Open Society

Education is not memorization. It is the activation of the imagination and a path towards liberation.”                                                                     – Dr. Christopher Emdin

“Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos // We want a world where many worlds fit.” – Zapatista of Chiapas

The default culture within most schools today is more transactional than transformational and dehumanizing in that students and teachers do not have the space where they can be successful without sacrificing some part of their identities. To remedy this, Dr. Christopher Emdin has argued that schools need to be spaces where people can be “ratchetdemic” – both ratchet and academic – or whole in their identities. This calls for a disruption of the dominant culture in schools that values individuation over standardization and creativity over compliance.Put another way, schools need to be places where students are known to have “jagged learning profiles” and teachers are known to have “jagged teaching profiles” as defined by Todd Rose, former professor and director of the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard. Rose argues that schools are suffering under “the tyranny of the average,” misguided by the notion that instruction should be directed toward an “average student.” The problem with this is that an “average student” is a fiction that only exists when you strip young people of their most human qualities.

“Any system produces what it was designed to produce.”                                                                       – The National Equity Project

Most striking was the finding that white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions–on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people. These results suggest that sociopolitical factors such as power, status, alienation, and trust are strong determiners of people's perception and acceptance of risks.