https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Miles

(~2:10)

Fascinating. Rob Pierri mentions that there had been a shift in education from the development of the soul to the development of monetizable skills... Keep society manageable.

The question that remains for me is, what will ultimately leave society better and advance it? In the end, what matters more, the material or the immaterial? Why?

for - educator - polycrisis - individual action - levers - climate and earth history specialists help with education

educator - earth climate history specialist can help with education about the past to help understand what we face in the present

climate education - low impact due to - ignoring perspectival knowing - and salience landscapes - It may help to look at the problem of education through the lens of Michael Levin's multi-scale competency architecture - https://hyp.is/FFxzRL2nEe6ghzeLcJGM7A/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10167196/ - Applied to cognitive and cultural evolution within the lifetime of a single individual (human) - The salience landscape of an individual can vary depending on their educational and cultural background - There are multiple categories of concepts, each with their own degree of salience: - immediate phenomenological experience - high salience - second hand, linguistically communicated experience - moderate and dependent on source - scientific reported phenomena - moderate, high or low, dependent on source and cultural / educational background - second hand, linguistically communicated experience - low, moderate or high, dependent on source and cultural / educational background - A key observation is that humans are evolved to detect specific environmental cue but miss many others - The rate of cultural evolution is so rapid that our biologically adapted processes cannot adapt quickly enough to the rapid cultural changes, resulting in the experience of "hyperobjects" - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=+hyperobject - education that is done haphazardly and in an adhoc manner will fail to discriminate between this large variety of salience landscape, with the overall impact of low educational impact

Lacy, Tim. The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. https://amzn.to/3R2rCox.

How much different things may have been if the state, and not the Church, had been the progenitor and supporter of the early university?

How might education have been different if it came out of itself (or something like curiosity or even society in general) without the influences on either church or state?

Link between the commentaries of the early middle ages and modern lectures

One of the primary problems with note taking in most of the mid-twentieth century (and potentially well before, particularly as framed in most educational settings) was that students would take notes, potentially review them once or twice for a test, but then not have easy access to them for later review or reuse.

People collected piles of notes without any ability to reuse or review them. Perhaps we should reframe the collector's fallacy as this: collection without reuse has dramatically decreasing returns. Certainly there may be some small initial benefit in writing it down as a means of sense making, but not reviewing it past a short period of two weeks or even several months and not being able to reuse it in the long term is a travesty, especially in a world of information overload.

disappearance [of education] as an...

there's also disappearance of context of what has gone before

In some respects, even the past is not a done deal. It must be examined and studied and will be viewed differently in the present and in the future, thus making history a feedback loop, though hopefully in positive ways.

Maria Montessori's educational model stemmed from the ideas of Pestalozzi and Froebel.

What sort of influence did these sorts of philosophy have on educational practices of their day and how do they reflect on our current educational milieu?

Bowles and Gintis apparently make an argument in Schooling in Capitalist America that changes in education in the late 1800s/early 1900s served the ends of capitalists rather than the people.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or On Education. Translated by Alan Bloom. 1762. Reprint, Basic Books, 1979. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile/9780465019311/

Collective memory is our history.

Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

http://hackeducation.com/2022/01/30/bell

Audrey Watters starts out a piece on the history of school bells with just the sort of falsehood that she's probably aiming to debunk. Perhaps she would have been better off with George Lakoff's truth sandwich model as starting off with the false story is too often has the opposite effect and leads readers down the road to inculcating the idea further into the culture.

She doesn't reveal the falsehood until the end of the third graph at which time one's brain has been stewing in falsehood for far too long.

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

This has to be one of the baddest-ass things I've seen in months. I wish more people had public-facing commonplace books like this!

Bonus points that Whitney calls it a Whiki! :)

It's well known that men had an advantage of getting a proper education which explains Mr. Gardiner's intelligence. This paragraph shows that Mrs. Gardiner was "amiable, intelligent" which shows that she had some form of an education. For women, getting an education was different than men because not all females got an education. According to the article, "Life for Women in 18th Century", if women got an education, it is usually because they were wealthy and were able to go to boarding school. Some women, not everyone, of lower class learned basic reading and writing skills. Although this doesn't mention her background and what exactly it means by "intelligent", it makes me wonder which social class she was raised in and if she really did get education.

In order for open education to be more than a movement, it feels like we should be consciously moving in this direction - to define a canonical set of resources that are foundational to the field in order to help orient others and further define ourselves as a field/discipline. Because, as we have seen with MOOC's, if we do not do it, then others will do it for us.

Some girls born into affluent families may have been educated at home by parents, a live in governess, tutor, or may have gone off to a private boarding school. Since women did not go on to have careers in this day, education and knowledge was something reserved primarily for boys.

Domestic trainings were a more appropriate education for a woman to receive. "For women of the 'genteel' classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of 'accomplishments,' such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian)" (The Republic of Pemberley, "Education, Women's Education, and Accomplishments")

Thomas Edison. Love his quotes