A secret WW2 wargame - HistoryExtra - "‘As a young submarine commander, he scored the first naval kill of the First World War, and on return to port, he would signal success to cheering onlookers by flying the pirates’ flag the Jolly Roger, a tradition that continued thereafter to the end of the Falklands War’...
‘The combination of ministration and expertise was not always welcomed by the experienced officers who were on the receiving end of advice from the wrens. Often the men would resent being told what to do, no matter how gently by young women barely out of school, and who in most cases had never been to sea in peacetime, let alone during a war…. from his perspective, a battle worn captain was being tutored on the finer points of view warfare by an inexperienced young woman... games have the capacity to make experts of amateurs and to instill in players invaluable, potentially life saving, battle winning expertise. In the summer of 1942, escort ships sank four times as many U boats as the previous month, beginning an upward trend that would continue for the rest of the year’"
So much for the primacy of personal experience and the sanctification of earning your stripes
William Shakespeare: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Did he have mistresses? The only surviving anecdote directly relating to Shakespeare's personal life is about him seeing a prostitute, which comes from the diary of John Manningham, who was at the middle temple, and he writes about Shakespeare overhearing Richard Burbidge making an appointment with a prostitute after she's seen him play Richard the Third. And he gets there before Burbidge arrives, and Burbidge says, please tell her that Richard the Third is at the door. And Shakespeare sends a reply that William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third. That's the only story we know about his personal life. And then we have Shakespeare's sonnets, which talk about my mistress, my mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun, sonnet 130. There's a bisexual love triangle. Three of them mentioned in Shakespeare's sonnets may be with different people, may be with the same man and woman. Sonnet 244, two loves I have of comfort and despair. That like two spirits suggest me still, the better angels a man right fair, the worser spirit a woman coloured ill. So there's reason to suppose that he did have mistresses. And this is probably not unusual for marriages of that period...
There were no women on stage, only boys played female roles, which is very difficult for us to imagine. But the voices broke later. So you know, a 18 year old maybe could have played Cleopatra with an unbroken voice or Lady Macbeth, for example, these great female roles that we think of now. So it would have felt very unusual to us’...
‘Why are some people still questioning whether Shakespeare really wrote his own plays? Are there any merits in the accusations?’
‘There are no merits in accusation. I'm always surprised at these accusations, because there's so much evidence that Shakespeare at Stratford upon Avon wrote the plays and the poems in the first place. You have to disprove every one of those pieces of evidence before you can start saying, oh, well, there's evidence for somebody else. There's never any evidence for anybody else, apart from somebody saying, well, I think it was so and so. And this has been going on only since the middle of the 19th century, when conspiracy theories perhaps connected to the rise of detective fiction, were conflating round Victorians’ interests in points of origin, theories of evolution and so on. Shakespeare is a great point of origin for this great body of work. Let's question it, let's unsettle it. So it's something that stuck, something I'd be much concerned with, in recent times, as long as I worked at the Birthplace Trust, really’…
‘People just think, one man couldn't have done all that?’
‘Yes... where these theories start from is they they have to assume if it's going to be somebody else, that Shakespeare's writing, that somebody else is writing in a bubble that they have, they're completely secret, and it requires them to point out who this other person might be, if it's not Shakespeare. Well, plays weren’t written like that, in the period, it's nonsense. People were always collaborating with each other. I love what Dame Janet Suzman says on this subject, that actors can't keep secrets. And had it been somebody else we would have known. You know, it's just it's, it's, it's more suspicious to me that this question wasn't asked until the mid of the 19th century than the question itself.’"
Germans Who Resisted The Nazis | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Your book contends there was more German resistance to Nazism than we might think. Why do you believe that people don't know these stories as well as they should?’
‘Well, look, after the war, clearly, the history was written by the winners, if you'd like to put it that way. The allies. And I suppose, for example, they didn't really want loads of heroes of the war, having been German communists and socialists. Because the name of the game after the war was absolutely to be anti communist. You know, the whole, the whole goalpost had changed by then... So what we were left with, which was also perfectly valid, was sort of what you might call Prussian aristocrats. That was, you know, July the 20th plot, which, of course, is absolutely massive. And one of my stories, one of my six stories is about that... And also, we never heard, by definition, about all the unknown people...
