SV

Many of the ills in education trace back to student / teacher decaying into customer / service provider

BRING IT BACK

High School English and the Making of American Readers Abstract. The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars

"Recent attacks on specific works of literature by Republican state legislatures and conservative orgs...pale in comparison to the large-scale divestment from literature to which liberal and conservative forces alike contribute."

so good, @manshel.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

An excerpt from Jesse Jackson’s powerful speech to the Democratic National Convention on July 19, 1988.

May he rest in peace.

Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs

the English major is so important now with the rise of ChatGPT. yes, the humanities are in decline; they’re seen as less useful than STEM, but with the rise of AI, we need people thinking about humanity.

what is the human? what makes us human? what could be more important?

Every day I become more and more convinced that the main thing we need to do to improve literacy is just make kids read a lot of books, both on their own and as read-alouds

quoted above excerpt

"—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away" —Omar El Akkad

Never more true than the past few years, right?

The entire millennial identity is being prepared and groomed for a version of the world that stopped existing by the time we reached it

we slammed into a horizon painted on a brick wall like fucking looney tunes

You go in. You quicken.

full text of "the drone" by Clint Smith

"the drone scoffs at sovereignty" —Clint Smith

There is no amount of money in the world that would lead me to fight a Vietnamese refugee that grew up in Louisiana

(Also I really want to try a Korean style Po’ Boy)

I keep reminding people that admins hate English departments because they are popular (read: inefficient), not because they aren’t. AI is in a long line of technologies that promise to solve that problem for them.

We needed to push back long ago that there was value to learning things.

That knowing how to think through things and figure shit out was a skill worth having.

Hell, just that fact that you could go out, do a thing, come back and say "I did this."

I mean this is the most church counselor way of putting it, but intelligence by itself is nearly worthless. wisdom and prudence and discernment are necessary qualities for intelligence to be useful. innumerable religious scriptures have tried to explain this but yr tech bros aren't big on books

Pope Leo tells priests not to use AI to write homilies or seek likes on TikTok "To give a true homily is to share faith," and artificial intelligence "will never be able to share faith," the pope said.

“Pope Leo XIV has urged priests to not to use artificial intelligence to write their homilies or to seek ‘likes’ on social media platforms like TikTok.”

“‘To give a true homily is to share faith,’ and artificial intelligence ‘will never be able to share faith,’ the pope added.”

On this day in 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court *unanimously* decided that people of South Asian descent could not be American citizens, and retroactively stripped citizenship from many who had already been naturalized. Years of organized persecution followed. www.saada.org/explore/publ...

The story of the Bible is the story of choosing the marginalized over Empire.

Again and again.

Remember that you are dust, and that to dust you shall return.

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop

And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹)

RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

High School English and the Making of American Readers Abstract. The high school English classroom is the most influential literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars

Most R1 English departments, my entire career: *very skeptical of English education*

@manshel.bsky.social: The high school English classroom is the most important literary institution in the United States, and the most overlooked by literary scholars.

Me: 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾

academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

I don't think it is only our job to teach students how to read long novels; it may also be our jobs to teach them how to live without an online surveillance state. To learn without intrusive apps. To swap notes. To write in a book's margins. To exist in their communities in slow, clunky, human ways.

The American right does not defend slavery because progressives say it was bad. They defend slavery because racial hierarchy has been an important and increasingly explicit component of their ideology for 70 years. Read a fucking book.

[Enter Valentine.]

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

excerpt from linked article

"Over half of students now use computers for one to four hours daily in school; a full quarter spend more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day."

...with zero evidence that this is good for student learning.

www.educationnext.org/latter-day-l...

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

“But I didn’t understand a word he said.” Guess what, that’s the experience of many immigrants when they arrive in a new country, including the United States. You get humbled. Then you work hard and start understanding. We could all use that experience

amandasmildtakes • 9m I enjoyed Kendrick Lamar's halftime show even though I'm not Black and I enjoyed Bad Bunny's even though I'm not Latina because I like America and watching different cultures in our country celebrate themselves because those are my neighbors and it never occurs to me to find that threatening because I'm not a punk ass bitch

presented without comment about the super bowl: