Search Results for: Education

Generational Shift for Kenya's Maasai Tribe

Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and nearly free education, instituted by former Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki, means most Maasai children are today in school. Those of the prior generation who were educated only in the ways of the tribe — who speak no Swahili or English but just Maa — are around 30 years of age. Many wile away the hours in clapboard bars, unable to resist that alcohol now available in quantities unheard of in the past, when beer was brewed in the home from honey and was not for sale.

David McDannald, in The American Scholar (subscribers only), on the effects of globalization on the Maasai tribe in Kenya.

Read more from The American Scholar in our archive

Photo: wwarby, Flickr

Just Who Is Herman Curtis Malone?

Longreads Pick

Curtis Malone created a D.C. youth basketball empire. Turns out, he was a drug dealer, too:

The Malone these by-the-book high achievers know is, well, one of them. Over three decades, he guided hundreds — some say thousands — of teenage boys toward higher education, especially those whose skills on the basketball court set them apart from their peers. The athletically gifted youngsters often landed on the Amateur Athletic Union basketball team Malone founded with his friend Troy Weaver in 1993, D.C. Assault.Malone built a winning team, which attracted more talent, which meant more wins. Charismatic and driven, Malone grew D.C. Assault into one of the top AAU boys’ basketball programs in the United States with nine teams.

Published: Mar 27, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Is There Hope for the Survivors of the Drug Wars?

Longreads Pick

Men from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods are turning to a family and job training center to keep themselves off the street dealing drugs and rebuild their lives after spending time in jail:

The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group in America to die young and to die from violence. Most of their life experience, the skills that have helped them survive the streets or prison, works against them in the legal world. The biggest problem the center has spent 15 years trying to solve isn’t how to get these guys jobs, or how to encourage them to be more involved in their children’s lives, or how make the streets safer, though those are tough enough. The problem is more profound: How do you give these survivors of the drug wars, men who are criminalized and discarded by society, who are at the bottom of every statistic, hope?

Published: Mar 24, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,059 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

Read more…

Inside The Barista Class

Longreads Pick

A former barista examines service work and the difficult transition into the creative class:

My kind of service work is not the kind of service work that puts you in the back room washing dishes for 12-hour shifts for dollars because you are considered completely expendable. But my kind of service work is part of the same logic that indiscriminately razes neighborhoods. It outsources the emotional and practical needs of the oft-fetishized, urban-renewing “creative” workforce to a downwardly mobile middle class, reducing workers’ personality traits and educations to a series of plot points intended to telegraph a zombified bohemianism for the benefit of the rich.

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 11, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,621 words)

What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 22, 2014

What We Talked About on Campus This Week: A Reading List

Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.

1. Professors, We Need You! (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, February 16, 2014)

Academics used to be a part of public discourse, and now they’re not. Blame them.

2. Why is Academic Writing So Academic? (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, February 21, 2014)

As usual, it’s about audience.

3. USC’s “Business Decision” to Ax Its Master of Professional Writing Program Leaves Unanswered Questions (Gene Maddaus, LA Weekly, February 20, 2014)

Graduate programs can be revenue generators, but not when enrollment goes down.

4. Is Faster Always Better? (Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2014)

High-school students take accelerated classes for college credit. But once on campus, they can struggle to keep up.

5. The Dark Power of Fraternities (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic, March 2014)

Fraternities thrive at colleges thanks to a culture that markets them and a risk-management system that protects them.

6. Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard (Kiera Feldman, The New Republic, February 17, 2014)

“How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?”

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Photo: Velkr0

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The Shadow Legal System on College Campuses, and What It Means for Reporting Sexual Assault

"Patrick Henry College is not alone in internally adjudicating sexual assault. Every college and university maintains its own shadow legal system—and many secular colleges have a terrible track record of investigating and punishing sexual assault. But Patrick Henry College is one of only four private colleges in the United States that eschews federal funds in order to avoid complying with government regulations. This poses financial hardships for students and their families—PHC students are prohibited from accessing FAFSA loans, Pell Grants, state funds, scholarships, or the G.I. Bill—and it makes the institution particularly dependent on its conservative evangelical donor base. Homeschoolers see this as a worthwhile price to pay for freedom from government intrusion. The financial-aid page on PHC’s website notes, “In order to safeguard our distinctly Christian worldview, we do not accept or participate in government funding.”

This also means PHC isn’t subject to the Clery Act, Title IX, or the more recent Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act. The Clery Act requires schools to issue campus crime reports. Title IX says schools must hold an investigation independent of a criminal investigation and ensure that victims can change dorms and class arrangements, get campus restraining orders, and receive help filing a police report if they choose to do so. The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act mandates that schools have prompt disciplinary proceedings and inform victims of their rights and options under Title IX. These regulations are no guarantee that sexual-assault accusations will be handled properly, and students at dozens of schools have recently filed Title IX and Clery Act complaints with the Department of Education that document widespread victim-blaming, mishandling of reports, and impunity for perpetrators. Yet, PHC students lack even that legal recourse. (The school says it tries to “generally follow the principles of those laws,” but it is not legally bound to comply with them.)

“As a private campus, it’s outside of federal influence. They can do whatever they want,” says Brett Sokolow, an attorney and president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. “If you’re a female student, and you elect to enroll at a campus that does not provide any of the federal protections that attach to other colleges and universities, you need to know that going in.”

Kiera Feldman, in The New Republic, on Patrick Henry College, an evangelical school in Virginia accused by former students of victim-blaming and covering up reports of sexual assault. Read more from Feldman.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Where the Gift of Writing Comes From

Let me state it so you get the picture clear as wind chimes in a soft breeze on a somnolent noon. Underlying my existence is a deeper intelligence that speaks to me when I am writing. My artist friends say I am an anomaly—no education, no family grounding, no proper socialization. My writing gifts seem to have come from nowhere. So maybe the deities pitied me for my lack of human support and sent the face to grant me relief. Maybe it comes to me as compensation for the constant invasion of privacy by the Orwellian judicial bureaucracy, a reaction to a life of stop-and-frisk and security screenings. I don’t know. I am certain, however, that this deeper intelligence has a face, and when I write, that face perches above my right shoulder and watches me.

—From the book The Face by Jimmy Santiago Baca, a haunting meditation, interspersed with beautiful poems. Read more fiction.

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