My dad, obviously, who was in the war, five years in the Royal Navy. And he had the view, as I was growing up, that there were no good Germans. There just weren't. He had this view. And by the way, he was very typical of his generation. And what they, their view was, there was something kind of, there was a kind of Teutonic flaw. And these Germans, you know, and instead of thinking, well, maybe there's an element of possibility in any country, you know, God knows, look around the world now and you see it, you know, he had this view. And as I was growing older, I started thinking, well hold on a moment. Nazis are one thing. Germans are another surely… two thirds of Germans never did vote for the Nazis, but they had to put up with’...
‘As you say, some of the figures here are from fairly distinguished backgrounds, as famously was Klaus von Stauffenberg. Did that offer any extra cover for anti Nazi behavior?’
‘No, I think the only cover, I mean, that there was this famous phrase used all the time that they had to wear a mask. You know, they had to look as though they were key Nazis, basically. And that made a big problem after the war, obviously, because the Allies, you know, didn't always know who had been wearing a mask and who didn't, and so on so forth... he did what a lot of people did, is he went into the army, because one of the few, there were two reasons actually. One was that that was the best cover you could find. And the other was, it was the only way they eventually realized, given that they were given no support from the French, no support from from the British apart from Churchill, all the appeasers weren't gonna join in before the war is when they were trying to stop all this. So they realized the only way they could win this thing was to assassinate Hitler. And the only way they could do that was to be in the army, basically’"
No one cares about racism against white people
Jeremy Crang On WW2 Blitz Spirit | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "The public was eager for advice on whether it was unpatriotic for housewives to pickle eggs"
Camilla Townsend, The Aztecs In Their Own Words | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘This book is different from other books about the Aztecs because I use the histories that they wrote in their own language for their own children and grandchildren in the 1500s...
The Aztecs that I have, whose voices I read in these texts really are not bloodthirsty, brutal people at all. They, they did practice human sacrifice. So right away, you're gonna say, well then, but it was, in effect, a political tactic. Most ancient peoples we now think, practised occasional human sacrifice around the world. The Native Americans certainly did. Prisoners of war, young warriors often faced that fate, women and children were usually adopted. Now, I will say the Aztecs in the latter part of their reign did bring this to, shall we say a high art. That is they turned it from an occasional spiritual practice to a terror tactic, that what in one of their historical writings, they actually say we would bring people in from the outskirts, people whose whose kingdoms we wanted to have join our empire. And we would show them the human sacrifice ceremonies and then let them go, telling them: tell your people that's what's in store for you if you don't choose to join the Empire… the artists and singers express horror of this violence and deep regret. There are several songs that say, oh, there should be more living, you know, living is what we are here for, oh, the tragedy that we have to enact death. I have found no songs, no poems that celebrate the gore or the blood or war at all. Again, these songs were written down as part of their own traditions, not to please the Spaniards at all... the Aztecs came down from the north from what is today the American Southwest, they were the last of a number of streams of people who came down from the north. So you could argue that the Aztec Empire had been building gradually, so to speak, as a phenomenon for several hundred years. They, these people coming from the north then conquered and or intermarried with more peaceful agricultural people living in the Central Valley of Mexico. It's a bit like the story of Genghis Khan coming down from the north, into China’...
