Now we have the opportunity and understanding to move from emergency pandemic remote school and its pantomime of learning to purposefully designed online education spaces that are accessible, sustainable, and representative of the communities they serve. It’s time for the academic conference model to respond accordingly.
Conference to Restore Humanity: The Need
We’ll be iterating our Conference to Restore Humanity track, “DIY at the Edges: Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own”, up to the deadline while half our team is traveling across country for the next two weeks. Our regular trip from Austin to Boston Children’s so they can marvel at our neurodivergence is now. 😀
Conference to Restore Humanity! is an international invitation for K-12 and college educators to engage in a human-centered system redesign: centering the needs of students and educators toward a praxis of social justice.
Conference to Restore Humanity
We are providing educators with the proper tools to build classroom environments that value the humanity of all involved. Our goal is to create a space that breeds innovation through like-minded individuals who draw upon hundreds of years of history and countless research studies. Over the course of four days (and more, if needed), educators will learn at their own pace in an in-depth track on progressive education.
Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d propose an addendum to this too: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.
B. F. Skinner: The Most Important Theorist of the 21st Century
Despite that,
And neurodivergent and disabled students lost.
Behaviorism is everywhere. The All Means All of public education is made meaningless by the bipartisanship of behaviorism.
There’s just one problem with Lakoff’s theory. An awful lot of people who are politically liberal begin to sound like right-wing talk-show hosts as soon as the conversation turns to children and parenting. It was this curious discrepancy, in fact, that inspired the book you are now reading.
I first noticed an inconsistency of this kind in the context of education. Have a look at the unsigned editorials in left-of-center newspapers, or essays by columnists whose politics are mostly progressive. Listen to speeches by liberal public officials. On any of the controversial issues of our day, from tax policy to civil rights, you’ll find approximately what you’d expect. But when it comes to education, almost all of them take a hard-line position very much like what we hear from conservatives. They endorse a top-down, corporate-style version of school reform that includes prescriptive, one-size-fits-all teaching standards and curriculum mandates; weakened job protection for teachers; frequent standardized testing; and a reliance on rewards and punishments to raise scores on those tests and compel compliance on the part of teachers and students.
The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting
This widespread adoption of a traditionalist perspective helps us to make sense of the fact that, on topics related to children, even liberals tend to hold positions whose premises are deeply conservative. Perhaps it works the other way around as well: The fact that people on the left and center find themselves largely in agreement with those on the right explains how the traditionalist viewpoint has become the conventional wisdom. Child rearing might be described as a hidden front in the culture wars, except that no one is fighting on the other side.
The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting
Mooney notes that “No Child Left Behind was perhaps the most damaging form of public policy as it pertained to public education and learning diversity that has happened in our history of education policy, and that was a bill that was sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy. It was a set of practices that was doubled down upon by the Obama administration.”
Normal Sucks: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences
The neurodiversity and disability rights movements well-understand the ubiquity of behaviorism, and its tremendous costs.
Behaviorist education is ableist education.
Stimpunks Foundation exists because of a bipartisan embrace of “Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity”. Reframing away from behaviorism is urgently needed and essential.
Therefore, eugenics is an erasure of identity through force, whereas radical behaviorism is an erasure of identity through “correction.” This all assumes a dominant culture that one strives to unquestionably maintain.
Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity
We’ve been on quite a journey over the past 15 years, navigating increasingly ableist, behaviorist, and underfunded systems while contributing to the Neurodiversity movement and building community compatible with us.
We rolled our own education, because we had too. We built something compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disability using the tools of distributed work and indie ed-tech.
We received a lot of help from human-centered educators along the way.
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