"We need a creative revolution." Sir Ken Robinson believes schools kill creativity "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." Sir Ken Robinson
Introduction
"We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children
In this chaotic world, it is time to work to give back to the children a healthier world and a sustainable future" - The International Summit on the Education of the Future, 2022.
Recent discussions on advances on educational policies remind me of Kahlil Gibran's (1883-1931) poem "On Children" in his 1923 publication, The Prophet:
Adults are the archers of the present. Every parent, every educator, and every teacher, is an 'archer' shooting their arrows (children) of renewal. Future generations are built on our examples, our words and our actions. For example, How Iceland solved its teens’ substance abuse problem, April 20, 2017, World Tribune
Excerpts: In the early 1990s, drug and alcohol abuse were skyrocketing among Iceland’s teenagers.
“You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” said Reykjavik University psychology professor Harvey Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”
Today, “Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens,” … Although this cannot be shown in the form of a causal relationship – which is a good example of why primary prevention methods are sometimes hard to sell to scientists – the trend is very clear,” ...
How did they do it?
Yes, some laws were changed ... >>>more
Philip Pullman received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005
Jury Motivation ... "Philip Pullman is a highly awarded British author, best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. He injects new life into the genre by introducing a variety of alternative worlds, and in his writing good, evil and the struggle between them – the staple fare of fantasy – become ambiguous...">>>more
Children need art and stories and poems and music as much as they need love and food and fresh air and play.
If you don’t give a child food, the damage quickly becomes visible. If you don’t let a child have fresh air and play, the damage is also visible, but not so quickly.
If you don’t give a child love, the damage might not be seen for some years, but it’s permanent.
But if you don’t give a child art and stories and poems and music, the damage is not so easy to see. It’s there, though. Their bodies are healthy enough; they can run and jump and swim and eat hungrily and make lots of noise, as children have always done, but something is missing.
It’s true that some people grow up never encountering art of any kind, and are perfectly happy and live good and valuable lives, and in whose homes there are no books, and they don’t care much for pictures, and they can’t see the point of music. Well, that’s fine. I know people like that. They are good neighbours and useful citizens.
But other people, at some stage in their childhood or their youth, or maybe even their old age, come across something of a kind they’ve never dreamed of before. It is as alien to them as the dark side of the moon. But one day they hear a voice on the radio reading a poem, or they pass by a house with an open window where someone is playing the piano, or they see a poster of a particular painting on someone’s wall, and it strikes them a blow so hard and yet so gentle that they feel dizzy. Nothing prepared them for this. They suddenly realise that they’re filled with a hunger, though they had no idea of that just a minute ago; a hunger for something so sweet and so delicious that it almost breaks their heart. They almost cry, they feel sad and happy and alone and welcomed by this utterly new and strange experience, and they’re desperate to listen closer to the radio, they linger outside the window, they can’t take their eyes off the poster. They wanted this, they needed this as a starving person needs food, and they never knew. They had no idea.
That is what it’s like for a child who does need music or pictures or poetry to come across it by chance. If it weren’t for that chance, they might never have met it, and might have passed their whole lives in a state of cultural starvation without knowing it.
The effects of cultural starvation are not dramatic and swift. They’re not so easily visible.
And, as I say, some people, good people, kind friends and helpful citizens, just never experience it; they’re perfectly fulfilled without it. If all the books and all the music and all the paintings in the world were to disappear overnight, they wouldn’t feel any the worse; they wouldn’t even notice.
But that hunger exists in many children, and often it is never satisfied because it has never been awakened. Many children in every part of the world are starved for something that feeds and nourishes their soul in a way that nothing else ever could or ever would.
We say, correctly, that every child has a right to food and shelter, to education, to medical treatment, and so on. We must understand that every child has a right to the experience of culture. We must fully understand that without stories and poems and pictures and music, children will starve.
"To the oppressed, and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side." First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire’s work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. […] he evolved a theory for the education of illiterates, especially adults, based on the conviction that every human being, no matter how “ignorant” or submerged in the “culture of silence” is capable of looking critically at his world in a dialogical encounter with others, and that provided with the proper tools for such encounter he can gradually perceive his personal and social reality and deal critically with it. When an illiterate peasant participates in this sort of educational experience he comes to a new awareness of self, a new sense of dignity; he is stirred by new hope.
