sam rick

For the immense wealth of what has been produced in the past is precisely what makes it illegitimate for us to assign a limit in advance to what man is capable of producing in the future; or to assume that a time will come when, man’s capacity for creative innovation being exhausted, he will be doomed merely to repeat himself throughout all eternity. Thus we come to conceive of man not as an agglomeration of finite specifiable elements, but rather as an infinitely flexible, protean force, capable of appearing in innumerable guises, according to the perenially changing demands of his circumstances. Far from its being the case that humanity in its entirety achieves full fruition at some one particular moment of history, there is in each of us a multitude of unrealised potentialities, seeds which may be dormant in the ground for ever, but which may also blossom into life if called upon by the force of circumstance.

— emile durkheim, “the evolution of educational thought”

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If one acquires the habit of contemplating vast horizons, overall views, and fine generalisations. one can no longer without impatience allow oneself to be confined within the narrow limits of a special task. Such a remedy (a liberal education) would therefore only make specialisation inoffensive by making it intolerable, and in consequence more or less impossible.

— emile durkheim, the division of labor in society

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I recently was able to see a demonstration of a fantastic online algebra game, for example, that not only challenges learning, but where every problem is a test, in the sense that, if you don’t solve the problem, the system generates a new problem that goes a little backward to some more basic principles, and then, when you succeed, it generates a more advanced problem and so forth. The results are amazing, because the test isn’t at the end of the year, it is in everything you do, as you do it, getting not just harder and harder but more and more interesting. We know that boredom — for the most gifted students and also for the lowest academic achievers — is the biggest inhibitor of learning there is.

— cathy davidson in “project classroom: transforming our schools for the future”

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motherjones:

Chart of the Day: The amount that students owe quintupled between 2000 and 2011. For more, check out our MoJo College Guide.

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chile's commander camila, the student who can shut down a city

“We do not want to improve the actual system; we want a profound change – to stop seeing education as a consumer good, to see education as a right where the state provides a guarantee.

“Why do we need education? To make profits. To make a business? Or to develop the country and have social integration and development? Those are the issues in dispute.”

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eight reasons young americans don't fight back

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force.
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. Many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. John Taylor Gatto upset many by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society.
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning.
6. The Normalization of Surveillance. Young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives.
7. Television. Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see.
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism.

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motherjones:

Yes, that is two children sharing an ice cream cone with a hammer and sickle in the background.
It’s the illustration for this:
“If anything, the knock on [Tim Pawlenty] seems to be that, with a few exceptions, he’s a little too ordinary. One of those exceptions came in 2003, when the newly elected Republican governor selected Cheri Yecke, a little-known Bush administration veteran, to produce new educational standards for what students should—and shouldn’t—learn.
The battle that followed put Pawlenty at the center of a culture war conflagration. Members of Yecke’s handpicked standards committees dismissed sharing and cooperation as “socialist” ideas, suggested replacing “We Shall Overcome” with “Dixie” in a unit on protest songs, and advocated downplaying the impact of slavery on the nation’s antebellum economy—lest it sour students on the virtues of the free market.”

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To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students’ blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

— Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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