सुक्खू सरकार व्यावसायिक भवनों से वसूलेगी प्रतिवर्ग फीट तक, पंचायतीराज विभाग ने तैयारियां की पूरी; जानें पूरा मामला
Himachal News: शहरों की तर्ज पर अब हिमाचल के गांवों में भी व्यावसायिक भवनों पर टैक्स लगेगा। ग्राम पंचायतों में स्थित होटल, दुकानों सहित सभी प्रकार के व्यावसायिक प्रतिष्ठानों से प्रति वर्ग फीट टैक्स वसूली होगी।
पंचायतीराज विभाग ने इसकी पूरी तैयारी कर ली है। मुख्यमंत्री सुखविंद्र सिंह सुक्खू के समक्ष भी विभाग योजना की प्रस्तुति दे चुका है। वित्तीय वर्ष 2025-26 से टैक्स लिया जाएगा। पंचायतों के सशक्तीकरण के लिए यह पहल की जा रही है।
आर्थिक तंगी से जूझ रही राज्य सरकार ने बीते वर्ष ही ग्रामीण क्षेत्रों में पीने के पानी के बिलों की वसूली शुरू की थी। अब ग्राम पंचायतों में कारोबार करने वालों पर टैक्स लगाने की तैयारी शुरू कर दी है। सरकार ग्राम पंचायतों में स्थित होटल, होम स्टे, दुकानों, रेस्तरां, मैरिज पैलेस सहित अन्य व्यावसायिक प्रतिष्ठानों से टैक्स लेगी। प्रति वर्ग फीट टैक्स कितना वसूला जाएगा, इसको लेकर अभी अंतिम फैसला नहीं हुआ है।
टैक्स की राशि तय करने को लेकर विभागीय स्तर पर मंथन जारी है। मंत्रिमंडल की बैठक में इसको लेकर फैसला लिया जाएगा। संभावित है कि बजट भाषण में टैक्स लगाने की घोषणा हो सकती है। पंचायतीराज एक्ट के तहत पंचायतों को कई प्रकार के टैक्स लगाने के अधिकार होते हैं। कई पंचायतों ने विभिन्न टैक्स लगाए भी हैं। कई पंचायतों में चूल्हा टैक्स भी लिया जा रहा है। इसके तहत पंचायत के तहत आने वाले हर परिवार से सालाना 30 रुपये टैक्स लिया जा रहा है। कांगड़ा की कुछ पंचायतों में आजकल आठ साल का एकमुश्त चूल्हा टैक्स लिया जा है।
हिमाचल में हैं 3615 ग्राम पंचायतें
प्रदेश में 3615 ग्राम पंचायतें हैं। इन सभी पंचायतों में स्थित व्यावसायिक भवनों पर टैक्स लगाया जाएगा। प्रदेश में इस साल के अंत में पंचायत चुनाव होने हैं। ऐसे में सरकार का यह फैसला कितना कारगर साबित होगा, यह चुनाव परिणामों से ही स्पष्ट होगा।
हिमाचल की ग्राम पंचायतों के सशक्तीकरण के लिए सरकार ने व्यावसायिक भवनों पर टैक्स लगाने का फैसला लिया है। घरेलू उपभोक्ता इसके दायरे से बाहर रहेंगे। टैक्स लगाने को लेकर जल्द ही विभाग की ओर से दिशा-निर्देश जारी कर दिए जाएंगे। – अनिरुद्ध सिंह, ग्रामीण विकास एवं पंचायतीराज मंत्री
10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
Getting human-centered, neurodiversity affirming, progressive practices into education, healthcare, and other systems is a battle, a grueling and grinding battle through bad narratives and bad framing.
framing = mental structures that shape the way we see the world
Our community of neurodivergent and disabled people encounters the following narratives over-and-over with dreadful regularity. They are fundamental contributors to the Double Empathy Extreme Problem (DEEP) we neurodivergent and disabled people must attempt to bridge. We make the attempt in hope that, once we do all the work of building the bridge, you will endeavor to meet us halfway.
Get over the bridge by recognizing these frames in your own thinking.
10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
(links are to our glossary, where you can learn much more)
- politics of resentment
- sameness-based fairness
- fundamental attribution error
- conquering gaze from nowhere
- scientism
- epistemic injustice
- behaviorism
- ableism
- deficit ideology
- ”Better get used to it.”
politics of resentment = manipulations of status anxiety; organization of interest groups based on perceived deprivation or the threat of deprivation
sameness-based fairness = notion of fairness where everyone gets the same thing rather than each getting what they need
fundamental attribution error = to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour
conquering gaze from nowhere = the interpretation of objectivity as neutral and not allowing for participation or stances; an uninvolved, uninvested approach that claims objectivity to “represent while escaping representation”
scientism = the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge
epistemic injustice = where our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity
behaviorism = a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs
ableism = a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness
deficit ideology = a worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities
better get used to it = preparing people for oppression by oppressing them
The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.
We need your help. We need you to help us bridge the Double Empathy Extreme Problem (DEEP). To do that, we all must change our framing. You cannot be an ally to us until you perceive beyond the framing listed above.
Meanwhile, we are being ground down. We are fundamentally marked by the system.
We have turned classrooms into a hell for neurodivergence.Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence – Stimpunks Foundation
“Sea Glass Survivors” is one of the most beautifully powerful pieces of research we have ever read about the autistic experience of unmet needs in the education system.
Sea glass is weathered by what it has endured at sea (Figure 2), a process that can be related to education. I am fundamentally marked by the system. Confidence eroded. Anxiety wavering. Now, overcompensation is a form of self-preservation, taking breaks is still unnatural and achievements come with a little sense of pride. Just as sea glass is ground down by every knock, its eventual form is a sum of its aquatic endurance.Positive memories of education have been flooded by the negative. Instead, I course through the ocean propelled to defy the lack of expectations imposed on me, but also by defiance, to disprove those who wrote me off.
However, a life tussling with the tide-against the odds— has also left its mark more positively. The researcher, practitioner, colleague and peer I am today refuses to entertain ideas or set up environments that make some people (neurominority) feel less intelligent, inadequate or inferior, than others (neuromajority), just as my secondary school English teacher and other curious individuals did. In many ways, these moments anchor my practice.
#ableism #behaviorism #conqueringGaze #deficitIdeology #epistemicInjustice #equity #fairness #framing #fundamentalAttributionError #scientism
Enable Dignity: Accessible Systems, Spaces, & Events - Stimpunks Foundation
Enable dignity. The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual. Accessibility is a collective process.Stimpunks Foundation
Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
“Science of Reading” particularly and #ResearchEd more generally, remind many of us in neurodiversity and disability communities of this from Alfie Kohn.
The underpinnings of that ideology include: a focus only on observable behaviors that can be quantified, a reduction of wholes to parts, the assumption that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement, and the creation of methods for selectively reinforcing whichever behaviors are preferred by the person with the power. Behaviorists ignore, or actively dismiss, subjective experience – the perceptions, needs, values, and complex motives of the human beings who engage in behaviors.
Table of Contents
- Scientism
- Epistemic Injustice
- Measuring the Surface, Badly
- On the Problems With “Science of Reading”
- Monsters of Ed-tech
- Reading Wars Are Destroying Our Schools
- Our Community Wants Progressive Education, Not Regressive Education
- Further Reading
Scientism
Autistic people see this sort of scientism over and over.
There are many ways for people to come to understand the world. Many different approaches to learning about things, including minds. Scientism — the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge — is a philosophical mistake (Hughes 2012).I say this as someone who loves science, who teaches it for a living and who’s in the middle of another science course right now, for general interest and with an eye to future research. Science is wonderful. We just need to be careful about how we apply it, and what ways of knowing we risk crowding out if we rely on it too heavily.
When it comes to autism, people sometimes rely on scientific studies to the point of disbelieving autistic people’s personal experiences. Despite the low quality of much of the published research on autism, non-autistic experts are assumed to understand autistic experiences better than the people having them. This is a serious problem in a number of ways, and also an interesting case study in the limitations of science.
Autism and Scientism, Research Journal Middletown Centre for Autism
This is one of the heartbreaks about being autistic. We tend to love certainty and support science. Yet, we constantly face scientific and medical professionals whose credentials we want to trust but whose information has been greatly misinformed. It’s a systemic problem.
The failures of autism science are not random: they reflect systematic power imbalances.
Autism and Scientism: Why science is not always the best way to learn about autism
Epistemic Injustice
A fundamental problem with “Science of Reading” is also a problem with autism research. Scientism begets epistemic injustice. The behaviorist bent of mainstream education repeatedly churns out these monsters of ed-tech that steal the credibility of science to rationalize and commodify ableism.
So much of the reason why borderline-abusive practices like ABA have been allowed to proliferate is that policy-makers have prioritised anything claiming to be scientific over the constant objections of the people having these things done to them.Science is an incredibly powerful tool, but that just makes bad science all the more dangerous. No court would dismiss someone’s testimony of their own pain just because there are no peer-reviewed studies to show it’s real – so why do politicians?
Epistemic injustice refers to harms that relate specifically to our status as epistemic agents, whereby our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity.
Measuring the Surface, Badly
The “Science of Reading” is not so scientific and not compatible with neurodiversity. Like behaviorism, it measures the surface, badly.
Behind SoR is a “who’s who” of behaviorist and traditional, “back to basics”, educators who abuse the term “evidence-based” to the point of meaninglessness.
According to Skinner, when we fail to properly correct behavior (facilitated by and through machines), we are at risk of “losing our pigeons.” But I’d contend that with this unexamined behaviorist bent of (ed-)tech, we actually find ourselves at risk of losing our humanity.
On the Problems With “Science of Reading”
We do not advocate for a particular approach to teaching reading; instead, we center children, arguing that HOW you teach reading MUST be determined by WHO you are teaching. Anything else is flawed.As a result, journalism frequently bestows unquestioned status to systematic phonics instruction while emphasizing other aspects of literacy learning far less. This instructional approach has come to be known in the popular press by the moniker “the science of reading,” even though actual research-based science of reading is far more nuanced and expansive. Furthermore, journalists often dismiss another approach to teaching called balanced literacy, an orientation supported by 59% of reading researchers that advocates for a robust range of literacy learning opportunities that include phonics, comprehension, writing, and other forms of literacy development in contexts that motivate young literacy learners.
