-
Becoming a Real Person – NYTimes.com
HT @HollyChesser via our MVUpper Diigo Group. Her questions:
Do we teach students to ask what is worth wanting? What does it mean to be an “excellent sheep”? Is it possible to teach how to build a self or become a soul? What would I need to know in order to facilitate that? What is the most compelling purpose of a university education in your mind? Commercial? Cognitive? Moral? What does a moral education look like? If the elite universities have abandoned it, what does that foretell for the institutions attempting to keep pace?
-
Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.
-
to discover “just what it is that’s worth wanting.”
-
Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
-
The system pressures them to be excellent, but excellent sheep.
-
What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self).
-
-
In the Whirled: When kids were unbreakable | Deseret News
-
There was a time when parents trusted the resilience of childhood.
-
We’ve come so far that there is now a counterculture to this type of parenting. There are people like Gever Tulley, who founded the Tinkering School as a space for kids to play with power tools and wield pocket knives. In places like Wales they are building “adventure playgrounds,” essentially controlled junkyards where kids can slide through mud, build precarious structures and light fires, all with the hope of re-creating a childhood that includes freedom and a sense of danger.
-
parents today operate under the assumption that society is more dangerous than when we were kids, when in fact the opposite is true.
-
-
A Day in the Life of a Modern Teenager | The Creek Bed
How school might get in the way of learning, at least to some degree.
-
What I Wish I Knew About Creativity When I Was 20 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
HT @MeghanCureton
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
it's about learning 