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Education

Goodbye faculty: What’s the point of a University anyway?

Tom Abel, Prosperous Way Down

Education has a remarkably inelastic demand curve and even in a contracting economy people will spend their last dollars to educate their children. Along with healthcare, high-tech weaponry, food, water, drugs, and internal ‘security’, Americans will pay almost any price for education, which is why the Right has furiously worked to privatize it and as well the rest of these. In a time when economies around the globe are stagnating (due to flattening or declining net emergies) they are the last growth industries of the capitalist growth economy.

archived May 21, 2012

Education for a new era - May 8

Staff, Energy Bulletin

- Jeffrey J. Brown: Instead of "Waiting for Godot", emphasize vocational and agricultural training
- Learning That Works
- Young Italians flock to become shepherds
- The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps

archived May 8, 2012

To young people, justice is a key ingredient in good food

Yoni Landau, On the Commons

Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.

archived April 25, 2012

Changing the climate in our schools

Bill Bigelow and Bill McKibben, Common Dreams

Maybe you've heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: We are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways -- and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.

Then again, if you've been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this.

That's because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense.

archived April 18, 2012

Closer to Earth: a project that saves lives

Christine Patton, Peak Oil Hausfrau

"Thank God for this job, otherwise I'd be in jail or dead, at the rate I was going."-Chris, age 17

archived April 18, 2012

Education in a post carbon world

Steve Bull, Zero Growth Now! (Canada)

Merit pay for teachers is a distraction; it ignores the larger context that should be the focus of debate in education: what curriculum (knowledge and skills) will best prepare students and their families for life in a post-carbon world? If we don't shift our focus to this larger question and begin implementing such changes soon, all other concerns may be moot.

archived April 7, 2012

More than the deck chairs: ASPO-USA launches webinar series

Staff, ASPO-USA

Given the tsunami of energy misinformation in the media right now, ASPO-USA’s role in providing accurate analysis of our domestic and global energy situation has never been more important.

Therefore, ASPO-USA is launching a series of monthly webinar programs, where members and donors will have the opportunity to see and hear presentations by distinguished speakers. The first will take place Thursday: “Shale Gas Update, with Art Berman.”

archived March 30, 2012

Bad knowledge and the promise of the university (response to Immanuel Wallerstein)

Dan Bednarz, Energy Bulletin

In a recent blog-post sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus … of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.”...Wallerstein has developed a world systems model of modernization and empire aimed at creating this better world. It is understandable that he mourns the docile, flaccid, opportunistic, and sometimes destructive contributions of the university as increasing social inequality, militarism, various forms of corruption, debt, unemployment, biophysical forces and natural resource scarcities are decimating human societies...Nonetheless, the historical precedent for such leadership from universities is to my knowledge non-existent.

archived March 26, 2012

Deep thought - March 14

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-For-Profit Higher Ed and the Occupy Movement
-Neo-Nazis cloak themselves in eco-rhetoric
-Getting Real About It: Meeting The Psychological And Social Demands Of A World In Distress

archived March 14, 2012

Food & agriculture - March 9

Staff, Energy Bulletin

-Follow the Food
-Eight is Great Challenge
-Changing the Way We Eat: Bringing the Backyard to the Bronx
-From Toxic Soil, an Unlikely Garden

archived March 9, 2012

Knowledge, technology, and the politics of rice

Harro Matt, Common Voices

The dominant focus on advanced technologies and higher-level politics, I argue here, has limited value for understanding crucial elements in processes of technological change that take place in society, therewith touching upon key democratic values. This is illustrated with introduced changes to rice cultivation. Technological change is often associated with innovation.

archived March 9, 2012

Higher education under attack

Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

One can write off the decline of higher education as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.

archived March 2, 2012

Mumbo Jumble: The underwhelming response of the American economics profession to the crisis

Philip Mirowski, OpenDemocracy

Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals.

archived March 1, 2012

Growing green (building environmental justice)Video

Majora Carter, Boston MOS

Majora Carter delivers an inspiring lecture at Boston Museum of Science on her work in pioneering solutions to concentrated environmental problems grounded in a progressive economic development approach.

archived February 29, 2012

Triumph of the generalist: Reading the farming/homesteading encyclopedias

Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book

These overview books on starting up a smallholding/homestead/small farm/urban sustainable oasis are often the first books any of us come to, precisely because we need that encyclopedic breadth so badly - eventually we may need to know more about growing melons or delivering a calf or butchering a rabbit or canning pickles - in fact, most of us end up with specialist books on all these things. But at first the best of these books give you a picture of the whole range of the work you are entering into - and that's what a lot of us need.

archived February 27, 2012