“My parents taught me that you can have a creative approach to thinking that is almost scientific… You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again… Everything that I do comes out of writing. It’s the genesis point… You go within yourself, wrestle with your demons, scribble some stuff up and come out with a vision of what the world is like. It is closer to being a painter.
“The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students'… desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic… Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and thorough in how they observe the world. Noticing details in paintings during a school tour, for example, helps train students to consider details in the future.”
“Racism is a prejudice… coupled with discriminatory action. It’s a very simple definition, it took me a long time to arrive at it, but it is composed of these two parts. You need to have prejudices concerning a certain group of human beings — to whom you attribute mental and physical features reproduced from generation to generation — coupled with discriminatory action. If you have only prejudices, you don’t have racism.”
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Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson