Category Archives: history

Just In Time for Easter

Education, history, thinking out loud,

In the spirit of Tom Woodward’s Internet Detritus, I thought I would share this article that arrived in my inbox from The Public Domain Review. It seemed appropriate as it is “bunny” time of year: Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits:

In late 1726 much of Britain was caught up in the curious case of Mary Toft, a woman from Surrey who claimed that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits. Niki Russell tells of the events of an elaborate 18th century hoax which had King George I’s own court physicians fooled.

We live in an era of hoaxes often perpetuated by the use of Photoshop. But it isn’t digital technology that leads to hoaxes; it is people. And while there is much in this article that would not be appropriate for students, one important discussion point would be why would someone like Mary Toft do something like this? Niki Russell, Chief Library Assistant at Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library, has her own theory:

As for Mary Toft, the case against her was dismissed, not for lack of proof of guilt, but probably because of the further embarrassment to the establishment that would ensue if the case were pursued any further. She spent a few months in jail then returned to relative obscurity. The question as to why she and her family went to such extraordinary lengths to convince the nation that Mary had the ability to give birth to rabbits is perhaps not too hard to answer. Monstrous or deformed people had been exhibited, at a price, all over Europe for hundreds of years, with poor and wealthy alike equally fascinated. Ironically for Mary, although the hoax was not successful, she did succeed for a while in becoming an object of curiosity.

Many eminent physicians and thinkers were taken in by Mary’s hoax and suffered for their gullibility. William Hogarth, the great satirical artist, had good fun at their expense.

If you haven’t checked out The Public Domain Review, you might want to browse its collections. The articles are written by scholars and the goal of the project is to bring the vast pool of public domain resources to the attention of, well, the public. They have lost their initial funding so I made a little donation to what seems like a worthy and well-done project.

 

 

Serendipity

Education, history, school reform

A question from a student, some tweets with a colleague, and I realized I had forgotten a good bit of my education history. The question had to do with why more progressive educational practices such as those found in Montessori schools did not catch in on public schools. The colleague suggested that it was the Cold War and A Nation at Risk that squelched progressive ideas. I made a vague commitment to read some history including Diane Ravitch‘s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

But it was a vague commitment and the fiction on my shelf was much more compelling. So, I was excited when I saw Bud Hunt’s post about starting an education history book club. He felt as though educators often repeat history because they don’t know enough about it:

So I’m pretty sure that my main objectives for a project like this would be basically encouraging educators and folks who impact education to better understand their history.  In my reading and writing and thinking, I’ve come to discover that people are pretty much ignorant of anything educationally relevant that happened more than ten or twenty minutes ago.  And we keep having the same conversations.  And forgetting the outcomes.  Then doing it again.

So, his suggestion is for a group to read historical documents related to education, beginning with the report of the Committee of Ten from 1892. This committee was created by the National Education Association to develop answers to questions related to what, when and how students should be learning.

I have started the report and am finding it tough going. I had trouble getting past the fact that, even though women made up more than 50% of teachers at that time, the committee included men only and seemed to celebrate that fact:

Six of the Chairmen were college men, and three were school men; while of the Secretaries, two were college men and seven school men (p. 11).

Forty seven of the ninety members of the committee were from colleges and universities but the report assures us that many have had school experiences.  But like many modern day education commissions, there were no practicing teachers on the committee.

Ravitch begins her book about school reform with the Committee of Ten, which was the first national committee to discuss how to standardize education in the United States. According to Ravitch, the one legacy of the committee’s work was the creation of the College Entrance Examination Board that set uniform standards for college admissions.

NB: Part of the reason I’ve struggled with the reading is because it took me some time to find the “right” digital version from the Internet archive. I wanted to be able to bookmark, highlight and annotate. After some experimentation, I found the ePub version to be the best although it has lots of errors that aren’t found in the online or pdf version.

 

Lest We Forget

Education, history, reading, technology

Lisa Petrides at Huffington Post suggests that technological and cultural changes in the 21st century are pointing the way to a renaissance in education similar to the capital-R Renaissance that began in the late 13th century.  While I share her enthusiasm about the sense of being on the cusp of something amazing, I worry a little that she is romanticizing the original Renaissance and thus the current one as well.

Indeed, the Renaissance saw a flowering of arts and sciences as well as the rise of the middle class whose increased income allowed for discretionary spending on things like books and art and music.  Newly found leisure time made is possible to enjoy those things as well and perhaps even to dabble in their creation.

But, there was still a vast population that lived in rural areas, working as serfs or sharecroppers, without access to all the wonders of the Renaissance.  Even in the cities where the great artists and thinkers congregated, poverty kept most people out of this community as they struggled simply to feed themselves and their families. For every Medici who was patronizing artists, there were thousands of unnamed poor people who received no such funding and for whom the Renaissance did very little to change their lives for the better.

So, the original comparison can be and should be expanded and deepened as the disparity between rich and poor is increasing in the 21st century just as it did in the Renaissance. The infographic on the new digital divide from Color Lines reminds us that not all access to the Internet is equal.  And while there are lots of opportunities to learn outside the classroom, studies continue to show that low reading skills correlate with high poverty, and despite the proliferation of media, reading remains a hugely important skill for those who wish to take advantage of open source courses.

I hate to be the negative to Petrides’ optimistic essay as I agree that opportunities for learners are greater than ever, but we cannot forget that while these wonders of education and creativity are more widely available than every before, there are still large parts of our population for whom they remain a distant dream and we won’t achieve a more humanistic and connected world if, in our enthusiasm, we leave them behind.

Steve & Me: Living History

Comics, history, thinking out loud,

When we moved earlier this year, I found was my stash of Macintosh boxes, beginning with my first one, a PowerBook 500.   Today, I am writing this on my new MacBook Air. In between was an iBook, a couple of MacBook Pros and a first generation Air.  There is a big Mac Pro sitting upstairs, but I rarely use it as my laptops mean I can curl up on the sofa, sprawl on the porch, or nestle in bed.  Add the original iPod that I used to record all my dissertation interviews, the iPod touch that was my first introduction to apps and now the iPad, and I begin to realize what an impact that Steve Jobs and Apple has had on my own life.

Because these are more than just computers somehow…instead they paved the way to a mobile life that offers the chance to get beyond the cubicle and really work from anywhere and at anytime.  Earlier this week, I as I took a break from a long drive, I sat in a Starbucks.  Yesterday, my office was a chair in the School of Education.  And on and on.  Jobs was doing more than just reorganizing circuitry or rewriting code; he was fundamentally changing the way we connect to the world which means we can also fundamentally change the notion of what it means to work, disconnecting it from a schedule and a location and connecting it to the tasks that need to be completed, the contacts that need to be made.  He didn’t create things like Twitter or Facebook but he made it easier to use them, using his creativity to combine resources from his own and others imaginations, something I think is the true mark of genius.

I am a little sad today as it seems like a particularly bright light has been extinguished.  There is also the sense that I am not old enough that the icons who created the world in which I live are beginning to fall.  But, I smiled a bit at the Toon Off over at Daryl Cagle’s cartoon website.  Maybe you will too as we spend our first day without Steve.

The Wisdom of John Adams

Civil Discourse, history, politics

The horrid events in Arizona are the talk of the Sunday morning news shows. We all pray for Gabrielle Giffords and her family and for all Americans and do hope that it may be the moment when we look for a new way to work together where we can have honest disagreements with others without having to demonize or destroy them.

I’m reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams and I have new found respect for this great American leader. I find myself marking the pages with quotes and ideas that are still relevant today. He would have been very sad about the state of civility in our country because respect was essential for a successful government:

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls…There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.