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When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my husband drove the family to see San Francisco one day. It was the most beautiful and inspiring big city I h

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my husband drove the family to see San Francisco one day. It was the most beautiful and inspiring big city I had ever seen. We stopped at the bookstore on the way home and I bought a bunch of books related to my interest in urban planning and read them while convalescing. One book was a collection of excerpts from various urban planning tomes. Another was a book called Seeing like a state. Another was about The Clemente Course in Humanities. https://www.clementecourse.org/ https://www.clementecourse.org/ To me, community development is about the people more than the buildings or infrastructure. Those things are not unimportant, but they need to serve the people. So I was also interested in the psychology of how the state relates to the needs of the people and how you develop human capital. Human capital is developed in part with education. Jobs and other social connections also matter but education is one of the things that tends to separate the privileged from the underprivileged. When I homeschooled my sons, I used to talk in online forums about teaching my kids a humanities education and defined it as being about learning to effectively cope with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of one's own humanity. Humanities also gets called Liberal Arts. In spite of its current poor reputation, Liberal Arts was so named because the idea was that it was education that was empowering and freeing. It was, in a word, liberating. My dream college back when I was a teenager, that I never got to attend, has a Great Books curriculum. https://www.sjc.edu/ https://www.sjc.edu/

kaba0 5y ago
Just in case you have missed, here is a thread on your dream college: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29324628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29324628
selimthegrim 5y ago
>Another was a book called Seeing like a state I think you'll find James Scott has a strong HN fanbase
- olau 5y ago
  Here's a little anecdote regarding Seeing like a state. I read the book some years ago, then afterwards as chair of a kindergarten had a state-like experience with the local municipality. They wanted to use a language test on all recently turned 3 year olds in the municipality because someone had told them that a bunch of the children starting in school ended up in trouble because they did not have good language skills. Now, the school curriculum had recently changed to be much more intellectual in the first year. So you might think that perhaps something had gone awry in the school end - but no, see, the problem is here, our kindergartens clearly suck, let's just measure 3 year olds (!) so we can identify the bad kindergartens/children and fix them. That's seeing like a state mentality in a nutshell. Having read the book, it was just so obvious. I talked to several kindergarten leaders who hated that test because it had clear false negatives (kindergarten pedagogues are there because they love the children, anything that goes against that makes them want to die) and made parents nervous for no good reason, but try explaining that to the responsible manager at the municipality. He obviously thought I was just being dumb. Luckily, the municipality made a mistake, because after a lot of digging it turned out they didn't actually have the authority to demand the tests. For the record, I think the right thing to do here would be to strengthen the caring culture for misfits in the kindergartens - often, but not always, the children with language trouble have other troubles. And then look holistically at the curriculum in the schools. If it's not working out for them with the children they get, they need to do something else. It's like when you make a program and your intended users are too dumb to figure it out, well, chances are you messed up.

kaba0 5y ago

Just in case you have missed, here is a thread on your dream college: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29324628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29324628

selimthegrim 5y ago

>Another was a book called Seeing like a state I think you'll find James Scott has a strong HN fanbase

olau 5y ago
Here's a little anecdote regarding Seeing like a state. I read the book some years ago, then afterwards as chair of a kindergarten had a state-like experience with the local municipality. They wanted to use a language test on all recently turned 3 year olds in the municipality because someone had told them that a bunch of the children starting in school ended up in trouble because they did not have good language skills. Now, the school curriculum had recently changed to be much more intellectual in the first year. So you might think that perhaps something had gone awry in the school end - but no, see, the problem is here, our kindergartens clearly suck, let's just measure 3 year olds (!) so we can identify the bad kindergartens/children and fix them. That's seeing like a state mentality in a nutshell. Having read the book, it was just so obvious. I talked to several kindergarten leaders who hated that test because it had clear false negatives (kindergarten pedagogues are there because they love the children, anything that goes against that makes them want to die) and made parents nervous for no good reason, but try explaining that to the responsible manager at the municipality. He obviously thought I was just being dumb. Luckily, the municipality made a mistake, because after a lot of digging it turned out they didn't actually have the authority to demand the tests. For the record, I think the right thing to do here would be to strengthen the caring culture for misfits in the kindergartens - often, but not always, the children with language trouble have other troubles. And then look holistically at the curriculum in the schools. If it's not working out for them with the children they get, they need to do something else. It's like when you make a program and your intended users are too dumb to figure it out, well, chances are you messed up.