold, talking about the valedictorians, said, “They’re extremely well rounded and successful, personally and professionally, but they’ve never been devoted to a single area in which they put all their passion. That is not usually a recipe for eminence.”

If you want to do well in school and you’re passionate about math, you need to stop working on it to make sure you get an A in history too. This generalist approach doesn’t lead to expertise. Yet eventually we almost all go on to careers in which one skill is highly rewarded and other skills aren’t that important.

Ironically, Arnold found that intellectual students who enjoy learning struggle in high school. They have passions they want to focus on, are more interested in achieving mastery, and find the structure of school stifling. Meanwhile, the valedictorians are intensely pragmatic. They follow the rules and prize A’s over skills and deep understanding.

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t. When there’s no clear path to follow, academic high achievers break down. Shawn Achor’s research at Harvard shows that college grades aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice. A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.

Following the rules doesn’t create success; it just eliminates extremes—both good and bad. While this is usually good and all but eliminates downside risk, it also frequently eliminates earthshaking accomplishments. It’s like putting a governor on your engine that stops the car from going over fifty-five; you’re far less likely to get into a lethal crash, but you won’t be setting any land speed records either."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.self-directed.org/tp/free-from-the-start/">
    <title>Free From the Start: One Child’s Progressive Path to Educational Freedom | Alliance for Self-Directed Education</title>
    <dc:date>2017-04-30T19:53:35+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.self-directed.org/tp/free-from-the-start/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about schools, and I wasn’t looking for a book recommendation. But a few months before my son was born, the man that my ex and I chose as our sperm donor/dad suggested a book. Reading it changed everything.

The book was Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School, by Daniel Greenberg, and it introduced me to self-directed learning. Greenberg’s basic principle is that children are compelled to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it. Left to themselves, they do an amazing job of determining not only what they like, but what they need, and they instinctively know the best for them to go about learning it. This concept made immediate sense to me, and I was inspired.

Not only did I buy a whole bunch of copies and start handing them out to friends, but even before my son, Timothy, was born, I decided that I would trust his learning instincts. It wasn’t always easy—there were times I wanted to teach him things I thought he “should” know—but I kept at it. When he was five, for example, he said he wanted to learn to read, so, together we went online and looked for reading workbooks. He chose one, I ordered it, and he used it to teach himself to read. It was effortless.

Before long, it was time to find a school, and I searched for a school with a self-directed philosophy. Unfortunately, there were none nearby, so we found a “progressive” school that was child centered with only 10-12 children per class. The children were sweet, Timothy had a lot of fun, and it was a good choice.

Kindergarten went without a hitch, but in first grade, it became evident that Timothy was far ahead of his classmates in both math and reading. This could have been problematic, but his first grade teacher was excellent; she quickly was aware that he needed more advanced assignments. She kept him very engaged.

Second grade was a different story. Timothy became bored academically, and he craved social time with other children. As the year went on, instead of getting closer with his classmates, there seemed to be less and less group time, and Timothy began coming home from school increasingly upset. Together, we realized that he needed a change.

Meanwhile, a self-directed learning school had finally been founded in Manhattan, and almost as soon as the Manhattan Free School opened its doors, we visited. Despite my personal hopes, Timothy wasn’t that interested, and—remembering to try to let him figure out for himself what was best—I didn’t push. But when second grade started to go so badly, he asked to see the school again. After a day’s visit, he knew he wanted to switch. He has been there for almost five years.

After the first year, however, the school almost didn’t make it. The director and staff had been having both interpersonal and philosophical disagreements, and the school itself had cash flow issues that left it unable to pay staff and overhead. Closure seemed imminent.

The same man who recommended the book that would change my life came to the rescue. He volunteered to run the school for free if the parents would let him transform the school based on a concept he called agile learning. The parent body agreed, and the Agile Learning Center concept was born. The man with the idea was Arthur Brock, Timothy’s dad.

Timothy has flourished. People who don’t understand self-directed learning environments often are concerned about students missing out on certain “important” topics, but Timothy understands math concepts, reads and writes. He grasps and retains a myriad of scientific concepts, and he enjoys memorizing historical facts so much that he knows more about some history than I.

Most parents of self-directed kids will tell stories of their childrens’ experiences and accomplishments that sound amazing against the backdrop of traditional education. But it’s really because self-directed students have the time and support to pursue their interests. Often, they grow the most in areas that are not tested for in traditional education.

Since he was very young, Timothy’s passion has been computers; he started coding when he was around 6 or 7, and now—at age 13—he teaches others, he built a computer last year, and he has a small group of tech support “clients”. He currently is most motivated by spending time learning to be social and collaborative. He is trying hard to understand how to make and keep friends. It hasn’t always been easy, but it is super important to him, and he’s starting to figure it out.

Being in an environment that is not forcing an unnecessary academic curriculum, but rather is giving him the freedom to spend his days interacting with both students and adult facilitators has been perfect.

He has found that he loves facilitating conflict resolution for younger children, he likes collaborating on projects, and he enjoys being a sounding board for his friends when they need someone they can trust.

When I was pregnant almost fourteen years ago, I did some crazy things. I ate food combinations that made no sense, I had fits of glee and anger, and I slept in bursts and starts. Of course, I knew that I was bringing into the world someone who would change my life, but I didn’t know that reading a book would change both of our lives.

Being committed to self-directed education (and parenting) has been both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. I’ve had my moments of concern, but when I take a step back and ask myself if my son (now a teenager) is learning, on his own terms, the skills he will need to be a successful and happy man, the answer is 100% yes."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://matt.haughey.com/15min-in-the-morning-homework-is-bullshit-e90755954448#.oha7esvr5">
    <title>15min in the morning: Homework is Bullshit — Technology Musings</title>
    <dc:date>2016-07-14T17:40:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://matt.haughey.com/15min-in-the-morning-homework-is-bullshit-e90755954448#.oha7esvr5</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["One of the pain points of parenthood is knowing that every choice I have for sending my daughter into school is likely going to grind out much of her enthusiasm for learning, bit by bit, through shitloads of homework.

The phrase you often see is that schools have an “academic focus.” Avoid those like the plague.

All of it is total fucking bullshit.

<blockquote>“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up” — Pablo Picasso</blockquote>

My gut feeling is this started sometime in the late 1990s, as the quest for higher academics was misconstrued by parents and schools into “giving the kids lots of homework will equal mastery in every subject.”

I still remember the news stories from the early 2000s, about gradeschool kids taking home backpacks so filled with books for completing homework that they were developing back troubles. By the mid-2000s my first friends with kids entered schools and talked about two to three hours of nightly homework at the “academic” schools. My own child hit kindergarten around 2010 and I hoped the thirst for mindless drudgery had dissipated but sadly, it did not.

Looking back (and acknowledging it’s through deep shades of nostalgia), I loved my childhood including school. I grew up in Southern California, so weather wasn’t a variable in my life and I could work all day at school and play all evening at home. I didn’t have nightly homework until high school, and it was fucking grand. I rode my bike for hours every night, visited local parks, played in the woods, played Atari 2600 at home, ran on cross country teams, and generally had a good time palling around my neighborhood with friends for hour after mindless hour. In my younger days, I spent as much time behind a desk at home as I was in the community pool, and I think I turned out alright.

College is mostly about the work you do outside the classroom lectures, so homework is required and expected, but we’ve lost sight of high school serving as college prep, which is a good time to teach study skills and introduce homework to students. But asking 8 year olds to spend two hours every night doing repetitive math worksheets? What the fuck is the point of that?

Kids today only have time for one or two sporadic hobbies. I know more than one twelve year old that can’t play guitar because of homework loads. Sports require huge blocks of time that are hard to work into after school schedules, despite our pushes to get kids moving and be less sedentary.

We’ve spent the last 15 years pushing kids through punishing homework regimens which would mean those young kids of the early 2000s are entering college now. Did we raise an entire generation of math super students crushing standards at levels never seen before? Or did we pulverize most kids’ curiosity and love for learning along the way? A high homework load seems like we’re preparing kids for boring, repetitive behavior, like those found in many factory jobs. Will there be any factory jobs ten years from now?

Kids need downtime. Play is important. Kids can love learning, pursue any hobby they like, and fill idle time with their imagination. These are the things I fear we lose every time we ask children to spend hours every night on what basically amounts to busywork."]]></description>
<dc:subject>homework sfsh schools matthaughey 2016 parenting children hobbies academics education learning busywork play downtime howwelearn howwelern curiosity loveoflearning deschooling unschooling</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://medium.com/life-learning/school-is-a-16-year-internship-for-professors-b9e584464eb6#.25mkdz3d6">
    <title>School is a 16-Year Internship for Professors — Life Learning — Medium</title>
    <dc:date>2016-05-01T01:15:05+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://medium.com/life-learning/school-is-a-16-year-internship-for-professors-b9e584464eb6#.25mkdz3d6</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The habits, ideas, processes, and perhaps most importantly, incentives of the environment you want to be a part of will teach you vastly more than consciously studied facts.

Julian Jaynes, in his seminal book on consciousness, cites a study where students were told to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week, red outfits were everywhere in the school. The girls weren’t consciously responding to factual knowledge but internalizing the compliments and altering their behavior subconsciously. Jaynes argues that learning signals, skills, and even reasoning are not, in fact, conscious processes. In fact, after taking in the basic structure, being conscious of learning gets in the way and slows the process.

This means the subconscious queues and incentives of the environment are a more powerful force in determing what you learn than whatever conscious topic is presented. What you pickup on and get rewarded for and see others doing to succeed or fail shapes how your brain transforms and adapts to succeed.

This has some pretty interesting implications for schooling, from kindergarten through college.

The school setting, whatever subject is being taught consciously, is a single-file line-standing, speak-when-given-permission, the “expert” knows all right answers, zero-sum, obedience training program. The clear “winners” in the school setting are the authority figures and those who best please them. The academics and kids who do things that academics like.

In other words, school is a 16-year internship for being a professor.

You’re immersed in the daily habits, worldviews, problems solving methods, attitudes, and incentives of professors. What you learn from shadowing academics isn’t whatever topic they might be teaching as much as how to be like them.

This is, of course, the ideal program if you want to be an academic. I have many wonderful professor friends and I’ve met some young people who want to be professors. The system was built for them, and it’s a good fit. They should stick with it happily.

