Pinboard (robertogreco)
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/
recent bookmarks from robertogrecoCarol Black on Twitter: "You have to look at the power dynamics. If you're in an abusive relationship, & your abuser coerces you into learning 'mindfulness' to improve your 'social-emotional-behavioral functioning,' how's that gonna work out?" / Twitter2022-07-18T00:58:47+00:00
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1547608573177237504
robertogrecocarolblack schools schooling mindfulness coercion psychology 2022 behavior bullying wellbeing children school neurodiversity control obedience deschooling socialemotional wellness hierarchy abuse depression mentalhealth punishmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:709c8703302f/Mockingbird Song Serenade - YouTube2020-04-11T21:57:39+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNNX3f3_svo
robertogrecobirds sounds wildlife multispecies morethanhuman childhood loneliness carolblack night nighttime birdsonghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:54bb8fba9984/Carol Black: Alternatives to Schooling on Vimeo2018-10-21T08:14:26+00:00
https://vimeo.com/126183982
robertogrecocarolblack unschooling deschooling education learning howelearn schools schooling happiness alternative work play experimentation development children age segregation experience experientialeducation readiness compulsion control authoritarianism authority power standardization centralization publicschools corporations corporatism compulsory agesegregaton sfsh tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject conviviality ivanillich community howwelearn 2015 institutions institutionalizations diversityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:15a2d351bd50/Carol Black: Reclaiming Our Children, Reclaiming Our World - YouTube2018-10-21T08:13:45+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRK72Kfa9f4
robertogrecocarolblack unschooling deschooling economics humans learning howwelearn schools schooling brains development children education agesegregation us history literacy standardization centralization publicschools corporations corporatism compulsory control power agesegregaton sfsh tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject 2012https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:90eefe3de96f/Carol Black on Twitter: "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 ali2018-10-21T02:58:14+00:00
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1053692745800269824
robertogrecocarolblack irasocol howweread reading literature closereading 2018 school schooliness education absurdity literaryanalysis writers writing howwewrite filmmaking howwelearn academia academics schools unschooling deschooling analysis understanding repetition experience structure rhythm characterization language vocabulary dialogue noticing intuition instinct film flowhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2cca59e9b5af/Carol Black on Twitter: "FYI: Dr. Chester M. Pierce, who coined the term "microaggression," also coined the term "childism:" https://t.co/vYyMkeWWpj HT @TobyRollo #Childism… https://t.co/2ZOH24MVIf"2018-10-21T02:46:10+00:00
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1053830230010290176
robertogreco"We contend that childism is the basic form of oppression in our society and underlies all alienation and violence, for it teaches everyone how to be an oppressor and makes them focus on the exercise of raw power rather than on volitional humaneness...
"Like its derivatives, sexism and racism, it is found in virtually everyone. Modification of childist practices would alter other oppressive systems that retard the development of humankind to its full potential."
—CHESTER M. PIERCE, MD GAIL B. ALLEN, MD
2. "In childism, the child-victim is put on the defensive. He is expected to accommodate himself to the adult-aggressor, and is hardly ever permitted to initiate action or control a situation."
3. "The vehicle for most adult action is microaggression; the child is not rendered a gross brutalization, but is treated in such a way as to lower his self-esteem, dignity, and worthiness by means of subtle, cumulative, and unceasing adult deprecation."
4. "As a result of this constant barrage of micro-aggression, the child remains on the defensive, mobilizing constantly to conform and perform. This incessant mobilization is not without cost, psychologically and probably physiologically."
5. "These children have not been physically assaulted. They have, however, been subjected to a number of pejorative acts; the posture, gestures, tone of voice... were an abuse that indicates their inferiority, for no other reason than their social attribute of childhood."
6. "If such abuse were an isolated occurrence, it could be ignored. Yet in all probability these youngsters receive the same gratuitously abusive behavior many times a day from "loving parents," "devoted teachers," "kindly physicians," "concerned policemen..."
7. "This places the child in circumstances that bring about serious, protracted... stress... It has a cumulative effect that may exert a powerful influence on his adult behavior, just as sexist or racist practices affect the entire future of women or members of a minority group."
8. "Children remain the most oppressed group... The more we understand the oppression of children, the more we understand oppression of any individual or group. With a more informed understanding of this process, many traditional dominance patterns could be modified."
~ Chester M. Pierce, MD, former Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Education at Harvard University, and Gail B. Allen, MD. http://www.mghglobalpsychiatry.org/chesterpierce.php "]]>chesterpierce gailallen carolblack childism ageism 2018 microagression tobyrollo authoritarianism deschooling schooling unschooling schooliness psychology oppression power control adults behavior stress sexism racism children dominancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8f2ab17b0ba2/“Minding the Gap,” Reviewed: A Self-Questioning Documentary About What Happened to a Group of Young Skaters | The New Yorker2018-10-20T22:42:47+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
robertogrecoAs a teen-ager, a decade ago, in the small city of Rockford, Illinois, Bing Liu filmed himself and his friends skateboarding. He shot much of his footage while skating alongside them, and, as a result, the skating sequences of his documentary “Minding the Gap” (which opens today in theatres and streams on Hulu) have a surging, gliding, soaring, joyously speedy energy that offers a hypnotic whirl and rush. Those images of skating, however, are merely the background and context for the film, and the diverting thrill that they offer is crucial to the film’s substance. That substance—domestic trauma, systemic racism, and economic dislocation—is also the very stuff of society, and the near-at-hand intimacy gives rise to a film of vast scope and political depth.
Allowing his film to unfold over years of shooting and editing and re-editing, Liu uncovered the hidden depth and dimension in his subject matter.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
“Minding the Gap” builds Liu’s investigations, and the personal and ethical considerations that they entail, into the film. What he discovers—and films—of his friends’ present-day lives disturbs him, and Liu grapples with his own conflicts even while filming himself grappling with them. The details of the film make for an exemplary work of reporting. Liu’s clear revelation of specific yet complex events brings out psychological causality and logical connections but doesn’t impose a narrative; rather, the drama crystallizes as the events unfold. It’s a documentary in which the very nature of investigation is established—intellectually, aesthetically, and morally—by way of the personal implication of the filmmaker in the subject, of the filmmaker’s own need to make the images, to talk with the participants, to get beyond the surfaces of the settings. “Minding the Gap” is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.
Learning technical skills from online forums and by emulating filmmakers who inspired him, Liu was then able to allow the personal, emotional story to emerge. https://filmmakermagazine.com/105737-i-had-a-moral-crisis-bing-liu-on-minding-the-gap-personal-doc-voiceovers-and-cycles-of-abuse/#.W8i8by-ZMWo
Filmmaker: I had seen part of a cut that you had about a year ago. What I remember is, there was a lot more voiceover and the structure was different. There was a scene in the first ten minutes where you’re going to meet your mom to do the interview about you being abused by your stepfather, and you’re being interviewed in the car on the way: “So how do you feel about this?” At a certain point, obviously a lot of those things changed. Documentary editing processes are inherently long and complicated, but I’d love it if you could talk about thinking through some of those changes.
Liu: I didn’t begin the film wanting to be in the film. My background is, I got a camera to make videos when I was 14. I watched movies that inspired me, like Waking Life, Kids and Gummo. Some of my first shorts when I was a teen were this sort of Slacker plot where I follow people around Rockford as they interact with each other. The structure is based off of hand-offs, to give you a slice of community and the people in it. Anyway, I learned cinematography and editing through going to forums. There’s this website called Skate Perception that was kind of the Reddit for skate media makers all over the country. This was in the 2000s, when the internet was still finding its identity in many ways. It no longer exists; forums aren’t really a thing, for the most part.
“I didn’t go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school, don’t go to school for film.” https://nofilmschool.com/2018/08/minding-gap-bing-liu-interview
NFS: How did you develop your unconventional aesthetics over time, starting from such a young age?
Liu: It was a mix of just emulating other creators and films that I was watching and also just going online and learning. By the time I was 16, I had a camera that I could set exposure and color temperature and with ND filters on it. By the time I was 17, I had a 24p camera and I was building my own dollies, so it was sort of just like exploring and emulation of what was happening at the time, which was a mix of the internet connecting more people, and also the DIY-style filmmaking that was growing with the advent of DSLR shooting video. I never really saw a career in film as a viable thing. I thought making films was just what I did.
"The Glidecam was freeing because you can run down stairs when you get good enough at it, and even jump over things with the cameras."
NFS: How did you transition to realizing that you could actually do this professionally?
Liu: It was when I got a job as a PA when I was 19 and I was like, “Oh, I can get paid $50 a day to like fetch coffee and carry heavy camera cases around for 14 hours.” It was less about the $50 and more about the “Oh, you can do this.”