We argue that reductive and singular models of reading fail to honor the cultures, experiences, and diversity of children. This confluence of research findings reveals an unequivocal need for caution as states, universities, schools, and teachers adopt assumedly universal and narrow approaches to teaching reading.
While science of reading advocates claim to be research-based, decades of reading scholarship have recognized reading as complex, multidimensional, and mediated by social and cultural practices.
- If the science of reading advocates only phonics instruction for all children, how can it address the various reading challenges faced by children?
- If NAEP scores have been largely unchanged for the past 30 years, why are science of reading advocates warning of a reading crisis?
- If decades of empirical research conducted by the world’s most accomplished reading scholars have increasingly documented the complexity of reading, why would schools, districts, and states adopt approaches that narrowly focus on phonics?
- If reading processes are distributed across neural networks in the brain, how can phonics be the singular and universal instructional approach for teaching children to read?
- If observations of young readers reveal that different kids attend differently to various aspects of text (e.g., letters/sounds, meaning, story elements, and language patterns), how could a primary emphasis on phonics be right for all readers?
We do not advocate for a particular approach to teaching reading; instead, we center children, arguing that HOW you teach reading MUST be determined by WHO you are teaching. Anything else is flawed. Reading is a “complex, multidimensional cognitive process situated in and mediated by social and cultural practices” (Moje, 2018, p. 2), and “teaching depends on knowing what students know and can do and then determining what they need” (p. 3). We base this claim on a confluence of evidence that presents reading as complex, involving multiple sources of information that are distributed across multiple neurological systems.
Complexities related to the teaching of reading lead to different children learning to read in different ways. Some like Tysha, quickly learn letter sounds. Other children are excited about stories and attracted to pictures; they might need particular assistance in learning how letters and words work. Some children read with stunning accuracy but can tell you little about what they read. All these readers need excellent, informed, and resourceful teachers.
The Science of Learning flattens the complexity of both learning and the brain, misplacing outsized importance on a limited view of “cognitive science” in its relationship to schooling. It’s also important for educators to understand where the evidence in “evidence-based education”, as “the science of learning” was known in a previous life, comes from and who it leaves out when we demand its faithful implementation in schools.
According to science, it’s actually impossible to understand what happens in a learner’s brain in any given moment.
The Science of Learning is misleading when it refers exclusively to cognitive science, memory management, and the brain, because it ignores all the unknowable and ineffable components of what happens inside a student’s brain. It positions The Science to be thoroughly researched, but it also doesn’t acknowledge a huge body of work that proves cognitive science is significantly more complex than they have portrayed it.
Research increasingly recognizes that, as medical researchers Peter Stilwel and Katharine Harmon write, “Cognition is not simply a brain event.”(*) Drawing from their intuitive 5E model, we can better understand learning as a process of sense-making about ourselves in relation to the world that is:
Embodied – sense-making shaped by being in a body
Embedded – bodies exist within a context in the world
Enactive – active agents in interactions with the world
Emotive – sense-making always happens in an emotional context
Extended – sense-making relies on non-biological tools and technologiesIf you look carefully at their briefs for the superiority of direct instruction (DI), however, you’ll notice two things. First, any benefits they’re able to show are almost entirely short-term and/or superficial in nature. As one group of researchers put it, “Studies favoring direct instruction tend to be small-scale, use limited measures and time horizons, [and rely on] ‘skill acquisition’ or simple concepts as the learning goals…”13 (Actually, student-centered learning often produces better results even in studies with those limitations; when more meaningful outcomes are assessed, the case for DI collapses almost entirely.)
Here’s a striking illustration: DI’s defenders triumphantly cited a 2004 experiment in which science students who received “an extreme type of direct instruction in which the goals, the materials, the examples, the explanations, and the pace of instruction [were] all teacher controlled” did better on a test than their classmates who designed their own procedures. But three years later, another pair of researchers returned to the same question in the same discipline with students of the same age. This time, though, they measured the effects after six months instead of only a week and they used a more sophisticated assessment of learning. It turned out that any advantage produced by DI quickly evaporated. And on one of the outcome measures, exploration ultimately proved to be not only more impressive than DI but also more impressive than a combination of the two — further reason to believe that DI not only is less effective but can actually be counterproductive.14
The second problem with evidence said to favor DI reflects the way its proponents tend to structure what happens in the two teaching conditions they’re comparing. On the one hand, they’re apt to set up inquiry learning for failure by using a caricatured version of it, a kind of pure discovery rarely found in real-world classrooms, with teachers providing no guidance at all so that students are left to their own devices. On the other hand, the version of DI they test sometimes sneaks in a fair amount of active student involvement — to the point that the two conditions may just amount to “different forms of constructivist instruction.”15
Fairer comparisons convincingly support the case against direct instruction. To be clear, I don’t believe the evidence argues against all teacher talk and guidance (in favor of the pure discovery model that’s employed as a straw man to make traditionalism seem more appealing). But that doesn’t justify a “split the difference; just use both” conclusion: A mostly student-centered approach really does make more sense most of the time.16
Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has had a very malign effect on teaching. It offers a simple story, purportedly based on incontestable cognitive science, about why students find learning difficult, and how to respond, that many in the teaching profession have found hard to resist. It seems authoritative, but it is in fact seductive and misleading. Here are some reasons why we should take it with a shovel of salt.
Cognitive Load Theory: Just Brain Gym for Traditionalists?
CLT is just a fad; it is, as someone said, like Brain Gym for Traditionalists. The sooner the fad passes the better.
Cognitive Load Theory: Just Brain Gym for Traditionalists?
In general, polarising and opposing Black and White versions of teaching simply betrays a lack of familiarity with the vast amount of high-quality hybrid and nuanced “dispositional teaching” that is already happening in many states and many countries. To trash these innovations through dogmatism, cherry-picked research, and ignorance is sheer vandalism.
Part of the problem is that some of those who peddle this silliness have no training and little standing in the wider world of cognitive science. (When I spoke to my old friend Alan Baddeley FRS, CBE, godfather of “working memory” research, four years ago he had not heard of “cognitive load theory” and didn’t much like the sound of it. The model in circulation amongst CLT proponents is a travesty of the research-based complexity of Alan’s current model.) Much CLT research derives from work on high school maths and science teaching. These subjects are not valid prototypes for other subjects on the curriculum nor indeed for the many wider forms of out-of-school learning.
Another part of the problem is the gullibility of educators in the face of authoritative claims to scientific warrant by a small posse of overconfident, and in some cases ideologically-driven) academics and consultants. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
The Sciences of Learning and the Practice of Teaching
But outside these important areas of agreement, we are concerned that the “science of reading” advocacy has been grounded in some very troubling patterns:10
- Failing to place the current concern for reading in a historical context.11
- Overemphasizing recent test scores and outlier data instead of longitudinal data withgreater context (for example, NAEP).12
- Misrepresenting the “science of reading” as settled science that purportedly prescribes systematic intensive phonics for all students.13
- Overstating and misrepresenting the findings of the National Reading Panel report of 2000, without acknowledging credible challenges to those findings.14
- Focusing blame on K-12 teachers and teacher education without credible evidence or acknowledgement of challenging teaching and learning conditions and the impact of test-based accountability policies on practice and outcomes.15
- Celebrating outlier examples of policy success (in particular, the Mississippi 2019 NAEP data16) without context or high-quality research evidence for those claims.17It’s time for the media and political distortions to end, and for the literacy community and policymakers to fully support the literacy needs of all children. Much of the legislation be- ginning to emerge is harmful, especially to students living inequitable lives and attending underfunded, inequitable schools.
As long as scholars, policymakers, and practitioners treat the science of reading as primarily about assessed reading proficiency, these other aspects of reading instruction are relegated to the periphery, if not ignored entirely.
We propose that a better central question for research, policy, and practice is, How can reading instruction best help students develop and flourish as literate beings in the ways that matter most? To be sure, the question, What works? remains part of this reimagined science of reading, but a bolder and broader vision is needed.”
We join prominent scholarly voices who have sounded the alarm over the trend to narrowly focus the science of reading on decoding (e.g., National Education Policy Center & Education Deans for Justice and Equity, 2020). Highlighting the “goal of moving the needle on students’ reading comprehension achievement” (Pearson et al., 2020, p. 247; see also Goldenberg, 2020) as some scholars have done may succeed in somewhat broadening the conversation, but a solid foundation for a robust and socially just science of reading requires more than even a decoding plus comprehension proficiency formula can provide. Here, we present the framework for a more expansive vision.
“Science of reading” approach is based on a small number of concepts taken from a few simple, dated studies which are being used to justify a variety of classroom practices, including ones that are contradicted by other research. (Seidenberg, Cooper Borkenhagen & Kearns, RRQ, 2021) (Seidenberg & Cooper Borkenhagen, Reading League Journal, 2020)
Not enough science in the “science of reading”.
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
Explicit instruction is there to scaffold statistical/implicit learning. Only as much as needed and not one bit more.
SoR assumes that everything has to be taught or else it won’t be learned (because “unnatural”).
That’s wrong (because of implicit learning) and it’s inefficient (SLOW)”
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
In my view, success is not guaranteed because of the shallowness of the science.
Which is resulting in the adoption of practices that are inspired by research but not closely tied to it.
Practices such as heavy emphasis on explicit instruction exist because the literature hasn’t been adequately digested.
Relying on “authorities” is not a good plan, in science or in “the science of reading”
Where Does The “Science of Reading” Go From Here?, Mark S. Seidenberg, Yale Child Study Center
Monsters of Ed-tech
“Science of Reading” is an emerging and growing monster of ed-tech. These ed-tech trends are implemented in practice with lots of behaviorism, ableism, and deficit ideology and without any input from the people most impacted by such reductionist trends: neurodivergent and disabled students.
There are monsters because there is a lack of care and an absence of justice in the work we do in education and education technology.
Reading Wars Are Destroying Our Schools
youtu.be/e1IUJ5TegB4?si=CFz0bJ…
Our Community Wants Progressive Education, Not Regressive Education
We want progressive education, not more of this regressive and behaviorist stuff.
