The Collector

Everywhere I go I'm reminded how much the desire to punish homelessness and migration and other Undesirablenesses make society markedly worse for everyone

Over on Bluesky...

For anyone unfamiliar with Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the entire thesis is that traditional educational models promote oppression by removing students' agency in their own learning. Freire argues that currently education functions as a "banking model" - teachers are the holders of knowledge, and students are empty vessels, waiting to have that knowledge put into their heads like a piggy bank. This reinforces a passive attitude towards information, not seeking and understanding it on your own terms, but waiting for a "banker" to deposit it into your head.

“I feel it in my work as a teacher, where I recognize that we are so close — so, so close — to a world where teaching looks like AI-generating lesson plans and delivering those lesson plans using AI-generated slides, and then assessing the skills of those lessons using AI-generated tests, and then grading those tests using a form of AI. The content of AI producing student work that is then fed back to AI for AI to assess. And for what? And at what cost? It pains me. It pains me deeply. And then I sit down and I read about clams. And it’s not just that I am reading about clams. It’s that I am reading the perspective of someone who thought that it was worth paying attention to clams. There. Remind me again why we read? I think that’s part of it. You pick up a book and someone has you by the arm. There, they are saying, look over there. They are pointing now. They are holding something in their hand. Little clam in the palm, refusing to open. Look at that thing that loves being alive, how it resists the same sun we turn our cheek towards. Crazy world, beautiful place. Down in the deep somewhere, a clam smaller than my hand is withstanding the pressure of a few dozen full-size trains just hanging out on top of its body.”