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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoWhat Liberals Get Wrong about the Right with Corey Robin - Factually! - 236 - YouTube2023-11-22T21:19:28+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CNOS0v8v5c
robertogrecocoreyrobin 2023 right left leftists rightwing politics history france counterrevolution adamconover class populism edmundburke elitism aristocracy bootstrappers establishment policy inequality exceptionalism donaldtrump frenchrevolution politicalscience power democracy reactionaries liberalism johnccalhoun hierarchy racism race privilege cooption reinvention self-preservation conservatism reactionarymovements fascism ww2 wwii neoconservatism hitler mussolini politicalmovements change rickperlstein statusquo civilrights richardnixon ada civilwar frederickdouglass republicans abolition slavery us irvingkristol clarencethomas gerrymandering republicanparty senate supremecourt constitution ronaldreagan workers wagneract labor law filibuster kyrstensinema joemanchin barackobama affordablecareact progressivism progress pessimism futility worldview freedom liberation blackpowermovement malcolmx racialpessimism patriarchy transformation survival votingrightsact hollywood votes voting virtue virtuousness beliefs cynichttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8d05c0350519/David Bowles (Mācuīl Ehēcatl) 🏳️🌈 on Twitter: "I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how le2020-10-05T23:54:38+00:00
https://twitter.com/DavidOBowles/status/1313246219905437701
robertogrecoHere’s something I am wondering… as a parent… Why are there so many tests happening during remote learning? Aren’t there other ways to assess at this point that would be more logically aligned with the type of learning environment students are in?
Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.
We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.
Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.
Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.
What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.
Some definitions.
Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.
Lyceum --> originally Aristotle’s school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.
Things we (scholars) DO know:
-Homework doesn’t really help, especially younger kids.
-Students don’t learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don’t either (it’s supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).
-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.
Do you want kids to learn? Here’s something we’ve discovered.
Kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are “cool,” or because …
… they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.
Maintaining the status quo? Nope.
Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.
If you’re perpetuating those systems, teachers, you’ve already freaking lost.
They won’t be learning much from you.
Except what not to become.
Sure, you can wear them down.
That’s what happened to most of you, isn’t it?
You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.
And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.
For what?
It’s all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.
WE.
DON’T.
KNOW.
HOW.
PEOPLE.
LEARN.
We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY.
But we DO know kids aren’t empty piggy banks.
They are BRIMMING with thought.
The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?
Education is all about capitalism.
“You need to learn these skills to get a good job.”
To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.
THAT is why modern education is a failure.
Its basic premise is monstrous.
“Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?”
Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words”]]>davidbowles capitalism education schools schooling teaching howweteach learning howwelearn unschooling deschooling paulofreire pedagogyoftheoppressed bankingmodelofeducation children reading purpose authority authoritarianism exploitation society meritocracy aristocracy elitism hierarchy justice unjustice communities statusquo objectives knowledge memory whatmatters cv testing grades grading homework time aristotle lyceum psychology 2020https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e9daf483d856/The Birth of the New American Aristocracy - The Atlantic2018-05-21T03:51:52+00:00
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
robertogrecoclass us politics economics inequality 2018 disparity matthewstewart education labor work unions highered highereducation nannies governesses workingclass elitism aristocracy wealth opportunity power privilegehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d813ef8e236e/[Essay] | The Neoliberal Arts, by William Deresiewicz | Harper's Magazine2015-10-06T00:13:12+00:00
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
robertogrecoThe paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.
leadership
service
integrity
creativity
Let us take a moment to compare these texts. The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence. Thinking clearly, it wants us to recognize, leads to thinking independently. Thinking independently leads to living confidently. Living confidently leads to living courageously. Living courageously leads to living hopefully. And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to develop their abilities to think and live.
Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
Four words, three of which — “leadership,” “service,” and “creativity” — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (“Integrity” is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar “character,” which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.) The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.
This is education in the age of neoliberalism. Call it Reaganism or Thatcherism, economism or market fundamentalism, neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace — in Wordsworth’s phrase, your getting and spending.
The purpose of education in a neoliberal age is to produce producers. I published a book last year that said that, by and large, elite American universities no longer provide their students with a real education, one that addresses them as complete human beings rather than as future specialists — that enables them, as I put it, to build a self or (following Keats) to become a soul. Of all the responses the book aroused, the most dismaying was this: that so many individuals associated with those institutions said not, “Of course we provide our students with a real education,” but rather, “What is this ‘real education’ nonsense, anyway?”"
…
"So what’s so bad about leadership, service, and creativity? What’s bad about them is that, as they’re understood on campus and beyond, they are all encased in neoliberal assumptions. Neoliberalism, which dovetails perfectly with meritocracy, has generated a caste system: “winners and losers,” “makers and takers,” “the best and the brightest,” the whole gospel of Ayn Rand and her Übermenschen. That’s what “leadership” is finally about. There are leaders, and then there is everyone else: the led, presumably — the followers, the little people. Leaders get things done; leaders take command. When colleges promise to make their students leaders, they’re telling them they’re going to be in charge.
“Service” is what the winners engage in when they find themselves in a benevolent mood. Call it Clintonism, by analogy with Reaganism. Bill Clinton not only ratified the neoliberal consensus as president, he has extended its logic as a former president. Reaganism means the affluent have all the money, as well as all the power. Clintonism means they use their money and power, or a bit of it, to help the less fortunate — because the less fortunate (i.e., the losers) can’t help themselves. Hence the Clinton Foundation, hence every philanthropic or altruistic endeavor on the part of highly privileged, highly credentialed, highly resourced elites, including all those nonprofits or socially conscious for-profits that college students start or dream of starting.
“Creativity,” meanwhile, is basically a business concept, aligned with the other clichés that have come to us from the management schools by way of Silicon Valley: “disruption,” “innovation,” “transformation.” “Creativity” is not about becoming an artist. No one wants you to become an artist. It’s about devising “innovative” products, services, and techniques — “solutions,” which imply that you already know the problem. “Creativity” means design thinking, in the terms articulated by the writer Amy Whitaker, not art thinking: getting from A to a predetermined B, not engaging in an open-ended exploratory process in the course of which you discover the B.
Leadership, service, and creativity do not seek fundamental change (remember, fundamental change is out in neoliberalism); they seek technological or technocratic change within a static social framework, within a market framework. Which is really too bad, because the biggest challenges we face — climate change, resource depletion, the disappearance of work in the face of automation — will require nothing less than fundamental change, a new organization of society. If there was ever a time that we needed young people to imagine a different world, that time is now.
We have always been, in the United States, what Lionel Trilling called a business civilization. But we have also always had a range of counterbalancing institutions, countercultural institutions, to advance a different set of values: the churches, the arts, the democratic tradition itself. When the pendulum has swung too far in one direction (and it’s always the same direction), new institutions or movements have emerged, or old ones have renewed their mission. Education in general, and higher education in particular, has always been one of those institutions. But now the market has become so powerful that it’s swallowing the very things that are supposed to keep it in check. Artists are becoming “creatives.” Journalism has become “the media.” Government is bought and paid for. The prosperity gospel has arisen as one of the most prominent movements in American Christianity. And colleges and universities are acting like businesses, and in the service of businesses.
What is to be done? Those very same WASP aristocrats — enough of them, at least, including several presidents of Harvard and Yale — when facing the failure of their own class in the form of the Great Depression, succeeded in superseding themselves and creating a new system, the meritocracy we live with now. But I’m not sure we possess the moral resources to do the same. The WASPs had been taught that leadership meant putting the collective good ahead of your own. But meritocracy means looking out for number one, and neoliberalism doesn’t believe in the collective. As Margaret Thatcher famously said about society, “There’s no such thing. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” As for elite university presidents, they are little more these days than lackeys of the plutocracy, with all the moral stature of the butler in a country house.
Neoliberalism disarms us in another sense as well. For all its rhetoric of freedom and individual initiative, the culture of the market is exceptionally good at inculcating a sense of helplessness. So much of the language around college today, and so much of the negative response to my suggestion that students ought to worry less about pursuing wealth and more about constructing a sense of purpose for themselves, presumes that young people are the passive objects of economic forces. That they have no agency, no options. That they have to do what the market tells them. A Princeton student literally made this argument to me: If the market is incentivizing me to go to Wall Street, he said, then who am I to argue?
I have also had the pleasure, over the past year, of hearing from a lot of people who are pushing back against the dictates of neoliberal education: starting high schools, starting colleges, creating alternatives to high school and college, making documentaries, launching nonprofits, parenting in different ways, conducting their lives in different ways. I welcome these efforts, but none of them address the fundamental problem, which is that we no longer believe in public solutions. We only believe in market solutions, or at least private-sector solutions: one-at-a-time solutions, individual solutions.