The problem is that most people have no idea that they are in an extended academic internship. Most don’t want to be professors or they simply have no idea whether they do or not because they’ve never been around anything else.

You can’t discover what you might enjoy or be good at from academic books and practictioners telling you about it. You need to experiment and experience it. You need to be around people doing those things. You need to apprentice with people other than just academics to learn what people other than academics do and how to succeed in that world.

Get out of the classroom and try real world stuff to find what you enjoy and are good at and immerse yourself in the subconscious learning of how to succeed in whatever environments you explore. A few courses or books or a major can’t give you that knowledge while your subconscious is fully occupied with learning how to be a professor.

You might not be learning much from the conscious process of schooling (hence forgetting everything after the test), but you’re definitely learning something in school. The question is, do you want to learn that something? Will it help you, or set you back in a dynamic marketplace that cares only for value creation, not academic process?"]]></description>
<dc:subject>schools schooling academia academics 2016 isaacmorehouse learning howwelearn</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://cryingacademics.tumblr.com/">
    <title>CRYING ACADEMICS</title>
    <dc:date>2016-03-29T06:30:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://cryingacademics.tumblr.com/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><dc:subject>tumblrs humor academics academia</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://randallszott.org/2016/02/22/the-electric-prod-of-professionalization/">
    <title>The electric prod of professionalization | Lebenskünstler</title>
    <dc:date>2016-02-29T08:00:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://randallszott.org/2016/02/22/the-electric-prod-of-professionalization/</link>
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<item rdf:about="http://miriamsweeney.net/2012/06/20/readforgradschool/">
    <title>How to Read for Grad School | Miriam E. Sweeney</title>
    <dc:date>2016-02-15T01:54:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://miriamsweeney.net/2012/06/20/readforgradschool/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In graduate school the work load increases and students will find that they are expected to master two to three times the material that they were used to as an undergraduate.  This can be intimidating to the point of overwhelming a student into paralysis.  Following these tips should help you master your readings instead of allowing the readings to master you!

1.     Read Strategically, Not Linearly. Reading for graduate school is different than reading a book for pleasure.  When we read for pleasure we often start at the beginning of the book, reading carefully in a linear fashion.  If you do this with your academic material, it will take twice as long and it is likely you won’t retain the right kind of information from the reading.  Instead of reading linearly, read strategically.  As an academic reader your job is to mine the text you are reading for information.  Instead of cruising along the narrative, you need to dive in, find the information you need, and move along to the next stack of readings for class.

If you are reading a book this means you should look over the table of contents, then read the entire introduction carefully.  In academic books, the introduction is where the author states all of their main points, the framework they will use, and an outline of what information will be covered in each chapter.  Next, look over the last chapter.  This is the conclusion, which will restate the main arguments of the author and will often contextualize these arguments in a broader context, suggest next steps, or speculate solutions or alternatives.  From here you can go to the parts of the book you want deeper knowledge about.  Individual chapters will be laid out similarly to the book structure with an introduction, and middle and the conclusion.  Skimming the beginning and end of the chapter will give you the main points, then you can gather evidence by browsing the middle parts of the chapter.  Remember, you are not really expected to read every single word of the book; your mandate is to understand the author’s main ideas, arguments, and be able to articulate why this discussion matters.

If you are reading a journal article, start by checking the name of the journal that published the article.  This will key you in to the scope and boundaries that the article is working within.  Next, carefully read the title and the abstract of the piece.  A good abstract should clearly explain the main argument of the article, the kind of evidence the author uses, and a succinct conclusion, or what the author found out.  Armed with this information, look over the introduction to see how the author is framing their work, paying attention to the citations they use.  This tells you who the author is trying to be in dialogue with. Next, flip to the discussion section.  Sometimes this is separate than the conclusion, sometimes not, depending on the disciplinary standards of the author and journal.  Read the discussion and conclusion carefully.  These sections will explain the author’s main arguments and the “why you should care” piece. Now you can go back through the article armed with the knowledge of where the author is leading you and browse over methods and results sections.  Pay attention particularly to images and data visualizations.  Note how these things relate to or support the discussion and conclusion sections you read.

Reading strategically instead of linearly will make you a more efficient and effective academic reader.  Getting familiar with how different formats of writing are structured will give you the confidence and control to find the information you need in them more efficiently.

2.    Take Notes! As you are reading strategically, you absolutely must take notes simultaneously. Otherwise it is guaranteed you will not remember the kinds of details you need to recall in class, in your paper, in your own research down the road. Develop a system of your own whether it is sticking a post-it note in the book and jotting something down, or opening up RefWorks or Zotero, or Word and throwing some notes down as you read.  Whatever you do, remember that future you will have NO IDEA what present you is thinking, no matter how brilliant a thought it is.  Be specific, include detailed citations and pages numbers for direct quotes so you don’t have to chase them later.

If you are reading as preparation for a class, make sure you are also jotting down 3-5 questions, observations, or provocations that you can use in class for participation.  In grad school, everyone is expected to participate on a high level, so have something to say ahead of time to avoid the high-blood pressure that comes from your professor’s cold, hard stare.

3.    Be purposeful.  Being purposeful in your readings means that as you are moving strategically through the text you are also being deliberate about what you want to glean from the reading, what are meant to glean, and how this fits with the other readings and conversations you have had in class, along with your own life experiences.  Ask yourself, “What is the author trying to say? What is motivating her exploration of this topic? What does this research contribute? What academic conversations is the author trying to align with? What are the main arguments of this piece? How does this relate to my other assigned readings?” Going in with these questions in mind will focus you as you read and aid you in pulling out the most relevant information.

4.    A Critical Perspective.  Lastly, applying a critical perspective in your reading is helpful for situating a reading in broader contexts.  Contrary to how it sounds, being critical does not simply mean being negative or criticizing wantonly.    Critical perspectives are those that trace and name flows of power:  Who has power and who does not?  Who benefits from particular social arrangements, and whom do they marginalize?  Critical perspectives also question assumptions and values that are implicit in arguments: What values are underlying this work? What experiences and perspectives do these values privilege?  How might centering different values or experiences re-frame the argument or conversation? Asking questions like this will help you have deeper conversations about your readings, and really, isn’t that the whole point of graduate school?

Time to make your reading work for you- good luck!"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.vice.com/read/student-teaching-0000748-v22n9">
    <title>After a String of Suicides, Students in Palo Alto Are Demanding a Part in Reforming Their School's Culture | VICE | United States</title>
    <dc:date>2015-12-14T04:55:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.vice.com/read/student-teaching-0000748-v22n9</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["There are a few encouraging signs that the community is coming around to recognizing and ultimately fixing these flaws. In March, the school board voted to allocate $250,000 of the district's budget to hiring two more full-time therapists for the high schools, which will relieve the strained workload of the counseling staff. At Gunn, students took the matter of improving mental health into their own hands, organizing the Student Wellness Committee with the help of Herrmann. It organically grew out of their discussions on what needed to change at the school after Cameron Lee's death. One of the things they set up was a referral box, which allowed students to anonymously refer their friends to counseling. "A startling number of people have told me that they wouldn't talk to a counselor if they had a friend who was in trouble," Gunn sophomore class president Chloe Chang Sorensen explained.

The committee also launched a mental health awareness campaign to educate students about causes, symptoms, and resources available to them. And finally, the committee collaborated with an organization called Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES!) to implement a mindfulness curriculum in physical education classes starting in the fall. These students were not interested in waiting for the adults to act. They made themselves into agents of change."

…

"Students were not willing to passively accept the superintendent's decision. Two Gunn juniors, Ben Lee and Nina Shirole, co-founded the Palo Alto Student Union to advocate for and promote the student voice. They put up posters with the words SUPPORT STUDENT CHOICE, SUPPORT STUDENT VOICE all over Gunn. And many teachers supported their efforts. With the superintendent sitting behind him on stage, retiring Gunn mathematics teacher Peter Herreshoff said in a speech at graduation, "Your class this year witnessed the imposition of an unjust policy regarding zero period. Although it didn't affect you directly, you united in solidarity with future graduating classes to oppose that policy. Although you didn't win, yet, you learned about taking agency over your lives and working collectively to do that." The student union considered holding a student walkout over the zero-period change but ultimately decided to host a sit-in at a school-board meeting.

A few weeks after the decision was announced, dozens of students attended a Tuesday-evening board meeting. This was the meeting at which zero period was originally meant to be discussed, but McGee had unexpectedly made a unilateral decision beforehand. One after another, students came up to the podium and blasted the superintendent. Gunn senior and school-board student representative Rose Weinmann called the move "misguided paternalism." What students were most peeved about was that the zero-period decision was orchestrated in a top-down manner without their consultation. Ben Lee told me later, "We were blatantly disregarded by the community. It was good to show that we weren't lesser beings. We were going to fight for our right to be heard." He believes that the decision was rashly made to "appease a few people." Shirole also thinks it's a contradiction that physical education and broadcasting classes during zero period will remain when the underlying intention of the change was to help all students get more sleep. And she says the research on later start times does not "account for the element of choice," as zero period is optional."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/18/vice-editor-explains-how-art-and-journalism-can-intersect-reportage-art">
    <title>YaleNews | VICE editor explains how art and journalism can intersect in ‘reportage art’</title>
    <dc:date>2015-12-02T06:01:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://news.yale.edu/2015/11/18/vice-editor-explains-how-art-and-journalism-can-intersect-reportage-art</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Crabapple spoke about her early years, shared some insights she gained through her art and journalism, and talked about the future of journalism.

“I was a terrible student. I didn’t get into a single academic college. … It’s probably not surprising that I never worked an office job [too],” remarked Crabapple. “Instead of doing my tests, I filled the blank spaces where the answers belonged with pictures of Kurt Cobain, my imaginary boyfriend.”

Crabapple then was sent to “a school shrink” who diagnosed her with oppositional defiant disorder, which she described as the “clinical basis of being a journalist.”

The first lesson Crabapple learned “by being a bad kid, being a failure early on,” she said, was that “trouble is the best school for an artist and a journalist.”

“Being the bad kid teaches you to work from an ‘internal compulsion’ that propels you to do something you want to or need to do — you don’t do something for external validation or an external reward.”

