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Maggie Verster

Bounds of Democracy :: Epistemological Access in Higher Education - 0 views

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    Bounds of Democracy: Epistemological Access in Higher Education
paul lowe

The Wealth of Networks » Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and... - 0 views

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    Yochai Benkler's wealth of nations book online Next Chapter: Part I: The Networked Information Economy » read paragraph Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Roland Gesthuizen

Education Rethink: What Didn't Happen at #ISTE12 - 3 views

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    "I want to see teachers stand up and speak as passionately about democracy, social justice and critical thinking as they do apps and iPads. I want to see teachers tell stories, not just about student projects, but about how standardization is getting in the way of authentic learning. I want to see us recover a vision of education as the development of critical thinking citizens rather than the kickstart campaign for a lagging economy"
BalancEd Tech

Daily Kos: Universal Public Education Is Dead: The Rise of State Schools - 0 views

  • U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content. The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive:
  • Re-reading and re-writing the world acknowledges that being as a human is always becoming, and these acts embrace the perpetual cycle of re-reading and re-writing as essential for both human agency and democracy. Teaching and learning are reciprocal and on-going, not hierarchical and ends to attain, possess.
Randolph Hollingsworth

"Promises" of Online Higher Ed: Profits - Campaign for the Future of Higher Education |... - 12 views

  • the burning questions focus squarely and exclusively on what will make money for particular companies
  • use their powerful brand reputations to get ahead of rapid technological changes that could destabilize their residential business models over the long-run
  • good credit news for elite institutions
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    on the revolutionary aspect of MOOCs to break down traditional barriers to higher ed as regularly stated by CEOs Koller and Thrun: "This rhetoric is perhaps the most glittery yet in the public discourse about online higher education. But it is also a diversion shifting attention away from the logic of profit-making. For parents, students, and the general public who focus primarily on what education means for people's futures, for social mobility, for a healthy economy and a robust democracy, a dip into the insider talk of MOOCs, their investors, and industry analysts is both instructive and disorienting."
Mark Johnstone

Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond - 32 views

  • Everybody was a good student. The kids were just encouraged to do what they like to do and what was best, and there was a structure; there was a program. It's not you ran around doing anything you felt like. I skipped a grade, but I didn't pay any attention and no one else paid any attention. Just that I was the smallest kid in the class, but the idea that somebody is a good student; somebody is not a good student - it just never arose. There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better. The kids weren't ranked; there were no grades. There's a lot of cooperative work and cooperative projects and they encouraged us. You know, study, challenging questions, and it was extremely successful. I remember everything very well. I went into the academic high school and it's kind of like a black hole. I was able to get all As and a scholarship to go into college. I might well not have gone, except for what I learned on my own.
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    "Everybody was a good student. The kids were just encouraged to do what they like to do and what was best, and there was a structure; there was a program. It's not you ran around doing anything you felt like. I skipped a grade, but I didn't pay any attention and no one else paid any attention. Just that I was the smallest kid in the class, but the idea that somebody is a good student; somebody is not a good student - it just never arose. There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better. The kids weren't ranked; there were no grades. There's a lot of cooperative work and cooperative projects and they encouraged us. You know, study, challenging questions, and it was extremely successful. I remember everything very well. I went into the academic high school and it's kind of like a black hole. I was able to get all As and a scholarship to go into college. I might well not have gone, except for what I learned on my own."
Kate Tabor

Alfie Kohn Rejects National Standards : Constructing Modern Knowledge - 36 views

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    Brian Silverman says, "It should be required reading for anyone concerned with democracy and long-term viability of public education. I've often said that national standards, even those thinly disguised under mischievous pseudonyms like "common core standards" are not only a destructive force, but a solution in search of a problem. Alfie Kohn makes the case quite effectively. Mr. Kohn once again demonstrates his courage, tenacity and chutzpah by publishing his new article in Education Week's special "Quality Counts" issue. "Quality Counts" is the annual issue sponsored by standardized testing companies who rank each state's educational quality as a function of their reliance on high-stakes testing, teacher-bashing, punitive and anti-democratic education policies. The more draconian the state, the higher their "quality," according to Education Week."
Richard Bradshaw

Liberty Equality and Democracy - 28 views

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    This essay interested me, because it attempts to synthesize the relationship between spirituality and politics.
Rafael Morales_Gamboa

Noam Chomsky on Democracy and Education in the 21st Century and Beyond - 38 views

  • So a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become workers in an industrial system.
  • we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats.
  • One can at least be suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      My landlord in Edinburgh, Peter Sinclair, used to say that students do not protest these days because they all have loans to pay.
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  • "the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young."
  • It's not just you learned how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things. And that can be done from kindergarten on
  • There are a lot of factors. And one of them, probably, is just that students are trapped
  • First of all, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of the unwillingness to let markets function. If you had markets, you wouldn't have advertising. Like, if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want. But when you have oligopolies, they want to stop price wars
  • there's no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt
  • It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself
Randy Schultz