NFS: That's what we're always telling people who want to break into the business: just get on set.
Liu: Yeah, I didn't go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school. don't go to school for film, and so I went to school for literature.
]]]>bingliu mindingthegap film filmmaking documentary srg unschooling deschooling authority authoritarianism school schooling schools learning skating skateboarding self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn canon video domesticviolence 2018 carolblack teaching howweteach schooliness online internet web domestictrauma economics rustbelt society childabuse children teens youth streetculture illinois rockford friendship parenting dropouts aesthetics filmschool emulation cinematographyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9e306829a2db/'Minding the Gap': How Bing Liu Turned 12 Years of Skate Footage into the Year's Most Heartfelt Doc2018-10-20T22:37:00+00:00
https://nofilmschool.com/2018/08/minding-gap-bing-liu-interview
robertogrecoAs a teen-ager, a decade ago, in the small city of Rockford, Illinois, Bing Liu filmed himself and his friends skateboarding. He shot much of his footage while skating alongside them, and, as a result, the skating sequences of his documentary “Minding the Gap” (which opens today in theatres and streams on Hulu) have a surging, gliding, soaring, joyously speedy energy that offers a hypnotic whirl and rush. Those images of skating, however, are merely the background and context for the film, and the diverting thrill that they offer is crucial to the film’s substance. That substance—domestic trauma, systemic racism, and economic dislocation—is also the very stuff of society, and the near-at-hand intimacy gives rise to a film of vast scope and political depth.
Allowing his film to unfold over years of shooting and editing and re-editing, Liu uncovered the hidden depth and dimension in his subject matter.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
“Minding the Gap” builds Liu’s investigations, and the personal and ethical considerations that they entail, into the film. What he discovers—and films—of his friends’ present-day lives disturbs him, and Liu grapples with his own conflicts even while filming himself grappling with them. The details of the film make for an exemplary work of reporting. Liu’s clear revelation of specific yet complex events brings out psychological causality and logical connections but doesn’t impose a narrative; rather, the drama crystallizes as the events unfold. It’s a documentary in which the very nature of investigation is established—intellectually, aesthetically, and morally—by way of the personal implication of the filmmaker in the subject, of the filmmaker’s own need to make the images, to talk with the participants, to get beyond the surfaces of the settings. “Minding the Gap” is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.
Learning technical skills from online forums and by emulating filmmakers who inspired him, Liu was then able to allow the personal, emotional story to emerge. https://filmmakermagazine.com/105737-i-had-a-moral-crisis-bing-liu-on-minding-the-gap-personal-doc-voiceovers-and-cycles-of-abuse/#.W8i8by-ZMWo
Filmmaker: I had seen part of a cut that you had about a year ago. What I remember is, there was a lot more voiceover and the structure was different. There was a scene in the first ten minutes where you’re going to meet your mom to do the interview about you being abused by your stepfather, and you’re being interviewed in the car on the way: “So how do you feel about this?” At a certain point, obviously a lot of those things changed. Documentary editing processes are inherently long and complicated, but I’d love it if you could talk about thinking through some of those changes.
Liu: I didn’t begin the film wanting to be in the film. My background is, I got a camera to make videos when I was 14. I watched movies that inspired me, like Waking Life, Kids and Gummo. Some of my first shorts when I was a teen were this sort of Slacker plot where I follow people around Rockford as they interact with each other. The structure is based off of hand-offs, to give you a slice of community and the people in it. Anyway, I learned cinematography and editing through going to forums. There’s this website called Skate Perception that was kind of the Reddit for skate media makers all over the country. This was in the 2000s, when the internet was still finding its identity in many ways. It no longer exists; forums aren’t really a thing, for the most part.
“I didn’t go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school, don’t go to school for film.” https://nofilmschool.com/2018/08/minding-gap-bing-liu-interview
NFS: How did you develop your unconventional aesthetics over time, starting from such a young age?
Liu: It was a mix of just emulating other creators and films that I was watching and also just going online and learning. By the time I was 16, I had a camera that I could set exposure and color temperature and with ND filters on it. By the time I was 17, I had a 24p camera and I was building my own dollies, so it was sort of just like exploring and emulation of what was happening at the time, which was a mix of the internet connecting more people, and also the DIY-style filmmaking that was growing with the advent of DSLR shooting video. I never really saw a career in film as a viable thing. I thought making films was just what I did.
"The Glidecam was freeing because you can run down stairs when you get good enough at it, and even jump over things with the cameras."
NFS: How did you transition to realizing that you could actually do this professionally?
Liu: It was when I got a job as a PA when I was 19 and I was like, “Oh, I can get paid $50 a day to like fetch coffee and carry heavy camera cases around for 14 hours.” It was less about the $50 and more about the “Oh, you can do this.”
NFS: That's what we're always telling people who want to break into the business: just get on set.
Liu: Yeah, I didn't go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school. don't go to school for film, and so I went to school for literature.
]]]>bingliu mindingthegap film filmmaking documentary srg unschooling deschooling authority authoritarianism school schooling schools learning skating skateboarding self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn canon video domesticviolence 2018 carolblack teaching howweteach schooliness online internet webapps domestictrauma economics rustbelt society childabuse children teens youth streetculture illinois rockford friendship parenting dropouts aesthetics filmschool emulation cinematographyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5a761392d28b/“I Had a Moral Crisis”: Bing Liu on Minding the Gap, Personal Doc Voiceovers and Cycles of Abuse | Filmmaker Magazine2018-10-20T22:36:02+00:00
https://filmmakermagazine.com/105737-i-had-a-moral-crisis-bing-liu-on-minding-the-gap-personal-doc-voiceovers-and-cycles-of-abuse/#.W8i8by-ZMWo
robertogrecoAs a teen-ager, a decade ago, in the small city of Rockford, Illinois, Bing Liu filmed himself and his friends skateboarding. He shot much of his footage while skating alongside them, and, as a result, the skating sequences of his documentary “Minding the Gap” (which opens today in theatres and streams on Hulu) have a surging, gliding, soaring, joyously speedy energy that offers a hypnotic whirl and rush. Those images of skating, however, are merely the background and context for the film, and the diverting thrill that they offer is crucial to the film’s substance. That substance—domestic trauma, systemic racism, and economic dislocation—is also the very stuff of society, and the near-at-hand intimacy gives rise to a film of vast scope and political depth.
Allowing his film to unfold over years of shooting and editing and re-editing, Liu uncovered the hidden depth and dimension in his subject matter.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
“Minding the Gap” builds Liu’s investigations, and the personal and ethical considerations that they entail, into the film. What he discovers—and films—of his friends’ present-day lives disturbs him, and Liu grapples with his own conflicts even while filming himself grappling with them. The details of the film make for an exemplary work of reporting. Liu’s clear revelation of specific yet complex events brings out psychological causality and logical connections but doesn’t impose a narrative; rather, the drama crystallizes as the events unfold. It’s a documentary in which the very nature of investigation is established—intellectually, aesthetically, and morally—by way of the personal implication of the filmmaker in the subject, of the filmmaker’s own need to make the images, to talk with the participants, to get beyond the surfaces of the settings. “Minding the Gap” is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.
Learning technical skills from online forums and by emulating filmmakers who inspired him, Liu was then able to allow the personal, emotional story to emerge. https://filmmakermagazine.com/105737-i-had-a-moral-crisis-bing-liu-on-minding-the-gap-personal-doc-voiceovers-and-cycles-of-abuse/#.W8i8by-ZMWo
Filmmaker: I had seen part of a cut that you had about a year ago. What I remember is, there was a lot more voiceover and the structure was different. There was a scene in the first ten minutes where you’re going to meet your mom to do the interview about you being abused by your stepfather, and you’re being interviewed in the car on the way: “So how do you feel about this?” At a certain point, obviously a lot of those things changed. Documentary editing processes are inherently long and complicated, but I’d love it if you could talk about thinking through some of those changes.
Liu: I didn’t begin the film wanting to be in the film. My background is, I got a camera to make videos when I was 14. I watched movies that inspired me, like Waking Life, Kids and Gummo. Some of my first shorts when I was a teen were this sort of Slacker plot where I follow people around Rockford as they interact with each other. The structure is based off of hand-offs, to give you a slice of community and the people in it. Anyway, I learned cinematography and editing through going to forums. There’s this website called Skate Perception that was kind of the Reddit for skate media makers all over the country. This was in the 2000s, when the internet was still finding its identity in many ways. It no longer exists; forums aren’t really a thing, for the most part.
“I didn’t go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school, don’t go to school for film.” https://nofilmschool.com/2018/08/minding-gap-bing-liu-interview
NFS: How did you develop your unconventional aesthetics over time, starting from such a young age?
Liu: It was a mix of just emulating other creators and films that I was watching and also just going online and learning. By the time I was 16, I had a camera that I could set exposure and color temperature and with ND filters on it. By the time I was 17, I had a 24p camera and I was building my own dollies, so it was sort of just like exploring and emulation of what was happening at the time, which was a mix of the internet connecting more people, and also the DIY-style filmmaking that was growing with the advent of DSLR shooting video. I never really saw a career in film as a viable thing. I thought making films was just what I did.
"The Glidecam was freeing because you can run down stairs when you get good enough at it, and even jump over things with the cameras."
NFS: How did you transition to realizing that you could actually do this professionally?
Liu: It was when I got a job as a PA when I was 19 and I was like, “Oh, I can get paid $50 a day to like fetch coffee and carry heavy camera cases around for 14 hours.” It was less about the $50 and more about the “Oh, you can do this.”
NFS: That's what we're always telling people who want to break into the business: just get on set.
Liu: Yeah, I didn't go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school. don't go to school for film, and so I went to school for literature.
]]]>bingliu mindingthegap film filmmaking documentary srg unschooling deschooling authority authoritarianism school schooling schools learning skating skateboarding self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn canon video domesticviolence 2018 carolblack teaching howweteach schooliness online internet web domestictrauma economics rustbelt society childabuse children teens youth streetculture illinois rockford friendship parenting dropouts aesthetics filmschool emulation cinematographyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d66a6aa2e7fb/Science / Fiction — Carol Black2018-06-23T02:45:43+00:00
http://carolblack.org/science-fiction/
robertogrecocarolblack learningstyles evidence 2018 paulkirschner jeroenvanmerriënboer li-fangzhang mariakozhevnikov carolevans elenagrigorenko stephenkosslyn robertsternberg learning education data danielwillingham daviddidau joanneyatvin power yongzhao research unschooling deschooling directinstruction children happiness creativity well-being iq intelligence traditional testing intrinsicmotivation mastery behavior howwelearn self-directed self-directedlearning ignorance franksmith race racism oppression intersectionality coreknowledge schooling schooliness homeschool multiliteracies differences hierarchy participation participatory democracy leannebetasamosakesimpson andrealandry pedagogy teaching howweteach colonization leisterman ibramkendi standardizedtesting standardization onesizefitsall cornelpewewardy cedarriener yanaweinsteinhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1b1e6b247723/Children, Learning, and the Evaluative Gaze of School — Carol Black2018-06-14T02:27:16+00:00
http://carolblack.org/the-gaze
robertogrecocarolblack canon unschooling deschooling evaluation assessment schools schooling schooliness cv petergray judgement writing art sfsh rubrics children childhood learning howwelearn education discipline coercion rabindranathtagore panopticon observation teaching teachers power resistance surveillance martinbuber gender race racism measurement comparison praise rewards grades grading 2018https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:39be1fd2b26e/Carol Black on Twitter: "THREAD Brief tutorial in why innovations in institutional education always "fail.""2018-03-20T00:46:11+00:00
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/975766319600615424
robertogrecocarolblack education sfsh tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject onesizefitsall unschooling deschooling diversity options learning children howwelearn howweteach schools schooling edreformhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ffcf461e25a3/An Autistic Education - The Autistic Advocate2018-01-22T02:07:49+00:00
http://www.theautisticadvocate.com/2018/01/an-autistic-education.html
robertogrecoautism experience schools schooling 2018 kieranrose education children accessibility difference carolblack standardizationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a622c2b9e3a3/Teacher Tom: "But How Do They Learn To Read?"2016-07-27T22:42:52+00:00
https://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/but-how-do-they-learn-to-read.html
robertogrecoStudies have compared groups of children . . . who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7 . . . (T)he early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children's reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who stared at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later.
Their recommendation is that the best "academic" education for children under seven is the sort of "informal, play-based" environment we offer at Woodland Park because that is how the human animal is designed to build the foundation for all future learning.
The sickening thing is that today's kindergartens and preschools are charging pell-mell in the wrong direction:
A new University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways from 1999-2006. There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined.
With the advent of the Common Core federal public school curriculum in the US (and it is a curriculum despite it's advocates' insistence that they are merely "standards") with its narrow focus on literacy, mathematics, and testing, it has gotten even worse since 2006. Indeed:
Last year, average math scores . . . declined; reading scores were flat or decreased compared with a decade earlier.
We are proving the research: we are damaging our children. This is why I remain so consistently opposed to what is happening in our public schools. By law I'm a mandatory reporter of child abuse in my state. This might not fit the legal definition, but it definitely fits the moral one.
That still begs the original question: how will they learn to read?
As I learned from Carol Black's brilliant essay entitled A Thousand Rivers, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439, very few people could read. In fact, reading was primarily the domain of the clergy who needed the skill to read and create Bibles. But the printing press suddenly made printed matter widely available. With no notion of formal literacy education, Europeans were left to learn to read on their own, passing on the knowledge from one person to the next, from one generation to the next.
Literacy rates steadily climbed for the next couple hundred years, then surged around the time of the American Revolution when Thomas Payne's pamphlet Common Sense became a runaway hit, selling over a half million copies and going through 25 printings in its first year. It's estimated that 2.5 million colonists read it, an astronomical number for the time. And it's not easy reading. Nevertheless, historians credit this viral document with inspiring the 13 American colonies to ultimately declare their independence from British rule.
People wanted to read, they needed to read, so they learned to read, which is why literacy rates in those original 13 colonies were actually higher than those we see today in in our 50 states. A similar thing has happened, albeit at a faster pace, with computer technology. I have a distinct memory of Dad buying an Apple II+, a machine that came with no software. Instead it came with thick instruction manuals that taught us how to write our own programs. You could take classes on "how to work your computer." Today, our two-year-olds are teaching themselves as these technology skills have gone viral. The idea of a computer class today is laughable, just as a reading class would have been laughable in 1776.
And just as "walking" or "talking" classes would be laughable to us today, so too should this whole nonsense of "reading" classes. Yet shockingly, we continue to go backwards with literacy to the point that most of us seem to think that it's necessary that children spend days and years of their lives at earlier and earlier ages, being drilled in a utilitarian skill that past generations just learned, virally, over the natural course of living their lives. No wonder children hate school. No wonder they are bored and stressed out.
Certainly, there are children in our world who are "at risk" for not learning to read, including those with actual learning disabilities, as opposed to the manufactured ones we are currently slapping on normal children who are simply taking a little longer to getting around to reading. And for those children, as well as for those who are being raised in illiterate households, intervention may be necessary. But for the overwhelming majority of our children, the greatest literacy challenge they face is our obsessive rush for more and more earlier and earlier. We are, in our abject ignorance, our refusal to actually look at the evidence, teaching our children to hate reading, which is in my view a crime not only against children, but against all humanity."]]>children reading play literacy pedagogy teaching schools carolblack unschooling deschooling play-basededucation kindergarten sfsh history thomaspayne tomhobson walking howwelearn necessity coercion learningdisabilities talking education gutenberghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3c293d49fe4b/On the Wildness of Children — Carol Black2016-05-08T03:22:11+00:00
http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/
robertogrecoIf children learn to normalize dominance and non-consent within the context of education, then non-consent becomes a normalized part of the ‘tool kit’ of those who have and wield power… This is unthinkable within Nishnaabeg intelligence.
Interestingly, the most brilliant artists and scientists in Euro-western societies tell us exactly the same thing: that it is precisely this state of open attention, curiosity, freedom, collaboration, consent, that is necessary for all true learning, discovery, creation."
…
"We no longer frame people as either “civilized”or “savage,” but as “educated” or “uneducated,” “developed” or “developing” (our modern terms for the same thing). But we retain the paternalistic attitudes of our forebears, toward our children and toward the “childlike” adults we find all over the world — a paternalism in which the veneer of benevolence is underpinned by the constant threat of violent force.
Control is always so seductive, at least to the "developed" ("civilized") mind. It seems so satisfying, so efficient, so effective, so potent. In the short run, in some ways, it is. But it creates a thousand kinds of blowback, from depressed rebellious children to storms surging over our coastlines to guns and bombs exploding in cities around the world."]]>education unschooling children childhood carolblack attention culture society learning wildness wild wilderness thoreau ellwoodcubberley williamtorreyharris schooling schools johntaylorgatto outdoors natureanxiety depression psychology wellness adhd mindfulness suzannegaskins openattention miniaodlafreeman paulejeune wilfredpeltier leannebetasamosakesimpson consent animals zoos nature johannhari brucealexander mammals indigenous johnholt petergray work play howwelearn tobyrollo chastisement civilization control kosmos colonization colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:69f840250e75/Learning / Sex — Carol Black2016-05-01T01:24:52+00:00
http://carolblack.org/learning-sex/
robertogrecocarolblack unschooling deschooling education learning howwelearn nealmarlens humor sex measurement standardization development motivation enjoyment joy dignity policy competition ranking rankings howweteach teachinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:955a6c853399/Carol Black on Twitter: "Leanne @betasamosake Simpson: Whose learning "standards" are centered, whose are pushed to the periphery? @JennBinis https://t.co/eqEMZIQiaz"2016-05-01T00:50:16+00:00
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/726485736665452544
robertogrecocarolblack standards standardization pedagogy education schooling 2016 power scale control curriculum compulsory self-determination sexism racism patriarchy paternalism punishment hierarchy colonization colonialism selfdeterminationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ae1f77b33917/The Future of Big-Box Schooling2015-01-07T08:01:42+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/big-box-schooling/
robertogrecocarolblack ellwoodcubberly johntaylorgatto kenrobinson meredithsmall culture knowledge diversity local education learning children parenting sugatamitra society indigeneity indigenous howweteach howwelearn pedagogy unschooling deschooling colonization standardization standardizedtesting standards relationships mentoring apprenticeships internships agesegregation work play control authority hierarchy colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:05f6cb44c3dd/Occupy Your Brain: On Power, Knowledge, and the Re-Occupation of Common Sense2015-01-07T07:52:27+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/occupy-your-brain/
robertogrecocarolblack education unschooling deschooling centralization decentralization curriculum power control policy authority colonization hierarchy autonomy testing standardization local freedom globalization knowledge diversity sustainability indigeneity colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:49efe447bdc7/Three Cups of Fiction2014-08-11T22:38:14+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/three-cups-of-fiction/
robertogrecometrics quantification education schooling gregmortenson children schools carolblack unschooling deschooling nomadism nomads trafficking failure girls worldbank development economics competition society poverty colonization colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cca28f5634e5/A Thousand Rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning.2014-08-10T20:58:30+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/a-thousand-rivers/
robertogreco“Spontaneous reading happens for a few kids. The vast majority need (and all can benefit from) explicit instruction in phonics.”
This 127-character edict issued, as it turned out, from a young woman who is the “author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter” and a “journalist, consultant and speaker who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better.”
It got under my skin, and not just because I personally had proven in the first grade that it is possible to be bad at phonics even if you already know how to read. It was her tone; that tone of sublime assurance on the point, which, further tweets revealed, is derived from “research” and “data” which demonstrate it to be true.
Many such “scientific” pronouncements have emanated from the educational establishment over the last hundred years or so. The fact that the proven truths of each generation are discovered by the next to be harmful folly never discourages the current crop of experts who are keen to impose their freshly-minted certainties on children. Their tone of cool authority carries a clear message to the rest of us: “We know how children learn. You don’t.
So they explain it to us.
The “scientific consensus” about phonics, generated by a panel convened by the Bush administration and used to justify billions of dollars in government contracts awarded to Bush supporters in the textbook and testing industries, has been widely accepted as fact through the years of “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top,” so if history is any guide, its days are numbered. Any day now there will be new research which proves that direct phonics instruction to very young children is harmful, that it bewilders and dismays them and makes them hate reading (we all know that’s often true, so science may well discover it) — and millions of new textbooks, tests, and teacher guides will have to be purchased at taxpayer expense from the Bushes’ old friends at McGraw-Hill.
The problems with this process are many, but the one that I’d like to highlight is this: the available “data” that drives it is not, as a matter of fact, the “science of how people learn.” It is the “science of what happens to people in schools.”
This is when it occurred to me: people today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools.
Schools as we know them have existed for a very short time historically: they are in themselves a vast social experiment. A lot of data are in at this point. One in four Americans does not know the earth revolves around the sun. Half of Americans don’t know that antibiotics can’t cure a virus. 45% of American high school graduates don’t know that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. These aren’t things that are difficult to know. If the hypothesis is that universal compulsory schooling is the best way to to create an informed and critically literate citizenry, then anyone looking at the data with a clear eye would have to concede that the results are, at best, mixed. At worst, they are catastrophic: a few strains of superbacteria may be about to prove that point for us.
On the other hand, virtually all white American settlers in the northeastern colonies at the time of the American Revolution could read, not because they had all been to school, and certainly not because they had all been tutored in phonics, which didn’t exist at the time. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, not exactly light reading, sold over 500,000 copies in its first year of publication, the equivalent of a book selling sixty million copies today. People learned to read in a variety of ways, some from small one-room schools, but many from their mothers, from tutors, traveling ministers, apprentice’s masters, relatives, neighbors, friends. They could read because, in a literate population, it is really not that difficult to transmit literacy from one person to the next. When people really want a skill, it goes viral. You couldn’t stop it if you tried.
In other words, they could read for all the same reasons that we can now use computers. We don’t know how to use computers because we learned it in school, but because we wanted to learn it and we were free to learn it in whatever way worked best for us. It is the saddest of ironies that many people now see the fluidity and effectiveness of this process as a characteristic of computers, rather than what it is, which is a characteristic of human beings.
In the modern world, unless you learn to read by age 4, you are no longer free to learn in this way. Now your learning process will be scientifically planned, controlled, monitored and measured by highly trained “experts” operating according to the best available “data.” If your learning style doesn’t fit this year’s theory, you will be humiliated, remediated, scrutinized, stigmatized, tested, and ultimately diagnosed and labelled as having a mild defect in your brain.
How did you learn to use a computer? Did a friend help you? Did you read the manual? Did you just sit down and start playing around with it? Did you do a little bit of all of those things? Do you even remember? You just learned it, right?”
…
"City kids who grow up among cartoon mice who talk and fish who sing show tunes are so delayed in their grasp of real living systems that Henrich et al. suggest that studying the cognitive development of biological reasoning in urban children may be “the equivalent of studying “normal” physical growth in malnourished children.” But in schools, rural Native children are tested and all too often found to be less intelligent and more learning “disabled” than urban white children, a deeply disturbing phenomenon which turns up among traditional rural people all over the world."
…
"Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – and the conscience – of our species. It’s no accident that indigenous holistic thinkers are the ones who have been consistently reminding us of our appropriate place in the ecological systems of life as our narrowly-focused technocratic society veers wildly between conservation and wholesale devastation of the planet. It’s no accident that dyslexic holistic thinkers are often our artists, our inventors, our dreamers, our rebels. "
…
"Right now American phonics advocates are claiming that they “know” how children learn to read and how best to teach them. They know nothing of the kind. A key value in serious scientific inquiry is also a key value in every indigenous culture around the world: humility. We are learning."
…
"“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top,” a great artist once said. Science is a tool of breathtaking power and beauty, but it is not a good parent; it must be balanced by something broader, deeper, older. Like wind and weather, like ecosystems and microorganisms, like snow crystals and evolution, human learning remains untamed, unpredictable, a blossoming fractal movement so complex and so mysterious that none of us can measure or control it. But we are part of that fractal movement, and the ability to help our offspring learn and grow is in our DNA. We can begin rediscovering it now. Experiment. Observe. Listen. Explore the thousand other ways of learning that still exist all over the planet. Read the data and then set it aside. Watch your child’s eyes, what makes them go dull and dead, what makes them brighten, quicken, glow with light. That is where learning lies."]]>carolblack 2014 education learning certainty experts science research data unschooling deschooling schooliness schooling compulsoryschooling history literacy canon parenting experimentation listening observation noticing indigeneity howwelearn howweteach wisdom intuition difference diversity iainmcgilchrist truth idleness dyslexia learningdifferences rosscooper neurodiveristy finland policy standards standardization adhd resistance reading howweread sugatamitra philiplieberman maori aboriginal society cv creativity independence institutionalization us josephhenrich stevenjheine aranorenzayan weird compulsory māori colonization colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f0bfaf1b7466/three cups of fiction | Schooling the World2011-05-08T00:04:15+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/blog/bestselling-fiction/
robertogrecothreecupsoftea gregmortenson afghanistan education unschooling deschooling learning nomads ngo development culturalsuperiority culture reform teaching systems systemsthinking 2011 inequality power charity economics designimperialism humanitariandesign humanitarianism stonesintoschools money failure rankings sorting testing children women girls society competition hierarchy class onesizefitsall grading poverty gender colonization carolblack colonialismhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8d8c57761fd4/Schooling the World | The White Man's Last Burden2011-02-20T18:50:47+00:00
http://schoolingtheworld.org/
robertogrecoeducation unschooling deschooling colonialism imperialism westernworld westernschools schooling schools us global documentary film reform wealth prosperity sustainability 2011 carolblack colonizationhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f3e80a054be6/