"Last Lecture," Randy Pausch

The Bush Multi-Year Plan on Global Warming

—by Tom Toles

Noam Chomsky on the US Election

A really interesting read:

1. Chomsky: US public irrelevant; US can learn something from Bolivia's democracy

Pedagogy of Hope

I finished reading Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire about a week ago. Not to say that these are the only important ideas, but here are some passages and quotations that caught my eye while I was reading:

"I thought I'd been so clear," I said. "I don't think they understood me."

"Could it have been you, Paulo, who didn't understand them?" Elza asked...

Talking about what he was writing, Josué suddenly told us: "I'll suggest a good habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book, or article, let it 'marinate' for three months, four months, in a drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always change 'something,'" concluded Josué, with his hand on the shoulder of one of us.

When it comes to language there is something else I should like to bring up here. It is something that I have never accepted—on the contrary, something that I have always rejected. It is the assertion, or even insinuation, that fine, elegant writing, is not scholarly. A scholar does difficult writing, not fine writing. Language's esthetic moment, it has always seemed to me, ought to be pursued by all of us, including rigorous scholars. There is not the least incompatibility between rigor in the quest for an understanding and knowledge of the world, and beauty of form in the expression of what is found in that world.

It would be an absurdity for there to be, or seem to have to be, some necessary association between ugliness and scientific rigor.

[T]eaching is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive, docile students.

[T]o teach is not the simple transmission of knowledge concerning the object or concerning content. Teaching is not a simple transmission, wrought by and large through a pure description of the concept of the object, to be memorized by students mechanically. Teaching—again, from the postmodern progressive viewpoint of which I speak here—is not reducible merely to teaching students to learn through an operation in which the object of knowledge is the very act of learning. Teaching someone to learn is only valid—from this viewpoint, let me repeat—when educands learn to learn in learning the reason-for, the "why," of the object or the content.

Therefore teaching is a creative act, a critical act, and not a mechanical one.

I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of "realistic socialism" does not mean, on one side, that socialism has shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism has now stepped forward in its excellence once and for all.

What excellence is this, that manages to "coexist with more than a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty," not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with which it coexists with "pockets of poverty" and misery in its own, developed body. What excellence is this, that sleeps in peace while numberless men and women make their home in the street, and say it is their own fault that they are on the street? What excellence is this, that struggles so little, if it struggles at all, with discrimination for reason of sex, class, or race, as if it reject someone different, humiliate her, offend him, hold her in contempt, exploit her, were the right of individuals, or classes, or races, or one sex, that holds a position of power over another? What excellence is this, that tepidly registers the millions of children who come into the world and do not remain, or not for long, or if they are more resistant, manage to stay a while, then take their leave of the world?

[. . .]

What excellence is this, that, in the Brazilian Northeast, coexists with a degree of misery that could only have been thought a piece of fiction: little boys and girls, women and men, vying with starving pups, tragically, like animals, for the garbage of the great trash heaps outlying the cities, to eat? Nor is São Paulo itself exempt from the experience of this wretchedness.

What excellence is this, that seems blind to little children with distended bellies, eaten up by worms, toothless women looking like old crones at thirty, wasted men, skinny, stooped populations? Fifty-two percent of the population of Recife live in slums, in bad weather, an easy prey for diseases that effortlessly crush their enfeebled bodies. What excellence is this, that strikes a pact with the cold-blooded, cowardly murder of landless men and women of the countryside simply because they fight for their right to their word and their labor, while they remain bound to the land and despoiled of their fields by the dominant classes?

What excellence is this, that gazes with serene regard upon the extermination of little girls and boys in the great Brazilian urban centers—that "forbids" 8 million children of the popular classes to go to school, that "expels" from the schools a great number of those who manage to get in—and calls all this "capitalistic modernity."

We become capable of imaginatively, curiously, "stepping back" from ourselves—from the life we lead—and of disposing ourselves to "know about it." The moment came when we not only lived, but began to know what we were living—hence it was possible for us to know what we know, and therefore to know that we could do more. What we cannot do, as imaginative, curious beings, is to cease to learn and to seek, to investigate the "why" of things. We cannot exist without wondering about tomorrow, about what is "going on," and going on in favor of what, against what, for whom, against whom. We cannot exist without wondering about how to do the concrete or "untested feasible" that requires us to fight for it.

[S]omething of basic imporance turns—the basic importance of education as act of cognition not only of the content, but of the "why" of economic, social, political, ideological, and historical facts, which explain the greater or lesser degree of "inderdict of the body," our conscious body, under which we find ourselves placed.

The fundamental problem—a problem of a political nature, and colored by ideological hues—is who chooses the content, and in behalf of which persons the thing the "chooser's" teaching will be performed—in favor of whom, against whom, in favor of what, against what.

It is impossible to democratize the choice of content without democratizing the teaching of content.

What is altogether impermissible, in democratic practice, is for teachers, surreptitiously or otherwise, to impose on their pupils their own "reading of the world," in whose framework, therefore, they will now situate the teaching of content.

The role of the progressive educator, which neither can nor ought to be omitted, in offering her or his "reading of the world," is to bring out the fact that there are other "readings of the world," different from the one being offered as the educator's own, and at times antagonistic to it.

The school we need so urgently [I said in 1960] is a school in which persons really study and work. [...] The intellectualism we fight is precisely that hollow, empty, sonorous chatter, bereft of any relationship with the reality surrounding us, in which we are born and reared and on which, in large part, we yet feed today.

"I do not authentically think unless others think. I simply cannot think for others, or for others, or without others."

There is no dialogue in "spontaneism" any more than in the omnipotence of the teacher. But a dialogical relation does not, as is sometimes thought, rule out the possibility of the act of teaching. [. . .] If the educator's thinking cancels, crushes, or hinders the development of the educands' thinking, then the educator's thinking, being authoritarian, tends to generate in the educands upon whom it impinges a timid, inauthentic, sometimes even merely rebellious thinking.

More than ever before, political decision making, in a progressive mold, ought to be extended into populism, so that a university would place itself in the service of popular interests, as well. This would imply, as well,in practice, a critical comprehension of how university arts and sciences ought to be related with the consciousness of the popular classes: that is, a critical comprehension of the interrelations of popular knowledge, common sense, and scientific cognition.

...an interdisciplinary understanding of teaching, instead of merely a disciplinary one.
Various academic departments sought to work in this way in an attempt to overcome the compartmentalization of views to which we subject reality, and in which, not infrequently, we become lost.

From the peak of an elevation, we descried* a whole world to be built differently. [. . .]

*Past tense of "descry," not a typo. I think.