Excerpt:
“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ... Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
and,
Chapter 2, p. 71
The "banking" concept of education as an instrument of oppression— its presuppositions—a critique; the problem-posing concept of education as an instrument for liberation—-its presuppositions; the "banking" concept and the teacher-student contradiction; the problem-posing concept and the supersedence of the teacherstudent contradiction; education: a mutual process, world-mediated; people as uncompleted beings, conscious of their incompletion, and their attempt to be more fully human.
Excerpt: Pavlov's dog experiments played a critical role in the discovery of one of the most important concepts in psychology: Classical conditioning.
While it happened quite by accident, Pavlov's famous experiments had a major impact on our understanding of how learning takes place as well as the development of the school of behavioral psychology. Classical conditioning is sometimes called Pavlovian conditioning.
Pavlov's Dogs: Background
How did experiments on the digestive response in dogs lead to one of the most important discoveries in psychology? Ivan Pavlov was a noted Russian physiologist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for his work studying digestive processes.
While studying digestion in dogs, Pavlov noted an interesting occurrence: His canine subjects would begin to salivate whenever an assistant entered the room.
The concept of classical conditioning is studied by every entry-level psychology student, so it may be surprising to learn that the man who first noted this phenomenon was not a psychologist at all.
In his digestive research, Pavlov and his assistants would introduce a variety of edible and non-edible items and measure the saliva production that the items produced.
Salivation, he noted, is a reflexive process. It occurs automatically in response to a specific stimulus and is not under conscious control.
However, Pavlov noted that the dogs would often begin salivating in the absence of food and smell. He quickly realized that this salivary response was not due to an automatic, physiological process.1
Pavlov's Theory of Classical Conditioning Based on his observations, Pavlov suggested that the salivation was a learned response. Pavlov's dog subjects were responding to the sight of the research assistants' white lab coats, which the animals had come to associate with the presentation of food. >>>more
Why don't we get the best out of people? "We are educating people out of their creativity," says Sir Ken Robinson, who argues that it's because we have been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies, far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity, are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences.
Why you should listen to Sir Ken
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken Robinson led the British government's 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.
How can academics help? Excerpt from a report on the 28th conference of the International Union of Land Value Taxation, held in London, July 2013. 'How can academics contribute to activism?' Professor Nic Tideman said that 'we wish to ignite a self-sustaining chain reaction'.Work identified for academics included: The development of General Equilibrium models; estimation of total revenue from land rent (in the US); land value mapping; work with marketing and social justice academics to widen the perspective and publishing opportunities, e.g. philosophy and political science departments; determine what would happen to investment if land speculation ends; identify the mechanisms by which people would secure credit without land as collateral; determine the impact on banks of an end to land speculation; conduct research on eco villages; survey economists about social justice and equity and land tax."
Jane McNab, The Observer, Melbourne, 11/2013, page 17
Allan Watt's innate humor and eloquence. South Park creators have animated a short talk by Alan Watts
where he laughingly explains what is wrong with our education system.
"In music, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of a composition…"
Lifelong education Lifelong learning represents learning as an integral part of an individual’s life experiences permeating all stages and areas of life. Rapid expansion of communication technologies and easy access to information has led to increasing expectations for lifelong learning, defined as the purposeful and continuous acquisition of skills and knowledge throughout an individual’s lifespan…" (Lifelong learning in the digital age: A content analysis of recent research on participation, (2015), Alison J. Head, Michele Van Hoeck, and Deborah S. Garson) Sources
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us Excerpts from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA: "
Once you get above rudamentry cognative skill, it's the other way around... We are purpose maximisers, not only profit maximisers.
I think the science shows that we care about mastery very, very deeply. And the science shows that we want to be self-directed. (10:13)
There are no essential limits to human knowledge: "Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear.
Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." Rudolf Steiner, “Goethean Science”, GA1, 1883 (PDF).
"None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
- - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Quotes)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director and critic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His works, including plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany and anatomy, continue to influence Western thought to the present day.
Also known as: The Ego as Experience of Consciousness, lecture 4 of 5, or Pythagoras, Galileo and Goethe. Lecture 10 of 11 from the lecture series:Human Evolution, Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Spirit.
Excerpt: The views which have to be developed in anthroposophical Spiritual Science in order to comprehend man and the world are more easily understood if we study the changes that have taken place in the mental outlook of man through the centuries. If we tell people to-day that in order really to know something about the nature of man, quite a different outlook is necessary from that to which they are accustomed, their first reaction will be one of astonishment and, for the moment, the shock will make them put aside all such knowledge. They feel that one thing at least remains constant, namely, man's spiritual or mental attitude to the things of the world. This is very evident in the outlook of many teachers of history at the present time. They declare that, so far as his mental attitude is concerned, man has not fundamentally changed throughout history and that if this were otherwise there could really be no history at all. They argue that in order to write history it is essential to take the present mental attitude as the starting-point; if one were obliged to look back to an age when human beings were quite differently constituted in their life of soul, it would be impossible to understand them. One would not understand how they spoke or what they did. Historical thought, therefore, could not comprise any such period. From this the modern historian infers that human beings must always have possessed fundamentally the same frame of mind, the same mental outlook as they possess to-day. — Otherwise there could be no history.
This is obviously a very convenient point of view. For if in the course of historic evolution man's life of soul has changed, we must make our ideas plastic and form quite a different conception of former epochs of history from that to which we are accustomed to-day.
There is a very significant example of a man who found it inwardly and spiritually impossible to share in the mental attitude of his contemporaries and who was forced to make such a change in his whole outlook. This significant example — and I mention his name to-day merely by way of example — is Goethe. >>>more
SAUSALITO, CA - SEPTEMBER 30, 2014:
Sarah Stein Greenberg, Managing Director at the Stanford Design School speaks onstage at the WIRED by Design retreat at Skywalker Sound on September 30, 2014 in Marin County, California.
TECHNOLOGY AND DATA are reshaping every aspect of our jobs, at an astonishing speed. Yet our higher education system still clings to a format created about 800 years ago: a teacher, in front of a classroom full of students, giving a lecture.
This dichotomy is at the heart of a current national debate over the value and cost of higher education, and how that education gets delivered. At issue is how institutions long wedded to a rigid teacher-classroom format can better prepare students to become what Sarah Stein Greenberg of the Stanford University d.School calls "daring, creative, and resilient problem solvers."
To understand the issue, it helps to backpedal a bit. The typical college admissions process requires a high school students to be a jack of all trades that earns straight A's, captains the soccer team, aces standardized tests, runs student government, and still finds time to volunteer on the weekends. Whether any of these things are genuine personal passions doesn't always matter, and for many students they are simply things to be checked off a list. Educators like Stein Greenberg wonder if this is doing little more than creating what the writer William Deresiewicz calls "really excellent sheep."
This dynamic doesn't change much in college, where students strive to earn stellar grades, produce stellar transcripts and finish career-track internships, all within the prescribed four years. But as online learning grows increasingly accessible, sending kids into classrooms to absorb information becomes less valuable. Students don't need information, they need to learn how to process and use it.
“I believe this is a problem we should all be interested in,” Stein Greenberg said during a presentation at WIRED by Design. “We’re producing a generation of students that are very highly structured, but entering an increasingly ambiguous world—the world of Ebola and ISIS and climate change and data security breaches.”
Stein Greenberg, along with students and faculty at d.school, Stanford's Institute of Design, decided to explore the contemporary, nuanced student experience. She gave d.school students video cameras and sent them out to interview classmates. This yielded case studies like Becca, who grappled with choosing the right major and so took a year off to work on a political campaign. When she returned, she finally felt that her education was more important to her in terms of the “arc of her life,” rather than the arc of the institution. She did more of her coursework, and liked more of it—exactly what Stein Greenberg says educators dream of hearing.
Then the d.school students went beyond the Stanford campus. They shadowed technicians at SpaceX. They went behind the scenes at Cirque du Soleil, where they learned that even performers in peak athletic condition must continue taking classes. And they spent time at Homeboy Industries, the Los Angeles nonprofit that helps former gang members and prisoners acquire new job skills and get tattoos removed. It operates a bit like an antidote to prison: You only show up when you’re truly ready to rehabilitate, and an advisor helps you blaze a unique path into the workforce.