Crabapple’s “internal compulsion” propelled her to draw. “Through it all, I drew. I was terrible for the first 20 years that I drew pictures, but I kept doing it because I was obsessed. I drew … and even if I was locked up in a room, I would draw,” she said."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/">
    <title>The Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools - The Atlantic</title>
    <dc:date>2015-11-22T00:22:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In the late 1990s, when she was an assistant professor in Yale’s psychiatry department, Suniya Luthar was doing research at an inner-city school in Connecticut. She wanted to know whether misbehavior correlated more with poverty or with a stage of adolescence. She needed a second school to use as a comparison. An undergraduate student she worked with had connections at a school in a Connecticut suburb that was more upscale, and Luthar got permission to distribute her surveys there. The results were not what she expected. In the inner-city school, 86 percent of students received free or reduced-price lunches; in the suburban school, 1 percent did. Yet in the richer school, the proportion of kids who smoked, drank, or used hard drugs was significantly higher—as was the rate of serious anxiety and depression. This anomaly started Luthar down a career-long track studying the vulnerabilities of students within what she calls “a culture of affluence.” I called Luthar, now a professor at Arizona State University, in March to find out whether the anxiety she was recording amounted to familiar teenage angst or something more serious. As it happened, she was about to fly to Palo Alto. A meeting on adolescents and suicide, hosted by Stanford’s psychiatry department, had been organized in a hurry. Earlier that month a fifth kid had killed himself, Byron Zhu, a 15-year-old sophomore at Palo Alto High. He had walked in front of an early-morning northbound train. The police were still at the scene when kids were biking to school that morning; the principal, who had rushed over, asked the police to put up a special barrier so they wouldn’t see.

Luthar had been invited to give a presentation on affluent youth as a largely unrecognized at-risk group. Convincing people that rich kids are at high risk isn’t easy, she said. But she has amassed the most thorough data set we have on that group, from schools scattered across the country. Luthar’s data come from school districts where families have median incomes of more than $200,000, and private schools where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. Her research suggests a U‑shaped curve in pathologies among children, by class. At each extreme—poor and rich—kids are showing unusually high rates of dysfunction. On the surface, the rich kids seem to be thriving. They have cars, nice clothes, good grades, easy access to health care, and, on paper, excellent prospects. But many of them are not navigating adolescence successfully.

The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm. They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

“We assume that because [these kids] have money and a good education, everything is fine,” Luthar says. And in the long run, money and education will protect them. But in adolescence, the dangers posed by the culture of affluence can be “quite potent.” That doesn’t mean rich kids are more likely to kill themselves. Studies on youth suicide have generally turned up few differences among social classes. But it does mean many are deeply suffering.

One of the two major causes of distress, Luthar found, was the “pressure to excel at multiple academic and extracurricular pursuits.” In one study, for example, kids were asked to choose and rank their parents’ top five values, from a list of 10. Half of the values were related to achievement (“attend a good college,” “make a lot of money,” “excel academically”), and the other half to well-being and personal character (“are honest,” “are kind to others,” “are generally happy with yourself and your life”). When the kids chose a greater number of achievement-related goals, that usually correlated with personal troubles, Luthar said.

The kids were also asked how much they identified with sentences such as “The fewer mistakes I make, the more people will like me” and “If someone does a task at work/school better than I, then I feel like I failed the whole task.” From their answers, Luthar constructed a profile of elite American adolescents whose self-worth is tied to their achievements and who see themselves as catastrophically flawed if they don’t meet the highest standards of success. Because a certain kind of success seems well within reach, they feel they have to attain it at all costs—a phenomenon she refers to as “I can, therefore I must.” Middle-class kids, she told me, generally do not live with the expectation that they should go to Stanford or earn $200,000 a year. “If I’ve never been to the moon,” she said of middle-class families, “why would I expect my kids to go there?” The yardstick for the children of the meritocratic elite is different, and it can intimidate as much as it can empower.

The second major cause of distress that Luthar identified was perhaps more surprising: Affluent kids felt remarkably isolated from their parents. When I wrote “The Overprotected Kid” for this magazine last year, I assumed that the brand of helicopter parenting I described as typical of my cohort involved a trade-off. Parents might be sheltering their kids, but at least they were more emotionally in tune with them than, say, the parents of the ’70s divorce generation were with their children. Luthar disabused me of this comforting narrative. The kids in the affluent communities she studied felt their parents to be no more available to them, either emotionally or physically, than the kids in severe poverty did.

Some of the measures Luthar used were objective: Did the family eat dinner together, or hang out in the evenings? Here, she discovered that some busy parents would leave adolescents alone in the afternoon and evening and often weren’t home at all during those hours. She also measured the kids’ feelings of closeness—“My father understands me,” or “My mother knows when I am upset.” Here again Luthar saw a fissure: Children had the sense that their parents monitored their activities and cared deeply about how they were spending their time, but that didn’t translate into feeling close. Many children felt they were being prodded toward very specific goals and behaviors by parental cues, some subtle, some less so. Their parents glowed warmly when they did well in school or sports but seemed let down when they didn’t. Often the kids learned to hide their failures—real or imagined—for fear of disappointing their parents. Other research has shown that a feeling of closeness to parents was inversely linked to household income, meaning that the most-affluent kids felt the most alienated. “It’s mind-boggling,” Luthar says. “We are comparing them to a group of parents we think of as being in dire straits—largely single mothers on welfare whose circumstances are assumed to affect the quality of their parenting. And yet kids from these affluent families, mostly Caucasian, say they feel no closer to their parents than the poor kids do.”

Luthar’s research was incorporated into the 2006 best seller The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine, a child psychologist who practices in the Bay Area. She reported that the adolescents she was encountering would “complain bitterly of being too pressured, misunderstood, anxious, angry, sad, and empty.” In the past couple of years, other best sellers have sounded a similar note. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor who contributes to this magazine, argues in Excellent Sheep that elite education “manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.” The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania warns of the dangers of insisting that admission to an elite college is necessary for a successful life.

After leaving Stanford, Julie Lythcott-Haims wrote a book, published in June, called How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. In it, she confesses that as a dean, she had interacted with students who relied on their parents “in ways that felt, simply, off” and who seemed “existentially impotent.” She detailed the growing mental-health crisis at colleges, and described the brilliant, accomplished students who “would sit on my couch holding their fragile, brittle parts together, resigned to the fact that this outwardly successful situation was their miserable life.”

I’ve read all these books, and so have many of my friends. We have kids this age, or about to be this age, and yet somehow we can’t absorb the message. I didn’t, really, until I spent some time in Palo Alto.

Since Levine wrote The Price of Privilege, she’s watched the stress in the Bay Area and in affluent communities all over the country become more pervasive and more acute. What disturbs her most is that the teenagers she sees no longer rebel. A decade ago, she used to referee family fights in her office, she told me, where the teens would tell their parents, “This is bad for me! I’m not doing this.” Now, she reports, the teenagers have no sense of agency. They still complain bitterly about all the same things, but they feel they have no choice. Many have also fallen prey to what Levine calls a “mass delusion” that there is but one path to a successful life, and that it is very narrow. Adolescents no longer typically identify parents or peers as the greatest source of their stress, Levine says. They point to school. But that itself may suggest a submission of sorts—the unquestioned adoption of parental norms.

In March, after spending two days among Palo Alto’s parents and civic leaders, Luthar came to see the community, still in shock over the suicides, as hovering somewhere between fear and denial. The meeting she attended with select parents, scholars, mental-health professionals, and community leaders was academically rigorous and yielded many important insights. But it was “eerie” in its almost complete lack of feeling, she later said. What she sensed from the group was a lot of “grief and terror and resentment,” but all under the surface. “There are a lot of very hard truths that are just not being spoken.”"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmRFYAnaQNg">
    <title>Professor Debbie Chachra on Olin's unique culture - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2015-07-14T18:32:35+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmRFYAnaQNg</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Debbie Chachra, associate professor at Olin College, describes the unique learning environment at Olin."]]></description>
<dc:subject>debchachra 2015 olincollege engineering education lcproject tcsnmy openstudioproject design students engagement projectbasedlearning progressive culture teaching learning howweteach howwelearn experience governance academics academia designthinking grades grading empowerment autonomy freedom mentoring mentors motivation scaffolding self-directed self-directedlearning programs responsibility decisionmaking</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/can-we-rebuild-social-capital.html">
    <title>CURMUDGUCATION: Can We Rebuild Social Capital?</title>
    <dc:date>2015-06-11T07:14:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/can-we-rebuild-social-capital.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Can We Rebuild Social Capital?
I often disagree with his answers, but Mike Petrilli frequently asks excellent questions.

In the recent National Review, Petrilli is spinning off Robert Putnam's latest book about America's children and discussing the idea of social capital. The problem is simple, and clear:"the fundamental reality of life for many children growing up in poverty in America today is the extremely low level of 'social capital' of their families, communities, and schools."

The problem with any deliberate attempt to build social capital, as Petrilli correctly notes, is that nobody has any idea how to do it. Petrilli accuses Putnam of suggesting that we throw money at the problem. Well, I haven't read the book yet (it's on the summer reading list), so I can't judge whether Petrilli's summation is correct or not.

But Petrilli himself offers three strategies for addressing the issue. And as is often the case, while he raises some interesting and worthwhile questions, his line of inquiry is derailed by his mission of selling charters and choice.
1. Invite poor children into schools with social capital to spare. 

No, I don't think so. Social capital is about feeling supported, connected, and at home in your own community. You cannot feel at home in your own community by going to somebody else's community.

Schools contribute to social capital by belonging to the community, by being an outgrowth of the community which has significant role in running those schools. Inviting students into schools that are not in their community, that do not belong to those students and their families-- I don't think that gets you anything. Social capital finds expression in schools through things like evening gatherings at the school by people from the community. It depends on students and families who are tied through many, many links-- neighbors, families, friends. It depends on things as simple as a student who helps another student on homework by just stopping over at the house for a few minutes. These are things that don't happen when the students attend the same school, but live a huge distance apart.

Making a new student from another community a co-owner in a school is extraordinarily different. But anything less leaves the new student as simply a guest, and guests don't get to use the social capital of a community.

