Howard Gardner: ‘A Blessing of Influences’ We all owe our lives to someone, starting with mother and father and then outward along a spreading tree of life going back in time. For those who make a living in the academic realm, a second tree of life is entwined with the first: a branching series of mentors and intellectual influences. “We are the sum of whoever we worked with,” said developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a celebrated, wide-ranging scholar based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). For him, that sum includes a few names everyone knows. Erik Erikson and David Riesman were both at Harvard when Gardner was an undergraduate. Jean Piaget and Claude Levi-Strauss corresponded with the young scholar before he earned his Harvard Ph.D. in 1971.
The Levi-Strauss letter, in response to Gardner’s first journal article, is framed in his Longfellow Hall office. Gardner framed a copy of his 1976 review of a book by Piaget, whose picture captures the older scholar’s Gallic charm. No Ultimate Political Solutions | Capital Commentary. By Timothy Sherratt October 18, 2013 “The land of the free...because of the brave.” Even the uncertain calligraphy on the homemade sign along the roadside lent that lapidary truth a certain dignity. On a bright fall day of breathtaking colors, the highway from Grand Junction, CO going south passes through one All-America City award winner after another, from the farming towns of Delta and Montrose to the old mining town of Ouray, and over the passes to Silverton and Durango.
The neat red, white, and blue signs describing the awards, as well as the homemade ones displayed outside homes and businesses, advertise a determined commitment to family, home, and civic responsibility-- a clear-eyed embrace of the links between liberty and sacrifice. But all is not well in this corner of the Rocky Mountains. Constitutional checks and balances have always promised to secure minority interests against majority power. But the problems lie deeper than the rules governing elections.
How the GOP Slowly Went Insane - Jon Lovett. The current moment in politics came about slowly, not suddenly, but it doesn't make it any less of a national emergency. When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber and he used to be black but he made himself white and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Wacko Jacko. After all, as a kid, you know you are changing, but the world seems static. If Michael Jackson is crazy it is inconceivable that he was ever not crazy in the same way it’s hard to imagine your parents as children because they’ve always been so old.
One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world. This is what I was thinking about, anyway, when Michael Jackson died: not what he meant to me but what he became to us. We made it a joke because it became normal. Yes, there are two types of public insanity. But then there is the more insidious crazy. The same happens in our politics. Gender and the Body Language of Power. We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.
Enjoy! Philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky once observed that being feminine often means using one’s body to portray powerlessness. Consider: A feminine person keeps her body small and contained; she makes sure that it doesn’t take up to much space or impose itself. She walks and sits in tightly packaged ways. Likewise, burping and farting, raising one’s voice in an argument, and even laughing loudly are considered distinctly unfeminine. Stunningly, when you think about it, these features of feminine body comportment are, in fact, not uniquely feminine, but associated with deference more generally. In groups of men, those with higher status typically assume looser and more relaxed postures; the boss lounges comfortably behind the desk while the applicant sits tense and rigid on the edge of his seat.
Acting feminine, then, overlaps with performances of submissiveness. Behind the camera: How selfies bring authenticity into focus. There’s a moment in Eddie Murphy’s legendary 1983 standup special, “Delirious,” when Murphy scans the front row of the crowd and asks if anybody has a camera. A hand reaches up to the stage to offer a quintessential 1980s point-and-shoot, one of those flattened rectangles that masks the photographer’s eyes like a censorship bar. Murphy proceeds to snap two photos of the audience. He then points the camera at himself, drops his arms to his sides, and takes a close-up of his fire-engine red-leather-clad crotch. “Let’s see you explain the last one to the guys at Fotomat,” Murphy jokes as he hands the camera back to its owner. The audience roars. How quaint. Thirty years later, Fotomat kiosks are but a distant memory and the mere question of whether someone in a 3,000-person audience might have a camera is dated to the point of surreality.
Most American adults own smartphones, which means a staggering number of people have high-quality cameras with them at any given time. “Dear daily mail, Article. The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years.
Be faithful in worship. Be uncompromisingly moral. The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. It is an extraordinary gift. Feminist_Pedagogy_Project091109.pdf. When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Martin Luther King, Jr. If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students.
Corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade any viable understanding of the connection between schooling and educating critically engaged citizens. Policies and practices that are based on distrust of teachers and disrespect for them will fail. Why? To read more articles by Henry A. . . . Why Women Still Can’t Have It All - Anne-Marie Slaughter. The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.
Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
Revaluing Family Values. When Judges Assume That Men Cannot Control Their Own Sexual Urges - Mieke Eerkens. Women and men alike should be concerned by the Iowa Supreme Court's recent ruling that it's legal for a man to fire an employee he finds too attractive. In Homer's great epic poem The Odyssey, penned in the 8th century BC, the male hero Odysseus barely escapes the devious sorcery and seduction of several archetypal female temptresses. Perhaps the most universally recognized of these temptresses are the irresistible Sirens, who beckon Odysseus and his crew with their hypnotic songs, songs famous for clouding men's minds and causing them to blow off course to shipwreck on the women's symbolic shores. Only stopping their ears with wax to remove the temptation succeeds in saving him and his men from the Sirens' clutches.
Yet Odysseus, titillated by the thought of them, wants so desperately to hear their bewitching song despite the danger, that he tasks his men with binding him to the mast in order to prevent him from succumbing to their lure and leaping overboard to his ruin. The face of America's homeless youth. Hundreds of homeless teens and young adults live in Denver, Colorado Many fled abusive families or foster parents Doyle "Sox" Robinson has opened a drop-in center for homeless youths "They are just like any other kids out there," Robinson says Denver, Colorado (CNN) -- When the sun dips below the Rocky Mountains and the streets of Denver go dark, Lokki, his girlfriend Magic and their friend Tripp head home.
They climb in between the rafters of a highway overpass, crouching as they sit under the concrete structure that rumbles with every car that crosses overhead. It is where they will sleep tonight. It is where they say they can live safely after escaping from abusive homes. "It's pretty hard," says Magic, 18, when asked about living on the streets. She refuses to talk about what caused her to leave home. Her boyfriend Lokki has a different outlook: He says he enjoys the fun and freedom of life on the streets. "I don't really have to worry about anything," says Lokki, 20. Anything But Human. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Wherever I turn, the popular media, scientists and even fellow philosophers are telling me that I’m a machine or a beast.
My ethics can be illuminated by the behavior of termites. My brain is a sloppy computer with a flicker of consciousness and the illusion of free will. I’m anything but human. While it would take more time and space than I have here to refute these views, I’d like to suggest why I stubbornly continue to believe that I’m a human being — something more than other animals, and essentially more than any computer. The temptation to reduce the human to the subhuman has been around for a long time. Let’s begin with ethics. I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics.
In fact, the very idea of an “ought” is foreign to evolutionary theory. Leif Parsons. 5 tips for creating civil discourse in an era of polarization | Opinion. Congress is now more polarized than at any time since Civil War Reconstruction. As we barrel toward a nasty presidential election, things will get even worse. Whether it is the news channels we watch, the blogs we read, the people we follow on Twitter, our physical neighbors, our Facebook friends, our churches, or the people with whom we socialize, most of us consume information in communities which do not invite us to critically examine our positions. The polarization is particularly powerful during those increasingly rare times during which we are forced to engage ideas to which we are seldom exposed: say, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in a required course in college or while watching a presidential debate.
When we do have our safe, comfortable views directly and thoughtfully challenged, we are often unable to come up with something other than a polarizing response. Happily, there are signs that we can do things differently. . • Humility. . • Solidarity with our conversation partner. Prosumer-Centric Capitalism. Irving Wladawsky-Berger has posted an illuminating piece titled Customer-centric Capitalism in which he convincingly argues the now dominant profit-driven businesses M.O. is in fact detrimental to society: For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies. But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers.
It is clear that our system of profit-driven capitalism must be modernized with a greater emphasis placed on the customer. This is already happening. A handful of companies, like Google, have adopted positive-sum or triple-bottom-line business models. Now consider the spread of modern day analytics.Thanks to the web information explosion and the social sharing boom it's become possible to track more complex behavior. What's a Prosumer?
Living With Less. A Lot Less. Make Anything Better in an Hour: How to Run a Public Brainstorm | Innovation on GOOD. When was the last time you really looked at a bus stop? It's the sort of mundane, everyday object that usually gets overlooked—and that's exactly why it's interesting to think about. There are unexplored opportunities for change, and making even a small change to a bus stop can be really impactful when multiplied all over the country. Along with GOOD Chicago, Greater Good Studio recently helped facilitate a workshop that generated hundreds of new ideas to redesign the lowly bus stop into a commuter tool, not just a piece of urban furniture. The workshop followed a panel discussion with current experts in the field. Whether you're redesigning a bus stop or any similar overlooked opportunity, here's a simple guide to facilitating your own public design brainstorm.
Framing Opportunities Through "How Might We" Statements After a panel discussion introducing the topic, generate some "How Might We" statements that pose generative, open-ended questions to frame the brainstorm. Brainstorm Warm-Up. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 1] I gave the Milton K Wong lecture in Vancouver on Sunday. I very much enjoyed the event- it was a stunning venue, a superb audience and a good discussion of the issues. My thanks to the Laurier Institution, University of British Columbia and CBC for inviting me. Entitled ‘What is Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perpective’, the lecture pulled together many of the themes about immigration, identity, diversity and multiculturalism of which I have been talking and writing recently. It was a long talk, so I am splitting the transcript into two. Here is the first part; I will publish the second part later this week. It is somewhat alarming to be asked to present the European perspective on multiculturalism.
Thirty years ago multiculturalism was widely seen as the answer to many of Europe’s social problems. Part of the problem in discussions about multiculturalism is that the term has, in recent years, come to have two meanings that are all too rarely distinguished. Consider France. The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science — Editor's Picks. Leap Year Project: A Prototype for Radically Experiential Learning | Education on GOOD. Why Borders Disfigure Landscapes as Well as Thoughts | Politics on GOOD.
The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis. 5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think.