My YouTube play list of favorite cover songs from 2020 is helping me cope with 2020. Plenty of goosebumps and chills moments.
Author: Ryan Boren
#ActuallyAutistic parent and retired tech worker. Equity literate education, respectfully connected parenting, passion-based learning, indie ed-tech, neurodiversity, social model of disability, design for real life, inclusion, open web, open source. he/they
Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. You can’t understand the history of education unless you realize this. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d go one step further: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.
Skinner won; Papert lost. Thorndike won; Dewey lost. Behaviorism won.
It seems to really bother folks when I say this. It’s not aspirational enough or something. Or it implies maybe that we’ve surrendered. Folks will point to things like maker-spaces to argue that progressive education is thriving. But I maintain, even in the face of all the learn-to-code brouhaha, that multiple choice tests have triumphed over democratically-oriented inquiry. Indeed, when we hear technologists champion “personalized learning,” it’s far more likely that what they envision draws on Skinner’s ideas, not Dewey’s.
Source: Behaviorism Won
See also:
Opposition to behaviorism is common ground in neurodiversity, disability, education, ed-tech, and tech ethics advocacy.
Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – and the conscience – of our species.
Dyslexic children often have better imaginations than non-dyslexics, after all, but nobody labels the “normal” children as having an “imagination disability.”
These children’s brains are organizing themselves differently, and it should go without saying that their developmental arc may therefore be different. When we interfere in the process of this organization, when we stigmatize it and test it and remediate it prematurely — when we try to teach dyslexics to think like other children by aggressively drilling them in phonics — Cooper says we are robbing these children of the opportunity to build organically on their many strengths rather than being treated as something broken that needs fixing.
Some simply have a different learning strategy; one that absorbs, considers, consolidates, integrates, and then suddenly blossoms fully formed.
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.
People all over the world know these things about children and learning, and interestingly, they are as workable for learning how to design software or conduct a scientific experiment or write an elegant essay as they are for learning to hunt caribou or identify medicinal plants in a rainforest.
But we don’t know them any more.
Source: A Thousand Rivers: What The Modern World Has Forgotten About Children And Learning
Distracting myself from the state of the world by rewatching Legend of Korra for the Korra and Asami relationship.
What other queer representation in animation should I distract myself with?
For millions of white people, “being racist” is somehow completely unrelated to articulating racist views and supporting racist policies.
Source: Fleming, Crystal Marie. How to Be Less Stupid About Race (p. 117). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.
“What Trump calls “patriotic education” is racist education.”
—Ibram X. Kendi
“Shout out to the teachers who have their students read the declarations of Confederate secession, the narratives of enslaved ppl, & the letters written by our founding fathers. Teaching a history of slavery isn’t indoctrination, the primary sources tell the story for themselves.”
—Clint Smith
“Patriotic education” is Stephen Miller’s fascism + Mike Pence’s fundamentalism. Some years ago, I took a course in “patriotic education” for my book THE FAMILY. I spent a season reading its textbooks & talking to its teachers. Here’s what to expect…
I read the textbooks of evangelical academies & Christian nationalist homeschoolers to write a chapter of my book THE FAMILY. Trump’s “patriotic history” is straight out of that world, where the textbooks extolling American “heroes” like Stonewall Jackson are already written.
“Patriotic education” is a fundamentalist concept. Just as fundamentalist religion supposes that divine truths are literal & determined by (white male) authority, so fundamentalist history discards the ongoing work of knowing the past.
“Patriotic education” proposes, as did the White House conference, that the Constitution is divine, “god-breathed,” as some say, & thus impervious to expanding ideas of rights. That’s the religion behind Clarence Thomas’ constitutional “originalism.” It’s false.
“Heritage studies,” or “patriotic education,” is a cult of personality. History matters not for its progression of “fact, fact, fact,” Michael McHugh, a pioneer of modern Christian nationalist ed, told me, but for “key personalities.” It’s the strongman view of the past.
—Jeff Sharlet
“The 1619 Project curriculum is available. What we’re exposing is a true fear of our children learning a more accurate history of the United States.”
“These are hard days we’re in but I take great satisfaction from knowing that now even Trump’s supporters know the date 1619 and mark it as the beginning American slavery. 1619 is part of the national lexicon. That cannot be undone, no matter how hard they try.”
—Nikole Hannah-Jones
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1306730215570386949?s=20
Since ideas and ideologies played an especially important role in the Civil War era, American history textbooks give a singularly inchoate view of that struggle. Just as textbooks treat slavery without racism, they treat abolitionism without much idealism. Consider the most radical white abolitionist of them all, John Brown.
The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he has slowly been regaining his sanity. Before reviewing six more textbooks in 2006-07, I had imagined that they would maintain this trend, portraying Brown’s actions so as to render them at least intelligible if not intelligent. In their treatment of Brown, however, the new textbooks don’t differ much from those of the 1980s, so I shall discuss them all together. Since Brown himself did not change after his death-except to molder more-his mental health in our textbooks provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society. Perhaps our new textbooks suggest that race relations circa 2007 are not much better than circa 1987.
Source: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing.
For whiteness is the mortar holding together the fortress of white supremacy, and if it crumbles, those walls will inevitably collapse. Because of its binding importance, the idea of whiteness has been, and remains today, vigilantly defended. In fact, virtually nothing has proven too costly a sacrifice on the altar of its defense: the bloodbath of the Civil War, the construction of a segregated education system, the creation of an apartheid Jim Crow system of laws enforcing segregation across all aspects of society, redlining real estate practices that divided virtually all of our major cities along racial lines, the development of a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates millions of black men, and even the distortion of Christian theology. If one stops long enough to reflect on it, the ransom this fiction has demanded to sustain itself is staggering: the number of lives both white and black, the amount of money and cultural energy, and the disfigurement of some of our most precious ideals.
White supremacy lives on today not just in explicitly and consciously held attitudes among white Christians; it has become deeply integrated into the DNA of white Christianity itself.
That last statement, standing alone, sounds shocking. But an honest look at the historical arc of white Christianity in America suggests that we should instead be astonished if it were otherwise. For centuries, through colonial America and into the latter part of the twentieth century, white Christians literally built—architecturally, culturally, and theologically—white supremacy into an American Christianity that held an a priori commitment to slavery and segregation. At key potential turning point moments such as the Civil War and the civil rights movement, white Christians, for the most part, did not just fail to evict this sinister presence; history confirms that they continued to aid and abet it. The weight of this legacy is indeed overwhelming.
