Category: issues

“An April study from Payscale.com, a data firm based in Seattle, ranked 1,500 educational programs on their return on investments for 2013. There were 74 schools that showed a return of $1 million or more on the investment in an education, while 30 schools had a negative return on investment–meaning the cost of attending was more than what the students would make up with increased wages, even over a 30-year period.”

“No organization is made better off by focusing on the broad shared vision; they are only made better off when they focus on the part of that vision that can be attributed immediately to their work. In this way, the shared vision of cultural innovation is lost to the competitive struggle for funding.”

The Plain Dealer actually has put together a list of Frequently asked questions about the three women who were rescued last week after a decade in captivity. Sasha Weiss considers – even as she understands why the paper did that – how coverage of the ordeal got to that point – and why the media narrative takes the forms that it has.

“Most of my students were born in the early-to-mid-1990s; they hit puberty under the influence of two conflicting social realities: the widespread availability of broadband and the Bush-era abstinence-only sex education policies. … [This] meant that Internet pornography became the primary and ubiquitous source of information about [sex] … It’s as if instead of offering driver’s ed, we taught you how to operate a car by showing you a James Bond movie.”

“The Minnesota case is particularly agonizing and seemingly inexplicable.”

“While visual arts generated the greatest immediate sense of achievement, it was music and dance that demonstrated a significantly longer energising effect than other art forms, with the results concluding that art practices can combat many of the most difficult effects of early dementia.”

“if you do a large-scale presentation, then you need to do a full accounting. If you’re going to show individual pieces, you may not have to.”

“If building audiences and arts engagement, and widening arts access at grassroots level, are prioritised, it could be that the arts find they have an army of advocates. It is those people whom this and future governments can’t afford to ignore.”

“When Mr. Delivorrias takes a list of employees from the top drawer of his desk, his hands are trembling just a bit. There are red question marks beside some of the names — the ones who might be getting laid off next. “

As Czech historian Milan Hubl once said: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”