Bernays

Tonight, I'm going to be talking about a bit of Edward Bernays's Propaganda. I found this clip from a BBC documentary The Century of Self. It's scary.

Cyber Bullying

At the MnCUEW keynote on Friday, John O'Brien presented a bunch of slides he'd complied to to illustrate his point that technology is changing how we communicate.

One video was about cyber bullying, and I re-post it here because it's direct - and uncomfortable:

Activities in Minnesota

According to the brainstorm list one of my students wrote on the midterm, these are activities you can do in Minnesota weather:

• swimming
• ice fishing / fishing
• ski / snowboarding
• hiking
• camping
• canoning / boating
• drag car racing

He added this wonderful sentence in his actual essay: "You can go snowboarding, show shoeing or ice fishing because where in Untied States you can go ice fishing." Where, indeed!

"Academically Adrift"

A couple of days ago in The New York Times, op-ed columnist Bob Herbert published "College the Easy Way." In it, he reflects on a new book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska. 

It was published in January, and it got a bunch of press then. In fact, I've heard these authors on the radio, and I'm sympathetic to their findings -- I, too, find that the institution I work for has struggled to preserve its integrity (often, in my view, sacrificing that integrity in order to satisfy legislative overseers who have none). 


I am not sympathetic, however, to the blaming of faculty: teachers are such easy targets, aren't they? Public conversation about teachers is almost always negative, a fact pointed out by Nicholas Kristof in this column, where he argues that teachers should be paid more, not less). It's tougher to look at systems -- and to see the forces behind the breakdown of systems.

Related to that point about the forces behind the breakdown, I read a comment at the end of Herbert's column, which ends with almost 200 comments from readers around the world. The following comment sums up what I have been thinking about the political consequences of the bully-Republican politics we are living under. I've printed it below [adding paragraph breaks] to share a straightforward articulation of the problem:

Dr. Sam

California

March 5th, 2011

1:40 am

It would seem from what we know now that rightwing Republicans want to set our kids "academically adrift." They know that an educated electorate would not buy into their conspiracy theories, their parochial view of the world and their narrow, inhumane vision of human relationship. 

Therefore, they have gone about rewriting school and college texts in such places as Texas and Mississippi to accommodate their bogus religious and political propaganda such as creationism, civil war heroes and a fictional interpretation of the pre-civil rights era. 

In their deficit-cutting frenzy, they have set their eyes on dismantling public education as we know[it], shifting money from public schools to private schools through a voucher program that benefits even the children of the rich. 

At the federal and state levels, they are proposing deep cuts in education even though America is clearly lagging behind in this important area compared to others nations like China and many parts of Asia, and even though we are now faced with global competition in a knowledge-based economy. 

Think of how ignorant our kids and the broad electorates in America are becoming as they listen to the misinformation and untruths that poor our in deluge in rightwing media daily. 

Finally, while they claim they are for small government, they interfere boldly with many aspects of our private lives, including the bed rooms of the nation. We are truly in trouble! God save us from Republican fundamentalism. 

Downtown

I'm writing this post from the MnSCU system office - where they've become so lean that there's no longer a receptionist to let you in the offices! Weird because the glass doors are locked at all times, and so you have to wait outside until you happen to come into the vision field of a person walking around inside.

I've been reading portfolios for the Outstanding Educator Award - quite a wonderfully tiring experience. Some really, really good people work in the MnSCU system. I'm learning some great new ideas, and I've discovered a program that I think would be perfect for my nephew: a Heavy Equipment program at Staples!

Okay, back to work.