2. Build on the social capital that does exist in poor communities. 

The basic idea here is solid. Putrnam's grim picture aside, poor communities still have institutions and groups that provide social capital, connectedness, support. I agree with Petrilli here, at least for about one paragraph. Then a promising idea veers off into shilling for charters and choice. 

Education reformers should look for ways to nurture existing social capital and help it grow. Community-based charter schools are one way; so (again) is private-school choice.

Churches, service organizations (in my neck of the woods, think volunteer fire departments), and social groups (think Elks) are all community-based groups that add to social capital. Unfortunately, as Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, those sorts of groups are all in trouble. 
 
One of the fundamental problems of social capital and these groups is a steady dispersing of the people in the community. People spend too much time spreading out to come together. Spreading them out more, so that their children are all in different schools and no longer know each other-- I don't see how that helps. Social capital is about connection.
 
3. Build social capital by creating new schools.

Exactly where does a high-poverty community come up with the money to build a new school? The answer, he acknowledges, is for charter operators to come in from outside and create a new school from scratch. He also acknowledges that it's an "open question" whether such schools create any new social capital. 
 
I would also ask if it's really more inexpensive and efficient to spend the resources needed to start a new school from scratch than it is to invest those resources in the school that already exists. Particularly since with few exceptions, that new school is created to accommodate only some of the students in the community. If the community ends up financing two separate but unequal schools, that's not a financial improvement, and it is not creating social capital.

Do we actually care?

In the midst of these three points, Petrilli posits that growing social capital and growing academic achievement (aka test scores) are two different goals that are not always compatible, and we should not sacrifice test scores on the altar of social capital.

On this point I think Petrilli is dead wrong. There is not a lick of evidence that high test scores are connected to later success in life. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that social capital does, in fact, have a bearing on later success in life. High test scores are not a useful measure of anything, and they are not a worthwhile goal for schools or communities. 
 
Petrilli's is doubtful that lefty solutions that involve trying to fix poverty by giving poor people money are likely to help, and that many social services simply deliver some basic services without building social capital, and in this, I think he might have a point.

And it occurs to me, reading Petrilli's piece, that I live in a place that actually has a good history of social capital, both in the building and the losing. I'm going to be posting about that in the days ahead because I think social capital conversation is one worth having, and definitely one worth having as more than a way to spin charters and choice. Sorry to leave you with a "to be continued..." but school is ending and I've got time on my hands."]]></description>
<dc:subject>socialcapital mikepetrilli petergreene community communities busing education schools testscores testing poverty cityheights libraries reccenters connectedness support edreform reform robertputnam society funding neighborhoods guests connection academics inequality charterschools</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201505/early-academic-training-produces-long-term-harm">
    <title>Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm | Psychology Today</title>
    <dc:date>2015-05-14T06:43:16+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201505/early-academic-training-produces-long-term-harm</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Research reveals negative effects of academic preschools and kindergartens."

…

"A Study in Germany that Changed Educational Policy There

For example, in the 1970s, the German government sponsored a large-scale comparison in which the graduates of 50 play-based kindergartens were compared, over time, with the graduates of 50 academic direct-instruction-based kindergartens.[2]  Despite the initial academic gains of direct instruction, by grade four the children from the direct-instruction kindergartens performed significantly worse than those from the play-based kindergartens on every measure that was used.  In particular, they were less advanced in reading and mathematics and less well adjusted socially and emotionally. At the time of the study, Germany was gradually making a switch from traditional play-based kindergartens to academic ones.  At least partly as a result of the study, Germany reversed that trend; they went back to play-based kindergartens.  Apparently, German educational authorities, at least at that time, unlike American authorities today, actually paid attention to educational research and used it to inform educational practice.

A Large-Scale Study of Children from Poverty in the United States

Similar studies in the United States have produced comparable results.  One study, directed by Rebecca Marcon, focused on mostly African American children from high-poverty families.[3]  As expected, she found—in her sample of 343 students--that those who attended preschools centered on academic training showed initial academic advantages over those who attended play-based preschools; but, by the end of fourth grade, these initial advantages were reversed:  The children from the play-based preschools were now performing better, getting significantly higher school grades, than were those from the academic preschools, This study included no assessment of social and emotional development.

An Experiment in Which Children from Poverty Were Followed up to Age 23

In a well-controlled experiment, begun by David Weikart and his colleagues in 1967, sixty eight high-poverty children living in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were assigned to one of three types of nursery schools:  Traditional (play-based), High/Scope (which was like the traditional but involved more adult guidance), and Direct Instruction (where the focus was on teaching reading, writing, and math, using worksheets and tests). The assignment was done in a semi-random way, designed to ensure that the three groups were initially matched on all available measures.  In addition to the daily preschool experiences, the experiment also included a home visit every two weeks, aimed at instructing parents in how to help their children.  These visits focused on the same sorts of methods as did the preschool classrooms.  Thus, home visits from the Traditional classrooms focused on the value of play and socialization while those from the Direct-Instruction classrooms focused on academic skills, worksheets, and the like. 

The initial results of this experiment were similar to those of other such studies.  Those in the direct-instruction group showed early academic gains, which soon vanished.  This study, however, also included follow-up research when the participants were 15 years old and again when they were 23 years old.  At these ages there were no significant differences among the groups in academic achievement, but large, highly significant differences in social and emotional characteristics.

By age 15 those in the Direct Instruction group had committed, on average, more than twice as many “acts of misconduct” than had those in the other two groups.  At age 23, as young adults, the differences were even more dramatic.  Those in the Direct Instruction group had more instances of friction with other people, were more likely to have shown evidence of emotional impairment, were less likely to be married and living with their spouse, and were far more likely to have committed a crime than were those in the other two groups.  In fact, by age 23, 39% of those in the Direct Instruction group had felony arrest records compared to an average of 13.5% in the other two groups; and 19% of the Direct Instruction group had been cited for assault with a dangerous weapon compared with 0% in the other two groups.[4]

What might account for such dramatic long-term effects of type of preschool attended?  One possibility is that the initial school experience sets the stage for later behavior.  Those in classrooms where they learned to plan their own activities, to play with others, and to negotiate differences may have developed lifelong patterns of personal responsibility and pro-social behavior that served them well throughout their childhood and early adulthood.  Those in classrooms that emphasized academic performance may have developed lifelong patterns aimed at achievement, and getting ahead, which—especially in the context of poverty—could lead to friction with others and even to crime (as a misguided means of getting ahead).

I suspect that the biweekly home visits played a meaningful role.  The parents of those in the classrooms that focused on play, socialization, and student initiative may have developed parenting styles that continued to reinforce those values and skills as the children were growing up, and the parents of those in the academic training group may have developed parenting styles more focused on personal achievement (narrowly defined) and self-centered values—values that did not bode well for real-world success."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/reading/">
    <title>Common-place: Common Reading: Undisciplined Reading: Finding surprise in how we read, Matthew P. Brown</title>
    <dc:date>2015-02-08T05:23:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/reading/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I read and teach novels regularly. But is the linear novel the only way one gets lost in a book? Consider those reference works that captivate you: a cookbook, a sports trivia volume, or a recordings guide. You open these books and escape into the pleasure of the cross-reference, the serendipitous, the transport to the known and the unknown. When I open David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film, forty minutes later the hard-boiled eggs are hard and boiling over, the cats are draped over the sleeping three-year-old, the dishes are still in the sink. Other than in Thomson's massaging, prickly prose, I know not where I am. The faint motion sickness I feel is from the cascade of ideas, memories, and anticipations, so different from the psychological and physiological response to channel- or Web-surfing, comparable fragmented modes of consumption. But reference-book reading of this sort assumes connoisseurship—that fancy word for heavy-panting, lighter-waving fandom—a habit of mind profoundly disciplinary.

I should feel shame about my disorderly reading, but I don't. In fact, I'd like to defend it as a reading practice of depth, rather than superficiality. Disorderly reading mimics the mind's generative activity of thought and discovery, those instances where you know something is happening but you don't know what it is. We might better call it discontinuous or nonlinear reading and acknowledge its long history, a history that reveals the fact that nonlinear reading lends itself to routinized procedure as well.

Reading seems ineluctably bound up in discipline, in customary behavior that precedes and structures the significance of the reading. But how then does reading become a means to the new, the unknown, the undiscovered? If even messy reading falls into predictable patterns and outcomes, how might what we read, or rather how we read, surprise us?

My contention is that one might use discipline to escape discipline, that freeing the mind is achieved by entering into restrictive procedures that liberate thinking. Let's begin by assessing that literary form most associated with the unknown, the undiscovered, or the novel—that is, the novel. Then we'll turn to early modern disciplines, finding analogies in them for contemporary reading scenes. Our guide here will be that Other to the twenty-first-century secular intellectual: the seventeenth-century English devout, those bigoted regicides and colonial Malvolios known—not without controversy, now and then, now perhaps more than then—as "Puritans.""

…

"Another reading discipline of surprise derived from Puritan mores is the conventicle. Conventicles were extramural religious meetings of select congregants within a church, most famously practiced in early America by Anne Hutchinson during the Antinomian controversy. (A quiescent version of conventicling from contemporary church history is the cellular model of Rick Warren's organization, the Saddleback megachurch.) Rooted in the idea that reading matter rather than institutional authority could be a source of spiritual sustenance, conventiclers absorbed scripture, repeated sermons, and sang psalms. Conventicling operated along a spectrum from conservative to separatist. And, like puritan, conventicle was a rhetorically charged word that could mean devout private gathering or conspiratorial unlawful assembly, depending upon who did the labeling.

Pious or riotous, conventicling illuminates a classroom dynamic familiar to current undergraduate literature professors. My rough sense is that in research universities and non-elite colleges, a majority of the students in each course are cats we herd unsuccessfully, while a largish minority learn something in a rote way. The remnant is the conventicle, actual or virtual students who meet with their minds in class discussion, with each other outside of class, and with the professor after sessions. When I read Susannah Rowson or Herman Melville or Toni Morrison or Richard Powers for class preparation, I have the majority in mind, as I gather the three points I want to get across in the fifty minutes. Reaching and teaching this majority is one of the real pleasures of my professorial life. But, in the reading prep, I have the conventicle in mind, for that is where the surprise happens."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/talking-cure">
    <title>Talk to Your Kids: The poorer parents are, the less they talk with their children. The mayor of Providence is trying to close the “word gap.”</title>
    <dc:date>2015-01-07T06:57:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/talking-cure</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Providence Talks had its critics, some of whom thought that the program seemed too intrusive. The A.C.L.U. raised questions about what would happen to the recordings, and one of the organization’s Rhode Island associates, Hillary Davis, told National Journal, “There’s always a concern when we walk in with technology into lower-income families, immigrant populations, minority populations, and we say, ‘This will help you.’ ” She continued, “We don’t necessarily recognize the threat to their own safety or liberty that can accidentally come along with that.”

