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Pedagogical Panopticon
At my relatively old age or state of maturity there are many things about which to dream. As a youth much of this nocturnal secretion necessarily extends beyond conscious experience. Hence we can easily believe that dreams are fantasy, in the sense of words describing what we could not have witnessed or done, at the […]
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The Enablers of Trump’s Rise to Power
Presently it is very likely that Donald Trump will be the nominee of the Republican Party. Joe Biden will represent the Democrats as the DNC had refused to groom over the last four years or so a much more appealing candidate. This blunder is just one in a series of even more significant failures of […]
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If I Understand the World, I Can March to Change It
Students display a butterfly they made at the Madu Adu (science, or ‘let’s do it’) corner. Credit: Photographs and collages by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In 1945, the newly formed United Nations held a conference to found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The main concern of the delegates, particularly those who came […]
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What If Our Society Valued Civics as It Does Entertainment?
A teacher once said to me: “A society pays for what it values.” If so, our society values commercial entertainment, including spectator sports, orders of magnitude more than it values civics defined as the rights and duties exercised by citizens in a democracy. What if we lived in a society that valued both equally? 1. […]
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Charter Schools Will Desert And Violate Thousands In 2024
Privately-operated charter schools have been around for 32 years. They fail and close every week, abandoning and harming hundreds of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals. Neoliberals cynically call this “free market accountability.” These closures, moreover, are often sudden and abrupt, revealing deep problems and instability in the charter school sector. Parents, students, […]
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We Need to Reverse the Culture of Decay and March on the Street for a Culture of Humanity
Michael Armitage (Kenya), The Promised Land, 2019. The final months of 2023 pierced our sense of hope and threw us into a kind of mortal sadness. Israel’s escalating violence has killed more than twenty thousand Palestinians to date, wiping out entire generations of families. Horrifying images and testimonies from Palestine have flooded all forms of […]
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The Dangerously Appealing Style of the Far Right
Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina), Arlequín (‘Harlequin’), 1928. Before he won Argentina’s presidential election on 19 November, Javier Milei circulated a video of himself in front of a series of white boards. Pasted on one board were the names of various state institutions, such as the ministries of health, education, women and gender diversities, public works, and culture, all recognised […]
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The Rise of the Desk Clerk Academic
It is a particularly quotidian breed in the modern, management-driven university. The desk clerk who pretends to be an academic and researcher but is neither. The desk clerk who admires rosters, work plans and “key performance indicators”, thinking that the process of knowledge is quantifiable by productivity targets and financial returns. The desk clerk who […]
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Collectivist, Individualist and Communist Selves Part II
Summary of Part I In Part I of my article, we began by distinguishing the social self from two forms of identity that are often confused with it: temperament and personality. The focus of part one is to show how very social (or even socialist) was the work of social psychologist George Herbert Mead. We […]
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Commodifying the Life of the Mind
As a long-time leader in higher ed unionism, I was recently asked to comment on the transformative changes taking place in American higher education. To answer, I reflected on my nearly sixty years in higher education. I was a working-class kid from New York City who went to CCNY, where tuition was free. Yes, free. […]
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