Posts Tagged ‘cultural literacy’
I Can’t Believe It’s June Links
* CFPs: MLA Subconference 2015 and Society for Utopian Studies 2014.
* Rebecca Schuman has the best my-thoughts-exactly rundown of the MLA Task Force report I’ve seen.
* Called psychylustro, German artist Katharina Grosse’s project is a large-scale work designed to distract Amtrak train riders from the dilapidated buildings and fallen factories of north Philadelphia.
* “But, Sergei,” I protested (I forget his actual name), “that didn’t happen because capitalists just decided to be nice. That happened because they were all afraid of you.” More Graeber: I’m thinking of a labor movement, but one very different than the kind we’ve already seen. A labor movement that manages to finally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people.
* Is my high school, Lake Area New Tech, a prison or school?
* School Guard Filmed Hitting Student, Dumping Him From Wheelchair.
* Translating Frozen into Arabic.
* Maya Angelou, Respectability Politics, and Sex Work.
* Revolution and American Indians: “Marxism is as Alien to My Culture as Capitalism.”
* The Way We Live Now: Faking Cultural Literacy.
* Just Following Orders: Thoughts on Agents of SHIELD‘s First Season.
In reality, after seven decades of growing into each other, it shouldn’t be so easy to separate out SHIELD from Hydra. On the one hand, Hydra should have so completely infested SHIELD as to taint all but the most minute of its good acts–as evidenced by the fact that even the good guys, who aren’t shooting at Captain America, were perfectly OK with SHIELD’s rampant trampling of privacy and civil rights before these escalated to mass murder. And on the other hand, SHIELD’s protocols and organizational culture are the ones that nearly all Hydra agents were trained in, which would shape their habits of thought even as they employ their training to evil ends. No matter who they swear allegiance too, SHIELD and Hydra agents should be pretty hard to tell apart, and the lofty or vile ideals that guide them should, in all but the most extreme cases of true believers, be less present in their psychological makeup than institutional culture.
* Ames notes the migration of rage massacres from the workplace (in the 80s) to the school (during the 1990s), a trajectory that followed the generalization of neoliberal principles into the US education system. In their suicide notes, school shooters also referenced prolonged bullying, as the entrepreneurial values of mainstream American culture found schoolyard expression in concentrated form, and the gulf between the school’s winners and its losers became more pronounced and more significant. Like the workplace gunman, the teenage killer embraced mass murder as a brutal and incoherent expression of social despair.
* In Florida City With Rampant Stop-And-Frisks, 11-Year-Old Deemed ‘Suspicous’ For Baggy Pants And Hoodie. If You’re A West Virginia Inmate, You Can’t Read This Story. LAPD adds drones to arsenal, says they’ll be used sparingly.
* Researchers Find Association Between Porn Viewing And Less Grey Matter In The Brain.
* 14 Bros Charged in Fraternity Hazing That Cost a Pledge One Testicle.
Lawrence actually defended his new brothers in a November interview, saying the ball-smashing was “not hazing.”
“It was a freak accident more than anything. It definitely wasn’t meant to happen, not hazing whatsoever,” Lawrence told WLWT.
* NC Senate amendment drops provision to close ECSU.
* AP History in the Less Magic Kingdom: “Snow White the False.” The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight.
* College football and basketball players have finalized a $40 million settlement with a video game manufacturer and the NCAA’s licensing arm for improperly using the likenesses of athletes, leaving the NCAA alone to defend itself in the upcoming Ed O’Bannon antitrust trial.
* Competitive yoga, because there’s nothing Americans can’t turn into a competition.
* A Brazilian Street Artist Has Created the World Cup’s First Viral Image.
* UC President Janet Napolitano said the university will lead research to develop an implantable device that will retrain the brains of the mentally ill. What could possibly go SARCASM OVERFLOW ABORT/RETRY/FAIL
* EPA rules may force Wisconsin utilities to reduce coal use. EPA Rule Will Cut Power Plant Emissions By 30 Percent By 2030. Well, that’ll fix it!
* And finally it can be told: What was Rogue’s missing plotline in Days of Future Past?
Kids Today
USA Today runs that old journalistic stand-by, “Kids today don’t know their [x]”:
Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of “a complete education.” And, its authors fear, the nation’s current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities — even if children can read and do math.
…
Among 1,200 students surveyed:
•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
•52% could identify the theme of 1984.
•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.
In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the “I Have a Dream” speech.
Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.
If anything, I’m surprised these numbers are so high. One-half of teenagers can identify the theme of 1984? Really? I would have guessed a third or less.
Gerry Canavan 