Others charged that Providence Talks was imposing middle-class cultural values on poorer parents who had their own valid approaches to raising children, and argued that the program risked faulting parents for their children’s academic shortcomings while letting schools off the hook. Nobody contested the fact that, on average, low-income children entered kindergarten with fewer scholastic skills than kids who were better off, but there were many reasons for the disparity, ranging from poor nutrition to chaotic living conditions to the absence of a preschool education. In a caustic essay titled “Selling the Language Gap,” which was published in Anthropology News, Susan Blum, of Notre Dame, and Kathleen Riley, of Fordham, called Providence Talks an example of “silver-bullet thinking,” the latest in a long history of “blame-the-victim approaches to language and poverty.”

To some scholars, the program’s emphasis on boosting numbers made it seem as though the quality of conversation didn’t matter much. As James Morgan, a developmental psycholinguist at Brown University, put it, obsessive word counting might lead parents to conclude that “saying ‘doggy, doggy, doggy, doggy’ is more meaningful than saying ‘doggy.’ ” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a psychologist at Temple University, told me that Hart and Risley had “done a very important piece of work that pointed to a central problem”; nevertheless, their findings had often been interpreted glibly, as if the solution were to let words “just wash over a child, like the background noise of a TV.” Her own research, including a recent paper written with Lauren Adamson and other psychologists, points to the importance of interactions between parents and children in which they are both paying attention to the same thing—a cement mixer on the street, a picture in a book—and in which the ensuing conversation (some of which might be conducted in gestures) is fluid and happens over days, even weeks. “It’s not just serve and return,” Hirsh-Pasek said. “It’s serve and return—and return and return.”

The original Hart and Risley research, whose data set had only six families in the poorest category, was also called into question. Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Do low-income people talk with their kids less? Well, that’s a question about millions of people. Think of people in the survey business, trying to predict elections or develop a marketing campaign. They would find it laughable to draw conclusions without a large randomized sample.” Encouraging adults to talk more to children was all to the good, Liberman said, but it was important to remember that “there are some wealthy people who don’t talk to their children much and some poor people who talk a lot.”

Indeed, recent research that supports Hart and Risley’s work has found a great deal of variability within classes. In 2006, researchers at the LENA Foundation recorded the conversations of three hundred and twenty-nine families, who were divided into groups by the mothers’ education level, a reasonable proxy for social class. Like Hart and Risley, the LENA researchers determined that, on average, parents who had earned at least a B.A. spoke more around their children than other parents: 14,926 words per day versus 12,024. (They attributed Hart and Risley’s bigger gap to the fact that they had recorded families only during the late afternoon and the evening—when families talk most—and extrapolated.) But the LENA team also found that some of the less educated parents spoke a lot more than some of the highly educated parents.

Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford, has published several papers examining the influence of socioeconomic status on children’s language development. In one recent study, Fernald, with a colleague, Adriana Weisleder, and others, identified “large disparities” among socioeconomic groups in “infants’ language processing, speech production, and vocabulary.” But they also found big differences among working-class families, both in terms of “the children’s language proficiency and the parents’ verbal engagement with the child.” Fernald, who sits on the scientific advisory board for Providence Talks, told me, “Some of the wealthiest families in our research had low word counts, possibly because they were on their gadgets all day. So you can see an intermingling at the extremes of rich and poor. Socioeconomic status is not destiny.”

In response to the privacy concerns, Mayor Taveras and his team volunteered their own households to be the first ones recorded. They also guaranteed that the LENA Foundation’s software would erase the recordings after the algorithm analyzed the data. Though this probably reassured some families, it also disappointed some scholars. “That’s a huge amount of data being thrown out!” James Morgan, of Brown, told me. “There were real concerns whether families would participate otherwise. But as a scientist it breaks my heart.”

To those who argued that Providence Talks embodied cultural imperialism, staff members responded that, on the contrary, they were “empowering” parents with knowledge. Andrea Riquetti, the Providence Talks director, told me, “It really is our responsibility to let families know what it takes to succeed in the culture they live in. Which may not necessarily be the same as the culture they have. But it’s their choice whether they decide to. It’s not a case of our saying, ‘You have to do this.’ ” Riquetti grew up in Quito, Ecuador, came to America at the age of seventeen, and worked for many years as a kindergarten teacher in Providence schools. In Latino culture, she said, “the school is seen as being in charge of teaching children their letters and all that, while parents are in charge of discipline—making sure they listen and they’re good and they sit still. Parents don’t tend, overall, to give children a lot of choices and options. It’s kind of like ‘I rule the roost so that you can behave and learn at school.’ ” The Providence Talks approach “is a little more like ‘No, your child and what they have to say is really important.’ And having them feel really good about themselves as opposed to passive about their learning is important, because that’s what’s going to help them succeed in this culture.”

Riquetti and the Providence Talks team didn’t seem troubled by the concerns that Hart and Risley’s data set wasn’t robust enough. Although no subsequent study has found a word gap as large as thirty million, several of them have found that children in low-income households have smaller vocabularies than kids in higher-income ones. This deficit correlates with the quantity and the quality of talk elicited by the adults at home, and becomes evident quite early—in one study, when some kids were eighteen months old. Lack of conversation wasn’t the only reason that low-income kids started out behind in school, but it was certainly a problem.

The biggest question was whether Providence Talks could really change something as personal, casual, and fundamental as how people talk to their babies. Erika Hoff, of Florida Atlantic University, told me, “In some ways, parenting behavior clearly can change. I have a daughter who has a baby now and she does everything differently from how I did it—putting babies to sleep on their backs, not giving them milk till they’re a year old. But patterns of interacting are different. You’re trying to get people to change something that seems natural to them and comes from a fairly deep place. I don’t know how malleable that is.”

After decades of failed educational reforms, few policymakers are naïve enough to believe that a single social intervention could fully transform disadvantaged children’s lives. The growing economic inequality in America is too entrenched, too structural. But that’s hardly an argument for doing nothing. Although improvements in test scores associated with preschool programs fade as students proceed through elementary school, broader benefits can be seen many years later. A few oft-cited studies have shown that low-income kids who attended high-quality preschool programs were more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to become pregnant as teen-agers or to be incarcerated; they also earned more money, on average, than peers who were not in such programs. Such data suggest that a full assessment of Providence Talks will take decades to complete."]]></description>
<dc:subject>class language cultue education parenting 2015 margarettalbot headstart bettyhart toddrisley nclb learning vocabulary rttt policy angeltaveras providence rhodeisland conversation words children howwelearn providencetalks andreariquetti jamesmorgan linguistics annettelareau patriciakuhl richardweissbourd debate verbalacuity advocacy self-advocacy academics schoolreadiness kennethwong</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/time_and_learning/2014/11/low-income_students_get_time_to_learn_in_california.html">
    <title>Low-Income High School Students Get Less Time to Learn, Calif. Study Shows - Time and Learning - Education Week</title>
    <dc:date>2014-12-01T05:31:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/time_and_learning/2014/11/low-income_students_get_time_to_learn_in_california.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The difference between attending a high-poverty and a low-poverty high school in California is nearly two weeks of instructional time a year, according to a new study on lost learning time from the graduate school of education at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In schools where most students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, teachers said they lost about 30 minutes of class time a day to emergency lockdowns, computer shortages, noisy and dirty classrooms, a lack of qualified substitutes, preparation for standardized tests, and students' dealing with the stresses of living in poverty.

As the chart below illustrates, the report also found that on any given day, low-income students are three times more likely than wealthier students to miss school, arrive late, or be distracted in class because they're hungry, homeless, don't have transportation to school, have no health insurance and are sick or caring for sick family members, are dealing with immigration issues, or live in violent neighborhoods.

"The ZIP code that you live in and, hence, the neighborhood in which you go to school, determines how much learning time you have, and the amount of learning time is a critical educational opportunity," said John Rogers, a UCLA education professor and co-author of the report."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://mrmacnology.com/never-change">
    <title>Never change | MrMacnology</title>
    <dc:date>2014-10-23T20:04:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://mrmacnology.com/never-change</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["My wife sent me this picture today. It’s put a smile on my face ever since I saw it. It is a perfect example of who my son is. He is silly and he enjoys indulging his imagination. I hope this never changes. He is fortunate to have a wonderful 2nd grade teacher this year that fosters these traits and has created an environment where my son feels comfortable, safe, and happy to be himself.

But what happens next year? What happens if he has a teacher that was looking for a more “academic" answer? What would have happened if he had another teacher that told him that his answer was wrong? Is it wrong? At what point do we as teachers and educators stop allowing our students to be themselves; stop allowing them to share a different answer that’s not on the answer key; stop allowing students to bring their world into their classroom and into their learning without consequence?

As I sit and laugh at my son’s answer, my eyes well up with appreciation for who he is becoming…but they also well up because I’m afraid. I’m afraid that someone might say something that discourages him from being himself; that discourages him feeling safe to share his thoughts and explain his learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant to him. I’m afraid that person could be me. Maybe I’m over thinking this. Maybe I’m not."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-generic-college-paper">
    <title>McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Generic College Paper.</title>
    <dc:date>2014-10-05T21:37:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-generic-college-paper</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Since the beginning of time, bullshit, flowery overgeneralization with at least one thesaurus’d vocabulary word. In addition, irrelevant and misleading personal anecdote. However, oversimplification of first Googled author (citation: p. 37). Thesis statement which doesn’t follow whatsoever from the previous.

