Joel's humanistic blog

Following up on my announcements of new electronic versions of classic 19th century works on education by Friedrich Froebel and Herbert Spencer are two examples of the difference between their ideas introduced well over a century ago and the educational practice today. Last Tuesday's health section of the New York Times had an appalling article , "Tough Day for Kindergartners (and Parents)" by Laurie Tarkan, about the unhappiness both children and their parents face when the children begin attending kindergarten; and how this unhappiness is being dealt with only by increasingly elaborate methods of "greasing the wheels" to make a smoother transition into the system. In the blandly matter-of-fact account of such methods, there isn't the ghost of a suggestion that the system itself is the problem, even as it acknowledges that the new environment is less individualized and breaks up the students' previous relationships with their parents and preschool co...

Prometheus Books is the largest and most well-known publisher of books about secular humanism in the United States, but it also has a few books that are a bit more offbeat. Here's a list of random interesting-looking books from them, prepared as part of my research for possible topics and guests for Equal Time For Freethought . In fact, a couple of books on the list (the ones by Litman and Davin) are ones I knew about and was interested in long before I noticed they were from Prometheus. Kropotkin: The Politics of Community by Brian Morris —About one of the greatest anarchist thinkers, Peter Kropotkin, and his current relevance. Morris also has a book (not published by Prometheus) about Bakunin, and Prometheus does publish a book on French anarchist Jean Grave and a collection of Bakunin's writings . Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman —Shows how pathetic copyright is and how modern changes in copyright laws, with an emphasis on the particularly egregious 1998 Digital Mi...

National Geographic magazine has a regular series where they look at a particular ZIP code area of the United States in each issue. In last month's (August 2005) issue, the feature was on the East Wind commune in Tecumseh, Missouri—a prototypical 1960s hippie commune that's lasted until today. While it's always nice to see the idealistic 1960s alternatives still around (for instance, contemporary alternative schools that began in the "free school" movement during the 1960s and early 1970s), it also happens to be an interesting example of market socialism in practice. While the work and resources within the commune are distributed collectively, the commune's revenue comes from the half-million dollars of annual profit which they obtain from a nut butter business. The article makes there out to be a sharp, ironic contrast between such market profitability and the socialist ideals of the commune—the name "East Wind" comes from a quotation by Mao Zedo...

Following closely Friedrich Froebel's autobiography , another pioneering work in education has been posted to Project Gutenberg , after being prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (see my earlier post on DP), and again I'm credited in the text for my work on it. The book in question is the collection Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects by Herbert Spencer, a leading 19th century scientist whose radical social and political theories influenced the likes of Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Henry George, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Tucker. The group of essays "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?", "Intellectual Education", "Moral Education", and "Physical Education" were originally written in the 1850s and collected in book form in 1861. This edition adds five additional essays, as well as an excellent 1911 introduction by Charles W. Eliot. Known for creating the "Five Foot Shelf" collection of selected books, Eliot summ...

I'm sad to see that today's New York Times has an obitiuary for Philip J. Klass, known among skeptics for his books about UFOs. One of these books, UFOs Explained , was the first skeptical book I read, which together with Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus , I found in my high school library. This is one of the factors that then led me to pick up Carl Sagan's books, starting with Broca's Brain (which has a section on pseudoscience) and the then-brand-new The Demon-Haunted World .

A 1902 collection by Thomas Henry Huxley, Lectures and Essays , including essays like "Autobiography", "Lectures on Evolution", "Naturalism and Supernaturalism", "Agnosticism", has just been posted to the website Project Gutenberg , after being prepared through Distributed Proofreaders . There's already a ton of Huxley material on PG , including many essay collections that overlap with this one (such as another one, posted just this past May, which also went through DP, Science and Christian Tradition , which has three essays in common: "The Value of Witness to the Miraculous", "Agnosticism", and "Agnosticism and Christianity"), but one can't have too much of a good thing.

Two weeks ago, the humanist radio show Equal Time for Freethought (on WBAI in the New York City area), for which I'm on the staff as a researcher, celebrated its third anniversary. Given that tonight's show featured science fiction author David Gerrold, I think a reference to Theodore Sturgeon's famous short story is appropriate. Given how marginalized the show's philosophy of "secular humanism and scientific naturalism" is in our society and (especially) the mass media, I'm proud it's been on for so long. In fact, when I started listening to tonight's show I suddenly got a gut reaction of surprise to this — hey, humanism is coming from the radio! It may be a relatively small step towards getting the message out (especially in the constraints of a half-hour format) but it's still significant. Tonight's discussion was interesting, since I'm a longtime science fiction fan (as, of course, is interviewer Barry Seidman). Some of my favorit...

An eBook of the autobiography of Friedrich Froebel , the education pioneer best known as the inventor of kindergarten, has just been posted on Project Gutenberg . This was prepared via Distributed Proofreaders and I had a role in producing this as the "Post-Processor" (completing a finished copy of the book after it's been proofread); I'm credited in the text. (I've previously posted about my involvement with DP, where I explained the process a bit more). Since Froebel didn't write a formal autobiography, it's a compilation of two long autobiographical letters, heavily annotated by the translators (with 142 footnotes for a work of about 150 pages!) and also contains a Froebelian chronology and bibliography, so it has quite a bit of historical material. Quotes about Froebel's educational philosophy from the book: While others have taken to the work of education their own pre-conceived notions of what that work should be, Froebel stands consistently ...

Today is exactly one year since I've joined Distributed Proofreaders . It's a project for producing electronic texts of public domain books (from classic to obscure) for the website Project Gutenberg (which is one of the largest such websites, and has existed in some form since the 1970s). The work of producing a text is split up so that many people can work on it at the same time. Most of the work of producing an accurate text is the work of correcting and formatting text that has been extracted by software (known as OCR) from a scan of a book's page; in DP, proofreaders log on to the site and, via specialized software, compare the digital text and image side-by-side. One page is proofread at a time by any one person. It's a lot of fun. It provides a way to indulge two of my favorite things, old books and computers, at the same time. There's a combination of flexibility and seriousness in the structure. The activity level is high as books move through the site an...

Well, after thinking about making a blog for a long while, I finally just decided to quit procrastinating and just start one, and see where it ends up. The first day of the first month of the second half of the year is a nice round time to start afresh. I've just got back from the Alternative Education Resource Organization 's 2005 conference, "A Spectrum of Alternatives", held last weekend, and one of the first things I'm going to do is to write about it. (Also, I was talking to a person at the conference who was posting entries to his own blog about the conference, and I was thinking, "hey, it looks easy, why not!") I've also been to two of their previous conferences in the same location, the International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) 2003 , and 2004's AERO 15th anniversary conference; it was nice seeing people again from those conferences, as well as seeing new folks too, such as seeing Alfie Kohn in person for the first time.