The d.school distilled all of this into four smart proposals for reinventing college:
Lose the 4-year Degree
“If I told you that you could exercise everyday for the next four years and at the end of the four years you would be fit for the rest of your life you would laugh,” Stein Greenberg says. “We give students one shot in early adulthood to learn what they need to know and then send them out into the outside world.” Instead, she asks, what if college was a six-year program that you could enter, leave, and re-enter again later? This way, work experience could inform higher education, and vice versa. This model is based on the idea of taking a year off, which students often do to travel or work. As Stein Greenberg sees it, this tends to get frowned upon, but can have enormous benefits for students.
Lose the High School to College Model
Unless you’re on the Van Wilder plan, undergraduate college is a four year stint. But Homeboy’s participants need to show up when they’re ready, and students, in their own way, do too. Four years can corner students into making important decisions before they’re ready. ”We only really offer [students] one rhythm, and they have to declare a major before they have any real idea of what it might be like to work in that major.” Her proposal? Abolish the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years, and let students move at their own pace from exploring various topics, to gaining some expertise, to applying those skills in practical settings—maybe failing—and then trying again.
Lose the Transcript
“We now live in a world where you can get any piece of information at any time. What if it wasn’t about information accumulation, but about developing competencies and skills,” Stein Greenberg says of this slightly more vocational proposition, in which students build individualized skill portfolios. “What if a transcript could be as unique as a fingerprint and really show and emphasize the skills you have going forward?”
Lose the College Major
Part of having an 800-year-old higher education system means that some majors also haven’t changed. Liberal arts are valuable fields of study. But they might not bolster students for careers the same way a decided "mission" might, like tackling climate change. “What if students declare missions, not majors? Wouldn’t that fuel their studies in some way of real purpose they don’t get?” This way, students would pursue, for example, anthropology degrees to help their family's ancestral Native American communities. It’s a new kind of incentive: give students real world applications, and then build a course around that goal. Source
Dr. Edward de Bono (1933-2021), famed for his original and unorthodox theories, originated the phrases Lateral Thinking and and Parallel Thinking, also known as the Six Thinking Hats® method as an alternative to argument: Proving that thinking skills can be improved by attention and practice.
Obituary
Excerpt
Through his 60-plus books, including The Mechanism of Mind (1969), Six Thinking Hats (1985), How to Have A Beautiful Mind (2004) and Think! Before It’s Too Late (2009), as well as seminars, training courses and a BBC television series, De Bono sought to free us from the tyranny of logic through creative thinking. “What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge,” he said. “At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed.”
"You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future."
“Rightness is what matters in vertical thinking. Richness is what matters in lateral thinking.”
“Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain”
"Rightness is what matters in vertical thinking. Richness is what matters in lateral thinking. Vertical thinking selects a pathway by excluding other pathways. Lateral thinking does not select but seeks to open up other pathways. With vertical thinking one selects the most promising approach to a problem, the best way of looking at a situation. With lateral thinking one generates as many alternative approaches as one can.
…
"With vertical thinking one may look for different approaches until one finds a promising one. With lateral thinking one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one. With vertical thinking one is trying to select the best approach but with lateral thinking one is generating different approaches for the sake of generating them." - Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 29
– available on Archive.org
Excerpt:
The work is divided into three parts, consisting of 15 chapters in all.
The section titles give a good idea of the issues it grapples with:
Part 1, “Knowledge and Right Opinion;”
Part 2, “What others do to academics;”
Part 3, “What academics do to themselves;”
Part 4, “What academics do to students;”
and Part 5, “Justification and advice.”
The whole is amply documented so that the reader can follow up with further printed and, in some cases, video material.
“This book was written not with the usual sense of achievement at the end but with a rising tide of anger,” James Flynn concludes. “In ‘The Informer’, an IRA man calls Ireland a holy church. I feel the same way about the University. How dare they profane it with their ignorance and intolerance? … Looming over this entire debate is a terrible temptation: the assumption that since you know that virtue is on your side, truth must be on your side — and that an honest effort to perceive the truth is immoral. This is the surest road to hell for an otherwise honorable human being.”