Utterly contrived topic sentence revealing pretty much every flaw of structured essay writing. Therefore, supporting sentence invoking source that exists only in the bibliographies of other cited material (pp. arbitrary to arbitrary + 5). Contemplative question? Definitive refutation paraphrased from a blog found at 2AM:

<blockquote>“Massive block text to lend legitimacy to this sorry endeavor.”
— Legitimate-sounding Anglo Saxon name (year between 1859 and 1967)</blockquote>

Obviously, non-sequitur segue. Utter misinterpretation of the only other author researched for this paper. Blind search for evidence reflecting increasing desperation (authors 4, 5, and 6). Moreover, loose observation to try to force coherence. Indeed, an attempt at humor!

Hence, statement violating every principle of syllogism followed by unnecessary semi-colon; forgettable punch line. Open-ended question undoing what little intellectual progress has been made? Filler sentence, which breaks entire flow of argument, specifically designed with maximum complexity in mind so as to solve lingering word minimum concerns.

Unconvincing conclusion statement. Empty belief that prompt has been answered sufficiently and requires no further investigation by anyone, ever. Last sentence, which consumed approximately 95% of the total mental effort dedicated—still reads clunky."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/?single_page=true">
    <title>Why Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys Do - The Atlantic</title>
    <dc:date>2014-09-18T23:38:18+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/?single_page=true</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[My tweet: https://twitter.com/rogre/status/512741051941924864 "“Why Girls Get Better Grades Than Boys Do” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get-better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/ … Missing: Conscientiousness or deference? Innate or conditioned?"]

"This self-discipline edge for girls carries into middle-school and beyond. In a 2006 landmark study, Martin Seligman and Angela Lee Duckworth found that middle-school girls edge out boys in overall self-discipline. This contributes greatly to their better grades across all subjects. They found that girls are more adept at “reading test instructions before proceeding to the questions,” “paying attention to a teacher rather than daydreaming,” “choosing homework over TV,” and “persisting on long-term assignments despite boredom and frustration.” These top cognitive scientists from the University of Pennsylvania also found that girls are apt to start their homework earlier in the day than boys and spend almost double the amount of time completing it. Girls’ grade point averages across all subjects were higher than those of boys, even in basic and advanced math—which, again, are seen as traditional strongholds of boys.

What Drs. Seligman and Duckworth label “self-discipline,” other researchers name “conscientiousness.” Or, a predisposition to plan ahead, set goals, and persist in the face of frustrations and setbacks. Conscientiousness is uniformly considered by social scientists to be an inborn personality trait that is not evenly distributed across all humans. In fact, a host of cross-cultural studies show that females tend to be more conscientious than males. One such study by Lindsay Reddington out of Columbia University even found that female college students are far more likely than males to jot down detailed notes in class, transcribe what professors say more accurately, and remember lecture content better. Arguably, boys’ less developed conscientiousness leaves them at a disadvantage in school settings where grades heavily weight good organizational skills alongside demonstrations of acquired knowledge.

These days, the whole school experience seems to play right into most girls’ strengths—and most boys’ weaknesses. Gone are the days when you could blow off a series of homework assignments throughout the semester but pull through with a respectable grade by cramming for and acing that all-important mid-term exam. Getting good grades today is far more about keeping up with and producing quality homework—not to mention handing it in on time.

Gwen Kenney-Benson, a psychology professor at Allegheny College, a liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, says that girls succeed over boys in school because they tend to be more mastery-oriented in their schoolwork habits. They are more apt to plan ahead, set academic goals, and put effort into achieving those goals. They also are more likely than boys to feel intrinsically satisfied with the whole enterprise of organizing their work, and more invested in impressing themselves and their teachers with their efforts.

On the whole, boys approach schoolwork differently. They are more performance-oriented. Studying for and taking tests taps into their competitive instincts. For many boys, tests are quests that get their hearts pounding. Doing well on them is a public demonstration of excellence and an occasion for a high-five. In contrast, Kenney-Benson and some fellow academics provide evidence that the stress many girls experience in test situations can artificially lower their performance, giving a false reading of their true abilities. These researchers arrive at the following overarching conclusion: “The testing situation may underestimate girls’ abilities, but the classroom may underestimate boys’ abilities.”

It is easy to for boys to feel alienated in an environment where homework and organization skills account for so much of their grades. But the educational tide may be turning in small ways that give boys more of a fighting chance. An example of this is what occurred several years ago at Ellis Middle School, in Austin, Minnesota. Teachers realized that a sizable chunk of kids who aced tests trundled along each year getting C’s, D’s, and F’s. At the same time, about 10 percent of the students who consistently obtained A’s and B’s did poorly on important tests. Grading policies were revamped and school officials smartly decided to furnish kids with two separate grades each semester. One grade was given for good work habits and citizenship, which they called a “life skills grade.” A “knowledge grade” was given based on average scores across important tests. Tests could be retaken at any point in the semester, provided a student was up to date on homework.

Staff at Ellis Middle School also stopped factoring homework into a kid’s grade. Homework was framed as practice for tests. Incomplete or tardy assignments were noted but didn’t lower a kid’s knowledge grade. The whole enterprise of severely downgrading kids for such transgressions as occasionally being late to class, blurting out answers, doodling instead of taking notes, having a messy backpack, poking the kid in front, or forgetting to have parents sign a permission slip for a class trip, was revamped.

This last point was of particular interest to me. On countless occasions, I have attended school meetings for boy clients of mine who are in an ADHD red-zone. I have learned to request a grade print-out in advance. Not uncommonly, there is a checkered history of radically different grades: A, A, A, B, B, F, F, A. When F grades and a resultant zero points are given for late or missing assignments, a student’s C grade does not reflect his academic performance. Since boys tend to be less conscientious than girls—more apt to space out and leave a completed assignment at home, more likely to fail to turn the page and complete the questions on the back—a distinct fairness issue comes into play when a boy’s occasional lapse results in a low grade. Sadly though, it appears that the overwhelming trend among teachers is to assign zero points for late work. In one survey by Conni Campbell, associate dean of the School of Education at Point Loma Nazarene University, 84 percent of teachers did just that.

Disaffected boys may also benefit from a boot camp on test-taking, time-management, and study habits. These core skills are not always picked up by osmosis in the classroom, or from diligent parents at home. Of course, addressing the learning gap between boys and girls will require parents, teachers and school administrators to talk more openly about the ways each gender approaches classroom learning—and that difference itself remains a tender topic."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/12/the-procedure-and-how-it-is-harming-education/">
    <title>‘The Procedure’ and how it is harming education</title>
    <dc:date>2014-01-13T05:55:31+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/12/the-procedure-and-how-it-is-harming-education/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Imagine John as the best middle school science teacher in America. Put him in an expertly administered upper-class suburban school. Assign him smart, healthy, highly motivated kids, drawn from advanced placement classes. Be sure each has two college-educated, happily married parents.Limit his class to no more than a dozen, and schedule it for late morning when they’re sharpest.

Now, hand John that 776-page textbook to distribute—the one organized like the contents of a dumpster at a demolition site—and assure him it covers the material that will be on the high-stakes tests.

What will happen? Almost certainly, at the end of the term every kid in John’s class will ace the test, and everybody—kids, parents, administrators, school board, the local newspaper, cable news—will be impressed and happy.

Everybody except John. He won’t be impressed and happy because (remember?) he’s the best middle school science teacher in America, and he knows—notwithstanding the test scores—how little his students actually learned in their race to the end of the textbook. They slam-dunked the test not because they learned a lot of science but because they followed The Procedure.

The Procedure: 1. Take notes during lectures, and hi-lite key sentences in the textbook. 2. Before a big test, load the notes and hi-lited passages into short-term memory. 3. Take the test. 4. Flush short-term memory and prepare for its re-use.

It’s no exaggeration to say that just about everybody in the country thinks The Procedure isn’t just acceptable but essential. It’s so broadly used, so familiar, so taken-for-granted, that many schools and universities go to great pains to accommodate it. Some even have rituals to enhance it.

The Procedure, of course, is called “cramming.” Do it well and it leads steadily up the academic ladder.

But here’s a question: Does The Procedure have anything do with educating?

Learning—real LEARNING—starts when, for whatever reason, the learner wants it to start. It proceeds if the aim is clear and what’s being learned connects logically and solidly to existing knowledge. It’s strengthened when mistakes are made, clarifying the potential and limitations of the new knowledge. It’s reinforced when it’s put to frequent, immediate, meaningful, real-world use. It becomes permanent when it’s made part of the learner’s organized, consciously known “master” structure of knowledge.

Slow down for a moment and think about it. Cramming is indisputable proof of the superficiality and inefficiency—even the failure—of what’s going on in most classrooms across America. What’s crammed wasn’t learned or there would be no need to cram; what’s crammed isn’t learned or it wouldn’t be forgotten.

In the real world, where it counts, the gap between crammers and learners is vast, and tends to widen over time. Unfortunately, the thus-far-successful “reform” effort to cover the standard material at a standard pace, and replace teacher judgment with machine-scored standardized tests has further institutionalized cramming and hidden the failure its use proves.

What a waste!

Here’s a fact: Information overload is just one of about two-dozen serious problems directly or indirectly connected to our 19th Century core curriculum. Sadly, no, tragically, instead of rethinking that curriculum, starting with its fundamental premises and assumptions, reformers have considered it so nearly perfect they’re determined to force it on every kid in America.

Aren’t we going at the job backwards? Shouldn’t we be doing just the opposite—developing and capitalizing on the learner diversity that enables humankind to adapt to change?"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://medium.com/p/8f73a9c1c123">
    <title>Free is not for Nothing. — Medium</title>
    <dc:date>2014-01-09T23:40:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://medium.com/p/8f73a9c1c123</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["If you’ve never experienced it, “free” just seems like a lower number on a slider that has “half-price” in the middle. But free is not a number.

If you paid for your education, you’re likely to understand education in transactional terms. In straightforward economic terms, it means that if you charge some money, you can have some stuff. With more money comes more stuff, higher quality stuff.

But “free” is something different than “less.” And free is not less than cheap. It’s something else entirely.

Instead of education, try thinking about love. There are people who pay for love. Some pay a lot, some pay a little. But let’s be honest: everyone knows that the moment you start paying anything, it’s not just love plus money. It’s something else entirely, and the problems in paying aren’t solved by paying less than others."

…

"What our experiences often have in common is this: for many of us, Cooper wasn’t even the cheapest way to go to school. And it certainly didn’t offer the best facilities, campus, labs, studios, athletics, or dorm life. It was always about immense sacrifices.

