STRONG Salem is for everyone who wants to help and participate in getting Salem, Oregon, to quit chasing Growth Ponzi Scheme plans and instead become a resilient, fiscally responsible place that lives by the wisdom that "Communities exist for the health and enjoyment of those who live in them, not for the convenience of those who drive through them, fly over them, or exploit their real estate for profit."
Department of Good Stuff
Web MD - Popcorn, already known to be a good source of fiber, has higher levels of healthy antioxidants than some fruits and vegetables, according to new research.
"Based on fiber, whole grains, and antioxidant levels, popcorn is the king of snack foods," says Joe Vinson, PhD, professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton.
NY Times's Frank Bruni:What if we have it backward? What if the 310-pound man trying to jam into the middle seat and the 225-pound woman breaking into a sweat only halfway up the stairs aren't the undisciplined miscreants of modern American life but the very emblems of it?What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn't how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few? . . .
Following in the heavy footsteps of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "The End of Overeating," "The End of Food" and much else, "The Weight of the Nation" makes an especially persuasive case that gluttony isn't Americans' problem. Agriculture and abundance are.
Over the last century, we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat — a positive development, for the most part.
We also became expert at feedlots for livestock and at processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap and addictive seductions. This has downsides.
Densely caloric and all too convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we're chromosomally hard-wired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it, creating plump savings accounts of excess energy, sometimes known as love handles, for an imagined future shortage that, in America today, doesn't come. . . .
John Hoffman, an executive producer of the documentary, told me: "Evolutionarily, there was no condition that existed when we were living with too much fat storage. We've only known a world of plenty for maybe 100 years. Our biological systems haven't adapted to it."
This is probably summed up best by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin in their book "The Evolution of Obesity." "We evolved on the savannahs of Africa," they write. "We now live in Candyland."
Our systems aren't just rigged to gorge. They're also rigged in many cases to rebound from weight loss and put pounds back on, as Tara Parker-Pope explained in a cover story for The Times's Sunday magazine last year. So we're fighting againstthat bit of nature, too. . . .If we're going to wage a successful war against unhealthy weight gain and obesity, we need to understand all of that. We need to stop vilifying obese people, who aren't likely to be helped by it
And we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do.
The kind of consciousness-raising and corporate prodding being done by Michelle Obama — laudable as it is — won't be nearly enough. Neither will the extra green space for exercise that cities like Nashville have commendably created, or New York City officials' admirable exile of sugary sodas from public school vending machines.
These important steps, plus others under consideration, are just the start. Let's move, yes. But let's do it a whole lot faster, because what we may be trying to hold back is a near inevitable tide.
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| Death-penalty (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Imagine the world decades from now, during an era of collapse to a post-carbon world with a new and changing climate, with former fossil-fuel addicts thrashing around trying to find food and water and other stuff, but not understanding who/what caused all this pain and suffering or what to do about it. That's a world in which the education system has failed miserably to do its most important job: prepare people for the future based on a factual understanding of the past, combined with tools for the real (not virtual) future. The author of this article is one of the damn few educators who gets it.
cheers anyway,
Tooj
What if schools were not school?
I just got home for the weekend. Last week, I was in Stockholm, speaking at SETT. Monday, I fly to Switzerland to speak at the St. Gallen Symposium. And on Saturday, UnCollege Research Apprentice Marlon Paine will be moving to San Francisco to start working fulltime! We've been working on a lot of exciting new programs and material, which includes the just-launched UnCollege Hackademic Camp:
From July 30th to August 3rd we will bring ten of the brightest young minds from around the world together in San Francisco for an intense human accelerator. They will learn from and connect with a network of thought-leaders, educators, entrepreneurs, investors, and successful dropouts. But more importantly, we will work together to create solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems—namely education. This is a chance not only to learn from experts and increase your own knowledge and skills, but also to make an impact—solving issues with those who have the power to make changes. If you think you're a hackademic, we encourage you to join us! To learn more and apply, click here.
********
What if schools were not schools? Insight Labs, a Chicago-based think tank, recently posed this question. They brought together experts from around the world to discuss the issues with the public education system in America. Their conclusion? What if schools were fundamentally different entities, focusing not on the output of students—i.e. test scores, as schools are currently measured by—and instead on cultivating citizens: what if schools were "the birthplace of the citizen ideal?"
But let's backtrack. A recent report from the Center for American Progress illuminated many of the current failures of the education system. Federal spending has increased three fold since 1970, while dropout rates and academic performance have changed insignificantly. America, in comparison to other developed countries, ranks only mediocrely when it comes to education, yet it spends more per student than any other country except Luxembourg.
The Center for American Progress suggests several ways to make budgets more effective, but I think the problem is bigger than that. School currently mass-produces students to be competitive, individualistic, and value numbers rather than tangible results. The goal of American schools seems to be to create a population that can compete with other countries and maintain America's economic supremacy. But this often comes at the neglect of the community.
What if the emphasis was instead on making the entire world better as a whole? What if the purpose of schools changed from producing the highest test scores to a place where kids learned to be a member of their community—focusing on cooperation, not competition? In the words of GOOD Magazine's Liz Dwyer, who recently wrote an article about this issue, what if school were a place where students "learn to live a life of selfless service on behalf of the community; it's where (students) find the path of virtue, subordinating inner self-interest as individuals to the interests of the community, the good of the whole." What if schools were, essentially, "the birthplace of the citizen ideal?"
