How Finland Created One of the Best Educational Systems in the World (by Doing the Opposite of U.S.)

in Education, Politics | May 26th, 2017

Every con­ver­sa­tion about edu­ca­tion in the U.S. takes place in a mine­field. Unless you’re a bil­lion­aire who bought the job of Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion, you’d bet­ter be pre­pared to answer ques­tions about racial and eco­nom­ic equi­ty, dis­abil­i­ty issues, pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ stu­dents, teacher pay and unions, reli­gious char­ter schools, and many oth­er press­ing con­cerns. These issues are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, nor are they dis­tinct from ques­tions of cur­ricu­lum, test­ing, or achieve­ment. The ter­rain is lit­tered with pos­si­ble explo­sive con­flicts between edu­ca­tors, par­ents, admin­is­tra­tors, leg­is­la­tors, activists, and prof­i­teers.

The needs of the most deeply invest­ed stake­hold­ers, as they say, the stu­dents them­selves, seem to get far too lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion. What if we in the U.S., all of us, actu­al­ly want­ed to improve the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic out­comes for our children—all of them? Where might we look for a mod­el? Many peo­ple have looked to Fin­land, at least since 2010, when the doc­u­men­tary Wait­ing for Super­man con­trast­ed strug­gling U.S. pub­lic schools with high­ly suc­cess­ful Finnish equiv­a­lents.

The film, a pos­i­tive spin on the char­ter school move­ment, received sig­nif­i­cant back­lash for its cher­ry-picked exam­ples and blam­ing of teach­ers’ unions for America’s fail­ing schools. By con­trast, Finland’s schools have been described by William Doyle, an Amer­i­can Ful­bright Schol­ar who stud­ies them, as “the ‘ulti­mate char­ter school net­work’ ” (a phrase, we’ll see, that means lit­tle in the Finnish con­text.) There, Doyle writes at The Hechinger Report, “teach­ers are not strait-jack­et­ed by bureau­crats, scripts or exces­sive reg­u­la­tions, but have the free­dom to inno­vate and exper­i­ment as teams of trust­ed pro­fes­sion­als.”

Last year, Michael Moore fea­tured many of Finland’s inno­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion­al exper­i­ments in his humor­ous, hope­ful trav­el­ogue Where to Invade Next. In the clip above, you can hear from the country’s Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, Krista Kiu­ru, who explains to him why Finnish chil­dren do not have home­work; hear also from a group of high school stu­dents, high school prin­ci­pal Pasi Majas­sari, first grade teacher Anna Hart and many oth­ers. Short­er school hours—the “short­est school days and short­est school years in the entire West­ern world”—leave plen­ty of time for leisure and recre­ation. Kids bake, hike, build things, make art, con­duct exper­i­ments, sing, and gen­er­al­ly enjoy them­selves.

“There are no man­dat­ed stan­dard­ized tests,” writes Lyn­Nell Han­cock at Smith­son­ian, “apart from one exam at the end of stu­dents’ senior year in high school… there are no rank­ings, no com­par­isons or com­pe­ti­tion between stu­dents, schools or regions.” Yet Finnish stu­dents have, in the past sev­er­al years, con­sis­tent­ly ranked in the top ten among mil­lions of stu­dents world­wide in sci­ence, read­ing, and math. “If there was one thing I kept hear­ing over and over again from the Finns,” says Moore above, “it’s that Amer­i­ca should get rid of stan­dard­ized tests,” should stop teach­ing to those tests, stop design­ing entire cur­ric­u­la around mul­ti­ple-choice tests. Han­cock describes the results of the Finnish sys­tem, and its costs:

Nine­ty-three per­cent of Finns grad­u­ate from aca­d­e­m­ic or voca­tion­al high schools, 17.5 per­cent­age points high­er than the Unit­ed States, and 66 per­cent go on to high­er edu­ca­tion, the high­est rate in the Euro­pean Union. Yet Fin­land spends about 30 per­cent less per stu­dent than the Unit­ed States.

