#article about education

[campiona1]

CBSE Notes

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[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[communistkenobi]

probably incredibly damaging to public knowledge that you can’t even read a single article about like, covid without being confronted by a paywall. like at a certain point I really can’t blame people for not reading anything

[linddzz]

Luckily the "what if the SHARK impregnated our ray???" seems to be dying down and bigger news organizations have the corrected information in their articles, but I wanted to share this great blog post by marine conservation biologist David Shiffman that covers both the cool actual science that got overshadowed while actually calling out the facility for how unscientifically they handled it and for the fact that they doubled down (esp since newer media they've put out is softly backtracking and it looks like they're attempting to play it off as a joke that the news misreported. Nope. They put the idea out there like it was as possible as parthenogenesis while calling themselves scientists at a "shark lab")

From the conclusion:

Unfortunately, poor handling of this story has made it likely that we are on track for another year where the most-shared news story about a shark or ray is pseudoscientific nonsense, rather than about their dire conservation needs, their importance to marine and coastal ecosystems, or amazing new discoveries about them. As a longtime supporter of zoos and aquariums and the roles they play in public science education, I am especially troubled by some of the public-facing communications here. If your goal is sharing knowledge with the public, there’s value in gaining accurate knowledge about the subject yourself first. Sharing wrong facts is not “raising awareness” or educating the public, and falsely claiming “anything is possible, don’t trust the experts” is, to put it mildly, not helping the ocean.

It's a great article to drop in if the "omg shark/ray babies???" keeps spreading. Or if you just enjoy niche science drama. The aquarium world doesn't get much of that

[guardianspirits13]

currently remembering that one time I needed a reference for a fanfiction I was writing and found a peer-reviewed paper about how grief affects children only it was locked behind a paywall so I emailed the author of the paper with my .edu email and said I was working on a project (which was technically true) and he emailed me the pdf for free

peace and love on planet earth

[shallowspocketdimension]

FYI just want people to know that the abbreviation of Omegaverse with and without the slashes is a very real world derogatory slur that has been hurled towards Indigenous Aboriginal Australians for centuries. I obviously understand not everyone is fully aware of Australia's history of institutionalized racism, genocide of traditional land owners and the stolen generation etc., but seeing the Omegaverse abbreviation everywhere is genuinely frustrating especially when people are ignorant to the actual serious implications of the word when put into a different cultural context.

EDIT: it should be noted that is also frustrating that people outside of Australia don't really know much about it's racist history (which is no fault of their own, hell even my education on Australian history back in primary school was abysmal and never mentioned the countless genocides the English settlers caused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people during colonization), but that's a whole other wider conversation - and even then you should be looking for Indigenous Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander Voices if you want learn about Australia's history.

[finelinens1994]

it always pisses me off a bit when i see people trying to use their platform to Educate The Public and the "educational resources" they provide are twitter threads, tiktoks, and carrds. like yes absolutely a social media post from a primary source is invaluably helpful when it comes to getting first-person perspectives on current events, but you just cannot learn extensive history from tiktok. idk. maybe you can. maybe i'm being too quick to write off tiktok as a whole. it's just rare that a tiktok is going to be well-researched and provide sources for the viewers to vet or use for further research on their own, so it's natural to be doubtful.

people easily believe anything on social media if it's well-said and seems sincere, which is just dangerously stupid. vet your sources. think critically. don't just blindly believe a tiktok because the person filming it is using smart people words

[shiraishi--kanade]

My unpopular opinion of the day is that grammar correcting AI isn't inherently bad.

Like, specifically AI (or just... Machine learning systems) that help you with spelling of certain words and punctuation and grammar structures? They're not bad. Actually, they're extremely useful and can be considered an aid to many people, such as:

- dyslexic people

- English as Second Language people

- people with fine motor issues

- more

As well as being generally just useful to all of us. Sure, there are drawbacks such as students using them to cheat on leaning the grammar/spelling, but 1) cheating spelling has been a thing since the online dictionaries became a thing and banning them won't solve the issue 2) AI-checking grammar and spelling in essays or formal papers isn't an issue because they're barely graded on those things anyway, and frankly they shouldn't be.

