…today’s debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse-a concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency fetishes, and a rightward drift in politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education altogether. We no longer have a way to talk about public education as a collective good because even we defenders have adopted the language of competition.
I use many healthcare portals for fetching med records & contacting docs. They’re all frustrating & buggy. Threshold flow is uniformly bad w/ archaic & unspecified password rules. I often can’t sign up at all, requiring phone calls. Med model flow is high friction & high stress.
Trumpist family especially break my heart right now. This is not something that can ever heal. You are lost way down deep, and I’m tired of searching and hoping you won’t conclude your lives with this as your legacy.
Nice people made the best Nazis.
Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on “politics,” instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.
Source: No Time To Be Nice: Now Is Not The Moment To Remain Silent | Cognoscenti
The one thing this photographic strategy doesn’t take into account is the sound. Photography emphasizes distance and objectivity. It’s evidence. Human faces shrunk down to the size of thumbprints, frozen in time. The sounds of the crying children reach a different part of our psyche. The cries resonate in our bodies as surely as if the suffering children were in the same room. Sound is intimate. That’s why I do radio and podcast: the sound connects us, retrieving a pre-internet, pre-printing press, pre-scribal sense of community.
Source: Team Human: Don’t have to look like a refugee – Rushkoff
When I first heard the term liberation theology (in opposition to a theology that fosters compliance with the status quo), I thought there should also be a liberation psychology—a psychology that doesn’t equate a lack of adjustment with mental illness, but instead promotes constructive rebellion against dehumanizing institutions, and which also provides strategies to build a genuinely democratic society.
liberation psychology is about looking at the world from the point of view of the dominated instead of the dominators.
Whether they realize it or not, mental health professionals who narrowly treat their clients in a way that encourages compliance with the status quo are acting politically. Similarly, validating a client’s challenging of these undemocratic hierarchical modes is also a political act. I believe that mental health professionals have an obligation to recognize the broader issues that form a context for their clients’ mental well-being, and to be honest with their clientele about which side of this issue they are on.
A minority of the anti-authoritarian kids I have worked with are aware of anarchism and identify themselves as anarchists, perhaps having T-shirts with a circle drawn around an A. However, even among those adolescents who know nothing of the political significance of the term anarchism, I cannot remember one who didn’t become excited to discover that there is an actual political ideology that encompasses their point of view. They immediately became more whole after they discovered that answering “yes” to the following questions does not mean that they suffer from a mental disorder but that they have a certain political philosophy:
- Do you hate coercion? Do you love freedom?
- Are you willing to risk punishments to gain freedom?
- Do you distrust large, impersonal, and distant authorities?
- Do you reject centralized authority and believe in participatory democracy?
- Do you hate powerful bigness of any kind?
- Do you hate laws and rules that benefit the people at the top and make life miserable for people at the bottom?
Source: Toward a Liberation Psychology
The cloud should never be the primary place to store / manage what you create; it should always be the exhaust.
Source: More Than Archiving, Organizing Your Shared Stuff Begins at Home – CogDogBlog
I think we can’t keep going with a system that allows the minority to run the country, especially a racist minority, a misogynist minority, a fundamentalist minority, a cruel and stupid minority.
The smallest 26 states have a population of about 57 million, less than the population of California and the New York metro area. Under winner take all rules, the minority can control the country with say 20 million voters, about 6% of the population. How many people in the US are like the people who turn out for Trump’s rallies?
How long will the majority consent to be governed by the minority?
Source: Waiting – emptywheel
much education research takes the form of collecting data on people’s ability to learn nonsense.
where scientific theory conflicts strongly with the basic empathic responses of ordinary people, history (and Jane Goodall) would suggest that it’s a good idea to pay attention to those conflicts.
There’s an Orwellian quality to the spectacle of cognitive scientists reasoning from their own inability to meaningfully address the differences in our children to a finding that our children don’t have meaningful differences after all.
What needs to be noted here is how the claim that LEARNING STYLES DON’T EXIST has morphed directly and explicitly into a claim about lower intelligence in certain children.
The question, then, is this: is there a scientific reason we should assume every difference is a deficit until proven otherwise?
Or is there a historical reason that difference was framed as deficit from the beginning, intentionally, to perpetuate and justify a hierarchical society of winners and losers?
So before we uncritically accept the debunkers’ claim that the scientific research supports a One-Style-Fits-All approach to instruction, we should stop and ask ourselves: “Who invented that One Style? Who succeeds by it, and who fails? What historical power structures does it emanate from, and whose power does it perpetuate and reproduce?
The logic goes like this:
What “works?” Direct instruction. How do we know? Tests. Who designs the tests? The same people who have always designed the tests.
Source: Science / Fiction — Carol Black
I read these edu-inspirations, and think about the ways concepts like learning styles, the marshmallow test, growth mindset, grit, and personalized learning take off and become policy and how an uncritical embrace of these “pseudo-ideas” makes the ground fertile for such behaviors.
rnbn 