Moore’s cam­era reg­is­ters the shock on Finnish edu­ca­tors’ faces when they hear that many U.S. schools elim­i­nat­ed music, art, poet­ry and oth­er pur­suits in order to focus almost exclu­sive­ly on test­ing. Though light­heart­ed in tone, the seg­ment real­ly dri­ves home the depress­ing degree to which so many U.S. stu­dents receive an impov­er­ished education—one bare­ly wor­thy of the name—unless they luck into a vouch­er for a high-end char­ter school or have the inde­pen­dent means for an expen­sive pri­vate one. In Fin­land, says the Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, “all the schools are equal. You nev­er ask where the best school is.”

It’s also ille­gal in Fin­land to prof­it from school­ing. Wealthy par­ents have to ensure that neigh­bor­hood schools can give their kids the best edu­ca­tion pos­si­ble, because they are the only option. Many peo­ple in the U.S. object to com­par­isons like Moore’s by not­ing that soci­eties like Fin­land are “homoge­nous” next to what may seem to them like mad­den­ing cul­tur­al diver­si­ty in the U.S. How­ev­er, Fin­land has incor­po­rat­ed (not with­out dif­fi­cul­ty) large immi­grant and refugee pop­u­la­tions—even as its schools con­tin­ue to improve. The gov­ern­ment has respond­ed in part to ris­ing immi­gra­tion with edu­ca­tion­al solu­tions such as this one, a “nation­al ini­tia­tive to rein­force Finnish high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions (HEIs) as sig­nif­i­cant stake­hold­ers in migrants’ inte­gra­tion.”

The sub­tan­tive dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries’ edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems may have less to do with demog­ra­phy and more to do with eco­nom­ics and the train­ing and social sta­tus of teach­ers.

In Fin­land, writes Doyle, no teacher “is allowed to lead a pri­ma­ry school class with­out a master’s degree in edu­ca­tion, with spe­cial­iza­tion in research and class­room prac­tice.” Teach­ing “is the most admired job in Fin­land next to med­ical doc­tors.” And as Dana Gold­stein points out at The Nation—a fact Wait­ing for Super­man failed to mention—Finnish teach­ers are “gasp!—unionized and grant­ed tenure.” Per­haps an even more sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence the doc­u­men­tary glossed over: in Fin­land, “fam­i­lies ben­e­fit from a cra­dle-to-grave social wel­fare sys­tem that includes uni­ver­sal day­care, preschool and health­care, all of which are proven to help chil­dren achieve bet­ter results at school.”

Hun­dreds of stud­ies in recent years sub­stan­ti­ate this claim. It would seem intu­itive that stress­es asso­ci­at­ed with hunger and pover­ty would have a per­ni­cious effect on learn­ing, espe­cial­ly when poor­er schools are so egre­gious­ly under-resourced. And the data says as much, to vary­ing degrees. And yet, we are now in the U.S. slash­ing break­fast and lunch pro­grams that feed hun­gry chil­dren and decid­ing whether to unin­sure mil­lions of fam­i­lies as mil­lions more still lack basic health cov­er­age. Most every Amer­i­can par­ent knows that qual­i­ty day­cares and preschools can cost as much per year as a decent uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion in this coun­try.

It seems to many of us that the atro­cious state of the U.S. edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem can only be attrib­uted to an act of will on the part our polit­i­cal elite, who see schools as com­pe­ti­tion for fun­da­men­tal­ist belief sys­tems, oppor­tu­ni­ties to pun­ish their oppo­nents out of spite, or as rich fields for pri­vate prof­it. But it needn’t be so. It took 40 years for the Finns to cre­ate their cur­rent sys­tem. In the 1960s, their schools ranked on the very low end—along with those in the U.S. By most accounts, they’ve since shown there can be sys­tems that, while sure­ly imper­fect in their own way, work for all kids, embed­ded with­in larg­er sys­tems that prize their teach­ers and fam­i­lies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Study Shows That Teach­ing Young Kids Phi­los­o­phy Improves Their Aca­d­e­m­ic Per­for­mance, Mak­ing Them Bet­ter at Read­ing & Math

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

Med­i­ta­tion is Replac­ing Deten­tion in Baltimore’s Pub­lic Schools, and the Stu­dents Are Thriv­ing

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Timelapse Animation Lets You See the Rise of Cities Across the Globe, from 3700 BC to 2000 AD

in History, Maps | May 26th, 2017

Last year, a Yale-led research project pro­duced an inno­v­a­tive dataset that mapped the his­to­ry of urban set­tle­ments. Cov­er­ing a 6,000 year peri­od, the project traced the loca­tion and size of cities across the world, start­ing in 3700 BC (when the first known urban dwellings emerged in Sumer) and con­tin­u­ing through 2000 AD. Accord­ing to Yale’s Mered­ith Reba, if we under­stand “how cities have grown and changed over time, through­out his­to­ry, it might tell us some­thing use­ful about how they are chang­ing today,” and par­tic­u­lar­ly whether we can find ways to make mod­ern cities sus­tain­able.

The Yale dataset was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Sci­en­tif­ic Data in 2016. And before too long, some enter­pris­ing YouTu­ber brought the data to life. Above, the his­to­ry of urban life unfolds before your eyes. The action starts off slow, but then lat­er kicks into high gear.

You can read more about the map­ping of urban set­tle­ments at this Yale web­site. And see the ani­mat­ed map in a larg­er for­mat here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

Watch a Mesmerizing Hourglass Filled with 1,250,000 “Nanoballs” (Created by the Designer of the Apple Watch)

in Design | May 26th, 2017

Apple Watch design­er Marc New­son has cre­at­ed an hour­glass that stands about 6 inch­es tall, mea­sures 5 inch­es wide, and fea­tures 1,249,996 tiny spheres called “nanoballs,” each made of stain­less steel and cov­ered with a fine cop­per coat­ing. It takes 10 min­utes for the nanoballs to pour through the glass, from first to last. The action looks pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing, to say the least.

You can pick up your very own hand-made hour­glass for $12,000. But if your pock­ets don’t run quite that deep, you can set­tle for watch­ing the time piece in the video above. Get more infor­ma­tion on the New­son hour­glass here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

Large Choir Sings “Black Hole Sun”: A Moving Tribute to Chris Cornell

in Life, Music | May 25th, 2017

They paid trib­ute to Prince last year. Now they’re doing the same for Chris Cor­nell. Choir!Choir!Choir!–a group that meets week­ly and sings their hearts out in Toronto–got togeth­er and sang Soundgar­den’s 1994 hit, “Black Hole Sun.” Turn up your speak­ers, await the goose­bumps, and even­tu­al­ly wipe away a tear.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rufus Wain­wright and 1,500 Singers Sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah”

This Is What It Sounds Like When 1999 Peo­ple Sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry”

Ice­landic Folk Singers Break Into an Impromp­tu Per­for­mance of a 13th Cen­tu­ry Hymn in a Train Sta­tion, and It’s Delight­ful

Kurt Vonnegut Ponders Why “Poor Americans Are Taught to Hate Themselves” in a Timely Passage from Slaughterhouse-Five

in Literature, Politics | May 25th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Amidst what is now an ordi­nary day’s chaos and tur­moil in the news, you may have noticed some out­rage cir­cu­lat­ing over com­ments made by erst­while brain sur­geon, for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, and cur­rent Sec­re­tary of HUD Ben Car­son. Pover­ty, he said, is a “state of mind.” The idea fits square­ly in the wheel­house of Carson’s brand of mag­i­cal think­ing, as well as into what has always been a self-help tra­di­tion in the U.S. since Poor Richard’s Almanac.

Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the immense pop­u­lar­i­ty of a book writ­ten dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, Napoleon Hill’s 1937 Think and Grow Rich, which has increased every year since its pub­li­ca­tion. By 2015, the book had sold around 100 mil­lion copies world­wide. Hill’s pro­lif­ic self-help cot­tage indus­try occu­pies a promi­nent place in a dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can genre, and an econ­o­my unto itself. Books, videos, sem­i­nars, and megachurch­es promise the faith­ful that they need only to change them­selves to change their eco­nom­ic out­comes, in order not only thrive but to “grow rich.”

The notion has had pur­chase among wealthy oppo­nents of a wel­fare state, who find it a con­ve­nient way to blame the poor for cir­cum­stances out­side their con­trol. But it also, as robust sales indi­cate, has wide appeal among the not-so-wealthy. Why? One reason—the pre­scient­ly, acer­bical­ly insight­ful observ­er of Amer­i­can cul­ture, Kurt Von­negut might argue—has to do with the fact that Amer­i­cans think of pover­ty as a per­son­al fail­ing rather than a social con­di­tion, and con­verse­ly con­flate wealth with intel­li­gence and capa­bil­i­ty.

