Student aid: send us all the necessary documents

me: sends all the documents

Student aid:

Student aid: we have received no documents. Please send us your documents

applying oneself to mathematics

Success is when a person sets a smart goal and then achieves that smart goal. Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Realistic. Timely. = Smart. It’s a simple mnemonic to make it easier to become successful. Do you actually want to do things the super duper easy way? If not, why do you want to do them the hard way? Or just the average way? Optimisation of your motivation is necessary. You can…

I’m trying to beat my procrastination and actually do some work for what is basically the last course of non-thesis writing i have left.

Dr. Theodore Brameld's Controversial Education Experiment

In 1944, University of Minnesota professor, Dr. Theodore Brameld (pictured above, center), conducted an experiment in Floodwood, Minnesota, a town 40 miles west of Duluth, asking high school age students to envision the postwar world they would lead. 

The students of the rural Minnesota Finnish farming town completed an intensive study of American government and society and came out in favor of quite radical ideas like a national health care system, public ownership of natural resources, and a lowered voting age. 

When Brameld published his results, there was backlash. Right-wing lobbying organizations claimed Brameld forced anti-American ideologies on the students. And the University of Minnesota took heat for teaching America’s youth that Communism and Socialism are superior to the American system.

Additionally, Brameld was a strong supporter of racial equality and believed that the education system was an obvious point of entry to foster unity. By combining desegregation efforts and curriculum changes, schools could lead the way in reconstructing society, an educational philosophy he supported and advocated, called “Reconstructionism.” Brameld taught at the University of Minnesota until 1947, when he relocated to New York University and later Boston University. 

Read more about the Floodwood experiment and its impact, in this recent Star Tribune article by John Reinan, whose mother was one of the Floodwood students who participated in the study.

Want to read more in-depth? Get on the HCL waitlist to read a copy of Brameld’s published report on the study, Design for America: An Educational Exploration of the Future of Democracy, for Senior High Schools and Junior Colleges, 1945.