Education reform today focuses on quantifiable measures of student learning, which are then used to rate teacher and school quality.  Reform of pedagogy concentrates on its technical aspects, and attempts to enumerate and catalogue the most minute features of teaching behaviors.  Test results are used to punish and threaten educators, and to obscure the humanity of both teachers and students, ignoring local contexts, as well as the powerful social and economic factors that affect our students’ lives and shape their futures.  One of the most pernicious myths of curricular refo

Daniel Weeks, the executive director of Open Democracy (a non-partisan advocacy organization founded by Doris “Granny D” Haddock), maintains that democracy is in default.

In 1982, more than 11,000 New Yorkers saw archaeologists at work on an excavation project at 175 Water Street, just blocks from the heart of New York’s Financial District. Then it was all gone. What would an underwater archeologist find beneath the pavement of Lower Manhattan? The remains of a colonial merchant ship.

When Marjorie Heins started her "dream job" at the American Civil Liberty Union's Arts Censorship Project in 1991, she did not realize how much it would focus on sex. The previous year, however, had seen prosecutions for obscenity against a museum for showing the works of famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and against a music store owner for selling a recording by a rap group. Heins foresaw how sex-and-censorship wars would continue throughout the 1990s.

We know within seconds upon entering a new house if we feel at home. We know when a place makes us feel more alive. This is the mystery that interests Howard Mansfield — Why do some houses have life, are home, are dwellings, and others are not?

Lois Lowry has opened the gates of literature for young adults in her classics such as Number the Stars and Anastasia Krupnik, and her brilliant dystopian novel, The Giver. Her talk at the Lyceum will coincide with the August, 2014, opening of the film version of The Giver, starring Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep. Ms. Lowry will speak about her life as a writer, and books that have been pivotal in her career, including The Giver and its journey to the screen.

Traditional Navajo ceremonies contribute to healing the human body at multiple levels. Navajo healing, using chant, prayer, and guided imagery, has been shown to change how the brain functions (neuroplasticity). The Navajo approach to keeping the physical body strong is a blend of mind-body medicine. The Navajo healing ceremony, an archetype of the Native culture, demonstrates the blend of traditional foods, Native spirituality, and connection within the community and to the natural world.

Panacea was a Greek goddess with the power to heal wounds and cure sicknesses. Nowadays the word panacea denotes a single solution to a complicated problem. Biology professor Bernd Heinrich views Nature as a panacea to humankind’s problem of surviving happily on this planet. Nature offers models to help understand the causes of diseases, provides chemicals to cure or control them, shows ways to manage our environment, and inspires us.

Making music is not merely a pastime but a priesthood. Join Dr. Bill Banfield as he journeys through the development of American musical culture, highlighting creative artists such as Rosetta Tharpe, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Kurt Cobain, all committed to art and social engagement. Banfield will show how popular music artistry is a critically important and needed interpretation of the human condition, defining, informing and therefore shaping our culture. His acclaimed band, Bill Banfield’s The Jazz Urbane, will join Bill to play music both during and after the lecture.

The media bombards us with hyper-sexualized images conveying powerful messages about sexuality, gender identity and intimacy. These images are so commonplace that they form the wallpaper of our young people’s visual landscape. They amount to a mass-produced industrialized vision of sex that profoundly limits our ability to form authentic relationships free of violence and degradation. Dr. Dines explores the need to adopt a public health approach to this issue to develop strategies for minimizing the harm of living in a culture saturated with hypersexualized and pornographic images.