Today, in the name of political correctness, we are being told what we can and cannot discuss, what facts we can and cannot believe, and even what we can and cannot think, especially out loud or in print.
Any political or social institution that suppresses facts in the pursuit of its idea of “correctness” is a movement built on an intellectual error, an ethical lapse, and a moral lie. It is the enemy of truth. And freedom can no more survive the death of truth than truth can survive the death of freedom. >>>more
While modern technology provides greater educational access, the importance of nutrition and health on intelligence is still under debate (Flynn, 2009).
Abstract
The hypothesis that enhanced nutrition is mainly responsible for massive IQ gains over time borrows plausibility from the height gains of the 20th century. However, evidence shows that the two trends are largely independent. A detailed analysis of IQ trends on the Raven's Progressive Matrices tests in Britain dramatizes the poverty of the nutrition hypothesis. A multiple factor hypothesis that operates on three levels is offered as an alternative instrument of causal explanation. The Raven's data show that over the 65 years from circa 1942 to the present, taking ages 5–15 together, British school children have gained 14 IQ points for a rate of 0.216 points per year. However, since 1979, gains have declined with age and between the ages of 12–13 and 14–15, small gains turn into small losses. This is confirmed by Piagetian data and poses the possibility that the cognitive demands of teen-age subculture have been stagnant over perhaps the last 30 years.
"According to a range of eschatological accounts, December 2012 will bring transformative events that mark our entry into a new age in human history." – Alisa Percy, University of Wollongong, Australia
"...in a market-led system that encourages individual responsibility and discourages analysis of dominant economic and political orders."
– Dr Bernie Grummell, Maynooth University, Ireland
What is Social Inclusion?
The concept was first launched in France and the UK. Canada and Australia followed, with the original focus on dealing with minimizing Social Exclusion.Former Premier of South Australia (2002-2011), Mike Rann was a primary force in development of the agenda in Australia,
Parliament of Australia House of Representatives Committees
On Monday, 18 March 2013, the Joint Standing Committee on Migration tabled its report on the inquiry into Multiculturalism in Australia entitled
INQUIRY INTO MIGRATION AND MULTICULTURALISM IN AUSTRLIA
Part 5/ Multiculturalism and the Social Inclusion Agenda
p. 87-102
Excerpt:
Introduction
5.1 The Australian Government’s statement on social inclusion, A Stronger, Fairer Australia, released in 2009, sets out the Government’s vision and strategy for social inclusion, now and into the future:
The Australian Government’s social inclusion policies recognise that while every person is ultimately responsible for making a go of their lives, not everyone begins at the same starting point and some people strike setbacks or crises during their lives.
5.2 The Social Inclusion Agenda attempts to ensure all Australians have the opportunity and necessary support to participate, through all sectors of the community working together.
To achieve this we need to tackle increasingly complex and entrenched forms of disadvantage.
5.3 In 2008, the Australian Social Inclusion Board was established as the main advisory body to Government on ways to achieve better outcomes for the most disadvantaged in our community.
“The Board engages with the community, business, the not-for-profit sector, academics, advisory groups and all levels of government to connect better policy with the knowledge and experience of the research, business and community sectors.
Social inclusion: Origins, concepts and key themes
Alan Hayes, Matthew Gray and Ben Edwards Australian Institute of Family Studies
May 2008
Excerpt from the Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the origins of the concepts of social inclusion and exclusion and of key themes and emerging debates about social inclusion in Australia and selected overseas countries. >>> more
The Australian Dept of PM and Cabinet too up the cause with the aim of directing government policy on economic justice policies. At that time, the government website, now offline, socialinclusion.gov.au stated:
The Australian Government’s vision of a socially inclusive society is one in which all Australians feel valued and have the opportunity to participate fully in society. Achieving this vision means that all Australians will have the resources, opportunities and capability to:
• Learn by participating in education and training;
• Work by participating in employment, in voluntary work and in family and caring;
• Engage by connecting with people and using their local community’s resources; and
• Have a voice so they can influence decisions that affect them.
The ‘SECOND CHANCE’ Myth: Equality of Opportunity in Irish Adult Education Policies
(2008) by Bernie Grummell, Ph.D.