Von­negut artic­u­lates these obser­va­tions in his 1969 clas­sic Slaugh­ter­house-Five, through a char­ac­ter named Howard W. Camp­bell, Jr., an Amer­i­can play­wright who becomes a Nazi pro­pa­gan­dist (and who stands tri­al in Israel in an ear­li­er nov­el, Moth­er Night). Osten­si­bly quot­ing from a mono­graph of Camp­bel­l’s, Von­negut writes, “Amer­i­ca is the wealth­i­est nation on Earth, but its peo­ple are main­ly poor, and poor Amer­i­cans are urged to hate them­selves.” Camp­bel­l’s mono­graph con­tin­ues:

To quote the Amer­i­can humorist Kin Hub­bard, ‘It ain’t no dis­grace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an Amer­i­can to be poor, even though Amer­i­ca is a nation of poor. Every oth­er nation has folk tra­di­tions of men who were poor but extreme­ly wise and vir­tu­ous, and there­fore more estimable than any­one with pow­er and gold. No such tales are told by the Amer­i­can poor. They mock them­selves and glo­ri­fy their bet­ters. The mean­est eat­ing or drink­ing estab­lish­ment, owned by a man who is him­self poor, is very like­ly to have a sign on its wall ask­ing this cru­el ques­tion: ‘if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an Amer­i­can flag no larg­er than a child’s hand glued to a lol­lipop stick and fly­ing from the cash reg­is­ter.

The Kin Hub­bard quot­ed here may now be large­ly for­got­ten, but in the first three decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry, he was a humorist as wide­ly admired as Mark Twain or Will Rogers. Hub­bard drew a pop­u­lar com­ic strip based on a char­ac­ter called Abe Mar­tin, and his humor was once described as a “com­i­cal mix­ture of hoss sense and no sense at all.”  The quote above comes from one of Mar­t­in’s many pithy polit­i­cal rumi­na­tions, which include lines like “It’s all right t’ aspire to office, but when a feller begins t’ per­spire fer one it’s time t’ watch out.”

The Hub­bard-quot­ing Camp­bell, writes Von­negut with wry humor, was “said by some to have had the high­est I.Q., of all the war crim­i­nals who were made to face a death by hang­ing.” He also pitch­es his appeals to the com­mon man, and ties togeth­er the “think and grow rich” phe­nom­e­non and the ten­den­cy of so many of the country’s less-well-off to sup­port can­di­dates and poli­cies that rou­tine­ly endan­ger access to pub­lic ser­vices, qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion, and health­care.

Amer­i­cans, like human beings every­where, believe many things that are obvi­ous­ly untrue. Their most destruc­tive untruth is that it is very easy for any Amer­i­can to make mon­ey. They will not acknowl­edge how in fact hard mon­ey is to come by, and there­fore, those who have no mon­ey blame and blame and blame them­selves. This inward blame has been a trea­sure for the rich and pow­er­ful, who have had to do less for their poor, pub­licly and pri­vate­ly, than any oth­er rul­ing class since, say, Napoleon­ic times.

Camp­bell appears else­where in the nov­el in an attempt to recruit Amer­i­can POWs into “a Ger­man mil­i­tary unit called ‘The Free Amer­i­can Corps,” of which he is “the inven­tor and com­man­der.” Near the top of the post, see the char­ac­ter in the 1972 Slaugh­ter­house-Five film defend his alliance with the Nazis and explain his bizarre uni­form in terms one com­men­ta­tor sees as dis­tinct­ly res­o­nant with today’s far-right rhetoric. For all his out­landish pre­sen­ta­tion, he is a com­pli­cat­ed figure—something of an amal­gam of the far right’s show­men and huck­sters and its cyn­i­cal intel­lec­tu­als, who often under­stand very well how the stark divi­sions of race and class are main­tained in the U.S., and exploit that knowl­edge for polit­i­cal gain.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Gives a Ser­mon on the Fool­ish­ness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Time­ly Again (Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Hear Kurt Von­negut Vis­it the After­life & Inter­view Dead His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Isaac New­ton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Beat Club, the 1960s TV Show That Brought Rock Music to 70 Million Kids in Germany, Hungary, Thailand, Tanzania & Beyond

in Music | May 25th, 2017

It took a bit longer for the youth rock rev­o­lu­tion to hit Ger­man tele­vi­sions com­pared to the Unit­ed States–where Amer­i­can Band­stand was already in exis­tence pre-Elvis–and the Unit­ed King­dom, where Oh Boy debuted in 1958 as that coun­try’s first pop show. But when Ger­man tele­vi­sion pre­miered Beat Club in Sep­tem­ber 1965, it would pro­found­ly change the cul­ture.