Imagine the impact of students dedicating over twelve years of their lives not to learning information geared towards a test, but learning about, and working on, the challenges the world currently faces—starting at a community level. The results would be a tangible difference in their own community, not a piece of paper with numbers and letter-grades. What if students had the ability to work on projects that interested them, and worked with teachers to integrate the learning of necessary skills into their projects—learning how to apply them in the real world?
This would obviously be a big change: it would take a whole community—educators, businesses, parents, etc.—to work with the school system to solve these problems. But the results would be exponentially greater that the cost: an entire population of students working to better the community. School could be, as stated in Insight Labs School is not School Manifesto, "a dynamic social engine for entire towns and cities that drive every citizen toward a higher, greater good: the public interest." Students discover their interests, how to solve problems, and use this knowledge not just for themselves, but to create a better community. Students work as, and learn to be citizens, not detached individuals.
At this point, the entire college question would be irrelevant: by the time a student graduates from high school, they will have experienced the real world, learned their passions, their skills, and put them into action. The ideals of apprenticeships and entrepreneurship would be engrained into students before college applications were due. Students that want to start businesses could turn that into their lesson plan; students that want to be writers could actually write what they want to. And then, inevitably, these students would learn how to describe and explain what they have learned—a skill so valuable, yet completely neglected by traditional schooling.
This plan is extremely idealistic—turning the entire education system on its head. But that's what we need. We need drastic changes to the current system so that it works with, and not against, the students. Imagine what the entire population of K-12 students could accomplish for their communities, and themselves, if instead of being stuck in a classroom, their time was spent creating value in their communities. The only thing holding us back are the deep roots of the current system—people are terrified to uproot, or even challenge it.
Apprenticeship programs and fellowships are starting to pop up, offering students a valuable alternative to college. The mainstream is catching on: I'm going to speak with NBC about these opportunities next week.
What if these alternative programs became the education system?
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to friends and encourage them to join the movement at uncollege.org!
Hack on,
-Dale
From: UnCollege <dale@uncollege.org>
Date: February 25, 2012 3:29:03 AM PST
To: John Gear <John@JohnGearLaw.com>
Subject: The Advantage of Self-Education
Reply-To: UnCollege <dale@uncollege.org>
The Advantage of Self-Education
View it in your browser.
Are we all capable of learning?
When I met filmmaker Astra Taylor in Brooklyn in December, she raised the same question as she did in her speech at the Walker Center: "What makes society so sure most people couldn't handle self-education?"Astra was unschooled until the age of thirteen, drifted in and out of high school, tried out Brown University but didn't like it, and eventually ended up with a Master's from The New School in New York.She, like me and many other unschoolers, has often had people say "Unschooling worked for you, but admit it won't work for everyone." In her talk, Astra points out that this is a compliment in disguise. "On one hand," Astra says, "it implies that my family is gifted. On the other hand, it implies that most people are not gifted, and they need to be guided, molded, tested, and inspected."I don't think anyone needs to be guided, molded, tested, or inspected. Over the course of the last seven months working on my book, I've talked to people who have come from every background imaginable to do everything imaginable. I've talked to individuals who grew up in the slums of Dehli and middle class Londoners who have gone on to do everything from become world-renowned DJs to senior executives at British Petroleum.Anecdotally, it seems that where you come from, the background of your parents, your socio-economic level, and so on has little to do with your success outside school. However, all of these factors are a huge determinant upon your success inside school.There is data to support this thesis. The first study I want to highlight was done in the United Kingdom in the late 1990's:Children taught at home significantly outperform their contemporaries who go to school, the first comparative study has found. It discovered that home-educated children of working-class parents achieved considerably higher marks in tests than the children of professional, middle-class parents and that gender differences in exam results disappear among home-taught children.Homeschool Legal Defense Association provides a nice summary a more recent study they commissioned in 2008 on their website. Some of the highlights include:Whether either parent was a certified teacher did not matter.Certified (i.e., either parent ever certified)—87th percentile
Not certified (i.e., neither parent ever certified)—88th percentileSpending on home education made little difference.Spent $600 or more on the student—89th percentile
Spent under $600 on the student—86th percentileTo be sure, there is a delta between 86th and 89th percentile. But that delta is quite small when the national average is the 50th percentile.*********I'm writing about this data because I've been reviewing in preparation to debate Vivek Wadhwa next Wednesday at TED in Long Beach. Vivek and I have debated before, both on TechCrunch and NPR, and we'll have a lively time next week.Vivek likes to make accusations like home or unschooling only works for the elite. No, I say. Everyone is capable of self-education regardless of their socio-economic background, parental education level, gender, or whatever other ways Vivek considers me privileged.Yes, both my parents have college degree, but they aren't wealthy. Money was tight as a child. I started selling fruit from our backyard to make money when I was 10. I subsequently delivered flowers and sold photocards to pay for my self-education.This time when I spar with Vivek I have data to refute his accusations.If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to a friend, post it on Facebook, or Tweet it.Keeping on hacking,Dale
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