I know a lot of you guys prefer written content so I linked to the blog in the OP, but here's the video (it's 35 minutes long and ranty with no chapters): youtu.be/RbvmtnWe2cw
What are the pros and cons of using Named vs Anonymous volumes in Docker for self-hosting?
I've always used "regular" Anonymous volumes, and that's what is usually in official docker-compose.yml examples for various apps:
volumes:
- ./myAppDataFolder:/data
where myAppDataFolder/ is in the same folder as the docker-compose.yml file.
As a self-hoster I find this neat and tidy; my docker folder has a subfolder for each app. Each app folder has a docker-compose.yml, .env and one or more data-folders. I version-control the compose files, and back up the data folders.
However some apps have docker-compose.yml examples using named volumes:
I tried googling the why of named volumes, but most answers were talking about things that sounded very enterprise'y, docker swarms, and how all state information should be stored in "the database" so you shouldnt need to ever touch the actual files backing the volume for any container.
So to summarize: Named volumes, why? Or why not? What are your preferences? Given the context that we are self-hosting, and not running huge enterprise clusters.
Another interesting observation is that linux marketshare in India has been falling in the last months since the peak above 17% in last September no 8,79% in January. Does anyone know something about what happened in there?
I've inherited a systemd service and it uses BindReadOnlyPaths to make certain paths available to the service (doc)
A bind mount makes a particular file or directory available at an additional place in the unit's view of the file system. Any bind mounts created with this option are specific to the unit, and are not visible in the host's mount table.
The service is running using a specific user and I would like the user to access those read-only paths outside of the service. Is there an possibility within systemd that would allow me to do that?
I have been using Grisbi for at least 15 years now to get around personal finances/expense tracking.
It is a very basic tool that tracks expenses, clearances, etc… Nothing crazy but it helps a lot to follow your budget, keep things on track. Everything is backed up through a file that I sync with Nextcloud.
For some reasons, I won’t be able to use it as easily in the coming months (new restrictions on my work laptop) so I’m looking for a Web-based selfhost-friendly alternative. I’ve already narrowed it down to 3: * Firefly III which looks pretty nice (and PHP is kind of a plus in my case) * Actual Budget which looks pretty cool too * Kresus much more barebone but might get the job done eventually
Do you have some feedback on any of those applications? Do you know any other alternatives worth looking at? Have you had the same kind of experience going from Gnucash/Grisbi/other to Web-based app?
The Road to Neuronormative Domination: Thorndike won, Dewey lost. Skinner won, Papert lost.
…one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d propose an addendum to this too: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.
Principles of progressivism are timeless pathways that support children to take their place in a democratic society by engaging them actively. This can only happen when educators see value in understanding childhood as they support cognitive, social‐emotional, and physical development, and foster empathy and relationships.
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.
Skinner won; Papert lost. Oh, I can hear the complaints I’ll get on social media already: what about maker-spaces? What about Lego Mindstorms? What about PBL?
I maintain, even in the face of all the learn-to-code brouhaha that multiple choice tests have triumphed over democratically-oriented inquiry. Indeed, clicking on things these days seems to increasingly be redefined as a kind of “active” or “personalized” learning.
Now, I’m not a fan of B. F. Skinner. I find his ideas of radical behaviorism to be rather abhorrent. Freedom and agency – something Skinner did not believe existed – matter to me philosophically, politically. That being said, having spent the last six months or so reading and thinking about the guy almost non-stop, I’m prepared to make the argument that he is, in fact, one of the most important theorists of the 21st century.
“Wait,” you might say, “the man died in 1990.” “Doesn’t matter,” I’d respond. His work remains incredibly relevant, and perhaps insidiously so, since many people have been convinced by the story that psychology textbooks like to tell: that his theories of behaviorism are outmoded due to the rise of cognitive science. Or perhaps folks have been convinced by a story that I worry I might have fallen for and repeated myself: that Skinner’s theories of social and behavioral control were trounced thanks in part to a particularly vicious book review of his last major work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a book review penned by Noam Chomsky in 1971. “As to its social implications,” Chomsky wrote. “Skinner’s science of human behavior, being quite vacuous, is as congenial to the libertarian as to the fascist.”
Like Edward Thorndike – and arguably inspired by Edward Thorndike (or at least by other behaviorists working in the field of what was, at the time, quite a new discipline) – Skinner worked in his laboratory with animals (at first rats, then briefly squirrels, and then most famously pigeons) in order to develop techniques to control behavior.
I would argue, in total seriousness, that one of the places that Skinnerism thrives today is in computing technologies, particularly in “social” technologies. This, despite the field’s insistence that its development is a result, in part, of the cognitive turn that supposedly displaced behaviorism.
These are “technologies of behavior” that we can trace back to Skinner – perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly due to Skinner’s continual engagement with the popular press. His fame and his notoriety. Behavioral management – and specifically through operant conditioning – remains a staple of child rearing and pet training. It is at the core of one of the most popular ed-tech apps currently on the market, ClassDojo. Behaviorism also underscores the idea that how we behave and data about how we behave when we click can give programmers insight into how to alter their software and into what we’re thinking.
If we look more broadly – and Skinner surely did – these sorts of technologies of behavior don’t simply work to train and condition individuals; many technologies of behavior are part of a broader attempt to reshape society. “For your own good,” the engineers try to reassure us. “For the good of the world.”
Whatever function “behaviorism” may have served in the past, it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on “legitimate” theory construction, and there is no reason why someone who investigates man and society should accept the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists would surely not tolerate and that condemn any intellectual pursuit to insignificance.
In fact, Skinnerian translation, which is easily employed by anyone, leads to a significant loss of precision, for the simple reason that the full range of terms for the description and evaluation of behavior, attitude, opinion, and so on, must be “translated” into the impoverished system of terminology borrowed from the laboratory (and deprived of its meaning in transition).
In fact, there is nothing in Skinner’s approach that is incompatible with a police state in which rigid laws are enforced by people who are themselves subject to them and the threat of dire punishment hangs over all.
In general, Skinner’s conception of science is very odd. Not only do his a priori methodological assumptions rule out all but the most trivial scientific theories; he is, furthermore, given to strange pronouncements such as the assertion that “the laws of science are descriptions of contingencies of reinforcement” (p. 189) — which I happily leave to others to decode.
Worse, we discover that Skinner’s a priori limitations on “scientific” inquiry make it impossible for him even to formulate the relevant concepts, let alone investigate them.
Skinner does not attempt to meet this criticism by presenting some relevant results that are not a monumental triviality. He is unable to perceive that objection to his “scientific picture of man” derives not from “extinction” of certain behavior or opposition to science, but from an ability to distinguish science from triviality and obvious error.
Skinner does not comprehend the basic criticism: when his formulations are interpreted literally, they are clearly false, and when these assertions are interpreted in his characteristic vague and metaphorical way, they are merely a poor substitute for ordinary usage.
At this point an annoying, though obvious, question intrudes. If Skinner’s thesis is false, then there is no point in his having written the book or our reading it. But if his thesis is true, then there is also no point in his having written the book or our reading it. For the only point could be to modify behavior, and behavior, according to the thesis, is entirely controlled by arrangement of reinforcers. Therefore reading the book can modify behavior only if it is a reinforcer, that is, if reading the book will increase the probability of the behavior that led to reading the book (assuming an appropriate state of deprivation). At this point, we seem to be reduced to gibberish.
Skinner’s “science of behavior” is irrelevant: the thesis of the book is either false (if we use terminology in its technical sense) or empty (if we do not).
But the thesis, in so far as it is at all clear, is without empirical support, and in fact may even be empty, as we have seen in discussing “probability of response” and persuasion. Skinner is left with no coherent criticism of the “literature of freedom and dignity.”
Skinner’s teaching machine might look terribly out-of-date, but I’d argue that this is the history that still shapes so much of what we see today. Self-paced learning, gamification, an emphasis on real-time or near-real-time corrections. No doubt, ed-tech today draws quite heavily on Skinner’s ideas because Skinner (and his fellow education psychologist Edward Thorndike) has been so influential in how we view teaching and learning and how we view schooling.
So much B. F. Skinner. So little Seymour Papert. So little Alan Kay.
I’d argue too that this isn’t just about education technology. There’s so much Skinner and so little Kay in “mainstream” technology too.
Watters, Audrey. The Monsters of Education Technology (p. 10).
Thorndike
Edward L. Thorndike was an educational psychology professor at Columbia University who developed his theory of learning based on his research on animal behavior – perhaps you’ve heard of his idea of the “learning curve,” the time it took for animals to escape his puzzle box after multiple tries. And John Dewey was a philosopher whose work at the University of Chicago Lab School was deeply connected with that of other social reformers in Chicago – Jane Addams and Hull House, for example. Dewey was committed to educational inquiry as part of democratic practices of community; Thorndike’s work, on the other hand, happened largely in the lab but helped to stimulate the growing science and business of surveying and measuring and testing students in the early twentieth century. You can think of the victory that Condliffe Lagemann speaks of, in part, as the triumph of multiple choice testing over project-based inquiry.
Skinner was hardly the first to use animals in psychological experiments that sought to understand how the learning process works. Several decades earlier, for his dissertation research, Edward Thorndike had built a “puzzle box” in which an animal had to push a lever in order to open a door and escape (again, often rewarded with food for successfully completing the “puzzle”). Thorndike measured how quickly animals figured out how to get out of the box after being placed in it again and again and again – their “learning curve.”
We have in the puzzle box and in the Skinner Box the origins of education technology – some of the very earliest “teaching machines” – just as we have in the work of Thorndike and Skinner, the foundations of educational psychology and, as Lagemann has argued, of many of our educational practices still today. (In addition to developing the puzzle box, Thorndike also developed prototypes for what we know now as the multiple choice test.)
Learning, according to Skinner and Thorndike, is about behavior – about reinforcing those behaviors (knowledge, answers) that educators deem “correct.”
Education technology has roots in war as well – in Thorndike’s development of standardized testing for World War I recruits, in the Department of Defense’s development of SCORM and in its use of computer-based training simulations. Simon Ramo, “the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile,” is also the oldest person to ever receive a patent – yes, in education technology – “for any person, business, or entity seeking information to ensure that information being presented is useful by being understood.”
The pigeon. The object of technological experimentation, manipulation, and control, weaponized.
The pigeon. The child. The object of ed-tech.
The pigeon. The history of the future of education technology.
Cubberley and his co-conspirators invented the schools we all live with and struggle with. This struggle is fought in classrooms, corridors, offices, books, at conferences, and on university campuses.
“Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”
— Ellwood Cubberley’s dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University (Wikipedia contributors, 2024a)
Over a century ago, Ellwood Patterson Cubberley built a fictitious history of American education. He worked within a worldview conflating Calvinist orthodoxy, age-of-robber-baron capitalism, and eugenics with democracy, equality, and opportunity. Unless we understand the beliefs behind the design of our public education system and the beliefs that keep the school day in thrall to Cubberley’s myth, we can never build the schools our children need.
In his research and writing, Papert demonstrated a prescience about the impact on learning of educational accountability models established in the late twentieth century. In the nation’s classrooms, he found compliance‐driven learning environments that stripped curiosity, creativity, engagement, and passion‐driven learning from young people as well as from the educators who taught at dominant teaching walls. By 2010, Papert’s perspective became the view of many parents and educators experiencing the negative learning after‐effects of children passing and failing millions of standardized tests. Foreseen by Papert, the most disastrous result of compliance‐driven schooling that began with Cubberley and that was exacerbated by the No Child Left Behind Act has been that children have not thrived as creative and critical thinkers, indeed, as agents of their own learning, inside America’s schools (Kaufman 2017).
What education has done literally to almost all kids now, everywhere across the country, is communicate through its structures that if a learner can’t do the work in class, we’ll give that student twice the amount of English and math in a school day, more by far any other content area, which includes science and social studies – and particularly any sort of art or physical education. That’s called double blocking. Kids in remedial classes find themselves doing twice as many worksheets, listening to twice as many lectures, and taking twice as many tests because a single block of math and/or reading didn’t work. So, once again, educators double down on compliance‐driven schooling. That’s the design of the institution – it’s not conspiratorial. This exists publicly as the strategy of choice if a student is struggling in school. Significant literature and historical research document how and why this was set in motion a long time ago. President Woodrow Wilson (Wilson 1909) and then Ellwood Cubberley (Cubberley 1919) from Stanford both basically said in the early twentieth century that we only need a small group of people to get a liberal education, and a much bigger group to forego the privilege of a liberal education. Unfortunately, for many people today that’s still okay. But it’s not okay with us. The district mission to create an inclusive community of learners and learning is no longer limited to just what we do in our own schools, but rather has expanded to influence equity and access beyond our schools. This has occurred through purposeful connectivity of our educators and learners with others across our district’s 25 schools as well as to other states and even countries. Our efforts are different and unique here because educators are working to convert a public school system that over years and years wasn’t designed for what we are doing now to empower children. We’re working – against rules and excuses – to convert an institution to a progressive model of education grounded in an “all means all” philosophy when it comes to every child participating in rich, experiential learning.
At the same time that America’s schools were being shaped by the factory work of the Machine Age, the leading educational progressive John Dewey challenged the assumptions of the early twentieth century and the scientific management beliefs exemplified by the work of Ellwood Cubberley, educator and dean of Stanford College of Education (Trachtenberg 1986). Dewey envisioned another path for learning:
The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these. Thus the teacher becomes a partner in the learning process, guiding students to independently discover meaning within the subject area. (Dewey 1897)
The philosophical frame for learning that John Dewey proposed in the early twentieth century could have taken America’s schools in a different direction, but in the conflict between social and economic construction, economics and, of course, war efforts won out. Schools became their own educational version of the Machine Age driven by measurement, assembly‐line curricula, “cells and bells” design, and obedience by classroom management and corporal punishment. Schools became “cults of efficiency,” pushing children, teachers, and administrators farther and farther apart, each generation of educators selected for their capability to ensure compliance within the hierarchy. World War I and then World War II drove America to fully embrace the efficiency model, as if Henry Ford’s assembly lines hadn’t been enough. The progressive concepts of natural learning, the slower, less efficient, more patient education embedded in Dewey’s model, hit a seemingly evolutionary dead end in public schools by the middle of the twentieth century (Giordano 2005). By 1950 almost all that was left of Dewey’s work were suburban classrooms with sinks and doors to the outside, even as Cubberley’s efficiency model permeated philosophy, policy, and practice within almost all of the nation’s schools:
Our Schools are essentially time‐ and labor‐saving devices, created by us to serve democracy’s needs.
No sector has more responsibility than education to help our nation successfully negotiate a path forward as technological impacts accelerate in this century. However, the school models set up by Stanford University’s Ellwood Cubberley in the early 1900s and that politicians double‐downed on in later educational reforms have changed little in response to changes outside of schools. Many schools today, in reality, still operate using the Second Industrial Revolution model that Cubberley envisioned to educate young learners for adulthood in 1910 (Callahan 1964). And, even as other sectors, both nonprofit and for profit, recognize the need to educate learners entering today’s real world for rapid transitions occurring in the workforce, community life, and home environments, most schools remain a long way away from the schools they must become to serve learners well in this century.
Socol, Ira; Moran, Pam; Ratliff, Chad. Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools (p. 149). Wiley.
Few voices have counteracted Cubberley’s drive to treat children as data points to be measured like widget production on assembly lines. One such voice that we still appreciate today is that of John Dewey, who informed a human‐centric approach to education in the face of Cubberley’s scientific management philosophy.
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.
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.
Ultimately, what all this would lead toward would be Galton’s proposal of the new science of ‘eugenics’ in the 1880s. Initially, it was Galton’s concern with surpassing the average that inspired the key theoretical change underlying what he referred to as the ‘method of statistics by intercomparison’.14 This consisted largely in substituting Quetelet’s mean for the median. The disability historian Lennard Davis has emphasised how it was this shift in statistical method that was used to justify Galton’s attempts to rank individuals and populations from the most to least fit. For while ‘high intelligence in a’ Quetelian ‘normal distribution would simply be an extreme’ and thus undesirable, under a Galtonian ‘system it would become the highest ranked trait’.15 As Galton wrote in 1883, the ‘median value may be accepted as the average’ due to representing not the ideal, but rather the ‘multitude of mediocre values’ between the highest and the lowest abilities.16
It was this shift that allowed Galton to present his newly coined concept of eugenics. He defined eugenics as: ‘the science of improving stock […] to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing’.17 Based on his new methods for ranking individuals and groups, Galton argued that the role of governments should be to improve the average range of successive generations. And thus it was precisely with Galton’s work, as Stephens and Cryle have stressed, that ‘the idea of the application of normal as a cultural practice’ finally emerged.18 In other words, Galton formalised, and provided a veneer of scientific legitimacy to, the informal normalising practices we covered in the previous chapter. It was this that would legitimise a mass expansion of these practices over the following decades – and, as we shall come back to, would in time be used to justify some of the worst atrocities ever committed.
Yet Galton’s influence on psychiatry was in fact highly significant. While he inspired a number of doctors, the most notable to expand Galton’s paradigm was the most prominent of all nineteenth-century German psychiatrists, Emil Kraepelin. Today, Kraepelin is widely credited with developing the biocentric, classificatory approach adopted both in the German psychiatry that dominated during his time before being reborn in the DSM from 1980 onward. His legacy is typically associated with his quest to turn psychiatry into a firmly scientific discipline, continuous with general medicine. In large part, he is taken to have done this through adopting a naturalistic and experimental approach, alongside attention to classifications he sought to map on to biological aetiology. Viewed in the context covered here, however, it would be more accurate to say that Kraepelin – who, in his autobiography, recalled Galton as a ‘fine old gentleman, who stimulated the field of psychology’19 – essentially expanded the scope of Galton’s paradigm.