The show took its visu­al cues from both the UK–with its Lon­don Under­ground-aping logo–and the US, with its go-go dancers. It even bor­rowed some of its hosts from across the Chan­nel, like Dave Lee Travis, who was work­ing at pirate sta­tion Radio Car­o­line at the time.

The show’s pro­duc­er Michael Lecke­busch was a more tra­di­tion­al man who pre­ferred musi­cals to rock, but he knew his mar­ket, and he knew how to check the pulse of the scene, by attend­ing The Star Club in Hamburg–one of the venues where the Bea­t­les paid their dues.

Over its sev­en years of shows, which went into col­or broad­cast right when psy­che­delia was tak­ing off, Beat Club intro­duced Ger­man teenagers to the likes of The Kinks, King Crim­son, The Grate­ful Dead, Cap­tain Beef­heart, Cream, Frank Zap­pa, The Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, Step­pen­wolf, Led Zep­pelin, Jimi Hen­drix, The Who, and David Bowie, among many oth­ers.

In fact, Ger­man acts did not appear on the show until 1971. But by that time Beat Club had also strayed from rock and was explor­ing jazz-rock, fusion, and oth­er non-pop for­mats.

The impact on a coun­try that was used to quiz shows and cof­fee and cake on a Sun­day after­noon can’t be over­stat­ed. It was, as the announc­er Wil­helm Wiegen told the view­ers, a show “by young peo­ple, for young peo­ple.” That sounds like basic mar­ket­ing now, but at the time it was a life­line to an entire gen­er­a­tion.

And soon the effect was felt beyond Ger­many, accord­ing to Ger­man site Deutsche Welle.

But Beat-Club kept the youth on its side, pulling in 70 mil­lion view­ers from approx­i­mate­ly 30 coun­tries — from Hun­gary and Fin­land to as far as Thai­land and Tan­za­nia. At its peak, 63 per­cent of Ger­many’s under-30s were reg­u­lar­ly tun­ing in to the music show.
These were the begin­nings of the youth that would become the Stu­den­ten­be­we­gung (“stu­dent move­ment”), also known as the 68ers. With hits such as The Who’s “My Gen­er­a­tion” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sat­is­fac­tion,” Beat-Club gave its “Beat-friends” the moti­va­tion to stand up and fight back against an out-dat­ed gen­er­a­tion. It was a sound­track for a new life.

There is plen­ty of footage of the show knock­ing around YouTube, includ­ing this chan­nel devot­ed to full episodes, and numer­ous oth­er clips. And though the show stopped in 1972, a nos­tal­gic radio ver­sion con­tin­ues to broad­cast with its orig­i­nal female host Uschi Nerke.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Rolling Stones Intro­duce Blues­man Howl­in’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Great­est Cul­tur­al Moments of the 20th Cen­tu­ry” (1965)

Radio Car­o­line, the Pirate Radio Ship That Rocked the British Music World (1965)

Watch the Pro­to-Punk Band The Monks Sow Chaos on Ger­man TV, 1966: A Great Con­cert Moment on YouTube

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

The Crazy, Icon­ic Life of Nico; Andy Warhol Muse, Vel­vet Under­ground Vocal­ist, Enig­ma in Amber

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Animations Show the Melting Arctic Sea Ice, and What the Earth Would Look Like When All of the Ice Melts

in Current Affairs, Science | May 24th, 2017

It’s no secret that cli­mate change has been tak­ing a toll on the Arc­tic. But it’s one thing to read about it, anoth­er thing to see it in action. Above you can watch an ani­ma­tion nar­rat­ed by NASA’s cryos­pher­ic sci­en­tist Dr. Walt Meier. Doc­u­ment­ing changes between 1984 and 2016, the ani­ma­tion lets you see the Arc­tic sea ice shrink­ing. As the impor­tant peren­ni­al sea ice dimin­ish­es, the remain­ing ice cov­er “almost looks gelati­nous as it puls­es through the sea­sons.” For any­one inter­est­ed, an updat­ed ver­sion of this visu­al­iza­tion can be down­loaded in HD here.