So the question is: why did we go? We went not because of the financial value of free — that is, zero tuition — but rather, because of the academic value of free.

Free for everyone meant that the students who were there were beholden to nothing (nothing!) except their passion, talent, hard work, and brilliance. This unique, very particular sensibility — that, more than any other thing they could build, hire or install — this was the experience of the institution."

…

"Because “free” affects far more than than a fiscal bottom line. It affects the intentions, behavior, ambition, and performance of everyone in the system. In other words, it determines the academic quality."

…

"Remaining free is what will allow Cooper Union’s shortcomings to remain what they were for us: a source of pride, of worthy sacrifice, a reason to fight, and strive, and someday, to give back.

Academic quality is a framing, a mindset, for the best students and for the best faculty, all of whom have choices about where to settle down. They won’t come to Cooper because it’s cheaper. They went there because it was free. We were seeking an exceptional environment. Genuinely exceptional. Cooper Union was exceptional.

It came to the edge through mismanagement and misconduct. And now, I fear, misunderstanding. Most anyone who experienced it knows that the tuition-free education was the source of academic excellence, not the threat to it."

…

"Attending a free school of sacrifices taught me something about what free meant. Building a half-price school of sacrifices is to succumb to the culture of Cubic Zirconium and Corinthian Leather. It’s fool’s gold. Ghetto scrip. It’s not for real, and it’s not for good."

[Felix Salmon after the vote: "The Shame of Cooper Union" http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/01/11/the-shame-of-cooper-union/ ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/why-academic-teaching-doesnt-help-kids-excel-in-life/">
    <title>Why Academic Teaching Doesn’t Help Kids Excel In Life | MindShift</title>
    <dc:date>2013-11-22T02:44:19+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/why-academic-teaching-doesnt-help-kids-excel-in-life/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Academics. Most of our current school system revolves around it, and yet, I think it falls miserably short of what our kids need. To be honest, I think our academic system of education is highly overrated, at best. At worst, it destroys a number of our kids.

Hear me out. I’m not saying that our kids shouldn’t learn to read, or do math, or develop other valuable skills. But too often, the focus of our kids’ school day is Content with a capital C, with little connection to why it matters. Instead of learning together, many of our students spend hours filling in worksheets or copying down lecture notes that they could google in 30 seconds.

Too often the lectures they listen to are boring and irrelevant to their lives. And from my experience, most of this content is simply memorized, spewed out for an exam and then quickly forgotten. But beyond this, there’s often only one right answer, which frequently cultivates in our students a fear of failure.

SCHOOLS VALUE HOOP JUMPING

For the most part, kids who we consider “academic” tend to be good hoop jumpers. They’ve figured out the system and can navigate their way through the predictable demands of the system. But they are seldom truly engaged. Rarely are they transformed by their learning. They’re going through the motions.

Research shows that some of the least engaged students are the highest achievers. Think about that. They do well because they know how to “do school.” Is this really the best we have to offer them? What if you’re not “academic”? Most of these kids pass through too many years of their young lives feeling like they don’t measure up. Feeling stupid. And for some, it radically alters their trajectory of their adult lives. Unfortunately, too many students have to recover from school once they graduate. Is this really what we want for them?"

…

"THREE QUESTIONS TO GUIDE STUDENT-DRIVEN LEARNING

As I’ve worked with my students, we’ve come to realize they need to be able to answer three questions, regardless of what we’re researching:

What are you going to learn?
How are you going to learn it?
How are you going to show me you’re learning?
How they get to this last question is often their decision. And what they come up with never fails to surprise me.

My classroom hasn’t always looked like this. But over the past three years we’ve shifted to a constructivist pedagogy that has transformed not only my thinking, but my students as well. Now we learn in an inquiry, PBL, tech-embedded classroom.

The journey at times has been painful and messy, but well worth the work. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that my students will often exceed my expectations, if only they’re given the chance."

[Reminds me some of something I wrote: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/66225339559/a-curriculum-in-questions ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.hammeronpress.net/page21.htm">
    <title>HammerOn Press - The Para-Academic Handbook</title>
    <dc:date>2013-05-13T05:27:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.hammeronpress.net/page21.htm</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["There is a name for those under-and precariously employed, but actively working, academics in today's society: the para-academic.

Para-academics mimic academic practices so they are liberated from the confines of the university. Our work, and our lives, reflect how the idea of a university as a place for knowledge production, discussion and learning, has become distorted by neo-liberal market forces. We create alternative, genuinely open access, learning-thinking-making-acting spaces on the internet, in publications, in exhibitions, discussion groups or other mediums that seem appropriate to the situation. We don't sit back and worry about our career developments paths. We write for the love of it, we think because we have to, we do it because we care.

We take the prefix para- to illustrate how we work alongside, beside, next to, and rub up against, the all too proper location of the Academy, making the work of higher education a little more irregular, a little more perverse, a little more improper. Our work takes up the potential of the multiple and contradictory resonances of para- as decisive location for change, within the university as much as beyond it.

Specialists in all manner of things, from the humanities to the social and biological sciences, the para-academic works alongside the traditional university, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, usually a mixture of both. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don't seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we've always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others.

We do this without prior legitimisation from any one institution. Para-academics do not need to churn out endless 'outputs' because of the pressures of a heavily assessed research environment. We work towards making ideas because learning, sharing, thinking and creating matter beyond easily quantifiable 'products'. And we know that this is possible, that we are possible, without the constraints of an increasingly hierarchical academy.

As the para-academic community grows there is a real need to build supportive networks, share knowledge, ideas and strategies that can allow these types of interventions to become sustainable and flourish. There is a very real need to create spaces of solace, action and creativity.

The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting, edited by Alex Wardrop and Deborah Withers, calls for articles (between 1,000-6,000 words), cartoons, photographs, illustrations, inspirations and other forms of text/graphic communication exploring para-academic practice, and its place within active intellectual cultures of the early 21st century."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://mpg734.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-university-as-googleplex.html">
    <title>The University as a Googleplex | MPG</title>
    <dc:date>2013-05-10T23:46:36+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://mpg734.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-university-as-googleplex.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["When you hear people say - now and in our present context - that they want the university to be run like a business - full of "sherpas" but not "coasters" - what they really mean is that they don't want it to exist. At all. They don't want it to be dependent on public dollars, or "welfare," or that they don't want "tenured radicals" to be rewarded for obscure, narrowly applicable research agendas, or that they want higher education to be cheap and affordable. This is a certain kind of business model. More like Wal-Mart. It cheapens education. And it spells, down the road, the end of schooling, generally, as anything other than a bestowal of bare skills on a prospective worker."

…

"Yes, there are serious structural problems with interdisciplinarity. Many clever deans and provosts and chancellors see the metaphors of "bridges" and "switching points" and "nodes" as cutting-edge cost-saving measures, since, in many cases, a single jointly-appointed faculty isn't a truly new hire; he or she is a reallocated budget line, once wholly in one department or another, and now split. Budget problems are real and ongoing. Your average administratrix does the best that he or she can in an age of limited resources to keep the antique disciplines strong and to open the curriculum up to the avante-garde at the same time. Sometimes, they figure - or hope? - that a single person, allocated in two directions, can do the institutional work of many. 

If you are trying to foster new knowledge, hiring is the start of it, not the end. What comes next, though, is what often gets skipped: building a more robust interdisciplinary infrastructure - a Googleplex for academics.

So, then, build bridges, where and when you can.  Worry as much about sidewalks as that new humanities building.  Offer faculty and staff subventions for a bicycle, or give them away.  Don't get too caught up with putting the cognate units close together.  Make the process of connection over space easier, so that the practice of articulation between units and fields and offices is generative.  Keep your faculty moving. Good ideas often come on the road, in transit, in the spaces between destination and departure.  If budgets are tight, worry less about clustering like-minded units; worry more about the creation of scenic walkways with flat, safe sidewalks, and benches.

But, then, don't skimp on the tech. You know what kills ideas?  It isn't the sprint from one office to another.  It is the discovery, on the end of the route, of dodgy wifi, spotty ethernet, and the chatter of the prehistoric desktop computer. Or it is the grinding weight of that 10 lbs. laptop from 2005.  So, really, ipads for everyone and segways, too, along with moleskine notebooks, whiteboards, and color pens. Pay for iphones and cover the data costs.  Spend the extra 10 million (a tenth of the cost of a big new LEED building) for the best internet connection. And, while you're at it, set up a shuttle bus.  And if someone wants to see if the new google chromebook works for them - just as an experiment - say "yes."  This isn't pampering.  It is dreamscape infrastructure.

When the time comes to hire someone, embrace the weird. Hire people who don't mind wearing running shoes, or who text while they run, or who gchat through meetings. People who love to be in two places, or three, at once.  People who aren't just working on three books at once, but who can actually make progress on each. People who can speak to a handful of fields and not just one.  Hire foxes, not hedgehogs.  And, above all else, hire people who can work with other people.

And then, finally, don't screw it all up by hanging these people out to dry: change the rules about tenure and promotion to protect interdisciplines, groupwork in the humanities, and digital publishing. Make it possible for new forms of knowledge production to be recognized as equally important and valuable.  In the humanities, this means that we need to stop the unthinking worship of the book, and remember that the book is a vehicle for ideas, which get expressed - fully and richly - in many ways.

All of this stuff costs about as much as one lab for one scientist, which sounds pretty efficient to me.  And the payoff, which may not come in the form of grant money or retail teaching, is worth every penny. If we want to measure our "best" and our "brightest" universities by their movement of the conversation, by their reorientation of everything we know about anything, then let's steal some good ideas from the Googleplex. 

But let's also remember that the Googleplex and Google are different.  The former is a structure of innovation, while the latter, just like Wal Mart, exists chiefly to market a product, in this case an eco-system through which an enhancement can be bought and downloaded.  So build a Googleplex, but don't be Google.  Because the central point here is that while universities can learn some useful things from studying corporate cultures of innovation, they can't ever be businesses.  And anyone who says otherwise really, truly, and seriously just wants to kill them off."]]></description>
<dc:subject>highered google highereducation education business publicgood interdisciplinary multidisciplinary crossdisciplinary schooldesign organization 2013 academics technology crosspollination lcproject openstudioproject hiring hierarchy flatness money matthewprattguterl publicgoods</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/08/lessons-learned-how-a-progressive-new-school-evolves/">
    <title>Lessons Learned: How a Progressive New School Adapts to Realities | MindShift</title>
    <dc:date>2013-01-08T13:00:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/08/lessons-learned-how-a-progressive-new-school-evolves/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["One major change has been how students are grouped. The year started with kids of all ages — six to 12 — working together on everything. But that proved problematic. … Now, students are grouped into age-based cohorts, or “bands,” so that age-appropriate work could move along more smoothly."