In short, progressive education isn’t just more engaging than what might be called regressive education; according to decades of research, it’s also more effective — particularly with regard to the kinds of learning that matter most. And that remains true even after taking our cognitive architecture into account.Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn
A Neurobiological Basis for Progressive Education
As the host mentions in this excellent conversation, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang‘s work essentially provides the neurobiological basis for progressive education.
open.spotify.com/episode/2obuy…
In short, learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.Among teenagers, these meaning-making narratives are related to the activity and changing connectivity of the networks in their brains—the very networks that predict long-term outcomes.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Although our coordinated neuroscientific and classroom studies are still in progress, educating for dispositions of mind is not new—in fact it is highly consistent with a century of educational research and theory (for example, Dewey, Montessori, Bruner, Perkins, Gardner), as well as with Doug’s decades of experience working with successful progressive public secondary schools. But tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kind of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Why is the narrative building process so compelling to teenagers, and so tied to their growth and well-being? In adolescence, the emotional engine that drives the hard work of learning comes from connecting the goings-on, procedures, and tasks of the here-and-now to newly emerging big-picture ideas that, in essence, become a person’s abstract narratives. Crucially, these stories are connected to individuals’ sense of self and values, and to their scholarly skills, resulting in agentic scholarly identity, durable understanding, and transferable capacities. To get a sense of why, we return to the brain.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
Today, there is a renewed focus on whole-learner approaches in schools, districts, and philanthropy, though now with explicit commitments to cultural responsiveness, trauma-informed practices, and restorative justice. Our findings reinforce the importance of these efforts, which focus on pedagogies that support youth in reworking the kinds of abstract narratives they create to affirm their lives, experiences, identities, values, decisions, and possible futures. By situating daily happenings in systems-level contexts with bigger, personal meaning, these pedagogies support youth learning to engage with, but also transcend and eventually reinvent, the here-and-now.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
New research on the connections between adolescents’ narrative building and brain development aligns closely with old lessons from progressive practices. Adolescent learners thrive when provided an environment conducive to building strong, personal narratives that leverage the emotional power of big ideas and abstract meaning-making in the service of motivated work on concrete tasks and skills. Presently, our public school system undercuts much of the approach we outline here, typically focusing on the here-and-now, the what-can-you-recall. Though student-driven approaches are often employed well in extracurricular activities and nonacademic spaces like the arts and afterschool clubs (Mehta & Fine, 2019), success in academics overwhelmingly relies on fast and rote activities. Students build narratives anyway, of course—but these, sadly, do not usually point kids in enlivening and healthy directions.
Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains
The whole notion of learning is a red herring. I don’t talk about learning, throw it out. I’m sick of thinking about learning because learning in our society, the way we conceptualize it, is about semantic recall and procedural recall in a context. Learning is not the aim of school, learning is the means, the aim of school is human development. It’s developing the dispositions, the capacities, to be able to engage in a complex systems-level of social and cultural institutionalization in the world, and to reify and create the kinds of structures and systems that we want and that we need given the changing circumstances.
The thing is, learning is essential…but it is essential because you need fodder to be able to develop around, not because it is the end point, but we call learning the ‘outcome’, ‘learning outcomes’, and then we’re done! That’s what school’s about: it’s about producing learning outcomes. But it’s not. The learning outcomes are just the midway to what you’re really supposed to be working on, which is: how did learning these things, how did engaging with thinking about these things develop you as a thinker, as a person, as a citizen? Those are the outcomes we should be caring about but we think about them as on a separate track from the learning. There’s the math, and then there’s the other stuff…which is kind of ridiculous.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Future Learning Design Podcast – The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
You have to be safe. You have to have time.
Safety and time.
Stimpunks was forged in the quest for survival and educational inclusion. We had to roll our own education, because even the “all means all” of public education failed to include us. We’ve learned a lot along the way and present to you Stimpunks Space as the syncretic synthesis of our forced interdisciplinary learning. That learning connected us with neurodiversity communities, disability communities, educators, doctors, nurses, autism researchers, sociologists, tech workers, care workers, social workers, and a long list of others. We wove together the aspects of these disciplines that were compatible with our community of neurodivergent and disabled people into a human-centered pedagogy and philosophy. We left out the stuff incompatible with and harmful to us, such as all forms of behaviorism. We built a learning space that works for us using a zero-based design approach.
We Weave Together
Effective education does not simply produce a standardized, predetermined product. It is instead about weaving a colorful cloth that reflects community members’ rich skills and relationships, with generative patterns that integrate complex knowledge and ideas, and that can look different in different contexts.We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems.
What would it mean to weave a colorful, durable cloth of individuals’ and communities’ relationships, knowledge and skills?
We take the analogy of weaving cloth to highlight the properties and valuable variations of effective educational systems.Envisioning humans and their contexts as mutually constitutive threads in a cloth, we ask, how can we most productively approach the interwoven micro- and macro-adaptations in the systems that make up the individual and context? How can we conceptualize and follow the humanistic threads and patterns that individuals and groups dynamically weave through educational environments and processes, in order to most strategically redesign educational systems to support the emergence of diverse human potentials and contributions? What would it mean to weave a colorful, durable cloth of individuals’ and communities’ relationships, knowledge and skills, designing educational systems that center equity and dignity, and attend to variability of experience? How could education systems be designed to enrich human capacities to invent and sustain vibrant and meaningful lives in a vibrant and healthy society?
In this sense, examining learning and its contexts is like examining the weaving of a cloth—the twists and knots of different threads are interwoven, and distinct patterns, textures and colors are discernable depending on how the observer zooms in or looks from afar. At one distance, threads can represent people in community, holding each other in place in the weave; further magnified, threads could be composed of the fibers of an individual’s skills and experiences, twisted together across the threads of others as they extend through time. The fibers, patterns, and weaves of various cloths will vary substantially according to available resources, needs and aesthetics, from thick wool blankets or rugs, to flowing silk scarves, to sturdy nets or straps. Weaving itself is dynamic: it generates out of disparate parts a unified set of patterns, stronger together as a whole. Cloth also needs repair due to its day-to-day use as well as to unpredictable accidents and tears. Inevitably, new threads and new patterns will take hold. Thinking of education as supporting the weaving of fibers and also as tending to the condition of the whole cloth underscores the shared features of healthy learning communities with well- designed systems and structures, as well as the substantial and valuable variation that will emerge within and across contexts.
Through their ideas and intentions as well as their actions, communities of individuals continually renew, together, the socio-cultural context in which they are living, including the beliefs, the norms, and the patterns of relationships that organize society’s social fabric—the cloth they are weaving.
The cloth can be strengthened and enriched, new patterns can be collaboratively generated, and holes and tears repaired.
Effective education does not simply produce a standardized, predetermined product. It is instead about weaving a colorful cloth that reflects community members’ rich skills and relationships, with generative patterns that integrate complex knowledge and ideas, and that can look different in different contexts.
Sea glass is weathered by what it has endured at sea (Figure 2), a process that can be related to education. I am fundamentally marked by the system. Confidence eroded. Anxiety wavering. Now, overcompensation is a form of self-preservation, taking breaks is still unnatural and achievements come with a little sense of pride. Just as sea glass is ground down by every knock, its eventual form is a sum of its aquatic endurance.
Positive memories of education have been flooded by the negative. Instead, I course through the ocean propelled to defy the lack of expectations imposed on me, but also by defiance, to disprove those who wrote me off.
However, a life tussling with the tide-against the odds— has also left its mark more positively. The researcher, practitioner, colleague and peer I am today refuses to entertain ideas or set up environments that make some people (neurominority) feel less intelligent, inadequate or inferior, than others (neuromajority), just as my secondary school English teacher and other curious individuals did. In many ways, these moments anchor my practice.
Further Reading
stimpunks.org/2023/12/11/scien…
stimpunks.org/glossary/reading…
stimpunks.org/glossary/scienti…
stimpunks.org/glossary/learnin…
stimpunks.org/glossary/objecti…
stimpunks.org/courses/diy-at-t…
stimpunks.org/access/education…
stimpunks.org/glossary/evidenc…
stimpunks.org/glossary/epistem…
stimpunks.org/2023/05/15/stimp…
stimpunks.org/written-communic…
stimpunks.org/glossary/progres…
#behaviorism #edTech #education #evidenceBased #neurodiversity #reading
The Sciences of Learning and the Practice of Teaching
A crib sheet highlighting some areas of contention and misunderstanding about learning, the practice of teaching and purposes of education.guyclaxton (Guy Claxton)
Empire of Normality: An Important Book Necessary to Our Times
“Empire of Normality” by Robert Chapman is an important book necessary to our times. We live in an age of mass behaviorism, unvarnished eugenics, and neuronormative domination. “Empire of Normality” explains how we got here.
…mass neurodivergent disablement and constant, widespread anxiety, panic, depression, and mental illness, combined with systemic discrimination of neurodivergent people, is a problem specific to the current historical era. Hegemonic neuronormative domination, in other words, is a key problem of our time.Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
capitalism is so intensely neuronormative, becoming more so with each passing decade.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Capitalism places everyone, neurotypical as well as neurodivergent, in a ’double bind’ of either being valued as a worker and thus exploited, or being categorized as surplus and thus discriminated against.
Below, we collect our favorite passages from the book covering a few key themes.
Bolding added to highlight key phrases and improve skimmability.
Table of Contents
- Pathology Paradigm
- Neoliberalism and the Shift From Keynesian Economics to Hayekian Economics
- Normalisation and The Prison Industrial Complex
- Resources
- Further Reading
Pathology Paradigm
The core assumptions of the pathology paradigm are that mental and cognitive functioning are individual and based on natural abilities, and can be ranked in relation to a statistical norm across the species. And while there were earlier notions of the mean understanding and normal body, I locate Galton as the founder of the pathology paradigm proper. Walker describes the pathology paradigm as being the place where the neurotypical mind became ‘enthroned as the “normal” ideal against which all other types of minds are measured’. And it was also with Galton that this, and mass normalisation, was formalised.Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Thus, for me, the key problem is not the pathology paradigm alone, but how capitalist logics and the pathology paradigm mutually reinforce each other, leaving no possibility of neurodivergent liberation without deep systemic change.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
since the pathology paradigm is a product of the broader economic system, overcoming it will require more than a revolution in how we think about neurodiversity. It will also require changing much deeper structures in our society, in ways that are usually left unclarified in existing neurodiversity theory.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
The rise of capitalism – through its colonial roots and then imperial stages – thus finally brought the modern notion that the mad need to be treated, to ease their suffering and return the idle to the workforce. It was in this new context of viewing the population as a malleable economic resource that we see the emergence of new professional roles that paved the way for early pre-paradigmatic psychiatry and related disciplines such as psychology and psychometrics to emerge. And the new mechanistic understanding of the body and mind, coupled with new conceptions of normality, brought a new way of grounding these projects. As we will see in the next chapter, this would then be combined with the emerging statistical notions of normal functioning to ground not just the rise of eugenics but also the psychiatric paradigm that still exists today – the pathology paradigm.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
This provided white, cognitively abled, middle-class people to justify the various hierarchies that had emerged given the rise of capitalism as well as colonialism and imperialism. It also allowed cognitively abled people to begin establishing a monopoly on property and the means of production. As such, the normality concept mirrored contingent social hierarchies while at the same time framing these hierarchies as natural.