The worst thing about “leadership,” the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of “citizenship,” the notion that society should be run by everyone together. Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States. To escape from neoliberal education, we must escape from neoliberalism. If that sounds impossible, bear in mind that neoliberalism itself would have sounded impossible as recently as the 1970s. As late as 1976, the prospect of a Reagan presidency was played for laughs on network television.
Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes. That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.
Already, improbably, we have begun to make that move: in the president’s call in January for free community college, in the plan introduced in April by a group of Democratic senators and representatives to enable students to graduate from college without debt, in a proposal put forth by Senator Bernie Sanders for a tax on Wall Street transactions that would make four-year public institutions free for all. Over the past several years, the minimum wage has been placed near the top of the nation’s agenda, already with some notable successes. Now the same is happening with college costs and college access.
But it isn’t happening by itself. Young people, it turns out, are not helpless in the face of the market, especially not if they act together. Nor are they necessarily content to accept the place that neoliberalism has assigned them. We appear to have entered a renewed era of student activism, driven, as genuine political engagement always is, not by upper-class “concern” but by felt, concrete needs: for economic opportunity, for racial justice, for a habitable future. Educational institutions — reactive, defensive, often all but rudderless — are not offering much assistance with this project, and I don’t believe that students have much hope that they will. The real sense of helplessness, it seems, belongs to colleges and universities themselves."]]>williamderesiewicz education highereducation neoliberalism capitalism learning purpose stevenpinker 2015 individualism economics leadership missionstatements courage confidence hope criticalthinking independence autonomy liberalarts wealth inequality citizenship civics society highered publicpurpose business ronaldreagan billclinton margaretthatcher government media lioneltrilling socialgood creativity innovation amywhitaker service servicelearning change fundamentalchange systemsthinking us civilization transformation money power aynrand meritocracy plutocracy college colleges universities schools markets wallstreet helplessness elitism berniesanders communitycolleges aristocracy reaganism clintonism politics entrepreneurship volunteerism rickscott corporatization modernity joshuarothman greatbooks 1960s stem steam commercialization davidbrookshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ebdccbcb6690/Tom Friedman: A New Ayn Rand for A Dark Digital Future2013-07-28T23:31:22+00:00
http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130724/tom-friedman-a-new-ayn-rand-for-a-dark-digital-future
robertogrecodisruption economics punditry 2013 thomasfriedman corporatism class politics policy globalization aristocracy technosolutionism neoliberalism aynrand ushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4102f75e9637/The importance of following directions « Re-educate Seattle2010-12-06T07:09:28+00:00
http://stevemiranda.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/the-importance-of-following-directions/
robertogrecoeducation learning stevemiranda schools schooling schooliness unschooling deschooling colleges universities aristocracyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:eb9077f0a4b9/College Is Only Good for Helping Rich People Get Richer - Education - GOOD2010-12-06T07:07:55+00:00
http://www.good.is/post/college-is-only-good-for-helping-rich-people-get-richer/
robertogrecocollege good highered education learning lcproject schooliness unschooling deschooling oligarchy wealth advantage credentials criticism criticalthinking aristocracyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2209289a3235/Johann Hari: America is now officially for sale - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent ["It's the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off"]2010-11-07T20:20:10+00:00
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-america-is-now-officially-for-sale-2125447.html
robertogreco
This is all made easy for Republicans by the fact that most of the Democratic Party slithers in same trough of corruption, begging from the same billionaires & corporations, and so can deliver only a tiny notch more for ordinary Americans. This makes left-liberal ideas look discredited, when in truth they are largely discarded…"]]>corruption government greed johannhari teaparty politics us 2010 johnboehner wealth policy money systems aristocracy republicans democrats economics unemployment socialsafetynet society eliakazan sarahpalin glennbeckhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a83995e6b3de/Are We Preparing Developers or Producers? « Venture Pragmatist2010-11-07T20:11:51+00:00
http://venturepragmatist.com/2010/10/are-we-preparing-developers-or-producers/
robertogrecosociety politics policy us learning schools poverty children parenting economics funding irasocol chadratliff reform systems germany china aristocracy 2010 healthcare families employment educationhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:85982c807590/