Steve Hargadon

• High councilors also attend the stake auxiliary leadership meetings for the auxiliaries to which they are assigned.
• may meet as a Melchizedek Priesthood committee

• "...all things unto me are spiritual,   and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal..."
• NOT for the constitution,   nature and use as was said of the plants but merely for the use
• However, the original scripture   (which was published for 148 years without that footnote) teaches   that he who forbids others to abstain from meats is the one who   is not ordained of God.

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• “There is no business model for MOOCs that makes sense,” said I. Elaine Allen, a professor at Babson College and co-director of its Babson Survey Research Group, which tracks online education. “They have not been shown to bring more students to a school, and they have incredible attrition.”

• In UC’s backyard, San Jose State University formed a partnership with the for-profit MOOC provider Udacity in January 2013, offering three classes for college credit and providing online mentors to encourage participation.

   

  By the end of the semester, nearly 57 percent of San Jose State students and 73 percent of students from outside the university had failed the courses. San Jose State has since ended the program.

• Some of the democratic schools, like those influenced by Jerry Mintz, from the Alternative Education Research Organization, have had the biggest successes in low-income areas. There’s usually a presumption that you need a program to go in and solve a problem, perhaps with charter schools, or a KIPP school system. Whereas what Jerry did was create a minimal structure of school with a lot of freedom in it (a good definition of a vibrant democracy), where students themselves could make decisions about what they wanted to do.
• The democratic school movement is a very healthy and interesting movement, but it doesn’t provide a lot of commercial revenue. Democratic schools don’t create funding opportunities, they don’t provide sponsorship deals, they don’t produce testing revenue. They’re not the kind of thing that a Wall Street firm would look at, or that politicians in Congress will lobby for. While these ideas might be the most brilliant solutions, they’re not going to produce the kind of growth in a capitalist system that we currently define as success.
• When we think about poor, urban school environments, and how children can become self-directed, we often say things like: “They are not getting what they need at home, and we need to provide it in schools.” If the core problem is the home environment, why aren’t we asking how we can support and bolster families? I might suggest that we don’t do this because we would have to relinquish some aspects of control, and because it doesn’t fit our current model of schooling to create social outcomes. Whether we are talking about parents and their children, or teachers and their students, the truth that I think most of us would recognize is that real learning and personal growth come from one-on-one interactions with caring people. Almost everyone has a story of someone doing or saying something that helped turn on the light-bulb of our learning. You can’t mandate that, you can’t create a system for that, you can’t test that. It’s a part of our human experience that we have to protect, and it comes from the belief that every child is important and has inherent capabilities. There is something sacred that becomes broken when we treat another person as someone we control. If we want to help the poor student, we have to think about poverty and the family, and how to truly help others. Because if we think about education as mandated school programs that are brought into places, we are a hammer looking for a nail.
• We think that the school system is going to solve a deficiency in parents, rather than understanding the deep importance of families to a healthy society, and thinking about how we support families. In the last fifty years we’ve transitioned from having a single income support a family to having most families need two incomes, and single parents that are completely buried financially. If for nothing else, most families depend on school just to have the kids be somewhere so the parents can work. Why are we comfortable with this? In what ways have we allowed those who benefit from dependency capitalism to create the narratives for our culture?

• We’re so deeply mired in this idea that school is the solution. We then couch the questions in the form of “What can we do in schools to make the experiences better for kids.” Let’s look instead at the alternative education models that don’t create funding opportunities, but that do a really good job with kids. How do we promote them, and how do we make them more visible, and how do we help people to understand the importance of one-to-one relationships, and the importance of a given adult in the life of a child. And it doesn’t come from a process, or a system, or a discipline structure. It comes from caring adults in the situation where they’re connecting with kids. And in some ways, that’s letting go of control–which means that sometimes things are going to happen in ways that we don’t want. But can it be any worse than it is now? Why are we hanging on to this system?

   

  So if we’ve got a system right now which is not working, I think it’s worth asking, is the system the problem? Is our desire to control others the problem?
• Don’t you think this idea of self-motivated learning only really makes sense to the people who’ve already had the benefits of an education created by our current system of education? Do you really believe that learning and motivation can just organically happen?
• But I want to have that conversation. Because I think that we can’t solve a problem that we’ve actually misunderstood.
• Learning is inherent. You don’t have to teach a kid how to learn. They learn to ride a bicycle, and they learn to walk. If we’re talking about memorizing, or reading a book when they don’t want to read a book, or doing math problems when they want to be out playing, yes, then we have to help them figure out how to learn. And more specifically, caring parents and adults recognize that “drawing out” the potential in student (going back to Socrates) is hard but very important work. But if we believe that learning is a natural, inherent part of our human experience, we don’t need to be teaching people how to learn–we do need to be helping them learn how to think. We have to be creating environments which give children opportunities and responsibilities, asking them to challenge themselves, and encouraging them to exceed their current expectations for themselves. If we believe in helping the individual gain capacity, for their own individual intellect, accomplishment, and achievement, then we should do things differently than the way they are.
• But we have core beliefs in freedom, the inherent worth and value of every child, and the importance of opportunity. If we can reclaim those beliefs, then I think we can become that country again.

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• I think I really agree with Jordan on a lot of things and I don’t want to speak him
• emotionsto
• we can ask ourselves a simple question: what is the outcome of our current system of learning? Do most students leave our public education system believing they are good learners? That they are capable of being independent and self-sufficient? Or that they are good at math? How is it that our system of learning leaves most who go through it feeling that they are not good learners?
• his textbook

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• After receiving the report, the leader accepts the person’s best efforts and expresses appreciation for the good things the person has done.
• Warn against Sin but Love the Sinner

• This divide between home and workplaces had wide reaching ramifications on the way we think about individualism and, therefore, the way we think about preparing individuals–through education–to participate in a modern civilization.

• “We first have to ask what kind of world we want, then ask what kind of education system will create that world.” – Jordan Shapiro

• Epigenetics suggest that traumatic events turn the genetic switch so that future generations are able to handle similar circumstances more effectively than their ancestors.

• Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."^[1] Elsewhere, he described the Panopticon prison as "a mill for grinding rogues honest".^[2]