Here, then, we see the beginning of what I call the Empire of Normality. This new apparatus, made up of a complex nexus of different carceral systems, legal precedents, institutions, concepts, and practices, led to populations beginning to be systematically ranked in terms of mental and neurological ability, while positing this as part of a timeless natural order. This was not an accident, but was rather built into the logics of capitalism from the beginning. And it was in this context, as we will come to next, that a British polymath named Francis Galton developed the pathology paradigm – the precise paradigm the neurodiversity movement would later arise to name and resist.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
It is curious that, despite his influence being acknowledged elsewhere, Galton is barely mentioned in general histories of psychiatry, whether those written by mainstream psychiatrists or anti-psychiatry critics. Yet it is my contention that he was the founder of the pathology paradigm, in the sense that he provided both its metaphysical basis and developed many of the experimental methods that provided blueprints for later researchers. And it was this – Galton’s paradigm – that would then be taken up by Emil Kraepelin, often described as the ‘father’ of modern psychiatry, and other influential clinicians and researchers across the psychological sciences. This would form the basis of the approach that has remained dominant to this very day, and which functions to naturalise and scientifically legitimise the neuronormative domination of capitalism as it continues to develop.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
The most fundamental limitation, which I have sought to address in this book, is that neither Walker nor any other neurodiversity theorist until now has provided a historical materialist analysis of the pathology paradigm. But here, by showing how the paradigm arose and caught on specifically because it allowed the individualisation and reification of neurodivergent disablement, we can better understand the significance and power of the pathology paradigm, as well as what it might take to overcome it. Since the pathology paradigm, and the way it naturalises increasingly restricted conceptions of normality, grew precisely to mirror the needs of the capitalist economy, it is these material conditions that need to be changed, not just our thinking. While changing our thinking is vital, we are unlikely to fully supplant the pathology paradigm while the capitalist global economic order remains dominant.
More generally, the key limitation of existing neurodiversity theory and activism is that it is more focused on changing our thinking and attitudes than on changing material conditions.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
It is vital to say here that some neurodivergent disablement and illness will always exist, and that imagined worlds where they do not exist at all are fascistic fantasies. But mass neurodivergent disablement and constant, widespread anxiety, panic, depression, and mental illness, combined with systemic discrimination of neurodivergent people, is a problem specific to the current historical era. Hegemonic neuronormative domination, in other words, is a key problem of our time. For the Empire of Normality, and in turn the pathology paradigm, emerged in the context of capitalist logics, but have now become pervasive and partially distinct systems of domination in their own rights.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Neoliberalism and the Shift From Keynesian Economics to Hayekian Economics
The basic idea of neoliberalism, as summarised by David Harvey, was that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. In practice this meant privatisation, deregulation, and austerity.Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
In the summer of 1975, a speaker at the Conservative Research Department in Great Britain was giving a talk on how the British Conservative Party should avoid the extremes of left and right. Instead, he was arguing, they should forge a new ‘middle way’. Suddenly, he was interrupted by a woman who stood up and pulled a book from her briefcase. Brandishing the book so all could see it, she stated ‘This is what we believe’, before banging the book down on the table. The woman who had interrupted the speech was none other than the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher. And the book she had declared her allegiance to was titled The Constitution of Liberty, written by Thomas Szasz’s idol, the economist Friedrich Hayek.
Four years later, in 1979, Thatcher was elected to be Prime Minister, and began ushering in Hayekian policies to the United Kingdom. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan in the United States also began implementing Hayekian policies. It is to this shift that we now turn. For the shift from Keynesian economics to Hayekian economics is vital for understanding the rising tide of mental health problems and the inability of biological psychiatry to effectively fight it.
The basic idea of neoliberalism, as summarised by David Harvey, was that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’.1 In practice this meant privatisation, deregulation, and austerity. Following the culture wars and economic recession of the 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan essentially sought to reverse the welfare capitalism of the earlier twentieth century. While Chile, guided by US pressure, had experimented with neoliberal policies several years earlier, it was during the early 1980s that Britain and the United States each began massively rolling back the state and diminishing the welfare system.
In the wake of changes made by Thatcher and Reagan, neoliberalism was quickly enforced across much of the rest of the world. It was globalised through international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, and through US imperial pressure. As state communism fell, even Russia and China increasingly liberalised their economies to fit in – to at least some extent, and with mixed success – with the new global system. From around the same time, traditionally left-leaning political parties in liberal democracies, such as the British Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the United States, also shifted to the right. This was largely as organised labour was crushed by neoliberal governments and neoliberal ideology was propagated by the press. In this context, aspirational voters were choosing the ideal of individual freedom offered by neoliberalism over the progressive ideals, and higher taxes, of more collectivist politics.
This was to have profound effects on pretty much every aspect of human life. Indeed, as Harvey writes, neoliberal ideology had since ‘become hegemonic as a mode of discourse’. It has, he goes on, ‘pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world’.2 As we will see below, our experiences and understandings of mental health were far from immune to this more general shift.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Normalisation and The Prison Industrial Complex
Thus, as capitalism further developed and the population grew, its norms hardened, with the abnormal becoming ever-more salient as more of the population fell beyond its new standards of functioning. It was this that necessitated the mass development of these new carceral systems, which, all in their own ways, imprisoned those deemed abnormal.Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Cultural practices of normalisation, where the divergent are changed to become more normal, also shifted following the Spitzerian revolution and the rise of neoliberalism. One place we see this regards the prison complex. During this period the numbers of people with psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities incarcerated in the prison system continued to grow. By the beginning of the twenty-first century over 50% of prison inmates in the United States and the United Kingdom had dyslexia, while around a quarter have ADHD. Moreover ‘Some of the largest mental health centres in the United States currently operate behind bars, and 40 percent of people diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders face arrest over their lifetimes’.32 Today, people with mental disorder diagnoses, especially Black people, are among the most likely to be arrested, be harassed by the police, or die in police custody.
At the same time, a massively increased use of prison pharmaceuticals has been used alongside electronic tagging and biomedical risk assessment for prison inmates. Sociologist Ryan Hatch describes these as forms of ‘technocorrections’, which aim to reduce costs and subdue prison populations to make them more pliable. Thus by the year 2000 in the United States, for instance, ‘95 percent of maximum/high-security state prisons distributed psychotropics, compared to 88 percent of medium-security prisons and 62 percent of minimum/low-security prisons’.33 Liat Ben-Moshe has also emphasised how conditions in prison tend to make mental health worse and that even talking therapy often serves oppressive functions in prisons.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Indeed, as recent research by the historian Anne Parsons has shown, following the asylum closures, the prison industrial complex began to grow massively. But now it mainly incarcerated not just the (often) white former inmates of asylums. Rather, it grew to incarcerate, in much greater numbers, mad or disabled Black people alongside mad or disabled white people.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman
Resources
Here are some links to podcasts / interviews/ webinars / articles author Robert Chapman has done regarding “Empire of Normality”.
- Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman – The Sociological Review
- The Future of Neurodiversity – Boston Review
- Acid Horizon: The Rise of Anti-Capitalist Neurodiversity: Robert Chapman’s ‘Empire of Normality’ on Apple Podcasts
- An Interview w/ Robert Chapman on Living in an Empire of Normality
- Arts & Ideas – What is normal? – BBC Sounds
- Politicizing Neurodiversity – by P.E. Moskowitz
- A Materialist History of Pathology and Neurodiversity: A Conversation with Robert Chapman
- Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Robert Chapman – BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
- Philosophy of psychiatry webinar : Robert Chapman talk – YouTube
Further Reading
- Neoliberalism
- Respectability Politics
- W.E.I.R.D.
- Meritocracy Myth
- Policing
- Predatory Inclusion
- Burnout
- STEM
- Ableism
- Harm Reduction Theater
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Minority Stress
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- When you measure include the measurer.
- Scientism
- Epistemic Injustice
- Scientific Essentialism
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
- Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
- Tech Ethics
- Techno-solutionism
- Technoableism
- Algorithm
- Roaming Autodidact
- Enshittification
- Disability Dongle
- Artificial Intelligence
- Luddite Sensibilities
- Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Deficit Ideology
- Empire of Normality
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Harm Reduction Theater
#behaviorism #capitalism #eugenics #neoliberalism #neurodiversity #neuronormativity
An Interview w/ Robert Chapman on Living in an Empire of Normality
neurodivergent marxism, let's goooooJesse Meadows (Sluggish)
Fundamental Attribution Error and Harm Reduction Theater
‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health’ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education
Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
Yet, individualized mindfulness programs pay virtually no attention to how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives. Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer argue in “The Wellness Syndrome” that the mindfulness movement exemplifies an ideological shift, which turns an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness into a moral imperative. This “biomorality” urges the individual to find responsibility via the “right” life choices-whether through exercise, food, or meditation-to optimize the self.
Consider “fundamental attribution error” when evaluating mindset marketing like mindfulness, grit, growth mindset, etc.twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
The notion that each of us isn’t entirely the master of his own fate can be awfully hard to accept. It’s quite common to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment—so common, in fact, that psychologists have dubbed this the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a bias that may be particularly prevalent in our society, where individualism is both a descriptive reality and a cherished ideal. We Americans stubbornly resist the possibility that what we do is profoundly shaped by policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities. We prefer to believe that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that overweight people simply lack the willpower to stop eating, and so on.81 If only all those folks would just exercise a little personal responsibility, a bit more self-control!The Fundamental Attribution Error is painfully pervasive when the conversation turns to academic failure. Driving Duckworth and Seligman’s study of student performance was their belief that underachievement isn’t explained by structural factors—social, economic, or even educational. Rather, they insisted, it should be attributed to the students themselves, and specifically to their “failure to exercise self-discipline.” The entire conceptual edifice of grit is constructed on that individualistic premise, one that remains popular for ideological reasons even though it’s been repeatedly debunked by research.