The real issue with those AIs is that most of the information in their data banks 1) is obtained without consent, illegally and/or by scrapping 2) isn't double-checked by a real human being. Which makes its usage dubious at best and actually pretty dangerous at worst.

This little blunder google documents did to my writing in the example above is most likely the result of the following:

1) Some people writing thankyou and getting a pop up correction for "thank you"

2) Those people, for whatever reason may be, chose to keep their original spelling

3) This probably happened enough times that now Google AI most likely considers "thankyou" to be an alternative spelling of "thank you" that it wasn't aware of previously instead of a mistake

4) Because it's a system that lacks context and awareness, it will occasionally offer incorrect spelling over a correct one because it considers them mutually possible. It will also not flag an incorrect spelling, unless some other data overrides the rule.

This happened so many times for so many people that now Google Doc's corrections are considered unreliable even for common words, which would not have fucking happened if Google didn't train their AI on their users documents.

But ethically trained on the input of consenting users that is also double-checked by real people to not contain any intentional misleading AI can still exist and would be a very good tool to have. Alas...

[reality-detective]

Good article 👆 to educate yourself with.

Trump's words were important every time he spoke, I didn't take notes like this guy but I do remember trying to figure out what he was saying and I got a lot right. It was like he spoke in coded messages. 🤔

[pumpumdemsugah]

Why do folks act like you can only acknowledge sex-based oppression and the reality of human sexual dimorphism if you want trans folks to die? Why are we acting like white folks made up ‘male’ and ‘female’ when every human culture knew what a male and a female was before colonialism existed and patriarchy has existed way before white supremacy did? Why?

It makes me uncomfortable bc you’d get labeled as a terf for saying this but the average irl person that isn’t chronically online holds these beliefs and still believes in trans rights and uses preferred pronouns. Hell, I have two nonbinary friends who recognize the reality of sex and sex-based oppression. I personally both recognize sex and believe that trans women have a place in our fight for women’s liberation. So like. Why are folks on the internet acting like it’s impossible? What is going on around here? Because I saw a (19 year old) person say ‘sex based oppression isn’t real socialization isn’t real yada yada yada that’s white colonial bullshit and if you believe otherwise then kill yourself’ and my eye twitched.

and it gets on my nerves bc most of the ppl saying this shit are Westerners! If they went to a non-West country and said this shit, I bet my left tit that they’d be looked at like they’re insane!

These people can say this for the same reason they hate radical feminists but recommend radical feminist Audre Lorde, they don't read or comprehend, they regurgitate talking points and see Black women not as academics or peers but tokens to invoke without knowing what they believe. It's arrogance, self righteousness and anti-intellectualism mixed together. Non-western cultures now all have the same ideas about gender that all support whatever some white American says. I think what's crazy is how incredibly racist the entire thing is and ahistorical. It's shrunk the experiences of everyone else so white western losers can feel more complex

I do not trust white people that bring up Black women to talk about gender in the modern sense because they always get racist and make shit up

Social media has melted everyone's brain so much everyone is making extreme claims grounded in wish fulfillment . Online liberals are acting and pushing the idea that sex is fake but the Blacks are just built different with one body plan. Please ignore that because human beings spend most of our time in Africa, African people have the most genetic diversity compared to every other group in the world . White people think complexity only applies to them. They did this before with race science and they're doing it again. Educated white people without expertise are making shit up

Male & female is fake but big negro bone is real and that research about bones, race and osteoporosis, I've read it, it doesn't say what online people say it does, you're just racist. It's projecting body insecurities onto Black women as inherent qualities of our bodies so their white body is normal and a problem that was a them thing is an us thing but this isn't racist and demeaning. Online liberals want us to be a permanent Other so they feel normal then claim it's solidarity not racial hierarchy by another name. The dehumanisation of enslaved Black women is brought up not to talk about slavery but to Other the bodies of dead tortured Black women and ask the living ones to agree because they said magic buzz words. Online people don't bring up slavery to talk about what white people did but to add sex characteristics they want Black women to have and rewrite history. Slave master didn't think Black people felt pain so performed surgery without anesthesia on enslaved Black women that needed to be held down because someone that needs to be held down commonly is a sign she doesn't feel pain. Slave masters knew they were chatting shit.

Talk about how WOC don't fit the gender binary because of white supremacist dehumanisation has become talk that our bodies are wrong and weird and that's why. The blame for shifted from white people's racism to, of course the non-white have wacky body plans. Do they even think we're people? Conservatives and dumb dumbs acting like the sexual dimorphism in human beings is extreme ( it's not ) and that's why male and female artistic gymnastics is so different. Not training or history and using it as a cover for mockery and sexism so now regular men are challenging actual female athletes ( and losing ) under the delusional being male is enough

The online left and right are so are stupid about this but everyone ends up affirming centuries old ideas about race and women. What's annoying is people that say sex is fake aren't being truthful, it's fake for white people as they transcend language but the crudely made Others, we're bigger and badly made and that's why they're normal. Solidarity though

Why does it need to be explained that Blackness isn't a sexed quality or characteristic ? It's unbelievably offensive. None of these people are as intellectually curious as they claim they are. None of them have read anything about slavery, colonialism or feminism. They saw a post.

[mantisgodiveblog]

Against all odds, we have survived. We're taking a university course now, because the government will pay us for it and we do need the money, but it has unfortunately been eroding at our sanity somewhat, and we are learning nothing that we don't already know. We are, however, getting money.

We have somewhat of a backlog on Discord at the moment, as it doesn't have a daily upload limit and also it's easier to stick things on while we are being told things that we already know by people who are phrasing in in ways we find significantly misleading or incorrect (note: we don't use apps for things the vast majority of the time and if we access Tumblr via browser it immediately fucks up our formatting on PC, which can last several months). We will, hopefully, be posting these soon, but all is dependant on if we can actually scare up the time between courses to conglomerate that and fix any formatting errors in thoughts and such.

If that will happen any time soon... good question! Every time that our work practicum teacher opens her mouth, we take points of physical damage, and we don't think she understands the fact that getting back after we walk to a place also involves walking. We've had a lot going on for a while now and very little of it has been good. We're on new meds, and if the gods prove merciful, we won't have to tolerate this particular clown show past March. If there is no mercy to be found, however, we might have to keep doing this until June, in which case you can probably expect the quality of this to take a sharp downturn as the short time we have already spent in this program is already having immediate and catastrophic effects on our mental health.

We do not recommend going to university in any circumstances, but we are unfortunately aware that it may be necessary to get such things as a fancy piece of paper saying you are employable. Additionally, we would tell you to calibrate your expectations for anyone with a degree lower, but apparently what we consider the basic level of knowledge you should know before saying anything on any topic is everyone else's "bachelor degree and a bit", so our estimations on what people think is a high degree of knowledge to have are probably also off.

Any donations go to the Fund To Compensate Us For Having To Correct A Teacher Multiple Times In A Lecture And Then Looking Up Her Sources Later And Discovering They Are Blatant Misinformation. We are very tired. Please do research on things before talking about them. Thank you.

[harrowscore]

does anyone know of some essays comparing and contrasting camus & sartre's works and philosophy? i've just finished nausea and i'm extremely interested in existentialism and absurdism, so... is there anyone familiar with these authors who can give me some recs? 🤔

[cookinguptales]

So when I was a child, I got Ranger Rick every month. It's a magazine for children designed to teach them about animals and nature. I was a tiny little nerd living in a heavily wooded area back then, so I loved it!

I had this exact issue lmao.

The mascot of this magazine was the eponymous Ranger Rick, a cute raccoon forest ranger who taught kids about nature.

