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[TypicalGirls] HumanifestX August 2025 Update: If the medium is the lesson, then we are overdue for a curricular revision!
- From: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
- To: Dina Hornreich <hornreichdina AT gmail.com>
- Subject: [TypicalGirls] HumanifestX August 2025 Update: If the medium is the lesson, then we are overdue for a curricular revision!
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2025 12:03:34 -0400
Dear friends (new and old):
As I have been in another period of grieving for both personal and communal reasons, it is becoming clear that Maya Angelou was correct: “The price of authenticity is high, but the rewards are great.” As an educator, I am fully prepared to help today’s learners get better for becoming informed, engaged, and wise citizens in a participatory democracy; this is because there are moralists (realists and romantics alike) who seem willing to consider how the separation of church and state doesn’t sanction wanton ludicrousness (i.e. immorality). These are pertinent considerations for each of us: whether we are talking about the intrinsic nature of sincere individuals on our personal journeys, or further extrapolating those truths for the goals of cultivating more civilized engagements on a larger scale. Oftentimes, I simply prefer to remind myself of Eleanor Rooseveld’s statement suggestive of how “With freedom comes great responsibility.”
As an educator, I frequently revisit with the ideas in Neil Postman’s “The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School” (1995) which cogently points out ongoing discrepancies between what we are studying and what we are actually learning in our emerging techno-social realities:
“It would seem that everywhere one turns these days, there are books, articles, and television shows on the subject of how technology has remade the world, and continues to remake it. It is among the leading topics in everyday conversation, especially among academics. There is, for example, hardly a school superintendent anywhere, or a college dean, who cannot give us a ready-made sermon of how we live in an “information age.” Then why do we not have a subject [i.e. academic discipline] in which students address questions such as these: How does information differ in symbolic form? How are ideographs different from letters? How are images different from words? Paintings from photographs? Speech from writing? Television from books? Radio from television? Information comes in many forms, and at different velocities and in different quantities. Do the differences matter? Do the differences have varying psychic and social effects? The questions are almost endless. This is a serious topic” (p. 190).
As a non-binary Jewish Feminist, I find inspiration from Arthur Waskow’s “Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Money, Sex, and the Rest of Life” (1995) which seems to suggest that it is Feminism that supports certain Jewish ideas about egalitarianism (i.e. by refuting the subjugation of femininity; since bell hooks has already taught us how “feminism is for everybody”):
“...As Jews became full citizens of the United States, the fact that the government had been sponsoring Christian religious observances became much more visible. American society responded not by endorsing Judaism too, but by putting new limits on the government's power to define, control, sponsor, and impose religion of any sort. If Jews were half the society, as women are, American culture and politics would have changed even more” (p.311-312).
Civic engagement requires an architecture of opportunities that is based on merit, values, and virtues. A cooperative citizenry should find a way to agree upon a secular morality which affords us the abilities to become re-centralized as we untangle the ways in which we have become over-differentiated and are otherwise striving to aggregate legitimate phenomena that continues to be erroneously dismissed as spuriousness. When we struggle silently and in isolation, we become fragmented and disempowered. The political structures that are explicitly laid out should afford healthy choices; and the implications of this reasoning support realigning our pluralistic, cultural structures for explicitly shaping the "content of our character" so that our decisions don’t contradict our rhetoric. In other words: It's time for us to walk the talk!
As such, the elevation of connective or socio-emotional labor (fka: “womens’ work”) suggests that as girls, women, and everyone in-between (or beyond?!) have become educated and employable constituencies in our communities, a new social fabric should emerge in order to prevent the traits of “toxic masculinity” (i.e. greed, violence, and misogyny) from further polluting our socio-technical ecosystems on micro, meso, and macro-levels. I remain "marginalized" for wondering about the implications of these ideas locally, globally, and (of course) transnationally. For example, I continue to ponder how we continue to allow our world leaders to condone and promote the exploitation of sovereign entities by allowing disagreements to become hostile acts of warfare? Whether it is the Sunni & the Shia; the Arabs & the Israelis; or the Indians & the Pakistanis; the story appears to be the same. Furthermore, it is clear to me that these considerations are not exclusive to an elite ruling class; on the contrary, they are basic human needs, wants, and desires for everybody to address.
Thank you for considering my ideas; and please feel free to share my newsletter with those whom you might deem appropriate recipients of such ideations.
As always, be well!
-Dina
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/NAMP:_Not_Another_Marketing_Ploy
linkedin.com/in/dina-hornreich-113a79283
medium.com/@dina-hornreich
413-315-0485
c/o FOH & CSO @29 Industrial Drive East, Northampton, MA 01060
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Advocating for better consumer safeguards and sustainable
economic reform in the age of surveillance capitalism for "wising up" from rationality to morality in this emerging "Conceptual
Age."
Stopping the epidemics of misinformation, disinformation, & malinformation (propaganda)
from disrupting our information, media, & technology (IMT) ecosystems by
facilitating the effective, appropriate, & ethical comprehension/production
of IMT artefacts on our journeys toward integrative recovery & holistic
wellbeing.
Facilitating the acquisition of lifelong literacies, instead of reinforcing the perception that "natural vulnerabilities" are "permanent deficiencies," as a community of learners struggling to fight the onslaught of unhealthy messages generated by practices which condone/promote the exploitation of typical human fallibilities reinforcing the greedy, violent, and misogynistic approaches of a plutocratic tyranny who resorts to criminalizing, pathologizing, and otherwise blaming the victims of their wanton ludicrousness.
Alerting
consumers to the impact of numerous illusions and other deceptive
efforts that turn our individual differences into manufactured
deviations (and other forms of "learned helplessness"); thereby
revealing systemic injustices that are perpetuated by ongoing
inequitable power dynamics (i.e. colonialism) and other accessibility
barriers to the basic resources that support our universal human needs,
wants, & desires.
Building a taskforce of nonviolent communicators who are:
- Promoting an informed, engaged, & wise global citizenry and participatory transnational Democracy. (cf: listography)
- Elevating “Conceptual Age” skills (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, & meaning) in order to remedy the shortcomings of residuals from the preceding "Information Age" and "Industrial Age."
- Preventing media pollution, information disorder, & “techno-lust” from further disrupting our social, cultural, political, & economic ecosystems.
- Championing mindful “meta-literacies” (i.e. becoming adept bullsh*t detectives) involving the creation, selection, organization, presentation, diffusion, consumption, & preservation stages for "processing" IMT artefactual innovations.
- Adopting the principles of "Data Feminism": Examining power; challenging power; elevating emotion & embodiment; rethinking binaries & hierarchies; embracing pluralism; considering context; and making labor visible.
- [TypicalGirls] HumanifestX August 2025 Update: If the medium is the lesson, then we are overdue for a curricular revision!, Dina Hornreich, 08/01/2025
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