Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear. Every afternoon last week, students, teachers, and neighbors gathered to hold classes on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza.
Everyone was welcome. Debt, hierarchy, and the modern university. David Graeber’s three social principles – hierarchy, exchange and communism – are useful devices to think about the world, particularly when you become sensitized to the way in which one can turn into or mask another.
One site of human interaction that may be illuminated by Graeber’s principles is the modern university: perhaps especially the British version which has evolved from nominally democratic modes of governance to extremely hierarchical ones within a generation. When I started my career, institutions were funded by a block grant from government, which they were largely free to do with as they wished, and departments often functioned (with disciplinary variations) according to a combination of exchange and communism: there was a rough division of tasks and some tally was kept of who was doing what, but not so precisely as to consititute a real market. Michael Hudson On The Financialization of Higher Education. How your brain likes to be treated at revision time. If you're a student, you rely on one brain function above all others: memory.
These days, we understand more about the structure of memory than we ever have before, so we can find the best techniques for training your brain to hang on to as much information as possible. The process depends on the brain's neuroplasticity, its ability to reorganise itself throughout your life by breaking and forming new connections between its billions of cells. How does it work? Information is transmitted by brain cells called neurons. When you learn something new, a group of neurons activate in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Your hippocampus is forced to store many new patterns every day. So what's the best way to revise? Forget about initial letters Teachers often urge students to make up mnemonics – sentences based on the initial letters of items you're trying to remember. Repeat yourself.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. Teresa Sullivan fired from UVA: What happens when universities are run by robber barons. Lin Jones/University of Michigan.
In the 19th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller’s dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolistic strategies. In the 21st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon and massive application of ego and hubris. On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, “radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Philip Kitcher: The Trouble With Scientism. Before 2014, catch up on the best of The New Republic.
For the next few weeks, we'll be re-posting a selection of our most thought-provoking pieces from the recent past.
Education - curators... Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show. A Nation of Little Lebowski Urban Achievers. Art by Loki Muthu The year Reagan was elected to his first term, the GOP’s educational agenda consisted of two main objectives: “bring God back into the classroom” and abolish the Department of Education.
This put the Reagan-appointed Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell, in an awkward position. Pressured to dismantle the very organization he’d been chosen to oversee, Bell asked the President to devise a national task force on American education, which he hoped would show the necessity of federal involvement in public schools. Bell, notorious within the cabinet for being too liberal, was ignored. He responded by assembling the task force himself. In 1983, the NCEE released A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform – arguably the most influential document on education policy since Congress passed Title I in 1965. The problem, as they saw it, was that kids were graduating from high school unprepared for success in a global economy.
Devastating Cuts to Public Higher Education « Ph.D. Octopus. By Peter Education is increasingly become a central domain over which class conflict is being fought in the 21st century.
Will corporate “Education Reform” succeed in privatizing our nation’s high schools, turning them into union-free charter-schools? Will there be any affordable public colleges in ten years? Will the burden of education be borne by society? Or by individuals who must go massively into debt to finance their own education? In this light we see the devastating cuts to public higher education: Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As public colleges that were formerly free or cheap increasingly rely on donations and tuition to fix their budgets the line between public and private college further erodes.