If you’re curi­ous what this could all lead to–well, you can also watch a har­row­ing video that mod­els what would hap­pen when all the ice melts and the seas rise some 216 feet. It isn’t pret­ty. The video below is based on the 2013 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic sto­ry, “What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melt­ed.”

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Sup­port the City Threat­ened by Cli­mate Change: A Poignant New Sculp­ture

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The New Show­time Series on Cli­mate Change

Stanford Researchers Discover a Smarter Way to Prepare for Exams: Introducing MetaCognition, the Art of Thinking About Your Thinking

in Education, Psychology | May 24th, 2017

Ear­ly in the sec­ond sea­son of Noah Hawley’s excel­lent Far­go series, one of the gruff, lacon­ic Ger­hardt broth­ers shakes his head dur­ing a tense crime fam­i­ly moment and mut­ters sage­ly, “know thy­self.” Chal­lenged to pro­duce the quotation’s source, he says, with irri­tat­ed self-assur­ance, “It’s in the Bible.” The quote does have an ancient origin—maybe the tem­ple of Apol­lo at Del­phi, maybe the tem­ple court at Luxor—and it’s an idea that reap­pears in every philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem from age to age. Even if the self doesn’t real­ly exist, some thinkers have rea­soned, we should still study it.

These days, psy­chol­o­gists call a cer­tain kind of self-knowl­edge “metacog­ni­tion,” a new word for what they rec­og­nize, Jen­nifer Liv­ingston notes, as a con­cept that has been around “for as long as humans have been able to reflect on their cog­ni­tive expe­ri­ences.” Devel­op­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist John Flavell used the term in 1979 to refer specif­i­cal­ly to “how human beings learn and process infor­ma­tion, as well as indi­vid­ual knowl­edge of one’s own learn­ing process­es.” Often defined as “think­ing about think­ing,” megacog­ni­tion involves know­ing what con­di­tions best enable con­cen­tra­tion and mem­o­ry reten­tion, for exam­ple, and prac­tic­ing it can immense­ly improve study skills and aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ment.

A new study pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence by Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy researchers has val­i­dat­ed the idea with exper­i­men­tal data. In two dif­fer­ent exper­i­ments, stu­dents in a con­trol group stud­ied for exams in their ordi­nary way. Those in anoth­er group received an exer­cise called “Strate­gic Resource Use.” “They were asked,” Stan­ford News reports, to think about what might be on the exam, “and then strate­gize what kinds of resources they would use to study most effec­tive­ly.” Then they reflect­ed on “why each resource they chose would be use­ful” and how they planned on using them. It may seem like seri­ous­ly front-load­ing a study ses­sion, but the inter­ven­tion paid off. Stu­dents who got it scored on aver­age a third of a let­ter grade high­er than those who didn’t.

Post­doc­tor­al fel­low Patri­cia Chen, the study’s main author, under­took the exper­i­ment when she noticed that many of her own stu­dents gen­uine­ly worked hard but felt frus­trat­ed by the results. “Describe to me how you stud­ied for the exam,” she began ask­ing them. After con­duct­ing the metacog­ni­tion stud­ies, Chen con­clud­ed that “active­ly self-reflect­ing on the approach­es that you are tak­ing fos­ters a strate­gic stance that is real­ly impor­tant in life. Strate­gic think­ing dis­tin­guish­es between peo­ple of com­pa­ra­ble abil­i­ty and effort. This can make the dif­fer­ence between peo­ple who achieve and peo­ple who have the poten­tial to achieve, but don’t.”

Think­ing about your think­ing can’t make all the dif­fer­ence, of course, but the effect is dra­mat­ic among groups in rel­a­tive­ly sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. An Aus­tralian study of 2000 Ph.D. stu­dents dis­cov­ered a close cor­re­la­tion between “how they thought about the learn­ing process,” notes Big Think, and “their suc­cess­es and fail­ures in achiev­ing their degrees.” A broad­er study in Britain that account­ed for class dif­fer­ences eval­u­at­ed Year 6 and 7 stu­dents in 23 pri­ma­ry schools. In eleven of these schools, stu­dents were instruct­ed in some­thing called “Self-Reg­u­lat­ed Strat­e­gy Development”—a means of con­scious­ly mon­i­tor­ing the writ­ing tech­niques they used in assign­ments: “Over­all,” the authors write, “the project appeared to have a large pos­i­tive impact on writ­ing out­comes,” espe­cial­ly among “pupils eli­gi­ble for free school meals.”

