There’s a wealth of critical literature on elevating ‘resilience’ among students as a character trait because of its tendency to rationalize systemic disparities and act as a “distancing move” to avoid confronting systemic issues. Paul Thomas is an essential source on this topic.

Source: Making Room for Asset Pedagogies – Long View on Education

See also:

Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology

Social psychologists sometimes use the term “fundamental attribution error” to describe a tendency to pay so much attention to character, personality, and individual responsibility that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are. This error has political implications: The more we focus on people’s persistence (or self-discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies and institutions. Consider Paul Tough’s declaration that “there is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than the character strengths…[such as] conscientiousness, grit, resilience, perseverance, and optimism.” Whose interests are served by the astonishing position that “no antipoverty tool” – presumably including Medicaid and public housing – is more valuable than an effort to train poor kids to persist at whatever they’ve been told to do?

The most impressive educational activists are those who struggle to replace a system geared to memorizing facts and taking tests with one dedicated to exploring ideas. They’re committed to a collaborative approach to schooling that learners will find more engaging. By contrast, those enamored of grit look at the same status quo and ask: How can we get kids to put up with it?

Source: Grit: A Skeptical Look at the Latest Educational Fad (##) – Alfie Kohn

Change also means that the ideas and concerns of all people need to be a part of the design phase and the auditing of systems, even if this slows down the process. We need to bring back and reinvigorate the profession of quality assurance so that products are not launched without systematic consideration of the harms that might occur. Call it security or call it safety, but it requires focusing on inclusion. After all, whether we like it or not, the tech industry is now in the business of global governance.

Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society.

Source: Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium

Personalized learning – the kind hyped these days by Mark Zuckerberg and many others in Silicon Valley – is just the latest version of Skinner’s behavioral technology. Personalized learning relies on data extraction and analysis; it urges and rewards students and promises everyone will reach “mastery.” It gives the illusion of freedom and autonomy perhaps – at least in its name; but personalized learning is fundamentally about conditioning and control.

those who work in and work with education technology need to confront and resist this architecture – the “surveillance dataism,” to borrow Morozov’s phrase – even if (especially if) the outcomes promised are purportedly “for the good of the student.”

Source: Education Technology and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Low-road Capitalism

When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” – as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts – what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads

Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.

What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism – a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider – one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.

Source: American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. – The New York Times

Low-road capitalism. That’s a handy term.

Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

Yet meritocracy itself is the bigger problem, and it is crippling the American dream. Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.

Meritocracy frames this exclusion as a failure to measure up, adding a moral insult to economic injury.

Source: Meritocracy Harms Everyone – The Atlantic

Via:

Autism is simply an internal human ‘normality’ with the volume turned up. We all have experienced moments when we aren’t quite aware or when we are too aware to handle the world. Or moments when we aren’t quite aware of the company we are in or so overly aware of it that it gets hard to function. We all have had times when we’ve had hardly any awareness of our bodies, even been out of them, or felt so in, weighed down by them, that we become hypercritical, eager to escape, tune out, disappear. We have all had times when we’ve lost the plot, the why, the what or been distracted by the meta-reality inside our heads to the extent that we are suddenly jolted out of a daydream. So too, have we all had moments when we have been so aware that we have taken things in in almost overwhelming, extreme detail. For me, the experience of ‘autism’ is not of any of these things in themselves, but rather the frequency and extremity with which they are experienced and the degree to which these experiences affect how one expresses oneself and relates to one’s inner world and the outer world. It’s a matter of whether you visit these states or whether you’ve lived there.

Source: Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct

Via: Inclusive Education for Autistic Children: Helping Children and Young People to Learn and Flourish in the Classroom