sequestering carbon, several books at a time CVII

The latest batch:

not a shop

There is a good discussion of what education is for, and how different disciplines use different tools, in the post How to speak truthfully about what it means to be human: a user’s handbook.  All of it is interesting, but there is one paragraph that speaks forcefully about why students are not “customers”, itself a quote from another piece (my emphasis):

We go to school, not to get what we already know that we want, but because we want to receive an education. Here, we would expect teachers not just to give students what they know they want or say they want or are able to identify as what they want, but to move them beyond what they already know that they want. We want teachers to open up new vistas, new opportunities, and help children and young people to interrogate whether what they say they want or desire is actually what they should desire. To turn the student into a customer, and just  work on the assumption that education should do what the customer wants is therefore a distortion of what education is about, a distortion that significantly undermines the ability of teachers to be teachers and of schools, colleges and universities to be educational institutions rather than shops.

Hear, hear.

 

Covid-19 diary: learning lessons from history

“Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages” is a brilliant essay by Renaissance scholar and all round Renaissance woman Ada Palmer, on why the question “If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?” is based on multiple misconceptions about history in general, and the Renaissance in particular.  However, there are things we can learn from history about how to tackle the Covid-19 aftermath, but will we?

The post is marvelous in general.  But in particular, the concept of “Ever-So-Much-More-So” really struck a chord with me.  As Palmer says, sprinkle some Ever-So-Much-More-So powder on the Middle Ages and you get the Renaissance: much more of the good bits, and much more of the bad bits.  

And this just keeps on: the good things keep getting more and better, but the bad things keep getting more and worse.  This is different from utopias (only the good things increase) or dystopias (only the bad increases): in the real future, everything gets Ever-So-Much-More-So.  The optimists notice only the more good; the pessimists only the more bad.  The reality is everything gets more complicated, more complex, more more.  Ever-So-Much-More-So.

Covid-19 diary: online workshops

We were due to run a small workshop in York on 25-26 March.  Lockdown started on 23 March, but we had anticipated this, and moved the conference into a virtual format.

Here's a short report on how it went, and what we could do better next time.