In other words, what Kraepelin envisioned was expanding the approach Galton had developed to study intelligence. It would now encompass every other aspect of the mind, including as a basis for psychiatry but also for a variety of roles in relation to the shifting needs of capital in education, the workplace, and so forth. The hope was that expanding this method would allow a greater and more specific understanding of a wide range of dysfunctions that could then be treated and controlled.
In turn, for Kraepelin, the ends of psychiatry, and its use of these methods, likewise echoed the Galtonian hope for bio-cultural normalisation and improvement. As Kraepelin put it:
The psychiatric importance of such investigation on the large scale cannot be over-estimated. A mass psychiatry, having at its disposal statistics in their widest scope, must provide the foundations for a science of public mental health – a preventive psychological medicine for combating all those mischiefs that we group under the head of mental degeneracy.22
Part of the worry here, Kraepelin went on, was that ‘an ever-widening stream of inferior stock is mixing itself with our offspring, contributing to the deterioration of the race’.23 Thus, for Kraepelin as for Galton, the concept of the normal mind was utilised precisely because it grounded the broader political project of biological and cultural control.
It was through this underlying framework that Kraepelin began the still ongoing project of dividing up mental disorders into different kinds and levels of subnormal functioning, with a focus on heredity, severity, development, and outcome throughout the lifespan. And in turn this approach was adopted in German psychiatry – which was very much a world leader in the psychiatry of the time – thus allowing a growing number of new classifications to be specified, studied, and controlled.
Indeed, eugenic thinking became so popular among psychiatrists that it was even included in influential textbooks of the time. Most notable here was the psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler, known for coining the terms ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘autism’. In his 1924 Textbook of Psychiatry, Bleuler openly stated his view that the ‘more severely burdened should not propagate themselves’ in case the race would ‘rapidly deteriorate’.24 Thus Kraepelin and his contemporaries expanded the Galtonian paradigm to form the basis for modern psychiatry, while the same metaphysics came to underpin the emerging fields of clinical, abnormal, and developmental psychology.
Dewey’s reply was uncharacteristically blunt and forceful in rejecting Snedden’s arguments, as he deepened and clarified his own vision of vocationalism. It is worth quoting at length, since it defines the stark contrast between the two visions, a contrast that he saw much more clearly than his befuddled opponent.
I would go farther than he is apparently willing to go in holding that education should be vocational, but in the name of a genuinely vocational education I object to the identification of vocation with such trades as can be learned before the age of, say, eighteen or twenty; and to the identification of education with acquisition of specialized skill in the management of machines at the expense of an industrial intelligence based on science and a knowledge of social problems and conditions. I object to regarding as vocational education any training which does not have as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as may be, the masters of their own industrial fate. I have my doubts about theological predestination, but at all events that dogma assigned predestinating power to an omniscient being; and I am utterly opposed to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men, no matter how well intentioned they may be….
Dr. Snedden’s criticisms of my articles seem to me couched in such general terms as not to touch their specific contentions. I argued that a separation of trade education and general education of youth has the inevitable tendency to make both kinds of training narrower, less significant and less effective than the schooling in which the material of traditional education is reorganized to utilize the industrial subject matter – active, scientific and social – of the present-day environment. Dr. Snedden would come nearer to meeting my points if he would indicate how such a separation is going to make education “broader, richer and more effective”….
Apart from light on such specific questions, I am regretfully forced to the conclusion that the difference between us is not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will “adapt” workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it. (1915/1977, pp. 38-39)
But Dewey’s rejoinder had no apparent effect on Snedden, who continued making the same case for a socially efficient and vocationally useful form of education throughout the 1920s and 30s, the only difference being that his arguments grew increasingly extreme and his influence within education grew increasingly weak. More significantly, however, Dewey’s critique of social efficiency also had no significant effect on the direction of American public education, which by the early 1920s was lining up solidly behind the social efficiency vision. Herbert Kliebard (1987, p. 149) put it this way, in commenting on the long-term outcome of the debate, “Needless to say, Snedden’s version with its emphasis on occupational skill training was the ultimate victor in terms of what vocational education became, while Dewey’s ‘industrial intelligence’ in the sense of an acute awareness of what makes an industrial society tick is almost nowhere to be found.” In short, the administrative progressive vision of David Snedden, with its focus on social efficiency and educational utility, defeated the alternative progressive vision of John Dewey, with its focus on social justice and educational engagement.
