Once Upon a College: January 2019

We'll be discussing human freedom in EII this morning, and what it means to be free. This, given the stated aim of liberal education is "... education worthy of a free person."

Our immediate example and foil for thought experiment is the plight of a young Saudi woman, now resident in Canada:

Here's the Canvas announcement:

You should read ahead in Pollan as soon as you have a copy, starting at the beginning. We'll read the whole book.

In the meantime, here's the reading I suggested today. We'll discuss this Thursday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/world/canada/rahaf-mohammed-alqunun-interview.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Here's a video on the same topic (there'll be an ad first):

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/saudi-teen-rahaf-mohammed-alqunun-speaks-out-after-gaining-asylum-in-canada-1425994819792 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Blaine House solar RFP and CMP buy-out

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Farmer's Market scandal exposed (for EII, from Cody)

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Climate bills and Janet Mills

Thursday, January 17, 2019

WAPO on climate, including Antarctic ice

New semester, new topics, old, old issues

What this is about

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