When students are tripped up by challenges, they may respond by tuning out, acting out, or dropping out. Often, however, they do so not because of a defect in their makeup (lack of stick-to-itiveness) but because of structural factors.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (p. 170). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Lee Ross defined FAE as a tendency for people, when attributing the causes of behavior, “to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour”. That’s very aligned with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. It’s at the heart of what I go on about with equity literacy, structural ideology vs. deficit ideology, designing for the edges, and changing our framing.American culture and education are vast engines of FAE. Special Education is a gauntlet of FAE attitudes. Our family gets tired of wading through bad framing.
Compulsory, top-down mindfulness (and mindset marketing more generally) is too often used to situate structural problems within individuals while “disguising the ways they kill us.” It contributes to the gauntlet.
This is harm reduction theater. Practicing pluralism, for me, for now, means triage and harm reduction. Harm reduction theater wastes resources and bikesheds deficit ideology instead of embracing equity and structural ideology.
twitter.com/HowWeTeach/status/…
Recognize and prioritize minority stress.
As we come to understand depression in the transgender community more accurately, it’s become clear that the major cause is what’s referred to as “minority stress;” that is, “stressors induced by a hostile, homophobic culture, which often results in a lifetime of harassment, maltreatment, discrimination and victimization.”When Worlds Collide – Mental Illness Within the Trans Community – Lionheart
Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,
“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”
We’re awash in behaviorism and mindset marketing that directs thinking away from systems and toward individuals, individuals who are structurally stressed.Design is tested at the edges, and you need structural ideology to do something about it.
Corporate and ed-tech mindfulness aren’t structural or equity literate. When you aren’t equity literate, you risk engaging in harm reduction theater. When you aren’t equity literate, you fail at triage and harm reduction.
Investment in universal mindfulness training in the schools is unlikely to yield measurable, socially significant results, but will serve to divert resources from schoolchildren more urgently in need of effective intervention and support.Mindfulness Nation is another example of delivery of low intensity services to mostly low risk persons to the detriment of those in greatest and most urgent need.
Those many fewer students in need more timely, intensive, and tailored services are left underserved. Their presence is ignored or, worse, invoked to justify the delivery of services to the larger group, with the needy students not benefiting.
Unintended effects of mindfulness for children | Mind the Brain
There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.” Structural ideology-an ideology shared by intersectionality, the social mode of disability, and design for real life-is necessary to good design.
Education workers, healthcare workers, coworkers, everyone: We need you to check your FAE. We need you to confront injustice. Are you practicing harm reduction theater? Are you contributing to the gauntlet while telling us it’s good for us?stimpunks.org/glossary/fundame…
stimpunks.org/glossary/harm-re…
stimpunks.org/glossary/minorit…
#equity #fundamentalAttributionError #harmReduction #mindfulness #mindsetMarketing #pluralism #structuralIdeology
Parkinson's law of triviality (bikeshedding)
Parkinson's law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant details, while crucial matters go unattended.Amanda Hetler (TechTarget)
It’s not DEI’s Fault; It’s the Rot Economy
Blaming a coding bug on DEI is the dumbest thing ever.Have you met any coders? We are all weird as shit. We get paid like doctors to talk to melted sand. Two thousand years ago that gene was expressed as “person who talks to trees.”
Pop the hood on any team of half decent programmers and you’ll find a bunch of tatted up, pierced, pride flag wearing anarchists from all walks of life with views on gender and human sexuality that would instantly vaporize the conservative mind.
The conversation about the mass IT outage caused by CrowdStrike has been frustrating because of bigotry and its inversion of reality.
I have decades of experience with deploying software updates to 100s of millions of machines. I’m also directly experienced in corporate DEIB work and the ethical decline of big tech.
DEIB
Blaming a coding bug on DEIB is preposterous.
Being anti-DEIB is what leads to mass outages and parts falling off of planes. Look at Boeing, which embraced open hostility to neurodivergent engineers who actually knew how things worked, purposefully driving them off and outsourcing their jobs. This is a common practice in the rot economy.
What we’re seeing today isn’t just a major fuckup, but the first of what will be many systematic failures — some small, some potentially larger — that are the natural byproduct of the growth-at-all-costs ecosystem where any attempt to save money by outsourcing major systems is one that simply must be taken to please the shareholder.A common refrain in every failure, from Marvel to Warner Brothers to Boeing, was this: “Leadership doesn’t know what they want,” and “leadership doesn’t trust the people who know what they’re doing to do their jobs.” It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking and datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse. It’s not that games are worse, it’s that leadership fucking sucks.
“People who constantly blame DEI for anything that goes wrong are frequently the cause of things that go wrong.”
Of all the stupid and uninformed takes I’ve seen re: Crowdstrike, including a good helping of conspiracy theories, the absolute stupidest is blaming “DEI engineers.”I wouldn’t be surprised if people who constantly blame DEI for anything that goes wrong are frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
Unironically narrow executive over-optimizing on short term gains and efficiency(which as you noted probably correlates with people who constantly blame DEI) is in fact frequently the cause of things that go wrong.
What we’re seeing with Boeing, CrowdStrike, and so many other companies is the rot economy at work.
This is the cost of the Rot Economy — systems used by billions of people held up by flimsy cultures and brittle infrastructure maintained with the diligence of an absentee parent. This is the cost of arrogance, of rewarding managerial malpractice, of promoting speed over safety and profit over people.
Jack Welch kickstarted the rot economy. We’re seeing the full fruits of his influence decades later.
The prevailing power dynamic of our economic age, Welchism has at its heart the conviction that companies must prioritize profits for shareholders above all else, that executives are entitled to enormous wealth and minimal accountability, and that everyday employees deserve nothing more than their last paycheck. Welchism ascribes moral worth to material success, bestowing millionaire CEOs with the veneer of virtue, almost entirely irrespective of their actions. It thrives on downsizing, dealmaking, and financialization. And the Welchist worldview adopts a Darwinian attitude toward the labor market, a smug conviction that those who don’t make it are to blame for their own misfortune, that the poorest among us ultimately deserve their fate. The closest historical analog to Welchism is probably imperialism. The empires of yore had a comparable multinational reach to today’s biggest corporations, a similar willingness to confer absolute power upon their rulers, and the same tendency to exploit their subjects. Yet unlike imperialism, which has largely faded into history, Welchism still thrives today. Forty years after Welch took power, his warped worldview is still shaping our economy in ways large and small.There is capitalism in America before Jack Welch, and after him. His career serves as a line of demarcation, a split between the past and the present. Look at the trend lines for any number of key economic indicators—wages, mergers and acquisitions, manufacturing jobs, union representation, executive compensation, corporate tax rates—and it’s clear that right around 1981, the year Welch took over, things started to go off the rails.
DEIB is a scapegoat for broken capitalism.
Blaming DEIB is part of the process of resentment,
Further Reading
- Neoliberalism
- Respectability Politics
- W.E.I.R.D.
- Meritocracy Myth
- Policing
- Predatory Inclusion
- Burnout
- STEM
- Ableism
- Harm Reduction Theater
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Minority Stress
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- When you measure include the measurer.
- Scientism
- Epistemic Injustice
- Scientific Essentialism
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
- Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
- Tech Ethics
- Techno-solutionism
- Technoableism
- Algorithm
- Roaming Autodidact
- Enshittification
- Disability Dongle
- Artificial Intelligence
- Luddite Sensibilities
- Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Deficit Ideology
- Empire of Normality
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Harm Reduction Theater
#capitalism #dei #deib #rotEconomy #tech #techEthics
The Rot Economy - Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business.Ed Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)
Fundamental Attribution Error and Harm Reduction Theater
‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health’ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education
Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
Yet, individualized mindfulness programs pay virtually no attention to how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives. Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer argue in “The Wellness Syndrome” that the mindfulness movement exemplifies an ideological shift, which turns an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness into a moral imperative. This “biomorality” urges the individual to find responsibility via the “right” life choices-whether through exercise, food, or meditation-to optimize the self.
Consider “fundamental attribution error” when evaluating mindset marketing like mindfulness, grit, growth mindset, etc.twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
The notion that each of us isn’t entirely the master of his own fate can be awfully hard to accept. It’s quite common to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment—so common, in fact, that psychologists have dubbed this the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a bias that may be particularly prevalent in our society, where individualism is both a descriptive reality and a cherished ideal. We Americans stubbornly resist the possibility that what we do is profoundly shaped by policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities. We prefer to believe that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that overweight people simply lack the willpower to stop eating, and so on.81 If only all those folks would just exercise a little personal responsibility, a bit more self-control!The Fundamental Attribution Error is painfully pervasive when the conversation turns to academic failure. Driving Duckworth and Seligman’s study of student performance was their belief that underachievement isn’t explained by structural factors—social, economic, or even educational. Rather, they insisted, it should be attributed to the students themselves, and specifically to their “failure to exercise self-discipline.” The entire conceptual edifice of grit is constructed on that individualistic premise, one that remains popular for ideological reasons even though it’s been repeatedly debunked by research.
When students are tripped up by challenges, they may respond by tuning out, acting out, or dropping out. Often, however, they do so not because of a defect in their makeup (lack of stick-to-itiveness) but because of structural factors.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (p. 170). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Lee Ross defined FAE as a tendency for people, when attributing the causes of behavior, “to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour”. That’s very aligned with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. It’s at the heart of what I go on about with equity literacy, structural ideology vs. deficit ideology, designing for the edges, and changing our framing.American culture and education are vast engines of FAE. Special Education is a gauntlet of FAE attitudes. Our family gets tired of wading through bad framing.
Compulsory, top-down mindfulness (and mindset marketing more generally) is too often used to situate structural problems within individuals while “disguising the ways they kill us.” It contributes to the gauntlet.
This is harm reduction theater. Practicing pluralism, for me, for now, means triage and harm reduction. Harm reduction theater wastes resources and bikesheds deficit ideology instead of embracing equity and structural ideology.
twitter.com/HowWeTeach/status/…
Recognize and prioritize minority stress.