Each of these stud­ies neces­si­tat­ed meth­ods of teach­ing self-reg­u­la­tion and metacog­ni­tion, and each one for­mu­lat­ed its own ped­a­gogy. The British study spe­cial­ly trained a group of Year 6 teach­ers. “Part of the appeal of Chen’s approach,” writes Jen­ny Ander­son at Quartz, “is its sim­plic­i­ty: any stu­dent, teacher or even par­ent could use it.” And one might rea­son­ably assume that any­one could teach it to them­selves. For par­ents and teach­ers of strug­gling stu­dents, Chen offers some straight­for­ward advice. Rather than sug­gest­ing more study time and resources, first “Look at the way they are doing things. Do you think they could have gone about it in a bet­ter way?” As near­ly every ancient philoso­pher would affirm, we bet­ter our­selves not by acquir­ing more, but by under­stand­ing and using wise­ly what we already have to work with.

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Game The­o­ry & Strate­gic Think­ing: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

32 Ani­mat­ed Videos by Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy Teach You the Essen­tials of Crit­i­cal Think­ing

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear 4+ Hours of Jazz Noir: A Soundtrack for Strolling Under Street Lights on Foggy Nights

in Film, Music | May 24th, 2017

Image from The Big Com­bo, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Nowa­days few crowds seem less like­ly to har­bor crim­i­nal intent than the ones gath­ered to lis­ten to jazz, but sev­en­ty, eighty years ago, Amer­i­can cul­ture cer­tain­ly did­n’t see it that way. Back then, jazz accom­pa­nied the life of urban out­siders: those who dab­bled in for­bid­den sub­stances and for­bid­den activ­i­ties, those influ­enced by the alien moral­i­ty of Europe or even far­ther-away lands, those belong­ing to feared and mis­treat­ed social groups. That image stuck as much or even more firm­ly to jazz musi­cians as it did to jazz lis­ten­ers, and when a new cin­e­mat­ic genre arose specif­i­cal­ly to tell sto­ries of urban out­siders — the lowlifes, the anti heroes, the femmes fatales — jazz pro­vid­ed the ide­al sound­track.

“Jazz dom­i­nates assump­tions about the music used in film noir,” write Andre Spicer and Helen Han­son in A Com­pan­ion to Film Noir, “and it is par­tic­u­lar­ly preva­lent in con­tem­po­rary ref­er­ences to and recre­ations of film noir.”

And “although the num­ber of films noir to employ jazz in their scores was rel­a­tive­ly small, it was still notable in terms of the over­all use of jazz in Hol­ly­wood films of the era — if jazz was an inte­gral part of a film’s score then those pro­duc­tions tend­ed to be films noir or social prob­lem films.” The music first crept in dieget­i­cal­ly, in the 1940s, by way of “club scenes, illic­it jazz ses­sions, or on record play­ers and juke­box­es,” and lat­er, in the 50s, con­tin­ued its “estab­lished asso­ci­a­tion of sex and vio­lence” even as chang­ing atti­tudes “con­tributed to jazz being more accept­able in Hol­ly­wood films.”

A few years ago we fea­tured clas­sic works of “crime jazz” by Miles Davis, Count Basie, Duke Elling­ton and oth­ers, all meant to set the scene for the law­less worlds of films and tele­vi­sion shows like Anato­my of a Mur­der, Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Peter Gunn, and The M Squad. The two playlists we have for you today take a wider view, col­lect­ing more than four hours of “jazz noir” on Spo­ti­fy (if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, you can down­load it here). It fea­tures tracks by Miles Davis, Chet Bak­er, Ben­ny Gol­son, Tom Waits and more. While lis­ten­ing — maybe with the lights dimmed, maybe with your pre­ferred high­ball in hand — you might con­sid­er brows­ing the r/jazznoir, an entire sub­red­dit ded­i­cat­ed to this “mys­te­ri­ous, melan­choly and men­ac­ing music by swingin’ sax men and sul­try sirens for hard­boiled hep­cats and leg­gy look­ers,” this “late-night lis­ten­ing for luck­less losers, and the sound­track to strolls under street lights on fog­gy nights.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Elling­ton Cre­at­ed Sound­tracks for Noir Films & TV

