recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: Progressive Education
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by Mara Sapon-Shevin When I was in middle-school, the way the “popular kids” tormented those of us who weren’t so lucky, was through something called “Slam Books.” A popular kid (it was usually a girl) would start a notebook with individual pages headed with the names of unpopular students. The book would be passed around…
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"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth,…
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By Chris Mercogliano I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority…
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by Glenn Branch The missing link? The recent battle over the place of evolution in Florida’s state science standards wasn’t quite ripped from the pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel—as far as I could tell from my office in California, at any rate, there were no greedy developers, lubricious politicos, or redneck gangsters involved, and…
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A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website. Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in…
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by Glenn Branch Not so long ago in Birmingham, England, it was a reggae version of the Origin of Species with a video to match, but soon in San Diego, they’ll be listening to the Galápagos Mountain Boys playing their own brand of scientific bluegrass. In Oslo, Norway, they’ll be attending a series of scholarly…
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by William Ayers In his State of the Union address on January 28, President Bush, our self-styled “education president,” urged Congress to re-authorize the No Child Left Behind Act, calling it a “good law” and claiming that because of this legislation student learning is improving and “minority students are closing the achievement gap.” In reality,…
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by Kelly Bulkeley Last night the students in my "Psychology of Dreaming" course at John F. Kennedy University turned in their first assignment of the quarter: a personal sleep history from childhood to the present. I like to begin my dream classes with a focus on sleep because it’s a great way to jar people…
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Bill Ayers, founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, is an expert on urban schooling. He also, incidentally, wrote the excellent Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2005). His blog is pretty low-traffic, so it’s always a great happiness to see him…
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by Glenn Branch I send a lot of e-mail in the course of the average day, and ordinarily nobody is fired as a result. But I’m not always so lucky. I work at the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Even eighty-two years…
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