"assessments covered three areas: students’ project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and skills acquisition and quantitative learning, according to Program Coordinator Justine Macauley. “Rather than assessing the students’ work product, we looked at their work and development during the process of their project,” asking questions like, Are they a supporter of other students’ projects or do they spearhead their own? Do they listen to others? Do they self-advocate? What subject areas do they gravitate to? and How adept is the student at organizing him/herself, their projects, their process?"

"Another change is the frequency in assessments…three times a year, instead of just once."]]></description>
<dc:subject>wateringdown waterin featurecreep deschooling unschooling academics rigor pressure parents progressive teaching schools program curriculum gevertulley justinemacauley 2012 assessment brightworks</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://theamericanscholar.org/start-a-blog/">
    <title>The American Scholar: Start a Blog - William Deresiewicz</title>
    <dc:date>2012-12-22T00:39:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://theamericanscholar.org/start-a-blog/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”"

"But celebrity, like the institutionalization that comes with being an academic, is inimical to the intellectual’s mission: questioning the mental status quo. The more a part of things you are—the more embedded in the machinery of status and position—the harder that is to do. As Kazin said, “values are our only home in the universe.” Allegiances, to any group, are fatal. The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates. As Kazin also said, an intellectual is someone for whom ideas are “instruments of salvation.” Becoming one requires a little more than setting up a blog."]]></description>
<dc:subject>disruption status celebrity russelljacoby academics academia intellectuals socrates deschooling unschooling outsiders thesystem jackmiles writing alfredkazin haroldrosenberg clementgreenberg dwightmacdonald lioneltrilling edmundwilson blogging publicintellectuals williamderesiewicz 2012 change allegiances outsider</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/articles/newtools-output.html">
    <title>New Tools for Men of Letters</title>
    <dc:date>2012-06-11T00:25:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.wallandbinkley.com/rcb/articles/newtools-output.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The new graphic arts devices are, I believe, capable of working the other way—as implements for a more [p.180] decentralized and less professionalized culture, a culture of local literature and amateur scholarship.

This possibility is especially important today, when electric power promises to develop the village at the expense of the metropolis, and when shorter working hours offer a prospect of leisure to a population of which an increasing proportion is being exposed to college education.

…

Today the Western scholar’s problem is not to get hold of the books that everyone else has read or is reading but rather to procure materials that hardly anyone else would think of looking at. 

…

Western civilization now expects even poetry to fit the Procrustean bed of the publishing industry.

…

The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue [p.186] as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced.

…"

[So much more, but another reaction: academics will always hope everyone is more like them.]]]></description>
<dc:subject>poetry printing duplication microfiche microfilm near-print micro-copying books photo-offset learning decentralization professionalization wpa greatdepression dialog conversation letterwriting letters ruricomp rural local localstudies academics academia research writing amateurresearch amateurism literature graphicarts liberalarts leisurearts leisure education community publishing microformats mimeograph media technology communication scholarship digitalhumanities 1935 robertbinkley dialogue artleisure amateurs</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://mindhacks.com/2012/06/10/the-labels-change-the-game-remains-the-same/">
    <title>The labels change, the game remains the same « Mind Hacks</title>
    <dc:date>2012-06-10T23:00:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://mindhacks.com/2012/06/10/the-labels-change-the-game-remains-the-same/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Today’s New York Times has a huge feature on the illicit use of stimulant drugs like Ritalin and pharmaceutical amphetamines in colleges and schools by kids ‘seeking an academic edge’.

The piece is written like an exposé but if you know a little about the history of amphetamines, it is also incredibly ironic.

The ‘illicit stimulants for study’ situation is a complete replay of what happened with the branded amphetamine benzedrine in the 1930s, as recounted in Nicolas Rasmussen’s brilliant book On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine…

…In 1937, none other than the The New York Times ran a story about benzedrine calling it a ‘high octane brain fuel’ and noting that without it the brain ‘does not run on all cylinders’. It was clearly pitched as a cognitive enhancer…

So the story isn’t really new but it’s ironic that the New York Times has inadvertently promoted the activity. Again."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="http://randallszott.org/2012/04/03/douglas-sloan-insight-imagination/">
    <title>Douglas Sloan – Insight-Imagination « Lebenskünstler</title>
    <dc:date>2012-04-09T22:02:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://randallszott.org/2012/04/03/douglas-sloan-insight-imagination/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“An education in which skills, narrow intellect, and information have no connection with insight, imagination, feeling, beauty, conscience, and wonder and that systematically evades all engagement with the great, central issues and problems of human life, is a wasteland.”

[quoting David Bohm] “…insight is not restricted to great scientific discoveries or to artistic creations, but rather it is of critical importance in everything we do, especially in the affairs of ordinary life.”

“…chronological snobbery and temporal provincialism that so constrict the modern mind set.”

[and this especially on the academically 'gifted'] “Those who display the requisite intellectual skills are singled out as special for their proficiency in the use of an aspect of mind that has no intrinsic relationship to the art of living well as persons…Most have been ill equipped by their education to live well as persons, to find delight in friendship and love, in the joys of sound and touch and color…”]]></description>
<dc:subject>lcproject insight humanism conscience beauty snobbery academia academics gifted deschooling unschooling friendship love wisdom living life well-being education randallszott douglassloan wellbeing</dc:subject>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/t:education"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/t:randallszott"/>
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<item rdf:about="http://annetrubek.com/2012/02/an-introverted-boy-against-an-army-of-label-makers/">
    <title>An Introverted Boy Against An Army of Label Makers | A.T. | Cleveland</title>
    <dc:date>2012-02-21T00:09:33+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://annetrubek.com/2012/02/an-introverted-boy-against-an-army-of-label-makers/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I certainly still lie awake some nights worrying that I am in denial, that Simon has some gross deficiency not yet identified, and I am did him great a disservice. I worry constantly that I should limit his reading and solitary time and push him into sports and classes and social activities. But just when I am about to write that check for ice hockey classes I touch base with my instinctive sense of my son, this imaginative, overly verbose happy creature, and decide not to risk ironing out his uniqueness.  Until we can figure out more creative ways to educate and encourage introspective boys who are neither high achievers nor troublemakers—boys “in the middle,” like Simon–I will keep holding my ground, my breath and my tongue, and shoo away the well-intentioned label makers who cross our path."]]></description>
<dc:subject>males boys academics introspection nclb productivity howwelearn unstructured creativity specialized learningdisabilities slowprocessing add dysgraphia dyslexia adhd overdiagnosis autism schooliness schools learningdifferences learning parenting education teaching introverts susancain 2012 annetrubek shrequest1</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.theamericancrawl.com/?p=969">
    <title>The American Crawl : Not Quite EverythingEverything: Why Our Approach to Music Education is Kinda Awful</title>
    <dc:date>2011-12-16T07:52:36+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theamericancrawl.com/?p=969</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["And all of this is to prelude a simple question: Why did I have to wait so long for this opportunity? While I was already a music “fan” and immersed in family practices that included going to musical performances, singing at family gatherings, and enthusiastically drumming on car dashboards, it really wasn’t until college that I was able to see music as a source of study, as a place to connect passion with purpose, a place to learn new ways of listening…

we leave music instruction into the hands of people who are inclined on the production side of things (and even then in only limited ways such as marching bands and big band numbers). Why do we wait to make the study of music, its history, and the cultural meaning of it an option only for those students that eventually matriculate into universities?"]]></description>
<dc:subject>anterogarcia 2011 music education teaching appreciation listening popularculture oddfuture culture culturalstudies semiotics engagement classideas instruction academics ofwgkta</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/20/how-college-prep-killing-high-school/94mGUe6o9InIEuO9oMhnzJ/story.html">
    <title>How college prep is killing high school - Ideas - The Boston Globe</title>
    <dc:date>2011-11-25T18:29:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/20/how-college-prep-killing-high-school/94mGUe6o9InIEuO9oMhnzJ/story.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Emerging research in the education world suggests that a tougher approach to high school academics might leave students no better prepared for college and work, while also increasing the number of high school dropouts. The National Research Council concluded that high school exit exams have decreased high school graduation rates in the United States by 2 percentage points without increasing achievement. In Chicago, a 2010 study found no positive effects on student achievement from a school reform measure that ended remedial classes and required college preparatory course work for all students. High school graduation rates declined, and there was no improvement in college enrollment and retention rates among students who did graduate."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>highschool college academics tcsnmy toshare collegeprep rigor dropouts unschooling deschooling dropoutrates education achievement achievementgap graduationrates 2011 research russellrumberger</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="http://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/63037778606292992">
    <title>Twitter / @Timothy Burke: &quot;Interdisciplinarity&quot; see ...</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-27T02:06:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/63037778606292992</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[A thread on Twitter about interdisciplinarity…]

"Interdisciplinarity" seems so formal, like a treaty organization. I like the version that's about smuggling stuff across borders. [http://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/63037778606292992 ]

@swarthmoreburke @publichistorian "Idea Smuggler". Love it. [http://twitter.com/navalang/status/63039078488211456 ]

@swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Cross-disciplinary. Anti-disciplinary. Black-market scholarship. [http://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/63041041145663488 ]

@tcarmody @swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Bricolage. [http://twitter.com/ayjay/status/63042045635334144 ]

[Additional, unassembled thoughts: discipline tunneling, cross-pollination, kludge, bilge, edupunk, thought trafficking, pirates, buccaneer scholar, clandestine, etc.]]]></description>
<dc:subject>interdisciplinary interdisciplinarity crossdisciplinary ideasmuggling crosspollination bricolage antidisciplinary black-marketscholarship pirates piracy cv academia academics timcarmody alanjacobs navneetalang suzannefischer transdisciplinary</dc:subject>
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