The False Promises of "School Choice" | Common Dreams - 22 views

  • State test results showed that students in private voucher schools performed significantly worse in math and about the same in reading as their public school counterparts.
  • or has Milwaukee’s voucher program met the promise of increased parental satisfaction. A longitudinal study on achievement, in its final report, noted that only17.5 percent of the voucher students remained in a voucher school after five years. The comparable figure for the public schools was 43.5 percent.
  • Vouchers are a vehicle to funnel tax dollars into private schools. Using the false promise of “choice,” they are an unabashed abandonment of public education and of our hopes for a vibrant democracy.
Javier E

Money Cuts Both Ways in Education - NYTimes.com - 19 views

  • If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.
  • This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.
  • But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.
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  • There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.
  • When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.
  • spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
  • But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.
  • “What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”
  • troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”
  • “I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.
  • “It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”
  • these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.
  • “When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”
  • we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.
Maughn Gregory

Boston Review - Carlos Fraenkel: Citizen Philosophers - 0 views

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    In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy's potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil's Social and Political Organization ("to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals," one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).
thebda

Steve Hargadon: Escaping the Education Matrix | MindShift - 49 views

  • “We tell a story about the power of learning that is very different from what we practice in traditional models of school
  • If we really want children to grow up to become self-reliant and reach their full potential, “we would be doing something very different in schools. We live in a state of cognitive dissonance.”
  • “What are most kids getting out of 12 years of school?” he asks. “The honest answer is they’re learning how to follow
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  • The reason so many adults find the situation tolerable, he says, may stem from the fact that they experience little control over their own lives. Additionally, they themselves are products of the system
  • For models of healthier ways to frame education, Hargadon suggests looking to food and libraries. “No one says that from age six to 17, we will give you all the same food, at the same time, regardless of your individual circumstances or needs,”
  • “In some ways, traditional schools have co-opted a lot of traditional parental responsibilities,” he says. “That’s really unhealthy,
  • Recognizing the different needs of every student, and the desire to help each one become personally competent as a learner and find productive things to do in life—that won’t happen online.”
  • Technology can support a transformation, but it’s not a silver bullet
  • one way change agents get tripped up is by promoting a particular model, rather than a process by which people can develop (or adopt) models
  • “Living in a democracy means involving people in decision making,” Hargadon says. “You can’t just create a new system to implement top down; you have to provide the opportunity to talk about it and build it constructively.”
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    "How do you tell a story that opens the door to rethinking what people have believed for decades?" Thoughtful piece on changing our paradigm.
Randolph Hollingsworth

The Heart of the Matter, report by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences... - 0 views

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    The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences asks us to join in a national conversation about the demise of the humanities in our schools. "As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic-a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support."
Fabiola Berdiel

A Meeting with Elders | International Field Program Seminar-Spring '11 - 8 views

  • The importance of a respect for elders was illustrated as soon as the meeting started. Mr. A introduced us to the community leaders, and made sure that highest ranking leader was invited to say his piece first. Once he did that the discussion became lively and we were all encouraged to contribute. Understanding the cultural norms around formal meetings and political discussions is good manners, but it also will help us understand the social norms during our work, as well as help us better analyze the upcoming election process. It is social norms such as respect for elders that informs the political practices built into Liberian society, and the manner in which democracy functions.
  • I’m personally interested in the existence of generational gaps in West Africa, especially around conflicting notions of the role of youth in society.
  • I’d specifically like to explore the impact of the spread of a global youth culture facilitated by communications technology on youth voice in both Monrovia and New York’s Liberian community.
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  • A Meeting with Elders
  • As my name is common in Liberia, and is associated with specific ethnic groups between Sierra Leone and Liberia, it will be interesting for me to navigate these issues from a personal standpoint.
  • I also believe that through religious institutions is the best way to really get to know members of any community.
Joanne Sobolik

Hiding the Sausage - 60 views

    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      Shouldn't the legislators be the ones who are writing the policy?
  • “Really, it’s not that much different than the way things have already worked for a while,” says Brad Ashwell, Florida Public Interest Research Group’s democracy and consumer advocate. “It’s the same thing as it always was, only now they have more top-down planning, more corporate structure around.”
    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      The speaker sees no problem with this--and I can thus infer that he believes corporate America should be running America.
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  • If nobody knows exactly what path the money is taking, it’s unlikely that it’s headed in the direction of the public interest.
    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      Yet many people believe these policies will benefit them.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • the stage is being set for a corporation-owned future, parcel by parcel.
  • ALEC, she says, is dangerous. “They own the government. I knew that they owned a certain amount, that there were certain contributions and certain leaders they owned, but I didn’t realize to what degree,” she says. “Now I’m frightened because they really own a great deal of our government from state to state. I’m not anti-corporation, but I am anti them taking over the government.”
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    Expose on ALEC
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