60 Free Film Noir Movies

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essen­tial Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Noir Films

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“A Brief History of Goths”: From the Goths, to Gothic Literature, to Goth Music

in Architecture, Art, History, Literature, Music | May 24th, 2017

The his­to­ry of the word ‘Goth­ic,’” argues Dan Adams in the short, ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above,” is embed­ded in thou­sands of years’ worth of coun­ter­cul­tur­al move­ments.” It’s a provoca­tive, if not entire­ly accu­rate, idea. We would hard­ly call an invad­ing army of Ger­man­ic tribes a “coun­ter­cul­ture.” In fact, when the Goths sacked Rome and deposed the West­ern Emper­or, they did, at first, retain the dom­i­nant cul­ture. But the Goth­ic has always referred to an oppo­si­tion­al force, a Dionysian coun­ter­weight to a ratio­nal, clas­si­cal order.

We know the var­i­ous ver­sions: the Ger­man­ic insti­ga­tors of the “Dark Ages,” ear­ly Chris­t­ian archi­tec­tur­al mar­vels, Roman­tic tales of ter­ror and the super­nat­ur­al, hor­ror films, and gloomy, black-clad post punks and their moody teenage fans. Aside from obvi­ous ref­er­ences like Bauhaus’ tongue-in-cheek ode, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” the con­nec­tive tis­sue between all the uses of Goth­ic isn’t espe­cial­ly evi­dent. “What do fans of atmos­pher­ic post-punk music,” asks Adams, “have in com­mon with ancient bar­bar­ians?” The answer: not much. But the sto­ry that joins them involves some strange con­ver­gences, all of them hav­ing to do with the idea of “dark­ness.”

Two sig­nif­i­cant fig­ures in the evo­lu­tion of the Goth­ic as a con­scious­ly-defined aes­thet­ic were both art his­to­ri­ans. The first, Gior­gio Vasari—con­sid­ered the first art historian—wrote biogra­phies of great Renais­sance artists, and first used the term Goth­ic to refer to medieval cathe­drals, which he saw as bar­barous next to the neo­clas­si­cal revival of the 14th-16th cen­turies. (Vasari was also the first to use the term “Renais­sance” to describe his own peri­od.) Two hun­dred years after Vasari’s Lives, art his­to­ri­an, anti­quar­i­an, and Whig politi­cian Horace Wal­pole appro­pri­at­ed the term Goth­ic to describe The Cas­tle of Otran­to, his 1765 nov­el that start­ed a lit­er­ary trend.

Wal­pole also used the term to refer to art of the dis­tant past, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ruins of cas­tles and cathe­drals, with an eye toward the sup­pos­ed­ly exot­ic, men­ac­ing aspects (for Protes­tant Eng­lish read­ers at least) of the Catholic church and Con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean nobil­i­ty. But for him, the asso­ci­a­tions were pos­i­tive, and con­sti­tut­ed a kitschy escape from Enlight­en­ment ratio­nal­ism. We have Wal­pole to thank, in some sense, for ersatz cel­e­bra­tions like Renais­sance Fairs and Medieval Times restau­rants, and for lat­er Goth­ic nov­els like Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la, Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, and the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

We can see that it’s a rather short leap from clas­sic hor­ror sto­ries and films to the dark make­up, teased hair, fog machines, and swirling atmos­pher­ics of The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux. In the his­to­ry of the Goth­ic, espe­cial­ly between Vasari and Wal­pole, the word moves from a term of abuse—describing art thought to be “crude and inferior”—to one that describes art forms con­sid­ered mys­te­ri­ous, and dark­ly Roman­tic. For anoth­er take on the sub­ject, see Pitch­fork’s  music-focused, ani­mat­ed, and  “sur­pris­ing­ly light-heart­ed” short, “A Brief His­to­ry of Goth,” above, a pre­sen­ta­tion on the sub­cul­ture’s rise, fall, and undead rise again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three-Hour Mix­tape Offers a Son­ic Intro­duc­tion to Under­ground Goth Music

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness