Cory Ryan Banta
Fuck Education Get Educated
THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH. People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species. Edward Carr tracks some down ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009 CARL DJERASSI can remember the moment when he became a writer. It was 1993, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California and he had already written books about science and about his life as one of the inventors of the Pill. Now he wanted to write a literary novel about writers’ insecurities, with a central character loosely modelled on Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal. His wife, Diane Middlebrook, thought it was a ridiculous idea. Even at 85, slight and snowy-haired, Djerassi is a determined man.
Eventually Djerassi got the bound galleys of his book. Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007 and, as Djerassi speaks, her presence grows stronger. Carl Djerassi is a polymath. The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking -- and What That Means For Our Kids' Future | Education. Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com May 18, 2012 | Like this article?
Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn't college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?) Amid the din, there's a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they're even right wing. The hell it is. Our answers to that question could not be more diametrically opposed. A Question of Human Nature Our beliefs about the purpose of education are rooted in even deeper beliefs about the basic nature of humanity.
All conservative politics springs from one central premise: they believe that human beings are essentially fallen and deeply flawed. Can Children Know, At Age 2, They Were Born The 'Wrong Sex'? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. iStockphoto Kathryn's Dad thought she was going through a tomboy phase. Kathryn's Mom suspected it might be something more. From the age of two onwards, Kathryn herself was utterly certain: "I am a boy," the child insisted. Kathryn's story was told on the front page of The Washington Post last Sunday, and I found it a gripping tale. It explores Kathryn's sense, expressed consistently through her toddler years, that she is a boy, and her parents' "upheaval" in trying to do the right thing by their child. When Kathryn was four, after seeking professional counseling, the parents decided to let her live as a boy. Tyler (the pseudonym chosen by the Post for Kathryn's new name) now dresses as a boy and attends preschool as a boy.
In a course I teach at William and Mary, Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender, my students and I grapple with questions of this nature. "What could it possibly mean," Fausto-Sterling asked during our phone conversation, "to say that a child is 'born that way'? The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond. Articles Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried.
In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, and if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the module is in any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. What’s Post Postmodernism? Let me explain. LIT | THE END OF BEING. ThisIsWhyImBroke.com :: The Internet's Mall.
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