As we come to understand depression in the transgender community more accurately, it’s become clear that the major cause is what’s referred to as “minority stress;” that is, “stressors induced by a hostile, homophobic culture, which often results in a lifetime of harassment, maltreatment, discrimination and victimization.”When Worlds Collide – Mental Illness Within the Trans Community – Lionheart
Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,
“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”
We’re awash in behaviorism and mindset marketing that directs thinking away from systems and toward individuals, individuals who are structurally stressed.Design is tested at the edges, and you need structural ideology to do something about it.
Corporate and ed-tech mindfulness aren’t structural or equity literate. When you aren’t equity literate, you risk engaging in harm reduction theater. When you aren’t equity literate, you fail at triage and harm reduction.
Investment in universal mindfulness training in the schools is unlikely to yield measurable, socially significant results, but will serve to divert resources from schoolchildren more urgently in need of effective intervention and support.Mindfulness Nation is another example of delivery of low intensity services to mostly low risk persons to the detriment of those in greatest and most urgent need.
Those many fewer students in need more timely, intensive, and tailored services are left underserved. Their presence is ignored or, worse, invoked to justify the delivery of services to the larger group, with the needy students not benefiting.
Unintended effects of mindfulness for children | Mind the Brain
There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.” Structural ideology-an ideology shared by intersectionality, the social mode of disability, and design for real life-is necessary to good design.
Education workers, healthcare workers, coworkers, everyone: We need you to check your FAE. We need you to confront injustice. Are you practicing harm reduction theater? Are you contributing to the gauntlet while telling us it’s good for us?stimpunks.org/glossary/fundame…
stimpunks.org/glossary/harm-re…
stimpunks.org/glossary/minorit…
#equity #fundamentalAttributionError #harmReduction #mindfulness #mindsetMarketing #pluralism #structuralIdeology
Parkinson's law of triviality (bikeshedding)
Parkinson's law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant details, while crucial matters go unattended.Amanda Hetler (TechTarget)
Fundamental Attribution Error and Harm Reduction Theater
‘The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health’ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education
Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
Yet, individualized mindfulness programs pay virtually no attention to how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives. Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer argue in “The Wellness Syndrome” that the mindfulness movement exemplifies an ideological shift, which turns an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness into a moral imperative. This “biomorality” urges the individual to find responsibility via the “right” life choices-whether through exercise, food, or meditation-to optimize the self.
Consider “fundamental attribution error” when evaluating mindset marketing like mindfulness, grit, growth mindset, etc.
twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
twitter.com/alfiekohn/status/1…
The notion that each of us isn’t entirely the master of his own fate can be awfully hard to accept. It’s quite common to attribute to an individual’s personality or character what is actually a function of the social environment—so common, in fact, that psychologists have dubbed this the Fundamental Attribution Error. It’s a bias that may be particularly prevalent in our society, where individualism is both a descriptive reality and a cherished ideal. We Americans stubbornly resist the possibility that what we do is profoundly shaped by policies, norms, systems, and other structural realities. We prefer to believe that people who commit crimes are morally deficient, that the have-nots in our midst are lazy (or at least insufficiently resourceful), that overweight people simply lack the willpower to stop eating, and so on.81 If only all those folks would just exercise a little personal responsibility, a bit more self-control!The Fundamental Attribution Error is painfully pervasive when the conversation turns to academic failure. Driving Duckworth and Seligman’s study of student performance was their belief that underachievement isn’t explained by structural factors—social, economic, or even educational. Rather, they insisted, it should be attributed to the students themselves, and specifically to their “failure to exercise self-discipline.” The entire conceptual edifice of grit is constructed on that individualistic premise, one that remains popular for ideological reasons even though it’s been repeatedly debunked by research.
When students are tripped up by challenges, they may respond by tuning out, acting out, or dropping out. Often, however, they do so not because of a defect in their makeup (lack of stick-to-itiveness) but because of structural factors.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (p. 170). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Lee Ross defined FAE as a tendency for people, when attributing the causes of behavior, “to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour”. That’s very aligned with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. It’s at the heart of what I go on about with equity literacy, structural ideology vs. deficit ideology, designing for the edges, and changing our framing.
American culture and education are vast engines of FAE. Special Education is a gauntlet of FAE attitudes. Our family gets tired of wading through bad framing.
Compulsory, top-down mindfulness (and mindset marketing more generally) is too often used to situate structural problems within individuals while “disguising the ways they kill us.” It contributes to the gauntlet.
This is harm reduction theater. Practicing pluralism, for me, for now, means triage and harm reduction. Harm reduction theater wastes resources and bikesheds deficit ideology instead of embracing equity and structural ideology.
twitter.com/HowWeTeach/status/…
Recognize and prioritize minority stress.
As we come to understand depression in the transgender community more accurately, it’s become clear that the major cause is what’s referred to as “minority stress;” that is, “stressors induced by a hostile, homophobic culture, which often results in a lifetime of harassment, maltreatment, discrimination and victimization.”When Worlds Collide – Mental Illness Within the Trans Community – Lionheart
Why are there greater mental health stresses on autistic people from gender-minority groups? To quote from the research paper,
“The increased rates of mental health problems in these minority populations are often a consequence of the stigma and marginalisation attached to living outside mainstream sociocultural norms (Meyer 2003). This stigma can lead to what Meyer (2003) refers to as ‘minority stress’. This stress could come from external adverse events, which among other forms of victimization could include verbal abuse, acts of violence, sexual assault by a known or unknown person, reduced opportunities for employment and medical care, and harassment from persons in positions of authority (Sandfort et al. 2007).”
We’re awash in behaviorism and mindset marketing that directs thinking away from systems and toward individuals, individuals who are structurally stressed.
Design is tested at the edges, and you need structural ideology to do something about it.
Corporate and ed-tech mindfulness aren’t structural or equity literate. When you aren’t equity literate, you risk engaging in harm reduction theater. When you aren’t equity literate, you fail at triage and harm reduction.
Investment in universal mindfulness training in the schools is unlikely to yield measurable, socially significant results, but will serve to divert resources from schoolchildren more urgently in need of effective intervention and support.Mindfulness Nation is another example of delivery of low intensity services to mostly low risk persons to the detriment of those in greatest and most urgent need.
Those many fewer students in need more timely, intensive, and tailored services are left underserved. Their presence is ignored or, worse, invoked to justify the delivery of services to the larger group, with the needy students not benefiting.
Unintended effects of mindfulness for children | Mind the Brain
There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.” Structural ideology-an ideology shared by intersectionality, the social mode of disability, and design for real life-is necessary to good design.
Education workers, healthcare workers, coworkers, everyone: We need you to check your FAE. We need you to confront injustice. Are you practicing harm reduction theater? Are you contributing to the gauntlet while telling us it’s good for us?
stimpunks.org/glossary/fundame…
stimpunks.org/glossary/harm-re…
stimpunks.org/glossary/minorit…
#equity #fundamentalAttributionError #harmReduction #mindfulness #mindsetMarketing #pluralism #structuralIdeology
Parkinson's law of triviality (bikeshedding)
Parkinson's law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant details, while crucial matters go unattended.Amanda Hetler (TechTarget)
We don’t prepare students for a world of potential oppression by oppressing them. “Better Get Used to It” is violence.
We applaud our children for surviving a ruthless system as if it is an initiation into being a functional human being.We don’t prepare students for a world of potential oppression by oppressing them.
Oh, what a disgrace, to see the human race, in a rat race.
youtu.be/QSHyZ6bGGjs?si=_5vC3V…
Don't forget your historyKnow your destinyIn the abundance of waterThe fool is thirstyRat race, rat race, rat race!Rat race!Oh, it's a disgraceTo see the human-raceIn a rat race, rat race!You got the horse raceYou got the dog raceYou got the human-raceBut this is a rat race, rat race!
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Rat Race Lyrics
Some teachers say, “Life is hard and full of insult. We must prepare children to cope with it by giving them a taste of insult in school.” It is true that modern life is often like a rat race. People struggle to be first in line; they push, wrestle, insult, and lie.Do we want to prepare children for such life? No. On the contrary. We need to tell children that rat races are not good for people. We want school to be not a replica of, but an alternative to, raw reality. Such a school needs teachers with sophisticated sensitivity and effortless empathy.
Observation: The more that someone emphasizes the need to “prepare kids for the real world,” the less likely it is that he or she will focus on preparing kids to improve that world.
Table of Contents
- Better Get Used to It
- Conditionality, Scarcity, and Deprivation
- Vertical Justifications
- We Have Normalised Violence
- Disrupt This Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Further Reading
Better Get Used to It
Almost by definition, the BGUTI defense ignores developmental differences.Getting Hit on the Head Lessons (#) – Alfie Kohn
BGUTI actually takes two forms. The positive version holds that it’s beneficial for children to have unpleasant experiences of the type they’ll presumably encounter later. The negative version says that the absence of unpleasant experiences—or the presence of experiences that are “unrealistically” supportive or reassuring—is harmful. Thus, if children are spared from having to do things that cause them anxiety, if they’re permitted to revise and resubmit a school assignment without penalty or introduced to cooperative games (where the point is to accomplish something together rather than trying to defeat one another), a typical response is “That’s not how things work in the real world!”
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting (p. 88). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
But let’s take a step back and ponder that phrase “subject kids to unpleasant experiences” in more general terms. We often hear an argument that runs as follows: If adults allow (or perhaps even require) children to play a game in which the point is to slam a ball at someone before he or she can get out of the way, or hand out zeroes to underscore a child’s academic failure, or demand that most young athletes go home without even a consolation prize (in order to impress upon them the difference between them and the winners), well, sure, they might feel lousy—about themselves, about the people around them, and about life itself—but that’s the point. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the sooner they learn that, the better they’ll be at dealing with it.
The corollary claim is that if we intervene to relieve the pain, if we celebrate all the players for their effort, then we’d just be coddling them and giving them false hopes. A little thanks-for-playing trophy might allow them to forget, or avoid truly absorbing, the fact that they lost. Then they might overestimate their own competence and fall apart later in life when they learn the truth about themselves (or about the harshness of life). We do them no favors by sheltering them from the fact of their own inadequacy or from the cruelty that awaits them when they’re older.
That’s why a teacher-blogger had no reservations about describing herself as coercive, insisting her approach is justified because, first, “the role of school is inherently to prepare students for adulthood,” and second, “when we become adults, life itself is coercive by nature. Most everything we do, we do with some amount of coercion present, in one form or another.”18 Now take this logic one more step. If children are going to have teachers who coerce them, then parents should start coercing them even before they start school. One parenting author offers the cautionary tale of a boy who was distressed when his preschool teacher punished him; the fault, according to the author, lay with his parents who hadn’t “prepared him for the real world” by punishing him earlier.19
In sum, the best way to get children ready for the painful things that may happen to them later is to make sure they experience plenty of pain while they’re young.
When the premise is spelled out so bluntly, it sounds ridiculous. But that summary captures a mindset that is widely accepted and applied. I call it BGUTI (rhymes with duty), which is the acronym of Better Get Used To It. It brings to mind a Monty Python sketch that featured “getting hit on the head” lessons. When the student recoils and cries out from the pain, the instructor says, “No, no, no. Hold your head like this, then go, ‘Waaah!’ Try it again”—and gives him another smack. Presumably this is extremely useful training . . . for future experiences of getting hit on the head.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (pp. 86-87). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
youtu.be/VT15xsxfzSo?si=2eul8-…
Regardless of the experiences that might be found among certain individuals, though, to endorse BGUTI is a way of saying to a child, “Your objections don’t count. Your unhappiness doesn’t matter. Suck it up.” (This attitude is made strikingly explicit with posters and buttons that feature a diagonal red slash through the word whining.)24 People who adopt this perspective are usually on top, issuing directives, not on the bottom being directed. “Learn to live with it because there’s more coming later” can be rationalized as being in the best interests of those on the receiving end, but it may just mean “Do it because I said so.” It functions as a tool to ensure compliance, which has the effect of cementing the power of those offering this advice.Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (p. 115). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Conditionality, Scarcity, and Deprivation
Behind the claim that rewards are required to motivate people is a commitment to conditionality. Behind the claim that competition produces excellence is a commitment to scarcity. And behind the claim that failure or unhappiness offers useful preparation is a commitment to deprivation.Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting (pp. 102-103). Hachette Books.
Conversely, no matter how high the quality of students’ thinking, from this perspective we’ve abandoned our commitment to excellence if a lot of those students receive A’s. This attitude perfectly captures the scarcity mentality, the assumption that education, like life itself, is a race in which most cannot prevail. Once again, that’s not based on the reality that everyone can’t win but on an ideology that confuses succeeding with winning.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting (p. 113). Hachette Books.
Alongside conditionality and scarcity we find the ideological engine behind BGUTI—namely, a determination to make sure that things aren’t too easy for kids. The premise here is not only that deprivation, struggle, and sacrifice are useful preparation for life’s hardships, but that there’s simply something objectionable about sparing kids from having to cope with deprivation, struggle, and sacrifice.22
I’m reminded of a famous ad campaign to sell Listerine mouthwash, which was based on the assumption that because it tasted vile, it obviously had to work well. The flip side of this way of thinking is that we ought to be wary of anything that’s too appealing. “Feel-good” and “touchy-feely” have become all-purpose epithets to disparage whatever seems suspiciously pleasurable. This is particularly true in education, where these terms are often applied to authentic ways of evaluating learning (in place of standardized tests), a course of study that emphasizes creativity (rather than the memorization of facts), and having students learn in cooperative groups (instead of alone or against one another).
Here, again, evidence that such practices are more effective may simply be waved aside. If something is enjoyable, that’s reason enough to describe it as touchy-feely and deem it unworthy of consideration. Progressive educators may make a case for creating a more engaging curriculum or for bringing kids in on making decisions, only to be informed rather huffily that life isn’t always going to be interesting (or responsive to kids’ preferences), and students had better learn to deal with that fact, like it or not.
“Like it or not,” in fact, is a favorite phrase of people who think this way. Another one begins “It’s time they learned that . . . ”—the implication being that children should be introduced to frustration and unhappiness without delay. There’s work to be done! Life isn’t supposed to be fun and games! Self-denial—whose adherents generally presume to deny others as well—is closely connected to fear of pleasure, redemption through suffering, and fury at anyone who coddles or indulges children. H. L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism seems apt here: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Sometimes one suspects that the tacit message from such traditionalists is: “I don’t get everything I want—why should they?” The educator John Holt once remarked that if people really felt that life was “nothing but drudgery, an endless list of dreary duties,” one would hope they might “say, in effect, ‘I have somehow missed the chance to put much joy and meaning into my own life; please educate my children so that they will do better.’”23 Is our primary goal to help kids take delight in learning, or is it to train them to do what they’re told, even if (or especially if) those things are unpleasant?
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child (pp. 113-114). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Vertical Justifications
This kind of reasoning is especially popular where curriculum is concerned. Even if a lesson provides little intellectual benefit, students may have to suffer through it anyway because someone decided it will get them ready for what they’re going to face in the next grade. Lilian Katz, a specialist in early childhood education, refers to this as “vertical relevance,” and she contrasts it with the horizontal kind in which students’ learning is meaningful to them at the time because it connects to some other aspect of their lives.Vertical justifications are not confined to the primary grades, however. Countless middle school math teachers spend their days reviewing facts and algorithms, not because this is the best way to promote understanding or spark interest, but solely because students will be expected to know this stuff when they get to high school. Even good teachers routinely engage in bad instruction lest their kids be unprepared when more bad instruction comes their way.
In addition to forcing educators to teach too much too early, the current Tougher Standards craze has likewise emphasized a vertical rationale – in part because of its reliance on testing. Here, too, we find that “getting them ready” is sufficient reason for doing what would otherwise be seen as unreasonable. Child development experts are nearly unanimous in denouncing the use of standardized testing with young children. One Iowa principal conceded that many teachers, too, consider it “insane” to subject first graders to a 4½-hour test. However, she adds, “they need to get used to it” – an imperative that trumps all objections. In fact, why wait until first grade? A principal in California uses the identical phrase to justify testing kindergarteners: “Our philosophy is, the sooner we start giving these students tests like the Stanford 9, the sooner they’ll get used to it.”
We Have Normalised Violence
We have normalised violence against Black people in this country. So normal is this violence that instead of fighting a government that enables the creation of such violent and debilitating conditions for a Black child, we want to talk instead about how Black CHILDREN must just work hard, just endure the pain of poverty, the pain of neglect, the pain of being dehumanised, the pain of being second-class citizens in their own country, and they will be fine. We want to measure the strength of Black CHILDREN by how much pain and suffering they can take without breaking. Suffering is normal to us. We even romanticise it. That distinction is only truly meaningful because the student suffered to have it. We applaud our children for surviving a ruthless system as if it is an initiation into being a functional human-being, when in reality, it creates Black adults who spend their entire lives recovering from their childhoods (and often failing).This violence that defines Black lives in our country is not normal and we must stop normalising it.
Disrupt This Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
But people don’t really get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. In fact, it is experience with success and unconditional acceptance that help one to deal constructively with later deprivation. Imposing competition or standardized tests or homework on children just because other people will do the same to them when they’re older is about as sensible as saying that, because there are lots of carcinogens in the environment, we should feed kids as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they’re small to get them ready.Getting Hit on the Head Lessons (#) – Alfie Kohn
“You’d better get used to it” not only assumes that life is pretty unpleasant, but that we ought not to bother trying to change the things that make it unpleasant. Rather than working to improve our schools, or other institutions, we should just get students ready for whatever is to come. Thus, a middle school whose primary mission is to prepare students for a dysfunctional high school environment soon comes to resemble that high school. Not only does the middle school fail to live up to its potential, but an opportunity has been lost to create a constituency for better secondary education. Likewise, when an entire generation comes to regard rewards and punishments, or rating and ranking, as “the way life works,” rather than as practices that happen to define our society at this moment in history, their critical sensibilities are stillborn. Debatable policies are never debated. BGUTI becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Getting Hit on the Head Lessons (#) – Alfie Kohn
I’d like to propose a different response: Encourage young people to focus on the needs and rights of others, to examine the practices and institutions that get in the way of making everyone’s lives better, to summon the courage to question what one is told and be willing to break the rules sometimes.
Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting (p. 178). Hachette Books.
If a practice can’t be justified on its own terms, then the task for children and adults alike isn’t to get used to it, but to question, to challenge, and, if necessary, to resist.
Further Reading
Read more about how “coddling” vs. “preparing for the real world” is bad framing on our “Coddle” glossary page.
#coddle #education #oppression
Bob Marley & the Wailers - Rat Race (Live in Exeter 1976)
EM BREVE um novo site para você!!www.reggaeraiz.com.brYouTube
Conquering Gaze from Nowhere: Meritocracy Myths, Marked Bodies, and Spoiled Identities
The interpretation of objectivity as neutral does not allow for participation or stances. This uninvolved, uninvested approach implies “a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988). In many ways, claims of objectivity allow one to “represent while escaping representation” (Haraway 1988) and mimics the construction of Whiteness2 in the racialization of marginalized peoples (Battey and Leyva 2016; Guess 2006). Indeed, there is extensive evidence suggesting that STEM cultural norms are traditionally White, masculine, heteronormative and able-bodied (Atchison and Libarkin 2016; Chambers 2017; Eisenhart and Finkel 1998; Johnson 2001; Nespor 1994; Seymour and Hewitt 1997; Traweek 1988). Thus, while purporting to be a neutral application of a generic protocol, science-and STEM more broadly-has a distinct set of cultures that governs legitimate membership and acceptable behaviors. The concept of a meritocracy is often used to justify who succeeds in STEM cultures. However, far from “leveling the playing field”, meritocracies exist in cultural systems that prioritize people who have, or to a lesser extent closely emulate, these traits. Success in science, then, tends to privilege cultural traits associated with the above identities and often marginalizes scientists who can not or will not perform these identities. This introduces structural inequities in the pursuit of science that align with social manifestations of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia and ableism (Cech and Pham 2017; Wilder 2014).
I love that paragraph on objectivity and meritocracy. It resonates with my experiences of meritocracy myth objectivity in STEM, big tech, Silicon Valley, open source, and rationalist communities. I bought a copy of Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” to get “a conquering gaze from nowhere” and “represent while escaping representation” in context.
I would insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the un-marked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.
That requires some unpacking, but really gets to the heart of it. The “power to see and not be seen” comes up in journalism regarding any reporter reporting on their own community. It comes up in autism research regarding autistic autism researchers and in conversations between autistic parents and parents of autistics.
twitter.com/transscribe/status…
twitter.com/transscribe/status…
Haraway’s “marked bodies” reminds me of “spoiled identities” and the masking required to fit into “cultural systems that prioritize people who have, or to a lesser extent closely emulate, these traits.”
With a pathologized status comes the experience of stigma, dehumanization, and marginalization. Stigma refers to the possession of an attribute that marks persons as disgraced or ‘‘discreditable,’’ marking their identity as ‘‘spoiled.’’ Stigmatized persons may attempt to conceal these spoiled aspects of their identity from others, attempting to ‘‘pass’’ as normal. Investigation of ‘‘passing’’ and ‘‘concealment’’ has been explored in depth in other stigmatized populations; however, the application of stigma in autism research is a relatively new endeavor. Stigma impacts both on how an individual is viewed and treated by others and how that treatment is internalized and interacts with one’s identity.
Those “who can not or will not perform these identities” are marginalized, and those who can are exhausted. Those who attempt to advocate for themselves are discredited by the conquering gaze.
Meritocracy is a myth.
Masking for a false meritocracy is exhausting.
The “objectivity as neutral” conceit of the “conquering gaze from nowhere” leads to discrediting marginalized people and, in turn, to some “bloody regressive politics”, as we saw with New Atheism.
From my perspective, though, the deepest of the rifts was the emerging anti-feminist wing and the active neglect of social justice issues.I realized it’s destination was where it is now: a shambles of alt-right memes and dishonest hucksters mangling science to promote racism, sexism, and bloody regressive politics.
Via:
twitter.com/13adh13/status/140…
Further reading,
stimpunks.org/glossary/objecti…
stimpunks.org/glossary/meritoc…
Defining the Flow—Using an Intersectional Scientific Methodology to Construct a VanguardSTEM Hyperspace
#VanguardSTEM is an online community and platform that centers the experiences of women, girls, and non-binary people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.MDPI
This is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for.
This is not a time to be dismayed.This is punk rock time, this is what Joe Strummer trained you for.
It is now time to go. You’re a good person. That means more now than ever.
Henry Rollins, @this.is.radio.clash • sound on 🔊 • Threads
instagram.com/losangelespunkro…
It was Strummer’s politically charged lyrics that helped bring punk to the masses. Calling out social injustices and giving a voice to the struggles of the working class, his lyrics struck a chord with legions of fans and the press alike, with Rolling Stone calling The Clash “the greatest rock & roll band in the world”.He once famously said, “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world.” And through his art Strummer played his part in shaping the musical landscape of the world and with it left an unrivaled and timeless legacy.
This is a public service announcement… with guitar!
Know Your Rights, The Clash
You have the right to food moneyProviding of course youDon't mind a littleInvestigation, humiliationAnd if you cross your fingersRehabilitationKnow your rightsThese are your rightsKnow Your Rights by The Clash
Disability systems rely on artificial economies of scarcity. Programs are underfunded, so caregivers, teachers, social workers, and disabled people themselves are all pushed to project their needs as necessary and virtuous.
youtu.be/krl-2hgFrJU?si=nHtErM…
This is radio clash using aural ammunition
This is radio clash can we get that world to listen?The Clash – This Is Radio Clash Lyrics
If we have learned one thing from the civil rights movement in the U.S., it’s that when others speak for you, you lose.
When they kick at your front doorHow you gonna come?With your hands on your headOr on the trigger of your gun?When the law break inHow you gonna go?Shot down on the pavementOr waiting in death row?
The Clash – The Guns of Brixton Lyrics
youtu.be/JcW8VNwYvL0?si=_fXFDH…
We are weird. We are different. That shouldn’t be a crime, but in our #CultOfCompliance societies, being different will get you interrogated, beaten, jailed, and killed.The receipts are endless.
We are schooled to act as neurotypical as possible to avoid triggering police escalation. We have to defy our neurologies to avoid deadly conflict.
Police profiling is ableist and ignorant pseudoscience that we must mask against to avoid interaction.This act of masking in the face of imminent violence is, for the most part, impossible to maintain. We have to “just take it”, but it’s hard.
The Cult of Compliance and the Policing of the Norm – Stimpunks Foundation
Revolution rockYeah so, get that cheese grater goingAgainst the grainsWearin' me downPressure increaseEverybody!Revolution Rock by The Clash
Know your rightsThese are your rights
The Clash
Know Your Rights, These Are Your Rights
We can help you know your rights and advocate for yourself. Here are some general resources and US-specific resources.
- The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 – Car Autism Roadmap – carautismroadmap.org/the-ameri…
- Job Accommodation Network – askjan.org/
- Inclusive Schools Network – inclusiveschools.org/
- Wrightslaw Special Education Law and Advocacy – wrightslaw.com/
- Olmstead Self-Assessment – olmsteadrights.org/self-helpto…
- How to Make a Supported Decision-Making Agreement – ACLU – aclu.org/other/how-make-suppor…
- National Disability Rights Network – ndrn.org/about/ndrn-member-age…
- Information on the ADA – ada.gov/
- International Disability Alliance – internationaldisabilityallianc…
- International Disability Rights – Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund – dredf.org/legal-advocacy/inter…
Resources – Welcome to the Autistic Community
We have worked together for many years, and we made the disability rights movement. The disability rights movement is when disabled people fight back against ableism. We work to change society to be better for disabled people, and fight for our rights as people with disabilities.
Self-advocacy isn’t just speaking up for yourself. It can also mean speaking up for your whole community. The self-advocacy movement is when we all speak up together. The self-advocacy movement is part of the disability rights movement, where people with intellectual and developmental disabilities fight for our rights.
We still have a long way to go, since disabled people still get treated unfairly. We can’t always choose where we live or what help we get. We don’t always have the right to vote. We might not get to choose how we want to spend our money, or have control over who cares for us. But we are still fighting for our rights.
Welcome to the Autistic Community
A motto of the self-advocacy movement is “Nothing About Us, Without Us!”. Lots of people talk about us without letting us talk. We should always be part of the conversation, and be in charge of our lives.
- Pacific Alliance on Disability Self-Advocacy (PADSA) Resources
- Welcome to the Autistic Community
- Accessing Home and Community-Based Services: A Guide for Self Advocates
- The Right to Make Choices: International Laws and Decision-Making by People with Disabilities (Easy Read and Families versions)
- Getting and Advocating for Community-Based Housing
- Voting Resources
- AutismAndHealth.org: Primary Care Resources for Adults on the Autism Spectrum and their Primary Care Providers
- SARTAC: Self Advocacy Resource and Technical Assistance Center
- Everybody Communicates: Toolkit for Accessing Communication Assessments, Funding and Accommodations
Via: Resource Library – Autistic Self Advocacy Network
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network seeks to advance the principles of the disability rights movement with regard to autism. ASAN believes that the goal of autism advocacy should be a world in which autistic people enjoy equal access, rights, and opportunities. We work to empower autistic people across the world to take control of our own lives and the future of our common community, and seek to organize the autistic community to ensure our voices are heard in the national conversation about us. Nothing About Us, Without Us!Autistic Self Advocacy Network
People with disabilities need to make policies ourselves.
We should get to use our stories to help change the world.
Nothing about us, without us!SHARING YOUR STORY FOR A POLITICAL PURPOSE
In a perfect world, we would all be guided by the presumption of competence, not just in regard to disability but in all human interaction. But we do not live in a perfect world. In the real world, no matter what skills I acquire—be they social, emotional, physical, or educational—there will be a sizable number of people who will presume me to be incompetent. Brace me for it. Make sure I know my rights. Let me know over and over again that I am so much more than the box some small-minded person wishes to fit me into. Practice with me the interactive tools I need to stand up in the face of those who do not believe in me.
Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network. Sincerely, Your Autistic Child (p. 6). Beacon Press.
Name the systems of power.
- Neoliberalism
- Respectability Politics
- W.E.I.R.D.
- Meritocracy Myth
- Policing
- Predatory Inclusion
- Burnout
- STEM
- Ableism
- Harm Reduction Theater
- Conservatism
- Resentment
- Southern Strategy
- Lost Cause
- Segregationist Discourse
- Meritocracy Myth
- Minority Stress
- Policing
- Toxic Masculinity
- Bodily Autonomy
- Biological Essentialism
- Stigma
- Shame
- Ableism
- Precarity
- Oligarchy
- Sadopopulism
- Rot Economy
- Fantasy Economy
- Metric Fixation
- Objectivity
- When you measure include the measurer.
- Scientism
- Epistemic Injustice
- Scientific Essentialism
- Fundamental Attribution Error
- Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
- Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
- Tech Ethics
- Techno-solutionism
- Technoableism
- Algorithm
- Roaming Autodidact
- Enshittification
- Disability Dongle
- Artificial Intelligence
- Luddite Sensibilities
- Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
- Ableism
- Neuronormativity
- Pathology Paradigm
- Behaviorism
- Deficit Ideology
- Empire of Normality
- Sameness-Based Fairness
- ”Better get used to it.”
- Inspiration Exploitation
- School-Induced Anxiety
- Toxic Positivity
- Burnout
- The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
- Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
- We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
- 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
- Double Empathy Problem
- Double Empathy Extreme Problem
- Triple Empathy Problem
- Harm Reduction Theater
Do not be the oppressor.
- Name the systems of power.
- The lens of power can really help us see what’s going on.
- Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems.
- Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.
- Every single one of us has a moral obligation to use whatever resources we have — time, money, knowledge, skills, emotional energy, access to physical resources — … in service of justice, and fighting against injustice and oppression and violence in all of its forms, structural and individual, subtle and overt.
- Inclusivity involves looking at a space and seeing all the ways it’s set up to benefit those in power. And then redesigning and resetting that space to support, affirm, and amplify marginalized folks.
- All struggles are essentially power struggles.
- Do not be the oppressor.
- People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.
But you can be thunderous in your own life, and being cool to the eight people around you? It rubs off. Goodness is viral.Henry Rollins
Don’t forget you’re alive.
Joe Strummer
#punk
Psychiatric Retraumatization: A Conversation About Trauma and Madness in Mental Health Services - Mad In America
A conversation with Noël Hunter about her new book, which offers an insightful critique of mental health’s diagnostic and treatment irrationalities.Bruce Levine, PhD (Mad In America)
Coach’s Corner: Hanover Wildcats (Boys) – 1/30/2025
anchor.fm/s/b3d88700/podcast/p…
Coach’s Corner: Hanover Wildcats (Boys) – 1/30/2025