This is what he looked like when I was a kid getting the magazine in the mid-90s.

Look how friendly and soft and dashing he looked!!! Ultimate nature educator for kids!

He got a redesign when I was around ten, which was a little odd, but I was getting a little too old for RR at that point, so I guess I didn't mind that much. That was about when we left Ohio, so I wasn't getting as much time in nature anyway.

Sorry that he's grainy, there are not that many images of early 2000s Rick on the internet. I think they were trying to make him feel more relatable, like he was a child instead of a ranger teaching them. Or at least a more casual teacher...? Not sure how well that worked.

I remember thinking the redesign was kind of pointless as a child, but this was around when my mom lost her job and we didn't have the money for things like magazine subscriptions anymore. I stopped getting the magazine and the design became kind of a moot point, but I still had beloved memories of Ranger Rick.

So imagine my surprise when I see a recent image of Rick and... oh.

Oh no... Look how they've massacred my boy... Look at those soulless eyes... That skinny little body that does not look huggable at all... Like I guess I'm glad that he's gone back to being more obviously a ranger, but like... the Flash of it all...

But. But I guess I should be grateful for what we have. He might be kind of soulless now, but look what they tried to launch a few years ago:

Jesus fucking christ.

[purplepink-blueberry]

fuck it imma yap

when i was like 16, i wrote my first article about asexuality. it provided a brief overview (probably not done very well, retrospectively, but i was 16) (also the article probably doesn't exist anymore)

im basically 23 now. and im working on an article (but, like, slightly academic this time) about asexuality (and my favourite concept in humanities thus far, the capabilities approach)

i am sleep deprived, i am in pain from my period, i am feeling horrible physically.

but i am reading and taking notes and fuck, this is so exciting and it's gonna be amazing (i hope, anyway)

heh, wish me luck!

and yes, this is how i am procrastinating on writing my bachelor thesis. if asexuality was considered more political, i'd write my BA thesis about that... now i'm working on gender and education in Slovakia

[biblicalhorror]

The most frustrating part of engaging in any of this discourse with pro-Israel people is that they claim there's just something ineffable about "seeing and understanding" how supporting Palestinian liberation is directly calling for the eradication of Jewish people (as if that type of rhetoric isn't exactly how actual antisemitism often manifests in online spaces but that's a topic for another day)

They get through people debunking the "the land belongs to the people of Israel anyway" argument and the "LGBTQ Palestinians are safe in Israel" argument and the "Genocide isn't what's happening here so you should educate yourself" argument and when all of those points are meticulously disproven over and over they still stand with "Well, myself and your Jewish friends see the hate you have in your heart for us" and it truly doesn't matter what you say at that point because even if you yourself are Jewish they will claim that refusing to support the state, government and military of Israel is inherently hateful and bigoted, as if a religious ethnostate is some inherent human right that is being taken away from them. I know many of them are blinded by the relentless propaganda that's been around their whole lives and how hard it is to break free from a belief system that is so tied to your core identity as a human being but it is so frustrating watching people being led straight to the point over and over again and just turning around and refusing to see it.

It's also so frustrating to see people using the momentum of this movement to casually tack on actual antisemitism to these discussions, as if having Jewish people in positions of power is why the US bends over backwards to excuse the actions of Israel and not, yknow, the fact that our government directly benefits from having a military stronghold in the middle east. I've talked to some well-meaning pro-Palestine friends irl who casually use antisemetic talking points because they've ALSO bought into the narrative that Israeli = Jewish and so they blame the actions of Israel and the IDF on Jewish people's "religious values" and ignore the fact that this conflict really has almost nothing to do with religion itself and everything to do with capitalism, imperialism and maintaining the US's status as a so-called "global power".

[criminalizegolf]

"haha, this extremely talented professional athlete is an idiot that only knows about his sport!" yeah because he was pulled from normal school at age 8 when people noticed how good he was. also the concussions.