EDUCATION TIPS

Review of "Powers of the Mind. . ."

From TC Record:Title: Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in AmericaAuthor(s): Donald N. LevinePublisher: University of Chicago Press, ChicagoISBN: 0226475530 , Pages: 256, Year: 2006reviewed by James Horn � March 05, 2007Search for book at Amazon.com Even as the University of Chicago’s rich liberal arts foundations were still being poured in 1918, former faculty member Thorstein Veblen (1918), offered this observation on the ambitious rise of the American university superstructure: It is always possible, of course, that this pre-eminence...

Fascinating New Article on Education and Global Development

I found this article by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee fascinating. In the second half, he explores the evidence around the relationships between education and development, focusing on India. While this is far out of my area of expertise (Raji?) the article feels pretty evenhanded. He expores the complexities involved in figuring out what aspects of a particular system result in social changes more broadly, finding an almost endless hall of mirrors in the "answers" different economists have found.An interesting paragraph:Consider, as an illustration, one of the perennial favorite projects in the...

Educating the Whole Child - what we owe our students

Let me explain why I am posting this here. In a time when national educational policy is under serious discussion, it seems important to me that we consider issues beyond those that NCLB seems to address. While I wrote the material below for dailykos, as will be event by the text at the end, it seems relevant enough to offer it to this community as well. If people strongly object, let me know and I will come back and delete it.Oh, and by the way, when I first tried to post it, it seemingly came up garbaged, so this is a repost after I deleted the original version.crossposted from dailykosEach...

Will the Privileged Ever Help Inner-City Kids Because they Care? Nope. It's a Fantasy

A wide range of scholars, including Nel Noddings and Hannah Arendt, have discussed the "caring" problem. Fundamentally, people can't care about groups of people, only individuals. An article in Foreign Policy lays out some of the empirical research behind these arguments. Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide—no matter how large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that...

Parallels Between NCLB and Bush's Iraq Policy

[Kevin Drum] What an infuriating article on the No Child Left Behind Act in the Washington Post tonight. The question is whether NCLB's requirement of 100% proficiency by 2014 is achievable, and the answer, as almost everyone in the article acknowledges, is no. 100% isn't achievable for anything. Everyone knows that. Nonetheless, here's a sampling of Republican bloviating on the subject:"We need to stay the course," U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Raymond Simon said. "The mission is doable, and we don't need to back off that right now." . . .Question: Why would NCLB mandate an obviously unmeetable...

Discussion of "Education Scholars Have Much to Learn: An Essay Review of Jeannie Oakes's and John Rogers's Learning Power"

This essay is now available at Education Review Online here.Welcome to a discussion of my review of Jeannie Oakes's and John Rogers's new book.Please use the comment link, below, to add your contribution.Let me start with one of my own critiques of my review. To some extent, the essay seems to set up a relatively stark binary between Dewey's vision of collaborative democracy and Alinsky's vision of mass-based social action. Of course this is too simple and leaves out many other models. I have left the review the way it is, however. Since an understanding of robust alternatives to Deweyan forms...

Community Organizing and Urban Education VIII: Fracturing Across Lines of Race and Class

[To read the entire series, go here.]In my limited experience in Milwaukee with MOVE--a congregational organizing group that work with the Gamaliel Foundation which operates nationally and internationally—the larger institutionalized community organizing groups have significant issues with race and class that they don’t deal with effectively. (Later I’ll talk about how intermediary organizations like Gamaliel work with local groups). From what I have read elsewhere, this reluctance to focus specifically on race and class in favor of more pragmatic and general visions of “self interest” and coalition...

I am a history-education half-breed

Over on my own blog, I've been outed as a Michael B. Katz student (when writing about the new Ravitch-Meier blog) and discussed in a sideways fashion the old debate over Diane Ravitch and presentism in education historiography. (My advisor isn't the same person as Michael S. Katz, a philosopher of education at San Jose State. They're two different Michael Katzes who have written about education and been elected presidents of their respective social-foundationsish scholarly societies.)But there's a personal story that ties in to my graduate education and says a lot about the respective position...