‘There is, or there was, I should say, great variability in the experience of the indigenous people. Certainly the Mexica, the Aztecs on their Island City, experienced great change, they had ruled the world and suddenly they did not. Even they though experienced some continuity. They did continue to govern Mexico City for themselves, and in fact, did not have to pay any taxes or tribute to the Spaniards for another whole generation. It was the 1560s, before the Spaniards felt that they could extract that. Before then they really needed the Aztecs to to help them govern, in effect. People around the Central Valley and then outside of the Central Valley, some of them, well, I should say, especially the people outside the Central Valley, some of them never saw a Spaniard for another generation or two. And yet the people that they paid their taxes to changed... even for them, the moment of reckoning always came, you know, in every part of Mexico, Spanish presence did grow. And as it grew, it became more and more impossible to, for the local people to argue with the Spaniards. At first, they could say no, we can't give you 20 turkeys every month as tribute or as tax. But within about 20 years, they simply had to do what the Spaniards said and poverty did begin to grow amongst the indigenous peoples then, in ways that it wouldn't, had never done under the Aztecs because the Aztecs were local people themselves and understood what the taxpaying limits of the people were. So over time, indigenous people everywhere, Mexica and non Mexica did lose power... the colonial era there lasted for 300 years, longer than British rule in North America lasted, partly because they did come up with a sort of, their version of a Pax Romana, kind of, and then the Independence Wars exploded all that. And ironically, many would say that it was in the 1800s, in the modern post independence period, that things got really bad for the Indians, because at that point, no Spanish crown was there to say, well, these are my children too. You know, big business just moved in and did what they wanted to do.’
Supposedly the Aztecs being local and knowing the country, didn't extract too much tax. Yet medieval tax collectors, despite knowing the country, extracted too much tax
Apparently only Spanish sources are biased and Aztec sources can be taken at face value
Ingenious Medieval Science | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘I wanted to show how the ideas of the Middle Ages weren't as infertile, and as stagnant and as dark as is often portrayed, that actually, the Middle Ages contributed a huge amount to the development of modern science, including the study, the recovery and the study of ancient texts, the involvement of Islamic texts in Western European scholarship, and the foundation of the universities and other institutions... There's this idea that there's been a conflict between religion and science, and that somehow, the church as this kind of all powerful body got in the way of science. And I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. First of all, the church, insofar as it was kind of controlling anything, had a huge role to play in supporting science in founding universities. The, there's a very popular image or metaphor, which scholars in the Middle Ages like to use, which was that there were two books in which one could understand God, you could read about God in Scripture, of course, but you could also read about God in the book of nature. And and, Hugh of St Victgor, who was a teacher in the 12th century Cathedral schools, has this extended explanation of the world as being like a book written by the finger of God, and someone who's not studied science was like an illiterate person who can only look at the pictures, but someone who had studied and had thought about scientific matters, was fully able to read this book written by God and could understand and it would ultimately make you a better Christian. So I think the point is, that the church fully supported the study of science. And science was done by religious people, by monks, in universities, all the way through the Middle Ages’...
‘There was debate in the Middle Ages. Often one of the stereotypes is that everybody believed the same thing. And just believed what they were told to believe. But there's actually a huge amount of debate in the Middle Ages’...
‘Do you think that at some point in the future, our own scientific knowledge might perhaps be disparaged in the way medieval knowledge is nowadays?’
‘Absolutely, thank you for asking that. The, one of the problems that I identified with disparaging medieval scientific knowledge is it's a way of making ourselves feel good. It's a way of saying we're not as stupid as them. And that's, that's always been the case. People have always defined themselves against people, often people in the past that they thought were stupid, or whose ideas they can dismiss easily. And this is a tremendous problem for us today. Because if we think of ourselves as having understood everything, then we lose the ability to question, we lose the ability to identify when we're doing things wrong, we lose the ability to improve our ways of studying science. And you see that, of course, in today's politics, when politicians are constantly emphasizing how they're following ‘the science’, or being led by ‘the science’. And that sounds great. But of course, there is no one Science, Science proceeds through debate. And if we had understood everything in science, then scientists could have given up and gone home a long time ago. Science is constantly developing, it's constantly progressing. And so what we have to understand is that sometimes that line of progress, that line of development, takes a week or takes a bump, goes down a dead end. And it's really important to see that that's just a normal part of the development of science. And that there may well be things in today's science, that future generation say, oh, my God, what were they thinking? I say may well, there will certainly be things in today's science that future generations will laugh at, or will say, thank god, we're no, no longer so stupid as they were back then. And so I think studying the science of the Middle Ages, apart from recognizing their achievements, also helps us see that you know, where we might now say they were wrong, we can notice if we study, that they may have been wrong, but they were wrong for the right reasons. And that these were deeply intelligent people. These weren't stupid people. And, and so if they were wrong, we have to say, well how can people be wrong about things for a long period of time? How does science support incorrect ideas? And we can look at that, and we can learn something about the way that science is done today.’"
Kiran Klaus Patel On The Success Of The EU | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra (aka "Has the EU been a success") - "‘And am I right to say there were quite a number of other not necessarily competing, but certainly taking place at the same time, European organizations in the early post war years?’
‘Absolutely. And again, we need to remember that nation states were just being reconstructed after the war. Again the United Kingdom, being one of the few cases of a country that had gone through the war without a major institutional crisis and destruction of political structures. So there is the nation states, there is the empires across Western European countries that continue to exist into the 1950s and 60s. Plus, there were also these other institutional forums. So you had, for instance, the so called OEEC, which is the predecessor of another, still not very well known organization, the OECD today. There was the Council of Europe, there were several other institutions. And many of them actually had the ultimate goal to set up a new framework for Western European politics. And if you look at all of them together, the interesting thing is that this institution, which then turned into today's European Union, was a latecomer, and was particularly small in comparison to the others when it comes to numbers of member states.’...
‘Now we're talking at the moment in the age of Brexit… But I was interested to read in your book that there are some previous occasions of countries leaving the European community, which was Greenland and Algeria’...
‘It's interesting that Brexit is not completely unprecedented... So Algeria, in 1962, was entering or had entered, I should say, the European Communities as part of France. And we need to remember that France was a colonial power, that Algeria from the French legal and political perspective was not even a colony, but an integral part of France. And for that reason, it had become part of the European Communities. And then with the war of liberation, the bloody war of liberations ending in 1962, the country also wanted to end the relations with European community, and did so officially. What I find interesting, and this is something that I only found in the archives that nobody I think had written about before, that the President of Algeria, independent Algeria, in late 1962, then wrote a letter to the President of the European Commission, asking if one could simply continue to have a relationship as was so far, mainly for economic reasons, because economically, it was much more beneficial for Algeria, to remain linked to the European community. The interesting story is that if you will, you have a very soft Alxit to to use that term for a second, which then turns into a hard and harsh Alxit only a few years later, when the protectionist dimensions of the agricultural policies at the European level had fully unfolded, which then meant that Algerian products, particularly Algerian wine, which was a major commodity, had no chances anymore on the EC market. Greenland is a very different case, but also with some similarities, because it had also like Algeria, not entered as a sovereign nation state, but as part of the Danish kingdom and was entered therefore, in 1973. Now what you have is in the 1980s situation by which more and more people feel that particularly the common fisheries policies is a nuisance for fishers in Greenland, and hence you have the country changing its status after a referendum. So some similarities to Brexit there, if you will, from being part of the community to being associated, with the ironic development that since then, there has been a tendency to try to forge closer links back to the European Union while trying to decouple slightly more amongst the 50,000 inhabitants of the island from the kingdom of Denmark. So if you want to summarize what one maybe can learn from history there, and again, keeping in mind all the differences to, again, the role and nature of the United Kingdom, still, I would argue that what you see is that after negotiations is only before the next round of negotiations. So the idea of once and for all ending the whole dispute is probably quite unrealistic. Again, we might remember that that was also the promise of David Cameron, when he called for the referendum in the first place. And everybody's aware of the last four years. So the referendum did not lead to clear cut result, and a quick solution of one kind or the other'"
The Seductive Appeal of Urban Catastrophe - The Atlantic - "Having witnessed a decline in U.S. cities’ fortunes over the past year, many American commentators are predicting the dissolution of entire communities too eagerly. Having spent the past several years researching a book about ancient abandoned cities, I’ve come to realize that urban collapse is a modern-day version of an apocalypse prophecy: It’s always lurking just around the corner, seductive and terrifying, but it never quite happens. Lost-city anxieties, like the ones aroused by the pandemic, result from a misunderstanding of what causes cities to decline. Pandemics, invasions, and other major calamities are not the usual culprits in urban abandonment. Instead, what kills cities is a long period in which their leaders fail to reckon honestly with ongoing, everyday problems—how workers are treated, whether infrastructure is repaired. Unsustainable, unresponsive governance in the face of long-term challenges may not look like a world-historical problem, but it’s the real threat that cities face... [Angkor] continued to thrive. What happened in 1431 was that the Khmer royal family fled south to Phnom Penh, where it remains today. As for all the nonroyals? They continued to live at Angkor, repaired its ailing water infrastructure, recycled stones from temples into new structures, and planted farms where high-density housing once was. Life probably improved for many people who otherwise would have spent part of the year as debt slaves in the service of nobles. In the 16th century, King Ang Chan even tried to revitalize what remained of the city’s downtown with new wall paintings and a luxurious stupa, or family shrine. Eventually the population trickled away, but that took centuries. This is an important reality check for people fretting over the imminent demise of, say, Detroit or Los Angeles in the aftermath of economic and natural disasters... In the late 14th and early 15th centuries, Angkor was hit by several droughts and intense monsoon seasons in a row. The weather extremes upended daily life. But the real blow came when civic leaders bungled maintenance of the city’s water system in response to the climate threats—leading to catastrophic floods, silt-clogged canals, and crop failures. People began to move away from the city in the 14th century when it became clear that much-needed infrastructure repairs were never going to happen."
Why Ice Cream Soared in Popularity During Prohibition - "“As men sought alternatives to having a drink at the local saloon, many ate ice cream more often,” wrote Anne Cooper Funderburg, the author of Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, driving an estimated 40 percent growth in consumption between 1920 and 1929. A song from a Pacific Ice Cream Manufacturers Convention in 1920 declared, “Gone are the days when Father was a souse,” and that now, instead of beer, he brings home a brick of ice cream. The Anti-Saloon League, the most powerful lobby for Prohibition, eagerly supported the dairy industry, trying to take credit for the growth of the ice cream market. “It is believed that this large increase in ice cream consumption was due in a large degree to the fact that men with a craving for stimulants turned readily to this refreshing and palatable food,” reported the organization’s yearbook in 1921. “The more ice cream that is used, the better it is for the consumers and the producers of milk.”... As sugary drinks became America’s favorite alcohol replacement in the 1920s, companies like Coca-Cola grew into behemoths and soda fountains replaced saloons as the place where people gathered to socialize in public. In 1922, The New York Times estimated the U.S. had more than 100,000 soda fountains—most of which were situated in drugstores—with $1 billion in sales. But ice cream played a key supporting role to soda, as fountain mixologists, not unlike saloon bartenders, concocted drinks that mixed the two—like the Coke float. Some got more creative: Proprietors of a soda fountain in Aspen, Colorado made the Aspen Crud, a cocktail of ice cream laced with bourbon, taking advantage of laws that enabled drugstores to sell alcohol for medicinal purposes."
Why Singapore has yet to produce a truly innovative startup - "In my opinion, the closest we have come to doing so is Viki — and, at risk of being accused of xenophobia, it wasn’t started by a born-and-bred Singaporean. And even then, Viki’s business model so closely mirrors Netflix’s that calling it truly innovative is a long shot by any standard. In fact, many of Singapore’s most well-funded startups are localised version of business models tested and proven on foreign shores. Grab, which has secured a whopping $680m of disclosed funding, is probably the best example of such a startup. Redmart, while providing an undoubtedly excellent service to increasingly time-starved Singaporeans, is simply doing what major supermarkets have been doing in the US and Europe since I was still an undergraduate (circa 2009)... Singaporeans are known the world over for their can-do, never-say-die attitudes, but also for their overwhelming sense of practicality, which, in my opinion, has been the single largest fundamental roadblock on the path of innovation... one learns not to experiment at all, because the price of failure is simply too high."
The way they teach Orwell in Canada is Orwellian | The Post Millennial - "a school board in Ontario that had decided, “as a response to TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] calls for action,” to jettison its literary program that had featured giants like Shakespeare and Orwell in order to fill the curriculum with indigenous stories. This does students a terrible cultural disservice. There’s nothing wrong with non-indigenous students learning about indigenous culture—but they should not be learning at the expense of their own aesthetic and intellectual heritage, which opens young minds to the creeds, principles and events that bind us as a nation. Collectively those ideas are contained under the umbrella of “liberal democracy,” a set of beliefs and assumptions featuring equality under the law for everyone and the sanctity of individual freedoms. Liberal democracy has, for many decades, suffered setbacks under the rising hegemony of “postmodern” theories and Marxism-based ideologies, headquartered in academia. The new mindset—encapsulated by Orwell’s “some are more equal than others”—has encouraged a state of “velvet totalitarianism” in virtually all university communities... Orwell is, however, a dead white European male, and therefore what he intended his book to be no longer carries moral weight—or any weight at all—with educators moulded in a post-truth era. The British Columbia Teachers Union (BCTU) is a case in point. According to their two-page lesson plan for Animal Farm, the students will:
Recognize Boxer and other characters, including Benjamin and Clover, as symbols of labour and working people;
Appreciate some of the struggles of working people as a theme in literature;
Develop and write a paragraph demonstrating awareness of Boxer or others as a symbol of labour...
Nowhere in the lesson plan is Boxer alluded to as those in the working class who are exploited by the rich, but who are as well the collateral damage of Marxist ideology and its most disastrous reification in the Soviet Union. In fact suggested “Activities” include the telling of stories—all local —about union strikers in B.C.’s mines, woodworking and Fisherman’s unions who were beaten up or who “died under strange circumstances” (like Boxer, you see). A student with no knowledge of Communism’s terrible history would infer from this lesson plan that “working people” are a monolithic class, and everywhere oppressed in exactly the same way, even though, of the examples of anti-union violence offered in the Activities section, none occurred later than 1937. The word “Soviet” does not appear anywhere in the BCTU notes. And yet, as Orwell made clear in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, the book was written with a clear purpose... Orwell is respected by both liberals and conservatives precisely because he was even-handed in his criticism of unfettered capitalism and Marxism. He was a socialist himself, but wrote in the same preface, “for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” Withdrawing Orwell’s Animal Farm from the high school curriculum is a form of pedagogical neglect. Laundering the novel’s message to serve as a propaganda tool for ideologues is an abuse of power. Orwell cannot object to this contamination of his legacy. Are B.C. parents satisfied to be “Boxer,” or will they become “aware of their strength” and demand justice for Orwell?"
Meme - "Stefan Molyneux @ @StefanMolyneux White Europeans were invaded, enslaved, colonialized, subjugated, turned into serfs, suffered under the Black Death, and forcibly sent to endless wars. They still built the modern world. I don't care about the suffering of your ancestors. Why not? You don't care about mine."
Meme - "1ST Inter-Course Competition
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
СIVIL ENGINEERING
Engineering got all the G-spots"
Thread by @antihero_kate - "As far as I can tell, Marxism was cooked up by the same resentful middle class strivers we’re dealing with today. It can only dream of creating the type of progress that capitalism has. It’s a childish pipe dream. A fraud. It’s outdated. It’s counter to human nature so it uses force and violence. It places the inept, incompetent, and unconscientious in positions they didn’t earn and don’t deserve. It removes the hardworking and knowledgeable from their positions and leads to shit like mass starvation.
Uneducated and slovenly can’t maintain a functioning society. You can throw as much money at it as you want and it won’t be maintained. They’re not wired for it and power and money leads to productivity. Not freebies. Communism is bankruptcy.
How is that different than what we’re currently experiencing? Wokeness is a form of communism with race-based vengeance sprinkled on top.
What we’re experiencing isn’t the free market. It’s centralized government and a type of corporate fascism."
Effects of cannabis on visual function and self-perceived visual quality - "The study found that smoking cannabis has significant adverse effects on all the visual parameters analyzed (p < 0.05). Self-perceived visual quality results revealed that about two thirds of the sample think that smoking cannabis impairs their vision. Contrast sensitivity, specifically for the spatial frequency 18 cpd, was identified as the only visual parameter significantly associated with self-perceived visual quality (Odds Ratio: 1.135; p = 0.040). Smoking cannabis is associated with negative effects on visual function. Self-perceived visual quality after smoking cannabis could be related to impaired contrast sensitivity."
Black woman charged more than white man for the exact same Uber ride in Toronto - " "Hi Adam, The surge prices applied are different (you can see 'Fares are a lot higher' vs. 'Fares are higher')," wrote the American tech juggernaut. "Surge pricing changes in real-time and has nothing to do with the identity of the rider.""
"A race-blind algorithm is racist!"
Weird. If Black people are really poorer (due to "racism") why would a profit-maximising company quote them a higher price, making them less likely to take up its services?
Meme - "A friend of mine tried to sell his soul on ebay and the starter price was $10 and people were bidding on it but before anything happened ebay took it down and sent him an email explaining that if he was selling a soul that didn’t actually exist then it was against their policy and if he was selling a real soul then that is a human body part and it is also against their policy"
Sargon of Akkad - Posts | Facebook - "Why is Kraut busy dehumanizing me on Twitter? The NYT reported that the military called Pelosi's request an attempted military coup, so now I'm nothing more than a "dangerous propagandist"?!"
Thread by @DavidOBowles - "I’ll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago. Most classroom practice is astrology... Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc. Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids. What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research...
Things we (scholars) DO know:
-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.
-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).
-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.
Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered.
Kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because ... ... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.
Maintaining the status quo? Nope.
Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.
If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost...
The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom? Education is all about capitalism.
"You need to learn these skills to get a good job."
To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.
THAT is why modern education is a failure. Its basic premise is monstrous.
"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"
Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words"
Well that escalated quickly. No surprise he wants to push his communist revolutionary agenda. And he wants to be deluded that most/all kids potentially want to learn
Weird how the scholars "know" things that are at the very least contested
Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987–2003 - "Studies are grouped into four research designs. The authors found that all studies, regardless of type, had design flaws. However, both within and across design types, there was generally consistent evidence for a positive influence of homework on achievement. Studies that reported simple homework–achievement correlations revealed evidence that a stronger correlation existed (a) in Grades 7–12 than in K–6 and (b) when students rather than parents reported time on homework. No strong evidence was found for an association between the homework–achievement link and the outcome measure (grades as opposed to standardized tests) or the subject matter (reading as opposed to math)"
Weird. Liberals claim homework is useless and counter-productive
Multiple-Choice Testing in Education: Are the Best Practices for Assessment Also Good for Learning? - "Multiple-choice tests are arguably the most popular type of assessment in education, and much research has been dedicated to determining best practices for using them to measure learning. The act of taking a test also causes learning, and numerous studies have investigated how best to use multiple-choice tests to improve long-term retention and produce deeper understanding. In this review article, I explore whether the best practices for assessment align with the best practices for learning. Although consensus between these two literatures is not a foregone conclusion, there is substantial agreement in how best to construct and use multiple-choice tests for these two disparate purposes. The overall recommendation from both literatures is to create questions that are simple in format (e.g., avoid use of complex item types), challenge students but allow them to succeed often, and target specific cognitive processes that correspond to learning objectives."
Weird. Liberals claim testing is useless and counter-productive
Can high stakes testing leverage educational improvement? Prospects from the last decade of testing and accountability reform - "testing has become a widely utilized instrument for educational reform in America. Research on these trends indicates that high stakes testing does motivate teachers and administrators to change their practices, yet the changes they motivate tend to be more superficial adjustments in content coverage and test preparation activities rather than promoting deeper improvements in instructional practice. Further, the information provided by large scale assessments is primarily useful to measure school and system progress, but of more limited utility for instructional guidance. Most problematic is that the high stakes testing system in America has been repeatedly promoted as a substantive reform in itself. However, high stakes testing is a relatively weak intervention because, while it reveals shortcomings, it does not contain the guidance and expertise to inform response"
If you don't want failing schools to be exposed, of course testing is a bad thing
