Tag Archives: Education

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Food & Drink, Libraries, Web & Technology

A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online | Open Culture

in Food & Drink | September 3rd, 2020

Screenshot from article…

As you know if you’re a reader of this site, there are vast, interactive (and free!) scholarly databases online collecting just about every kind of artifact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a significant number of cookbooks online, too.

But proper searchable, historical databases of cookbooks seem to have appeared only lately. To my mind, these might have been some of the first things to become available. How important is eating, after all, to virtually every part of our lives? The fact is, however, that scholars of food have had to invent the discipline largely from scratch.

“Western scholars had a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry. ‘It’s the baser sense,’ says Cathy Kaufman, a professor of food studies at the New School.” Kaufman sits on the board of The Sifter, a new massive, multilingual online database of historical recipe books. Another board member, sculptor Joe Wheaton, puts things more directly: “Food history has been a bit of an embarrassment to a lot of academics, because it involves women in the kitchen.”

Source: A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online | Open Culture

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Science & Health

Which states are the most educated? – USAFacts

Of the top 10 most educated states, nine are located on the east coast.

Published on Mon, November 14, 2022 12:39PM PST | Updated Mon, November 14, 2022 3:08PM PST

Over the past decade, Americans have become more educated. The rate of residents receiving a high school diploma or GED is on an upward trend.

In 2011, 28% of Americans had not graduated high school or received a GED – the same percentage that had received a bachelor’s degree or higher. As of 2021, 35% of Americans have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 26% of Americans without a high school diploma or GED.

Data from the US Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey collects information on maximum educational attainment by age group, location and gender. The data used here highlights the maximum educational attainment of the population 25 and older.

Source: Which states are the most educated? – USAFacts

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Politics, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Is Your School Facing a Book Challenge? These Online Resources May Help | Education Week

By Ileana Najarro — September 01, 2022

Amanda Darrow, the director of youth, family, and education programs at the Utah Pride Center in Salt Lake City, poses with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents in recent weeks.
Rick Bowmer/AP Photo

Book challenges, restrictions, and outright bans on materials in K-12 classrooms and school libraries are popping up more and more across the country these days.

Though such challenges are a perennial problem, school districts have seen an uptick in requests to ban books about LGBTQ characters, race, and racism. A PEN America report found that 2 million students in 86 school districts across the country have had their access to books restricted this past school year. And the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is now getting reports of at least two—and sometimes three or four—book challenges a day, when in the past they would get that many cases per week, said the office’s director, Deborah Caldwell-Stone.

Some educators have been successful in overturning such efforts by supporting students eager to push back, a balancing act requiring them to observe constitutional boundaries about student protests and First Amendment rights. Yet many now teach in states where pushback to book challenges can be even trickier, thanks to new laws that more broadly restrict how topics such as race and gender are discussed in school.

Source: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-your-school-facing-a-book-challenge-these-online-resources-may-help/2022/09

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” | Salon.com

Republicans are channeling tax dollars to right-wing institutes at colleges across the nation. What’s the endgame?

By Kathryn Joyce, Published May 31, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

Statue of Socrates, the philosopher (Getty Images/vasiliki)

Last fall, when professors at Flagler College, a private liberal arts school in St. Augustine, Florida, gathered for a faculty senate meeting, they learned that the college administration had worked with their local legislator to propose a new academic center on campus, the Flagler College Institute for Classical Education.

To administrators, it was an exciting prospect: the chance to receive $5 million from the state to shore up their “first year seminar,” a universal core curriculum for incoming freshmen intended to help students, particularly first-generation students, prepare for the rigors of college.

But some faculty members felt concerned, reading between the lines in a state that has become ground zero for the nation’s education debates — where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-style Republican with his eyes on the White House, has imposed gag orders and mandates on K-12 schools and described universities as “hotbeds of stale ideology” and “indoctrination factories.”

Source: EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” | Salon.com

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Politics

School libraries banned more books than ever before in 2021 – The Washington Post

By Hannah Natanson, April 7, 2022 at 1:13 p.m. EDT

Pennsylvania librarian Samantha Hull has been fighting book bans all school year. (Kyle Grantham for The Washington Post)

Two reports this week show the United States is facing an unprecedented wave of school book banning — spurring Congress to hold a hearing Thursday focused on the issue, which free-speech advocates warn will undermine democracy.

PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, found there have been 1,586 book bans in schools over the past nine months.

–from article…

The bans targeted 1,145 unique books by more than 800 authors, and a plurality of the books — 41 percent — featured prominent characters who are people of color.

Thirty-three percent of the banned books, meanwhile, included LGBTQ themes, protagonists or strong secondary characters, and 22 percent “directly address issues of race and racism.”

Source: School libraries banned more books than ever before in 2021 – The Washington Post

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Politics

The Collapse Of American Teaching

Teachers all over the country describe problems that touch every aspect of our culture and society, from technology dependence to stats-obsessed bureaucracy to a post-COVID behavior crisis.

By Rosie Gray, BuzzFeed News Reporter, Updated on April 1, 2022, 6:29 am, Posted on March 31, 2022, 3:38 pm

Paige worked in corporate America for several years before deciding at the beginning of 2020 to switch to a career she found more meaningful.

When the pandemic hit a short time later, she second-guessed her decision, but the crisis also made her feel “more compelled to rise to the occasion.”

She completed virtual training. Paige — who spoke on the condition that only her middle name be used — started her first job as a teacher at an under-resourced Dallas-area middle school in January 2021.

The district was using a hybrid classroom model, blending remote and in-person instruction. Paige had the advantage of a previous career that prepared her for the technological headache. She felt she was able to build constructive relationships with her students, especially the roughly 30% who came to school in person.

Though her subject, reading, is a perennial testing priority, she was liberated from test pressure since states were given the option to waive the usual battery of exams that year. In hindsight, her first few months of teaching were “breezy and manageable” in comparison to what came after.

Source: The Collapse Of American Teaching