Published in the British Journal of Educational Studies, one of the UK's foremost international education journals. Dr Bernie Grummell B.A., M.Soc.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Email: bernie.grummell@nuim.ie
Bernie Grummell is Research Manager/Lecturer
Departments of Education and Adult & Community Education
National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Excerpt: Critical theories on education argue that emancipation through education is possible but this has to involve the active participation and critical forces of the oppressed themselves, an ‘education of equals’ based on ‘an active, dialogical, critical and criticism-stimulating method’ (Freire, 1974:45). Ideally, the political and economic system should be sensitive to this form of education, creating the space and support structures for it to occur.
This is difficult in a market-led system that encourages individual responsibility and discourages analysis of dominant economic and political orders. Download the PDF here.
A new age in higher education or just a little bit of history repeating? Linking the past, present and future of ALL in Australia, 2011.
by Alisa Percy, Ph.D.
Published in the Australian Journal of Academic Language and Learning Dr Alisa Percy
Senior Lecturer, Learning Development,
University of Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia
Email: alisa@uow.edu.au Excerpt: For those relatively new to the field of Academic Language and Learning (ALL), the “new” social inclusion agenda may appear as the dawning of a new age in higher education – a revolutionary moment in history where a qualitative transformation of teaching and learning feels imminent.
For others, it may feel like “a little bit of history repeating”. This paper critically examines the limitations of the agency of ALL in “forging new directions” by considering how the past haunts the present. Using the lens of governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999; Dean, 1999), the paper makes the claim that, given that ALL is deeply embedded in the social regulation of conduct in the academy, new directions emerge, not so much from the wisdom of ALL, but from the constellation of historical circumstance, political reasoning, and social, economic and institutional exigencies that reconfigure the university as an apparatus of government, reconstitute the student as an object of government, and position the ALL practitioner in particular ways at particular times to do particular work. This paper provides a framework for making sense of our institutional intelligibility and considering future directions through this lens.
1. Introduction
According to a range of eschatological accounts, December 2012 will bring transformative events that mark our entry into a new age in human history. Coincidentally, 2012 is also the year that the Australian Government will hold universities accountable to its new social inclusion agenda through the Reward component of its Performance Funding (DEEWR, 2011). This being the case, one might regard this agenda as symptomatic of a revolutionary moment; certainly, it appears to contain the sentiment of democracy, shared affluence, and individual and social transcendence. On the one hand, the new social inclusion agenda does resemble a new age in higher education as the alignment of international competition, national policy and institutional exigencies open the discursive space for thinking otherwise about higher education curriculum and pedagogy. On the other hand, it reads like a little bit of history repeating, as the Government’s desire to manage the aspiration and education of the population recuperates diagnoses that seek to treat old problems with old solutions. This is not to say the discursive and regulatory environment has not changed. Rather, this paper suggests that with the recuperation of diagnoses and practices that target individual and social difference, we are witnessing an intensification of Academic Language and Learning (ALL) work that complicates our deployment in the academy as multiple and conflicting rationalities play out in our institutional intelligibility.
This paper provides a tentative framework and a partial account for making sense of the institutional intelligibility of the ALL practitioner in Australian higher education. I argue that, A-132 Linking the past, present and future
like the past, the present and the future in ALL, our visions for a brighter future are both enabled and derailed by those discursive regimes that govern our political and moral relationship with the university and the higher education student. Forging new directions from this perspective involves an ever-present engagement with the politics of truth in the field as we come to recognise ourselves as both agent and effect of discourse. >>> more
AN EXAMPLE:
Tertiary Curriculum on SIA Guidelines Melbourne University's Professional Development course on Social Inclusion Policy and Practice (no longer available) provided interesting insight on 'new' approaches to higher education philosophy.
2012 COURSE DESCRIPTION
The subject engages with contemporary policy and research practice in the area of social inclusion, in Australian and international contexts. It focuses on key analytical and practical challenges relating to the development, implementation and assessment of policies, programs and practice within a social inclusion framework. The subject also examines new theoretical contexts linked to social inclusion which are informing current organisational changes and approaches to program development and practice. By taking this subject, students will develop a critically informed understanding of social inclusion policy and practice with relevance to a broad range of organisational and research contexts.
