* Down with the Aesthetes! Up with the Wonks!

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theantiyale 10 hours, 30 minutes ago

The real LINE, (and the undeclared war between the Bill & Melinda Gradgrinds vs. the Harold Blooms of the world) is:

LEFT BRAIN worshippers who believe that everything can be quantified and measured in standardized testing,

vs.

RIGHT BRAIN aesthetes, who know that NOTHING VALUABLE CAN.

Interesting, but cruel, battle.

Bill and Melinda Gradgrind http://gradgrindfoundation.blogspot.com and their clones, Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan (and even the Obam man himself), seem totally indifferent to the fact that they are grinding up all the right brain flowers in their obsession with "measuring” left brain “outcomes".

They are ever so anxious that we are falling behind China and India in producing left brain wonks, aka ‘engineers’.

Mercy!

Run right home parents and give your children two tablespoons of facts, morning, noon, and night, to ward off this epidemic.

As every mother knows, you cannot rush a rose.

See BOOOST ("Better Opt Out Of Standardized Testing') my challenge to parents across America to revolt against cowardly school boards across America, including the school board that authorized my salary in Vermont for the last 25 years.

http://testoptout.blogspot.com

(And now, here they come, all my left brain credentials--- just to annoy the left brain wonks.)

Paul D. Keane

M. Div. ‘80

M.A., M.Ed.

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MEDANSKY: Broadening the liberal arts

BY MARISSA MEDANSKY

STAFF COLUMNIST

The Yale Daily News

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

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The students of the journalism program, however, recieved a slightly different explanation. In a letter to the students, the program’s director, Hank Klibanoff, recounted his experiences at a recent meeting where Foreman alerted him of the program’s fate.

Journalism is “viewed by many at Emory as a ‘pre-professional program’ and therefore as ‘not an easy fit’ in a liberal arts environment,” Klibanoff wrote. “It’s unclear to me why we didn’t have a discussion on that, even a debate, before the decision was made to close the program.”

In his immortal 2008 essay, William Deresiewicz took to the pages of the American Scholar to craft the image of the bumbling Ivy League graduate, able to navigate corporate boardrooms and cocktail parties yet utterly bamboozled by a conversation with the local plumber. The titular disadvantages of an elite education, he writes, are myriad: We live in gated castles and earn meaningless grades, failing to ever learn. Deresiewicz bemoans that only a “small minority” of Ivy League undergraduates “have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey,” daring to ask the “big questions” that define the life of the mind. Churning out doctors, lawyers and MBAs, to Deresiewicz, is anathema to the pursuit of liberal education. Liberal education is “something more” than a shot at Harvard Law or Goldman Sachs.

I revive Deresiewicz not because I think he is particularly novel, but because I think his piece effectively illustrates the weird false dichotomy that’s plaguing our peers down in Atlanta.

The quest to define what constitutes a liberal arts education is often needlessly exclusive. The classic liberal arts education included music, geometry, astronomy and rhetoric, among other disciplines. And math is math is math, whether you’re learning it to churn out spreadsheets and financial models on Wall Street or to write proofs in an academic post — or just because you think it’s cool.

We can’t get hung up on definitions. The line between “liberal arts” and “pre-professional” is relative, not authoritative, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

After all, if Emory truly believes the line between liberal arts and career skills is so firm, it should ban future engineers from taking higher-level math courses; they might, you know, use those skills at work someday. Future novelists? Stay away from literature, lest you dare to glean some inspiration from Dickens or Cervantes. Interested in a career in music? Sorry, those classes are restricted to the tone-deaf.

Yes, some disciplines are more pre-professional than others — but the idea that a course in journalism could only exist in the context of a pre-professional experience is simply untrue, as is the notion that some disciplines are devoid of career-applicable skills. A journalism course, for instance, might employ sociology or anthropology to question recent media trends (“Muslim Rage,” anyone?). It might include a reading list of journalistic standards, then force students to analyze them; that’s no different from a literature course. This isn’t just true for journalism, but also engineering, art, education and more. I buy that budget cuts are a thing, and universities need to prioritize, but doing so on the terms of some liberal-artsier-than-thou humanists is harmful.

The liberal arts are — dare I say it — a social construct; ask any STEM major (emphasis on science and math, both liberal arts) who has chuckled when a humanities major mourns Yale’s loss of its “liberal arts” focus. If we really want to embrace the liberal arts, we need to recognize that they’re broader than Emory’s dean thinks and apply the same principles of critical thought and analysis across the disciplines — no matter how professional those disciplines might be.

Marissa Medansky is a sophomore in Morse College. Her column runs on Tuesdays. Contact her at marissa.medansky@yale.edu .

* WANTED: Gradgrind Enemy # 1, Matt Damon (aka Matt Demon)

WANTED

Digital or Alive

Matt Damon 
(aka Matt Demon)

for
 the sin 
of 

HERESY

Against the Gradgrind God: 

DATA.






Reward: 


Eternal Life 


in 


The Cloud 


(aka Singularity)

* GRIND, GRIND, GRIND THOSE DELICATE SOULS !

Thomas Gradgrind, Founding Father of the  
Bill and Melinda Gradgrind Foundation 

Thomas Gradgrind
 Hard Times 
by Charles Dickens




Thomas Gradgrind, a Utilitarian school governor with political aspirations, believes his young charges should strive for unemotional perfection through rigid, crushing repetition of facts, and facts alone ("Facts alone are wanted in life."). Decorations such as pictures of horses drawn by the children will never adorn his walls, because in real life, would horses ever appear on actual school walls? If not, then they are "fancies," products of the dreaded human imagination, and are to be avoided at all costs.

From Chapter II
 (Murdering the Innocents)
 Hard Times

"'THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir - peremptorily Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!'

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words 'boys and girls,' for 'sir,' Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts. 

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away."

* Digital Tailoring

        The Age of Individuation:


Professor DATA  vs. Dr. Spock

Word count: 303

Are we creating lonely kids who will become lonely adults?

The Age of Individuation is upon us.

The advent of Brain Based Learning techniques means every kid in public school will have an Individual Learning Plan based on what parts of his/her brain fire-up in reaction to x, y, and z  “educational” stimuli.  

The decoding of the human genome means every patient soon may have an Individual Health Plan based on what parts of  his/her code are missing or distorted. Doctors will become genetic tailors, cutting and sewing DNA garments to fit each client.

Health and education will become matters of conspicuous consumption: Armani, Gucci, and  Saks Fifth Avenue creations down to K-Mart  and Wal-Mart  discount choices.

You already know who the winners will be.

The danger of all this analysis lies in what psychiatry used to call “morbid introspection.” 

If we replace the joyful naivete and  blithe spontaneity of childhood with recipes for learning and for health which parents, doctors, and educators  use to “cook” their child into the perfect culinary creation, we may be in danger of making kids so self conscious, so analytical, that we destroy the very notion of childhood itself.

Kiss ‘childhood” goodbye and replace it with depression.

Part of the problem is that parents have been bullied into surrendering  their intuitive parenting skills and knowledge to the  digital gods of DATA. 

 They have replaced Dr. Spock with Professor DATA.

Are we on the verge of  creating a world of highly educated, extremely healthy, depressed children who enter adulthood with a deep loneliness which no digital god -- and no hand-held touch screen -- can fill?

 And if you add conspicuous consumption to the problem, won't we be in real trouble?

We need pause and seek higher ground ------ before the digital tsunami overwhelms us.

Paul D. Keane

M.A., M. Div., M.Ed.

* The Gradgrind Religion

DATA!  DATA!  DATA!

Lord God Almighty

Blessed of New Icons

Singularity.

Praise DATA, from whom all Word docs flow;


Praise IT all  ye algorithms here below;


Praise IT above ye heavenly Cloud;


Praise DATA's digits,


 all aloud.

*Singular Choice: Bill and Melinda's Goal (I Am a Datum)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
(from Wikipedia) 


The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web

From

You Are Not a Gadget

by 

Jason Lanier

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0.  The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process.  Individual web pages as they first appeared in the 1990s had the flavor of personhood.  MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun.  Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh and inventive.  (kindle 995+)

*Banned Reading

Don't Read this Editorial