Our world is built largely on consistent "conceptual metaphors" that order our way of thinking. If education is war survival by any means necessary makes perfect sense. Anyone with the money to purchase a paper would do so.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-d-blum/education-is-war-accordin_b_1909001.html
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Today’s New York Times has articles that suggest two competing views: Everyone should go to college, and college is a waste of time.
Which view is right? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-d-blum/is-college-worth-it_b_1888083.html You have probably heard that a teaching assistant grading final exams in a large Harvard class noticed suspicious similarities among the responses. That assistant notified authorities, and now a full-fledged investigation is underway—scrutinized by public attention. As someone who has studied college cheating and plagiarism, I find this case, like so many before and yet to come, provocative. Here are some of the things I wish to say about it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-d-blum/harvard-cheating_b_1877921.html At my department’s semi-annual retreat, we had another round of discussion about Friday classes. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons to avoid them. Each reason reveals a different, and compelling interest, on the part of various constituencies. But there is no way to adjudicate them, because they stem from fundamentally different goals.
My visit to the American Automobile Association (AAA) office to renew our membership on the eve of helping my college-graduate daughter move out of state brought a lot of information—about the loquacious employee’s life and family. But the memorable core was about her school-challenged son’s effortless passing of his driver’s license examination.
Observe how kids learn to throw balls, or to jump rope, or to play chords on the guitar, or to speak a new language if they move to a new place.
All of it happens with others, in activities that involve what we could call the social mind-body. And compare that to school. My heart filled with tenderness for all the parents standing with their kids at bus stops, all the new backpacks carefully placed on tiny, bony shoulders, all the new shoes saved until this morning...all the world starting over, fresh and filled with all the possibilities imaginable, at least this one day a year.
She is the eager girl always raising her hand, always with an answer, always following the rules. A know-it-all, a pleaser, she is the kind of student most other kids can’t stand; she makes them all look bad. And most teachers like her because she does everything she is supposed to do, and then some. Teachers don’t have to cajole and plead and threaten; she does all the work, and she does it with joy.
I invite you to join me in an enterprise I’m calling a Critical Anthropology of Education. This approach to education—helping young folks grow into the kinds of people we and they want—is fully anthropological in every sense. This field is, for each of you, optional. It is not on the test.
Except that for our society as a whole, it is mandatory. And the test is all around us. We aren’t doing too well. I opened the class thinking that I would get students to design the assignments and evaluations themselves. I began with a discussion of what grades mean. They watched me suspiciously. What does she want? They assumed it was a trap. Then I required a page-long self-assessment. It asked them to spell out their goals and to discuss how they had and had not met them. It asked them to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their paper, in terms of both content and form, and to explain this. And, finally, I asked them to grade themselves.
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