The narrow form of vocational education was a bust, since the preparation it provided was too narrow and backward-looking to be economically efficient and too complex to be implemented in schools.
He (Dewey) charges that Snedden’s system of “narrow trade training” leads to “social predestination” and argues instead for a broad vision of vocational education that has “as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as may be, the masters of their own industrial fate.”
Dewey had the last word in the debate in The New Republic, and reading both sides today, he comes away from the exchange as the clear winner on points. But if Dewey won the debate, it was Snedden who won the fight to set the broader aims of American education in the twentieth century. The debate was followed quickly by two events that set the tone for educational system for the next 100 years – the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act (1917), establishing a federal program of support for vocational education, and the issuance of the NEA report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918). Both documents reflected key elements of the social efficiency vision that Snedden espoused and Dewey detested. Snedden’s vision has shaped the practice of schooling in the U.S. ever since, whereas Dewey’s more liberal vision has persisted primarily in the rhetoric of educators.
In this paper I seek to answer the question, How could someone as utterly forgettable as David Snedden trounce the great John Dewey in the contest to define the shape and purpose of American education? Drost is circumspect in judging his subject, but two reviewers of his biography of Snedden are less cautious in assessing the educator’s stature. Willis Rudy (1968, p. 171) put it this way: “David Snedden, professor of educational administration, emerges from these pages as the very prototype of the stock pedagogue-philistine figure of modern times, half-educated, anti-intellectual, instinctively hostile to humanistic culture.” Robert L. Church (1969, p. 394) reviewed the Drost book in conjunction with a biography of Edward L. Thorndike titled The Sane Positivist, and in his view, “If Thorndike was a ‘sane positivist,’ perhaps we should brand David Snedden an ‘insane’ one.”
In his response, Bagley rejected both Snedden’s diagnosis of the problem with education and his prescription for a cure. He defended traditional liberal education against the charges made by his opponent, arguing that “The evidence for these sweeping indictments has, as far as I know, never been presented” (p. 162), and he asserted that Snedden’s distinction between education for production and utilization merely reproduced the old discredited distinction between education for gentlemen of leisure and education for workers. At the end he warned about “the danger of social stratification…inherent in separate vocational schools” (p. 170).
He (Dewey) made two main arguments against the vision of vocationalism promoted by people like Snedden: this form of education was politically slanted toward the interests of manufacturers, and it was impractical in application. Noting that, though manufacturers had long provided special skill training to their employees,
It is natural that employers should be desirous of shifting the burden of their preparation to the public tax-levy. There is every reason why the community should not permit them to do so…. Every ground of public policy protests against any use of the public school system which takes for granted the perpetuity of the existing industrial regime, and whose inevitable effect is to perpetuate it, with all its antagonisms of employers and employed, producer and consumer.” (1914/1977, p. 55).
In addition he noted that the very factors that led to the destruction of the apprenticeship system – particularly “the mobility of the laboring population from one mode of machine work to another” (p. 56) – would also make vocational training in specific job skills impractical.
All children can learn because learning is natural; and a good system of education not only seeks to stimulate the learning process but deliberately tries to get out of the way of student learning. The complaints that the pedagogues had about their administrative counterparts in the progressive movement were that the stratified and vocationalized curriculum promoted by the latter would stifle the student’s urge to learn, block student access to a broad range of educational and social opportunities, and thereby reproduce rather than challenge the existing social structure.
In 1964, Paul Goodman forecasted “Two Looming Prospects”:
“the upsurge of a know-nothing fascism of the right.”
“progressive regimentation and brainwashing, on scientific principles, directly toward a fascism-of-the-center, 1984.”
Goodman concluded:
…given the maturing of automation, and the present dominance of the automating spirit in schooling, so that all of life becomes geared to the automatic system, that is where we will land.
The immediate future of our country seems to me to have two looming prospects, both gloomy. If the powers-that-be proceed as stupidly, timidly, and “politically” as they have been doing, there will be a bad breakdown and the upsurge of a know-nothing fascism of the right. Incidentally, let me say that I am profoundly unimpressed by our so-called educational system when, as has happened, Governor Wallace comes from the South as a candidate in Northern states and receives his highest number of votes (in some places a majority) in suburbs that have had the most years of schooling, more than 16.
