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!
“in Norway they tax the fossil fuel industry and give kids free university education, in Australia we subsidise the fossil fuel industry and charge kids a fortune to go to university.”
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.
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".
A few years old but a very neat piece from evolutionary #anthropologist Karen #Kramer. How do children learn best? Packed into same-age classrooms listening to an adult?
'...work among with the Pumé of Venezuela and the Maya living in the Yucatan Peninsula—resoundingly suggests that they learn from one another.'
...
'IN THE CHILD-populous world of hunter-gatherers, little separates the spheres of adults and children. The places they work, play, relax, and sleep are not segregated. Privacy, alone time, and adult-only spaces are concepts unknown to the Pumé, for example. They live in open-walled structures that children freely run in and out of without requesting entry. Pumé children also aren’t restricted from what might be considered adult spaces and activities, such as menstrual huts (special structures where women in many traditional societies go for the few days a month when they menstruate), watching births, being around the dying, or participating in all-night social dances, called tohé, where the band joins together to sing, conduct healings, and tell stories.'
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)..."
Great news: all Italian-language schools in South Tyrol migrated to free software. Read about the project, the results, and what other schools can learn from the experience of the FUSS Project, when migrating to free software: https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-cases-italy-south-tyrol.html
'...The choice to use free software in schools is beyond economic or technical reasons, it is an ethical and political choice based on the values of computing freedom, access to information, and knowledge sharing...'
A #School District’s Reliance on #Police to Ticket Students Is Discriminatory, Civil Rights Complaint Says
Two civil rights groups are asking the US Dept. of #Education to force the third-largest district in #Illinois to stop discriminatory discipline that involves police.
DRM restricts the important freedoms that people need to teach and learn. Help the FSF in its mission to end DRM. Donate to the FSF to help bring free software to every learning environment around the world. https://donate.fsf.org/#LearnLibre#EndDRM#DRMFree#Education
Full recording of NORRAG-TISS-Western University panel on 'Private Sector Approaches to Education'.
I speak about the equity issues in the Global South, and a tendency to view education as a technical enterprise. I argue education is a complex and political process and systems are value-laden, requiring a critical examination of supposed resource scarcity and the roles of public and private actors.
New rule: Anyone who says "they" is only plural is not allowed to use any new word invented since 1375, when the singular "they" first appeared in print.
School Lunch Around the World - Not every country has the same recipe for brain food, by Andrew Coletti May 27, 2024
"...“School lunch is gross” is a longstanding cliche in American pop culture, and it seems just as relevant now as it was when I was a kid. In 2022, an anonymous New York City high schooler went viral for their Instagram documentations of school lunches that seemed baffling, nutritionally deficient, or just plain bad. One featured mozzarella sticks, two pieces of cauliflower, and a clementine, beside the word HELP scrawled in marinara sauce...."
And of course republicans begrudge the little bit of nutritionally useless junk American schools feed kids and would like to make kids go hungry all day.
“"The result of this vote is a message to government and the Saskatchewan School Boards Association (SSBA) that teachers need to see real changes to classroom complexity and compensation. In feedback from members, we heard clearly that their priorities haven't been adequately addressed." #Saskatchewan#Education#Skpoli
#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.
In all seriousness, I find that Trump supporters and Putin supporters are very alike, just like all supporters of far-right populist leaders everywhere, specifically in that they are: extremely ignorant, genuinely racist, and easily swayed by angry nationalistic rhetoric.
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