education

Computer illiteracy is just another symptom of mass disability

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The unhappy truth is the complexity of our technological environment has exceeded the cognitive grasp of most humans. We now have an unsustainable mismatch between “middle-class” work and the cognitive talents of a large percentage of Americans.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks

This is something we experienced at helpdeskJerb (a school). Most of the upper management had worked there for decades and had seen the technological environment go from zero tech to full-on academic infrastructure.

… And the vast majority of them could not handle it. About the most they can do is interact via email. Instant messaging? CRM? ERP? Completely out of their abilities. Which meant they need assistants to translate and handle things coming from the system/environment into something they could manage via email… bypassing the system entirely. It’s fine for them, but then someone has to enter the information into the system. During my time there we found this usually doesn’t happen, so there’s a lot of institutional memory that is lost when people leave the school.

That’s the management. Noticed the same thing happening with new students: A fair number of them were completely unable to navigate the school’s intranet and course management systems, requiring extra attention from counselors and assistants to get them signed up for what they wanted to study.

For all that modernity provides, it doesn’t help when you’re disabled. And now with the incoming US administration, they would rather you just die.

College has always been a business

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It might seem ludicrous to sacrifice public health to preserve indiscretion as an ideal of college life, but that life has never aspired toward well-being in the first place. It’s a deliberate feature of college, not a side effect. “Youthful indiscretions were tolerated and even encouraged as part of the process of upward social mobility that the college facilitated,” Thelin writes.

Source: Why Did Colleges Reopen During the Pandemic? – The Atlantic

You can only do this if you’re white, however. If you’re not white, you’ll likely become another customer of the carceral state and universities are more than happy to throw you down that well.

In the past 60 years colleges have sold the aspirational aspect as something worthy to be experienced no matter the cost. For-profit schools benefited from the halo effect.

No more.

Hoist the flag

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Pirate Care is a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.

Source: Pirate Care – Pirate Care

This is a worthy goal. Piracy not for the sake of avoiding to pay for things, but rather as a way to learn about the world and its processes when the entities in power would prefer you not to— whether they be people, corporations, or governments. For these entities any form of non-compliance is to be crushed and its practitioners made customers of the carceral industry.

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I really don’t want to be writing this. Well no, that’s not true. I don’t want to have to write this, but sex education is lacking as it is and far too many people are being rather lackadaisical about the whole thing. Because I can’t in good conscience let condoms which can’t reliably condom be on the market […]

Source: A Pox On Your Box: The Problem of LELO Hex – Lorax Of Sex

It’s makes all the difference whether something fails silently or something fails and explodes in your face.

For most programming code written out there, you want some indication that it failed (that is, it sets off a small explosion or it sets off a big explosion) so you can know something is wrong and can fix it. When something fails silently you don’t even know there’s a problem until something happens that you literally cannot fix. Like your backups silently failing until you need to recover something… to find the information has been lost. Forever.

In the case of this condom design, the consequences of it failing silently are literally of life and death important:

  • You could get an STI and not know.

    • You would then become one of those asshole people that don’t even bother to get tested for STIs because “it could never happen” to them.

  • You could get pregnant, or get someone pregnant.

    • When a regular condom fails you know it failed and you can take measures. In this case the only alternative will be to have the baby, or have an abortion.

These things are important and fact people are falling for the hype means sex education is simply not keeping up with the reality of the world.

Culture and class in the quest for success

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Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the affluent also enjoy an advocacy edge: parents are quicker to intervene when their children need help, while low-income families often feel intimidated and defer to school officials, a problem that would trail Melissa and Angelica in their journey through college.

Poor Students Struggle as Class Plays a Greater Role in Success – NYTimes.com.

Isn’t this what is happening in Mexico?. Even when I was going to school, teachers were complaining they had to inculcate and instill basic skills, knowledge and culture to kids, when those kids should have gotten the memeplex implanted into them at home.

These days I’m sure the situation is even worse, and the average school in the Mexican public school system is much worse than that of the poorest school in the American school system.

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I’d been feeling, the past few years of my 30-plus-year tenure in public education, that there was something or somebody out there, a power of a sort, that doesn’t really want you kids to be educated. I felt a force that wants you ignorant and pliable, and that needs you able to fill in the boxes and follow instructions. Now I’m sure.

‘A Test You Need to Fail’: A Teacher’s Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students | Common Dreams

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