The other prospect-which, to be frank, seems to me to be the goal of the school-monks themselves— is a progressive regimentation and brainwashing, on scientific principles, directly toward a fascism-of-the-center, 1984. Certainly this is not anybody’s deliberate purpose: but given the maturing of automation, and the present dominance of the automating spirit in schooling, so that all of life becomes geared to the automatic system, that is where we will land.
Therefore in this book I do not choose to be “generous” and “fair.”
For Ellwood Cubberley, the study of education was deeply shaped by eugenics, the science of human improvement through selective reproduction based on ableism and racism.
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.
Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?”
The step-by-step guide to building a Second Brain. Based on 10+ years of research & experiments with organizing our digital lives & improving our productivity.
This map highlights 20 common aspects of monotropic experience.
How many do you experience?
Map of Monotropic ExperiencesMap of Monotropic Experiences Numbered with KeyMap of Monotropic Experiences NumberedMap of Monotropic Experiences Key Created by Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms in collaboration with Stimpunks.
Inspired by the fabulous Map of Procrastination by Gemma Correll, I have created a map of monotropic experiences that reflects the main issues that impact my own life.
Curious to know what you would add or take away from this if you are Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD and resonate with this theory.
Attention Tunnels – Entering flow states – or attention tunnels – is a necessary coping strategy for many of us. Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivation. (Murray)
Penguin Pebbling – “Penguin pebbling” is a little exchange between two people to show that they care and want to build a meaningful connection. (Edgar)
Tendril Theory – When I’m focused on something, my mind sends out a million tendrils of thought, expands into all of the thoughts & feelings. When I need to switch tasks, I must retract all of the tendrils of my mind. This takes some time. (@EisforErin)
Rumination – When your thoughts are all swirly and you just keep chewing on the same thought over and over and you can’t stop thinking about it and it’s distracting you and sometimes even putting you in a really bad mood or making you irritable. (Chipura)
Unmet Needs – Mismatch between the areas we actually receive support, compared to the areas we would ideally like support. (Cassidy, et al)
Rabbit Hole – “Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. (Wikipedia)
Infodumping – Talking a lot about a topic in great detail.
Autistic Rhizome – A growing and evolving network of Autistic communities with no hierarchy or dependence on anothers existence. (Edgar)
Flow States – Entering flow states – or attention tunnels – is a necessary coping strategy for many of us. Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivation. (Murray)
Cavendish Space – Psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction. (Boren)
Meerkat Mode – Heightened state of vigilance and arousal that involves constantly looking for danger and threat. It is more than hyper-arousal, it is an overwhelmed monotropic person desperately looking for a hook into a monotropic flow-state. (Adkin)
Monotropic Time – When absorbed in our special interests or passions it can feel like entering a portal. Normal time can feel like it is dissolving, the outside world may feel like it is melting away. This can be really rejuvenating for the sensory system and help to recharge the bodymind. (Edgar)
Neuronormativity – Neurormativity is a set of norms, standards, expectations and ideals that centre a particular way of functioning as the right way to function. It is the assumption that there is a correct way to exist in this world; a correct way to think, feel, communicate, play, behave and more. (Wise)
Behaviourism – Behaviorism is a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs. There is an ever-growing body of research suggesting that behaviorism is not only harmful to how we learn, but is also oppressive, ableist, and racist. (McNutt)
Double Empathy Problem – The ‘double empathy problem’ refers to the mutual incomprehension that occurs between people of different dispositional outlooks and personal conceptual understandings when attempts are made to communicate meaning. (Milton)
Body Doubling – A “body double” is a person or even pet who is present with us while we work. This provides a gentle form of accountability — their presence serves as a reminder of what we’re supposed to be doing so we’re less likely to get distracted. (McCabe)
Burnout – Autistic burnout is a state of physical and mental fatigue, heightened stress, and diminished capacity to manage life skills, sensory input, and/or social interactions, which comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs. (Raymaker)
Object Permanence – Autistic children have difficulties with their understanding of: what’s here, what’s now, what is permanent, and so on. (Lawson)
Autistic Joy – Autistic joy is one of our favorite things about being autistic. It can be intense as a meltdown, but filled with overwhelming happiness and excitement. When we experience joy, we feel the excited vibrations throughout our bodies. To release the energy, we do a “happy stim.” We will jump up and down, excitedly flap our hands, sometimes even dance. (Blackwater)
Limerence – Limerence is a state of involuntary obsession with another person. The experience of limerence is different from love or lust in that it is based on the uncertainty that the person you desire also desires you. (Psychology Today)
Sensory Experiences – Neurodivergent people are hypersensitive to mindset and environment due to a greater number of neuronal connections. They have both a higher risk for trauma and a large capacity for sensing safety. (Elisabeth)
Unexpected Events – If an autistic person is pulled out of monotropic flow too quickly, it causes our sensory systems to dysregulate. This in turn triggers us into emotional dysregulation, and we quickly find ourselves in a state ranging from uncomfortable, to grumpy, to angry, or even triggered into a meltdown or a shutdown. (Rose)
What is Monotropism?
Monotropism is a theory of autism developed by autistic people, initially by Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson.
Monotropic minds tend to have their attention pulled more strongly towards a smaller number of interests at any given time, leaving fewer resources for other processes. We argue that this can explain nearly all of the features commonly associated with autism, directly or indirectly. However, you do not need to accept it as a general theory of autism in order for it to be a useful description of common autistic experiences and how to work with them.
If we are right, then monotropism is one of the key ideas required for making sense of autism, along with the double empathy problem and neurodiversity. Monotropism makes sense of many autistic experiences at the individual level. The double empathy problem explains the misunderstandings that occur between people who process the world differently, often mistaken for a lack of empathy on the autistic side. Neurodiversity describes the place of autistic people and other ‘neurominorities’ in society.
I'm Sonny and I'm multiply neurodivergent which means I diverge in many, many ways. It isn't just my Autism and ADHD that diverges from neuronormativity but my plurality, my eating differences, my learning differences, my mania, my perception of time…
Updated our “We Are Woven Together” lily pad (featured on front page and elsewhere) with a quote from Radical Intimacy.
Updated Behaviorism why sheet with a quote from a new study and new signatories. Bumped the version to 1.5.
Updated Behaviorism glossary page with a quote from a new study and layout changes.
Published Now. This is our new now page that lists what we’re doing right now.
We’re working on our latest Pebble Board. If you would like to share something on the board (a favorite song, video, photo, fidget, drawing, or any other “Penguin Pebble”), let me know.
Neurodiversity-Affirming Support To Help Autistic People Thrive And Grow Helen EdgarAutistic Advocate, Author & Consultant I'm an Autistic parent a ...
Latest Terms in the Stimpunks Glossary for November 2024
As we go about our work, we expand our glossary, which is currently at 378 terms in English and 413 terms across all languages. We added 8 new terms in the past month.
Friendships, like play, occupy a central place in children’s social lives. While associated with children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, friendship is also a determining factor for social adaptation and psychological adjustment (Bagw…
In the name of efficiency, we have increasingly disabled the ability of healthcare, industry, and education to carry out their missions effectively. Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 45).
When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words. Language is also a place of struggle. I was just a girl coming slowly into womanhood when I read Adrienne Rich’s words “this is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you.” This language that enabled me to attend graduate school, to write a dissertation, to speak at job interviews carries the scent of oppression. Language is also a place of struggle.
Language is also a place of struggle. We are wedded in language, have our being in words. Language is also a place of struggle. Dare I speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination — a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you. Language is also a place of struggle.The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.
Does your school reinforce harassment and rape culture with its dress codes? Yes, it does. School dress codes are reliably sexist, racist, and ableist. They reinforce toxic masculinity, rape culture, gender binaries, racial profiling, and inequality.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
The Lost Cause provided white Southerners-and white Americans in general-with a misunderstanding of the Civil War that allowed them to spare themselves the shame of their own history.
Latest Terms in the Stimpunks Glossary for October 2024
As we go about our work, we expand our glossary, which is currently at 370 terms in English and 405 terms across all languages. We added 6 new terms in the past month.
An autistic person, particularly if not self-aware of their autism, will experience escalating symptoms of chronophobia if a prolonged lack of socioeconomic integration occurs.
Latest Terms in the Stimpunks Glossary for November 2024
As we go about our work, we expand our glossary, which is currently at 378 terms in English and 413 terms across all languages. We added 8 new terms in the past month.
Friendships, like play, occupy a central place in children’s social lives. While associated with children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, friendship is also a determining factor for social adaptation and psychological adjustment (Bagw…
Latest Terms in the Stimpunks Glossary for December 2024
As we go about our work, we expand our glossary, which is currently at 381 terms in English and 416 terms across all languages. We added 3 new terms in the past month.
While Wine 10.0 recently debuted with the initial Wine Wayland driver, that native Wayland support is still in early form with various limitations and yet-to-be-implemented features..
