#Genocide needs to be taught in all schools. It's sad to see so many adults who obviously never learned what genocide truly is. They really believe that it's only genocide if almost every person targeted in a genocide is dead. There's more to genocide than only body counts.
#China's internet #censors have deleted a video in which #children at a private #PerformingArts school in the southwestern province of #Sichuan dance to British rock band #PinkFloyd's 1979 hit "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" which featured a choir of #schoolchildren protesting overbearing authority & "thought control" in #education.
I agree with Kenan Malik; behind the increasingly instrumental view of university education (that it should be judged by what it does for your subsequent career & earning potential), lies a class-based assessment of who should benefit from education at all.
The working class do not deserve the humanistic value of education but rather must be trained in work skills... while the privileged should be able to buy the benefits of enlightenment!
>160k student loan borrowers are now in line to have their balances canceled, bringing the total amount of #DebtForgiveness allowed under the Biden admin’s policies to $167B, the #Education Dept announced Wed.
How the Brain Processes Different Components of Language - Moving beyond neural localization of language. Posted May 28, 2024
"...This is in line with recent ideas about a "cortical mosaic" architecture for linguistic structure within overlapping portions of posterior temporal and inferior frontal cortices for processing demands that bias syntactic and semantic computations, whereby, for example, effects of composition can be found within a narrow strip of tissue within the broader lexicality-sensitive cortical sites (a spatial mosaic), or where different demands of sentence-level inferential semantics can be detected over closely overlapping temporal windows within a small area of cortex (a spatiotemporal mosaic)..."
Neoliberal economics is killing the arts
By Tim Lutton, originally published by Red Pepper May 28, 2024
"...As a society, we must resist art-as-capital, where it is reduced to pure exchange value in a market of commodities. There, any politically-charged and counter-hegemonic content is rendered powerless, constituted as a stable harmonisation of the dominant socio-political order and drowning out all contradictions.
...In the present era, the tendency towards total marketisation of artistic production accompanies perpetual austerity and an atomised rentier economy that is shrinking public and social life. Without a rupture from neoliberal capitalism in general, the means to make new, generative and disruptive art disappears, and much else that is meaningful in our lives will follow after. The rest is silence."
"[H]ighly-educated people [...] tend to be significantly worse at gauging others’ political beliefs, often assuming other people are much more extreme or dogmatic than they actually seem to be. This is perhaps because, compared to the general public, highly-educated or intelligent people tend to be more ideological in their thinking, more ideologically rigid, and more extreme in their ideological leanings."
Nice reminder from Florian Waldow (Humboldt Uni) that "utopia" is spatial and not at all temporal. Today's usage as future-oriented should really be "Uchronia".
I use @flipboard for the following reasons. 1. I enjoy the content it serves. 2. It helps me broaden my horizons. 3. I enjoy making magazines that matter and I take great pride in curating each and every one of them. 4. I love the community. I hope #flipboard stays the same as always, providing good and educational content for all. #reading#learning#education#curation#flipboardusergroup
Good news on open access to my works on bilingualism, the research area related to my teaching, child-raising, and using Japanese for over 40 years. I was interviewed by The Japan Times on #bilingual#education for a forthcoming paywalled article. It was a long interview, and usually a newspaper article uses only short passages from one individual. However, the #Japan Association for #Language#Teaching Bilingualism Special Interest Group (#JALT#Bilingualism SIG) would like to publish the full interview in its newsletter Bilingual Japan. Everyone should be able to read that as I back it up in research repositories. The tentative title is "English Education and Bilingual Education in Japan."
My publications on bilingualism have been backed up mostly at Academia Edu, which is not so easy to access anymore [any comment?], so I've added links to the original sources of articles, which are open access, at https://japanned.hcommons.org/bilingualism
Parents are increasingly taking their children out of school & home schooling them, with the most reported reason being the mental health of their children.
To some extent, the pandemic normalised the idea of children learning from home, so we might wonder whether the threshold for concern prompting a turn to home schooling has lowered.
But, it also suggests the impact on children of the myriad crisis that have engulfed school in recent years.
“Once again, François Legault sticks his neck where it doesn’t belong, interfering in the affairs of a university he’s defunding, in a city he otherwise doesn’t care about.”
Four years ago today, I would have logged onto Zoom to "attend" a Winnipeg Pentecostal church service that adherred to pandemic restrictions (thankfully it wasn't more extreme like many NAR Christian nationalist churches in the US). Now I don't know what to believe anymore.
But here's the first thing I discovered after leaving Christianity.
You know how in the Bible in Romans 12:2, it says "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by renewing your mind"? The first question I asked when reading this verse again 20 years later was this "What is the pattern of this world currently?"
I soon realized the pattern pretty much goes something like this:
Obey your parents
Go to school
Get a job
Work 8 hours a day or more
Get married
Pop out tons of babies if you're a woman
Pay your bills
Go to church on Sunday and hang out with church members before going to work on Monday
Buy a car
Buy a house
Watch talking heads on Fox
Listen to "podcasts"
Buy the latest thing because it helps keep the economy going
Watch the latest TV shows but keep it G or PG rated
Listen to music unless it talks about drugs, sex, or has tons of swear words
Start a side hustle if you can't get a job
Help your neighbors if they're nice to you and not trying to shove an "agenda" down your throat
The second question I asked was "How does any of this renew the mind or transform a person?" And I found that all it does is remove their freedom to simply be and exist, while following a social order that "fights for spiritual freedom."
The third and final question I asked, going back to the idea of the pattern of this world, is "What group pushes the pattern of this world on its citizens the most?"
And the answer I came up with is very simple: straight vvhite American Christians.
#NewYork Education Department Hindered an Abuse Investigation at Boarding School for #Autistic Youth
A judge ruled that the agency must cooperate in a #disability rights investigation into Shrub Oak International School, which charges up to $573K/year but has no meaningful oversight.
A ProPublica investigation found that would-be whistleblowers could not get state authorities to intervene at the #school.