2011 COURSE OVERVIEW
How does a social inclusion framework affect social policy and practice?
The not-for-profit, public and private sectors have witnessed a wave of discourse and action under this policy banner. But how has this way of thinking about poverty and disadvantage influenced policies and
practices and in what ways is it continuing to do so? This subject will enable participants to consider the latest developments in ways that are theoretically informed and advance best practice. This subject will introduce and critically examine national and international policies and programs aimed at addressing systems and processes that create and sustain marginalisation. It builds on the Social Inclusion and the Politics of Recognition subject which looks at the theories of social inclusion and exclusion focusing on notions of recognition, respect and redistribution. TRAINING OBJECTIVES
Participants will examine policy and practice that is informed by social inclusion principles. They will acquire an enhanced capacity to critique social policies within social inclusion frameworks and develop policies and programs aimed at addressing systems and processes that create and sustain marginalisation. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OUTCOMES
Course participants will gain the following professional development outcomes:
• Knowledge of a broad range of policies and programs delivered
nationally and internationally with the purpose of enhancing social
inclusion
• First hand access to programs and practitioners at the forefront of
social inclusion practice
• Acquisition of research tools relevant to developing programs
targeted at improving social outcomes for excluded sociodemographic
groups
• Ability to select the most appropriate methodologies for evaluations
of social inclusion initiatives.
Cargo Cult Science
by Richard Feynman
Reviewed HERE (pdf)
Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974. Excerpt:
... So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The full lecture is posted HERE
“As we teach, we experience the joy of learning over and over. Our mirror neurons fire, and our body responds to the successes we observe.... Every happy teacher I know talks about watching a student “get it.” We say, “The light came on.” The electrical nature of neurons and the development of neural networks that are the foundation of our thought processes give validity to the light bulb analogy. We have all experienced it. Given what we know about the brain chemistry of pleasure, it’s reasonable that the moment when we humans learn something or figure out something results in a lovely squirt of dopamine, serotonin or some other pleasurable neurochemical. In short, learning feels good." – Ruth Ferree, University of Virginia
“Universities have thrown away free speech for the last 15 years, and now one stares into the abyss of what they’ve created,” declared Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). “We’ve been in this mad cycle where university administrators have felt obliged to selectively criticize or denounce the viewpoints of others. It’s not unreasonable now for students to turn to these authorities for the repression of views.” John K.Wilson, (2008). Academic Freedom in America after 9/11
The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment? By David West, April 14, 2016
Published in the Australian National University-based Demos Journal
Excerpt: Recent decades have seen a protracted attack and painstaking demolition of the traditional or ‘old’ university and an associated purging of academics. The rise of managers and ‘managerial’ doctrines were supposed to make universities more efficient and productive, more lean and transparent, and above all, more modern. In practice, managerial reforms have given rise to a range of pathologies and side effects. Bullying is widespread, many staff are unhappy. But the spread of managerialism is also threatening the university’s role as a centre of committed teaching, disinterested scholarship and critical research. Examination of the actual effects – rather than stated aims – of the managerial experiment is long overdue.>>> more
A Declaration of Professional Conscience for Teachers (pdf) by Kenneth S. Goodman 1990
Excerpt:
There is a time in the historic development of every human institution when it reaches a critical crossroad. Institutions, like people, cannot stand still; they must always change but the changes aren't always for the better. Human institutions are composed of people. Sometimes the people within the institutions feel powerless to influence the directions of institutional change. They feel they are swept along by a force beyond anyone. Yet people within institutions can determine the directions of change if they examine their convictions and take a principled stand. ...
There are strong pressures today to dehumanize, to depersonalize, to industrialize our schools. In the name of cost effectiveness, of efficiency, of system, of accountability, of minimal competency, of a return to the basics, schools are being turned into sterile, hostile institutions at war with the young people they are intended to serve. As teachers we hereby declare ourselves to be in opposition to the industrialization of our schools. We pledge ourselves to become advocates on behalf of our students. >>> more
A Brief History of Heuristics A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about their next course of action. Heuristics are helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases... Heuristics help make life easier and allow us to make quick decisions that are usually pretty accurate. Being aware of how these heuristics work as well as the potential biases they introduce might help... >>>more
Making Sense of the Narcissistic Mind
by Mark Zaslav Ph.D.
Psychology Today Posted Jul 14, 2020
Often envious, grandiose, lacking empathy, manipulative, entitled, and desperate for attention and admiration, narcissists can make our lives difficult and challenging. They are also confusing.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
By Kendra Cherry
Medically reviewed by Steven Gans, MD Updated on June 14, 2019
… Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."...
"In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious," wrote David Dunning in an article for Pacific Standard. "Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge."
What Is An Education?
John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018)
"Throw off the shackles of formal schooling and embark upon a rich journey of self-directed, life-long learning."
A reflection on the significance of schools and schoolteaching, the difference between networks and communities.
Publications list HERE
Video lectures HERE
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. …The universe is the game of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever."
–Alan Watts, 1960 lecture,
The World of Emptiness (YouTube).
British-born American philosopher Alan Watts, is best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for Western audiences.
"It is not enough to change the world.
That is all we have ever done.
That happens even without us.
We also have to interpret this change.
And precisely in order to change it.
So that the world will not go on changing without us.
And so that it is not changed in the end into a world without us."
– Günther Anders
German philosopher, journalist, essayist and poet, Günther Anders, born Günther Siegmund Stern (1902-1992), obtained a PhD in philosophy in 1925, at age 23, and wrote “The Obsolescence of Man" in 1956.
See more of his works on Libcom.org
2.
Work will not set you free - Notes on Günther Anders – Franz Schandl
An annotated synopsis of the views of Günther Anders on the question of “work” or “labor”, including numerous quotations from Anders published here in English for the first time (which the author claims “are undoubtedly among the most radical and best examples of the critique of labor that appeared during the 20th century”), along with many choice selections from his pithy observations regarding conformism, technology, “duty”, “the right to a job”, “the humanization of labor”, consumerism, television, sports, etc., which in many respects anticipate some of the ideas later advocated by Guy Debord and the situationists.
Wikipedia BIO:
Trained in the phenomenological tradition, he developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, focusing on such themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, the nuclear threat, the Shoah, and the question of being a philosopher. … his main philosophical work, whose title translates as The Obsolescence of Humankind (1956), became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement…
Extract (Source):
“In order to stifle any revolt in advance, one must not use violence. Methods like those used by Hitler are outdated. You need only develop such powerful collective conditioning that the very idea of revolt will not even cross people’s minds.
Ideally, individuals should be conditioned by limiting their innate biological abilities from birth. Then, we would continue the conditioning process by drastically reducing education in order to bring it back to a form of integration into the world of work. An uneducated individual has only a limited horizon of thought, and the more his thoughts are confined to mediocre concerns, the less he can rebel. Access to knowledge must be made increasingly difficult and elitist. The gulf between people and science must be widened. All subversive content must be removed from information intended for the general public.
Above all, there should be no philosophy. Here again, we must use persuasion and not direct violence: we will massively broadcast entertainment via television that always extols the virtues of the emotional and instinctive. We will fill people’s minds with what is futile and fun. It is good to prevent the mind from thinking through incessant music and chatter. Sexuality will be placed at the forefront of human interests. As a social tranquilliser, there is nothing better.
In general, we will make sure to banish seriousness from life, to deride anything that is highly valued and to constantly champion frivolity: so that the euphoria of advertising becomes the standard of human happiness and the model for freedom. Conditioning alone will thus produce such integration that the only fear – which must be maintained – will be that of being excluded from the system and therefore no longer able to access the conditions necessary for happiness.
The mass man produced in this way must be treated as what he is: a calf, and he must be kept a close eye on, as a herd should be. Anything that allays his lucidity is good socially, and anything that could awaken it must be ridiculed, stifled and fought. Any doctrine questioning the system must first be designated as subversive and terrorist, and those who support it must then be treated as such.”
– Günther Anders,
"L’Obsolescence de l’homme" - The Obsolescence of Man, 1956
Dr Bernie Grummell B.A., M.Soc.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.
Dr Alisa Percy
