K-5 curriculum for the post-carbon era

Echoing the influential American educator John Dewey, contemporary educational scholar Nel Noddings argues convincingly that all citizens should be able to surmount the minor obstacles imposed by failures in carpentry and plumbing by the time they graduate from secondary school. Better yet, she argues, we should encourage and facilitate the interests and talents of every student at every level of education, even if they do not fit the two-dimensional liberal-arts model. Yet for me, twenty years were needed before I could overcome the biases and prejudices built into our narrowly focused educational system.”

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Illegitimi non carborundum

I love the Socratic aspect of academia, and it’s the part I do best. I supervise nine independent-study projects this semester, with a total of ten students. Most of them have spent a weekend at the mud hut, or soon will. Indeed, I’m just back from the mud hut, where I spent the weekend with one of the students, the poet in resident at the renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center. He called the trip “transformative.” I meet regularly with all the students, probing and pushing until they do more and better work than any of us thought possible. Ditto for the small, hard-working herd of graduate students I advised and mentored during two wonderful decades.

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Community, community, community

As we pass from the industrial age to the post-carbon era, the mantra of real-estate agents comes to mind. But the important factor isn’t so much “location, location, location” as “community, community, community.” The latter can be created in any location. Well, except for those locations the United States bombs into the stone age. It’s tough to build community when the U.S. military is carpet-bombing the ‘hood.

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Capitulation draws near

Over at Endless Emendation, I’ve been debating whether the industrial economy is near its end. Even without seriously raising the issue of the horrors of the industrial economy for the world’s cultures and species, and even for our own species, I’ve met a bit of resistance.
It’s not unlike the resistance I’ve met here. Or, during the last several years, everywhere else in the empire. I’ll avoid the issue of the horrors, just for simplicity. But I’m going to foray into the last of fast collapse. Readers, brace for impact.

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