Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

From @MikeNayna's doc on Evergreen State, a line I can't get out of my head: "I can't make you agree or disagree — I hate to even use that language, of agree or disagree — but when you're here you are required by your job to create an atmosphere in which all children can learn."

The speaker — a "scholar of whiteness studies" — is addressing faculty at a college, where as I understand it we accept that disagreement is the raw material of progress, students should be treated like the adults they are & learning occurs w/o anyone having their pillow fluffed.

But it also sounds pretty unobjectionable — and worse, it's the sort of thing you're going to spend too much defending yourself over if you *do* object.

Your typical college student has spent his or her entire life thieving small advantages from idiot captors in order to make passable grades w/o sacrificing every waking second. Think they're gonna pass on an opportunity like "I can't learn because of the environment you created"?

For many college students, the idea that they're responsible for their own learning & for curating optimal environments for themselves is incomprehensible. And after 10+ years of being strapped into a desk-chair & force-fed words like a foie gras duck, is that not to be expected?

I'm re-listening to the doc with a pedagogy-as-gaslighting frame rather than focusing on the social justice elements. It's really well done. However bad Evergreen State's treatment of @BretWeinstein & @HeatherEHeying looks at a glance, it's actually worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk …

A broad observation: people in a hierarchy have a strong emotional reaction when those they internally accept as their higher-ups publicly debase themselves. The nature of the reaction probably varies notably depending on whether they're aggressively climbing or seeking stability