kottke.org posts about education
In 2024, schoolteacher Ginny Robinson won the Best in Show award at a quilting convention for her quilt called What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies.
This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of the most grotesque realities in America today. She is a teacher.
What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies is the title for this provocative work of art that features school supplies hurling toward the center on the front and an assault rifle on the back. This long, narrow quilt is the actual size and shape of a door. An outline of a human is stitched through the layers. On the front, the person is meant to represent a shooter, and on the reverse side, a teacher.
Robinson’s quilt is now part of the collection at the International Quilt Museum.
In 1966, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party and wrote a 10-point manifesto of what the group stood for and what they wanted. Here’s the full text of the plan.
4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
Students and faculty from Columbia University recently held a “25-hour speak-out” in support of academic freedom. Some of the remarks made during the speak-out are published at Rise Up, Columbia: part 1, part 2.
Turkuler Isiksel, political science professor:
Like other scholars in my discipline, political science, I think a lot about how in recent decades, elections have come to be used for authoritarian ends.
Many countries that hold regular elections, where leaders come to power through a competitive struggle for the people’s vote, are nevertheless authoritarian. But how can that be? Aren’t elections the same thing as democracy?
Well, elections in authoritarian regimes are a kind of window-dressing: authoritarian incumbents win elections because they ensure that they cannot lose: by restricting media freedom, manipulating information, intimidating civil society leaders, jailing dissidents, banning opposition parties, outlawing rallies and demonstrations. Once in power, they typically try to conquer 5 key social institutions:
- The press
- The bureaucracy
- The military
- The judiciary
- Universities
Why these institutions?
First, because they answer to a different authority than whoever happens to be in political power. Their activities are guided not by whoever happens to be in power, but by its own professional ethic.
- journalism is guided by a commitment to informing the public,
- the bureaucracy is guided by an ethic of professionalism and public service,
- the military is guided by respect for the chain of command and political neutrality,
- the judiciary is guided by the ethic of impartially applying the law, and
- universities like ours are guided by the search for truth.
In scholarly inquiry, disciplinary standards have priority over other metrics (profits, power, glory, public opinion). Political non-interference is a precondition for our scholarly and teaching mission.
In short, the third law of thermodynamics does not change because the commander-in-chief doesn’t like it. So these institutions present an obstacle to political and social control.
James Schamus, film & media studies professor:
I’ve been asked to speak briefly today as part of a specifically Jewish cohort of Columbia faculty. And the request as always surfaces in me two contradictory immediate reactions. The first reaction is simple: Who cares what Jews think? A genocide is a genocide is a genocide; ethno-state fascism is ethno-state fascism. The false and dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism as a cover for Israel’s crimes and the fascist repression of our universities here in the states is obvious now to all: Jews have no privileged perspective from which to add to those obvious facts.
My second reaction is also simple: This genocide in Gaza is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf; the destruction of American universities is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf. So I am indeed called to speak out, to fight back, and to work to create alternative forms of community and identity to counter the false claim that Israel’s depredations and Trump’s destruction of my university are somehow in my interest.
(thx, joe)
Randall Munroe notes that the typical path to getting a Ph.D. at an American college or university has changed somewhat in the past few months. In the alt-text for the image, he notes: “Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.”
Öztürk is still being held without evidence and a federal judge recently ruled that she must be returned to Vermont while her detainment is being challenged.
Harvard is refusing to comply with Trump’s demands related to his regime’s racist, xenophobic political agenda, including a threat to cut $9 billion in research funding. From the AP:
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter to the Harvard community Monday, said the demands violated the university’s First Amendment rights and “exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote, adding that the university had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.
“These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” he wrote. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”
You can read Garber’s letter and the letter Harvard received from the Trump regime.
I recently attended a virtual talk and Q&A with Timothy Snyder and when he was asked about Columbia and other schools capitulating to Trump’s demands and what needs to happen in order to stop it, he replied something along the lines of: “Some big school is gonna have to stick their neck out and take the hit. Say ‘no’ unequivocally to Trump and get their funding pulled. Lead by example and others will follow. Solidarity is the only way out of this.” Good on Harvard1 for helping to lead the way on this…hopefully more schools will find their backbone after this.
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They’re pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can’t or won’t do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a “calamity” and says “the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends”.
Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don’t have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I’ll post it for you.)
Food historian Max Miller stumbled upon the original recipe for 1980s/90s school cafeteria pizza (you know, with the iconic rectangular slices) and decided to whip up a batch (with “pourable dough”).
Tastes just like it. You can like — all of those herbs are exactly the same as they were. I think maybe it tastes a little fresher than I remember, like the flavors are a little heightened…but that’s that’s them. This is the pizza…
While the pizza was baking, Miller talked about the history of school lunches (following up on his video about school lunches during the Depression) — it’s a story that features J. Edgar Hoover and The Black Panthers.
You can find the pizza recipe on Miller’s website or in the original 1988 USDA publication Quantity Recipes for School Food Service courtesy of the Internet Archive. The pourable dough recipe is on page B-15 and the cheese pizza recipe is on D-30. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
Gareth Fearn writing for the London Review of Books about the student protests on US campuses: Liberalism without Accountability.
This is a toxic combination: universities reliant on investment portfolios in a system where mega-profits are made by companies that threaten and destroy human life, influenced by an increasingly radicalised class of billionaires, teaching students whose degrees won’t earn them enough to pay off their loans, managed by supine administrators threatened by (or willingly collaborating with) a reactionary right, who have decided that young people’s minds are being turned against capitalism not by their own lived experience of austerity and racialised police violence but by ‘woke Marxist professors’. This situation has now met with a live-streamed genocide which is supported, and brazenly lied about, by political leaders and commentators who claim to stand for truth and justice. Students, like much of the public, cannot square the reality of what they see with the world as constructed by politicians and the media.
Under such circumstances, pitching tents, raising placards and demanding divestment are really quite mild-mannered responses. That they have been met, in many US universities, with militarised policing reflects the fragility of liberalism — in the face of the growing hegemony of the conservative right as well as its own inability to offer a future even to Ivy League college students, let alone the less privileged.
This is a quote I like that’s attributed to Alvin Toffler from his 1970 book, Future Shock:
The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
It turns out that’s not a direct quote — it’s been cobbled together from two separate passages in the book:
By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.
and:
Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: “The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”
Somewhere along the line, someone combined Gerjuoy’s observation with Toffler’s phrasing to create, IMHO, a more insightful quote about the flexibility their future (and our present) requires.
For more misattributed quote debunking, see also “I Hate to Write, but I Love Having Written” and Where the Rich Use Public Transportation…
For the past 13 years, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has taught a class called Wealth & Poverty at UC Berkeley. He retired from teaching this year and has uploaded his lectures from the course to YouTube.
Welcome to my final UC Berkeley course on Wealth and Poverty. Drawing on my 40+ years in politics, including my time as secretary of labor, I offer a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s in the United States, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society.
This course also offers insights into the political and public-policy debates that have arisen in light of this inequality, as well as possible means of reversing it.
Here’s the first lecture, What’s Happened to Income & Wealth:
Reich has also published an abbreviated syllabus for each of the classes; links can be found in his course introduction (here’s class #1).
A high school here in Vermont is located (temporarily) in an abandoned Macy’s department store. A crew from the BBC recently made a short video tour, where you can see books on shelves designed to display fine china, an absence of windows, escalators, a lack of floor-to-ceiling walls, and fashion branding that remains on the walls.
Alexandra Lange wrote about the school in 2021 for Curbed.
The genre may be nearly dead, yet the building remains. And for economic, ecological, and social reasons, those buildings should be reused. “It’s amazing to think that we are standing in what used to be a department store; that we’re greeting people where we used to buy winter coats; reading books where they once sold fine china; taking phone calls in converted changing rooms; and learning science in the old suit racks,” Burlington’s school superintendent, Tom Flanagan, said at the ceremony. A school in a department store doesn’t have to be a sad story. In fact, this should just be the beginning, both for the students and for a country once addicted to big boxes.
Vermont indie newspaper Seven Days published a writeup, video tour, and photo slideshow of the school when it opened two years ago.
For Black History Month, Masterclass is offering an entire class on Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love for free.
From critical race theory to the 1619 Project, Black intellectuals are reshaping conversations on race in America. Now seven of those preeminent voices share their insight on the reckoning with race in America in three parts: past, present, and future. Gain a foundational understanding of the history of white supremacy and discover a path forward through the limitless capacity and resilience of Black love.
The class includes several hours of videos about “the history you weren’t taught in school” from an absolutely incredible lineup of instructors: Angela Davis, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, Sherrilyn Ifill, John McWhorter, and Cornel West. This is a fantastic resource. (thx, neil)
Dan Sinker writes for The Atlantic about how navigating Covid risks, politically motivated bullshit, and America’s failing infrastructure has broken parents during the pandemic: Parents Are Not Okay.
Instead it was a year in limbo: school on stuttering Zoom, school in person and then back home again for quarantine, school all the time and none of the time. No part of it was good, for kids or parents, but most parts of it were safe, and somehow, impossibly, we made it through a full year. It was hell, but we did it. We did it.
Time collapsed and it was summer again, and, briefly, things looked better. We began to dream of normalcy, of trips and jobs and school. But 2021’s hot vax summer only truly delivered on the hot part, as vaccination rates slowed and the Delta variant cut through some states with the brutal efficiency of the wildfires that decimated others. It happened in a flash: It was good, then it was bad, then we were right back in the same nightmare we’d been living in for 18 months.
And suddenly now it’s back to school while cases are rising, back to school while masks are a battleground, back to school while everyone under 12 is still unvaccinated. Parents are living a repeat of the worst year of their lives-except this time, no matter what, kids are going back.
Almost every parent I know is struggling with exactly this: trying to keep their kids (and family and friends) safe from Covid-19 while balancing the social & emotional wellbeing of everyone concerned and not getting a lot of help from their governments or communities. Remote school is no longer an option, few infrastructure upgrades have been made to improve ventilation in schools, no vaccine mandates for teachers or staff, parents fighting administrators about vaccine & mask mandates, and everyone is trying to do complex risk calculations about sending their can’t-yet-be-vaccinated kids into buildings with other kids whose parents, you suspect, are not vaccinated and aren’t taking any precautions in states where Delta is endemic. All while trying to work and remain sane somehow? And most of the parents I know have resources — they have steady income & savings, live in safe communities, and have friends & family to fall back on when times get tough. Those who don’t? I truly do not know how they are doing any of this without incurring significant, long-term trauma for parents and kids. We, inasmuch as we’re still a “we” in America, are failing them all.
In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student at the newly desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Escorted to her first day of school by federal marshals, she was immortalized by Normal Rockwell in a 1964 painting called The Problem We All Live With. Bridges has a new book out today called This Is Your Time.
Written as a letter from civil rights activist and icon Ruby Bridges to the reader, This Is Your Time is both a recounting of Ruby’s experience as a child who had no choice but to be escorted to class by federal marshals when she was chosen as one of the first black students to integrate New Orleans’ all-white public school system and an appeal to generations to come to effect change.
In a segment on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Bridges shared some of her story from the book.
The first day that I arrived with federal marshals, they rushed me inside of the building. And 500 kids walked out of school that first day and they never returned.
[Making friends] did not come easy because I heard kids, there were days when I would go into this coat closet to hang up my coat and I could hear kids laughing and talking, but I never saw them. Later on, I came to realize that they were being hidden from me in another classroom.
And that was because there were some white parents who actually crossed that picket line and brought their kids to school. But the principal who was part of the opposition, she would hide them. And even though I was complaining — or at least mentioning it to Mrs. Henry, she would never say anything to me, but she was actually going to the principal and saying, if you don’t allow those kids to come together, because the law has now changed, then I’m going to report you to the superintendent. And so I think after months of that, we were allowed to come together.
Bridges is only 66 years old today — this was all not so long ago.
Update: Sad news: Ruby’s mother, Lucille Bridges, died yesterday at the age of 86.
Her daughter went on to become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, memorialized in Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Problem We All Live With” which depicts a tiny Ruby in a white dress carrying her notebooks and a ruler surrounded by much taller U.S. Marshals. But Ruby Bridges once credited her parents as the forces behind her history-making achievement.
“My parents are the real heroes,” the U.S. Marshals Service once quoted her as saying during a ceremony at an art gallery showing the painting. “They (sent me to that public school) because they felt it was the right thing to do.”
MIT’s biology department is offering a new online class this fall called COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic. The class will be led by Richard Young and Facundo Batista and will include guest lectures by several leading authorities on Covid-19, coronaviruses, epidemiology, and immune systems like Anthony Fauci, Michael Mina, and Akiko Iwasaki. Here’s the course description and syllabus.
Lectures by leading experts on the fundamentals of coronavirus and host cell biology, immunology, epidemiology, clinical disease, and vaccine and therapeutic development.
The first class is today, Sept 1st, at 11:30am ET and meets on Tuesday through December 8. Lectures are via live video but will be archived if you miss a class. There’s no homework or outside reading (it’s just the lectures), no pre-requisites needed, and it’s a 1-credit pass/fail exploratory course, so despite the source and subject matter, it should be fairly accessible. I’m taking the course and will let you know how it goes! (thx, meg)
Update: Here’s an archive of the first lecture by Bruce Walker of the Ragon Institute.
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