Robert Baird
Paranormal Maven
It is not just the extreme individuals in the Mideast who present a problem in a society headed for ruination or apocalypse. The largest group I hold responsible are those who have no excuse. The people who have had everything given to them after having ripped off earlier people or having killed those people in genocidal religious inspired rages. Yes, Americans and their corporate CIA backed greed which General Smedley Butler spoke eloquently about. But not just any Americans - no it is the supposed professional and helpful bureaucrats I hold responsible. Of course there are the pulpit pounding panderers to idiocy and alien intervention to consider as well. Rogues educated to risk manage and maintain illegal and immoral programs on Wall Street are not the target of this little tirade.
I am introducing a former Catholic expert on education whose study of Central American efforts to bring higher education there; saw him say it decreased the quality of life and drove people apart. He was excommunicated shortly after that and I followed his work for decades. In 'Limits to Medicine' he documented a mechanistic out of touch and destructive profession so well that the British Medical Journal 'Lancet' said it 'was a grapeshot across their bow'. He joined up with another great humanist and emancipating force by the name of Professor John McKnight. Even if it takes you four hours - if you have never understood why you are so screwed up or why you think the Illuminati did it (whatever you actually do when you reject independent thinking and seek easy answers) - read this book.
https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/Ivan_Il...rofessions.pdf
People are more likely to have a Joy of Learning if they have a say in what it is they are going to study. Sound familiar - you have heard about the proverbial horse and the much needed water. Yes, Learning is undoubtedly as meaningful for a productive life as water is to sustain life. The question Illich raised by mere dint of observation and thinking still sends shockwaves around the world some 45 years after he wrote his fantastic little book.
We really must stop our testing industry from destroying the innate Joy of Learning you will see me prattle on about in discussions about the book titled The Wonder Child or Howard Gardner's Learning styles research. If people are encouraged to learn throughout their life and not view school as the end of required or beneficial learning - the world will be better for it. The programming of people's thoughts will be left to other less expensive and more transparent (hopefully) means. We have the technology to affect how people think to a far greater extent if we are honest about what we have always done or tried to do, anyway.
"While the World Bank correctly notes that Education for All has to a great extent devolved into «Schooling for All», they fail to see that their Learning for All might just as well be dubbed «Evaluation for All». Moreover, the World Bank’s overly biased research evidence to sustain the main normative ideas in their report, along with a directive and arbitrary tone in their lines of argument, has triggered an immediate knee-jerk response from scholars. Joel Samoff’s words are representative of this reaction: «Learning for All has little to say about learning and even less about all» (2012, p. 120).
With this reworking of international education policies in mind, this paper proposes to contribute to the critique of post-2015 debate by drawing on the thoughts of Ivan Illich (1926-2002). His best-known writings underscore the risks entailed by compulsory universal education for large sectors of the population.
He was a critic of modernity who zealously called for the need for institutional and technological limits at a time when economic growth and development and social progress were heralded as unarguable dogmas of wellbeing. As an intellectual he challenged the foundation of the human capital theory. His texts pose the option of centring the debate on international education policy on
questions referring to the means for learning, and not so much on the spread of schooling or the investment in education as the mechanisms to ensure universal access to a quality education. At the same time, he repudiates the alternative of
articulating a system able to measure worldwide learning efficiently and homogeneously.
As a thinker, his work, despite being considered scantily grounded in theory, especially in the 1970s (McConnell, 1972; Gintis, 1972; Nassif, 1975; Petrovski, 1976, Hannoun, 1976), is taking on deeper significance in the context of 21st-century thought (Igelmo Zaldívar, 2012, p. 43)."
http://forodeeducacion.com/ojs/index...ewFile/319/287
What is aptitude? Why must people work within a social framework that values following 'norms' of intellect and has questions on tests rather than judgments of soulful and ethical actual behavior? The book 'Emotional Intelligence' makes a good case for EQ rather than IQ. Kaoru Yamamoto of the University of Colorado describes the making, coaching, and taking of tests seem like all our teachers are learning. He correctly identifies the flawed ability to maintain or generate effective learning by turning the process into unwilling students being force fed by uncharismatic automatons without authority. Most teachers know they are little more than 'glorified baby-sitters' and so they don't want to be held accountable. Accountable to tests that value regurgitation is not accountable to real value. They have lots of good arguments on all sides of the issue because the fundamental premises are hugely flawed.
Some social scientists make a very good point about the purpose of education in our recent history when they note the Industrial Revolution sought workers to punch time clocks and follow the bosses and their minion's orders. The homogenization of memorization being the key to learning assumes something worse than what isn't in evidence. It is not evident that linear logical processes or competency in memory skills is paramount to the functioning character development of productive people. In fact we have ample reason to limit these skills now that hand held or wristwatch sized data bases are able to connect to near total knowledge networks. Forgetting that important point, we must understand what education and teaching really is supposed to achieve. Simple common sense alone would indicate a high priority should exist in the augmentation of interest in learning and the joys it may offer a person throughout their life.
Co-operative and social integrational skills teaching are well enough developed in the science of education and should be given more support. In Canada the word 'co-operative' is used but the purposes of learning style (Take a look at H. Gardner's work which now has eight distinct learning style proficiencies.) and personality differences aren't known by the teachers who think co-operative learning means some kind of teamwork between teachers, students and parents. Group dynamics within the student's core appreciation of purpose and relating to each other is more the point. Seeing the benefits of a good creative spatial competency in another person within the group and learning the most important things are useful creative outputs rather than some goal established by someone outside the group, might have more merit. The compassionate diplomatic and purposeful ethic of net additional value rather than homogenized adherence to hypocritical unquestioned pablum with frequent prejudicial or egoistically infused judgement needs support.
I am introducing a former Catholic expert on education whose study of Central American efforts to bring higher education there; saw him say it decreased the quality of life and drove people apart. He was excommunicated shortly after that and I followed his work for decades. In 'Limits to Medicine' he documented a mechanistic out of touch and destructive profession so well that the British Medical Journal 'Lancet' said it 'was a grapeshot across their bow'. He joined up with another great humanist and emancipating force by the name of Professor John McKnight. Even if it takes you four hours - if you have never understood why you are so screwed up or why you think the Illuminati did it (whatever you actually do when you reject independent thinking and seek easy answers) - read this book.
https://www.uvm.edu/~asnider/Ivan_Il...rofessions.pdf
People are more likely to have a Joy of Learning if they have a say in what it is they are going to study. Sound familiar - you have heard about the proverbial horse and the much needed water. Yes, Learning is undoubtedly as meaningful for a productive life as water is to sustain life. The question Illich raised by mere dint of observation and thinking still sends shockwaves around the world some 45 years after he wrote his fantastic little book.
We really must stop our testing industry from destroying the innate Joy of Learning you will see me prattle on about in discussions about the book titled The Wonder Child or Howard Gardner's Learning styles research. If people are encouraged to learn throughout their life and not view school as the end of required or beneficial learning - the world will be better for it. The programming of people's thoughts will be left to other less expensive and more transparent (hopefully) means. We have the technology to affect how people think to a far greater extent if we are honest about what we have always done or tried to do, anyway.
"While the World Bank correctly notes that Education for All has to a great extent devolved into «Schooling for All», they fail to see that their Learning for All might just as well be dubbed «Evaluation for All». Moreover, the World Bank’s overly biased research evidence to sustain the main normative ideas in their report, along with a directive and arbitrary tone in their lines of argument, has triggered an immediate knee-jerk response from scholars. Joel Samoff’s words are representative of this reaction: «Learning for All has little to say about learning and even less about all» (2012, p. 120).
With this reworking of international education policies in mind, this paper proposes to contribute to the critique of post-2015 debate by drawing on the thoughts of Ivan Illich (1926-2002). His best-known writings underscore the risks entailed by compulsory universal education for large sectors of the population.
He was a critic of modernity who zealously called for the need for institutional and technological limits at a time when economic growth and development and social progress were heralded as unarguable dogmas of wellbeing. As an intellectual he challenged the foundation of the human capital theory. His texts pose the option of centring the debate on international education policy on
questions referring to the means for learning, and not so much on the spread of schooling or the investment in education as the mechanisms to ensure universal access to a quality education. At the same time, he repudiates the alternative of
articulating a system able to measure worldwide learning efficiently and homogeneously.
As a thinker, his work, despite being considered scantily grounded in theory, especially in the 1970s (McConnell, 1972; Gintis, 1972; Nassif, 1975; Petrovski, 1976, Hannoun, 1976), is taking on deeper significance in the context of 21st-century thought (Igelmo Zaldívar, 2012, p. 43)."
http://forodeeducacion.com/ojs/index...ewFile/319/287
What is aptitude? Why must people work within a social framework that values following 'norms' of intellect and has questions on tests rather than judgments of soulful and ethical actual behavior? The book 'Emotional Intelligence' makes a good case for EQ rather than IQ. Kaoru Yamamoto of the University of Colorado describes the making, coaching, and taking of tests seem like all our teachers are learning. He correctly identifies the flawed ability to maintain or generate effective learning by turning the process into unwilling students being force fed by uncharismatic automatons without authority. Most teachers know they are little more than 'glorified baby-sitters' and so they don't want to be held accountable. Accountable to tests that value regurgitation is not accountable to real value. They have lots of good arguments on all sides of the issue because the fundamental premises are hugely flawed.
Some social scientists make a very good point about the purpose of education in our recent history when they note the Industrial Revolution sought workers to punch time clocks and follow the bosses and their minion's orders. The homogenization of memorization being the key to learning assumes something worse than what isn't in evidence. It is not evident that linear logical processes or competency in memory skills is paramount to the functioning character development of productive people. In fact we have ample reason to limit these skills now that hand held or wristwatch sized data bases are able to connect to near total knowledge networks. Forgetting that important point, we must understand what education and teaching really is supposed to achieve. Simple common sense alone would indicate a high priority should exist in the augmentation of interest in learning and the joys it may offer a person throughout their life.
Co-operative and social integrational skills teaching are well enough developed in the science of education and should be given more support. In Canada the word 'co-operative' is used but the purposes of learning style (Take a look at H. Gardner's work which now has eight distinct learning style proficiencies.) and personality differences aren't known by the teachers who think co-operative learning means some kind of teamwork between teachers, students and parents. Group dynamics within the student's core appreciation of purpose and relating to each other is more the point. Seeing the benefits of a good creative spatial competency in another person within the group and learning the most important things are useful creative outputs rather than some goal established by someone outside the group, might have more merit. The compassionate diplomatic and purposeful ethic of net additional value rather than homogenized adherence to hypocritical unquestioned pablum with frequent prejudicial or egoistically infused judgement needs support.
