Teachers as the Gravediggers of Neoliberalism: Promoting Dialectical Individualism from the Ruins of the Neoliberal State

Neoliberalism will not die naturally, it must be killed through relentless criticism. However, as criticism of neoliberalism expands, scholars must not reify the term. Scholars must begin to disentangle the historical antecedents that comprise neoliberalism in order to expose it for the sham that it is. Perhaps the biggest sham of neoliberalism is its call for individual freedom. Specifically, by paying attention to the more revolutionary conceptions of individualism contained in some strands of Eighteenth century liberalism, the contradictions of neoliberalism can be exposed. If education, and society in general, is to move past neoliberalism, neoliberalism cannot simply be discarded or wished away, rather, it must be dialectically negated by superseding its unjust elements and retaining and transforming any of its more revolutionary elements to lay a new foundation for education in a post-neoliberal world. Drawing off this dialectical negation of neoliberalism, this paper argues for a new conception of individualism called dialectical individualism. This is not a return to some idealized form of liberalism however, but a new phase in human history with a new conception of individualism. The dialectical movement should not be seen as the product of some otherworldly force, but rather, it should be viewed as centered in the individual and driven by volunteerism in the context of the historical situation. Students can be taught to be dialectical in their actual school work, by writing challenging papers, by writing vision statements, and by partaking in collaborative assignments, and through their understanding of history and the present.Educatio

The Untruth of Truth: A Suggestion for Teaching in the Information Age

The notion of representation has entertained philosophers and thinkers for centuries. How can anything, any idea, any concept or object truly be represented by a language, institution, idea or image? In the information age, the notion of representation is even more pressing. Twenty-four hour news feeds, YouTube, social media, government propaganda, iPhones, the media, the advertising industry and other agencies and devices disseminate a seemingly infinite amount of images that portend to represent something, from consumer products to political intentions. However, more times than not, supposed truths do not correspond to any underlying reality because they no longer need to. Information is now viral; it proliferates and leaves its referents behind. And it is the social studies that deal with many of these emerging avenues of information. Economist’s reports, political pundits, the seemingly endless plethora of historical information on the internet, all of these must be grappled with by teachers and students in the social studies. With the proliferation of information, truth becomes precarious. Nonetheless, it is the job of the social studies to provide some truth, or some notion of truth. This paper devises a methodological tool to better examine misrepresentations that may arise in the course of the teaching and learning of the social studies

Principal torus bundles of Lorentzian S-manifolds and the {\phi}-null Osserman condition

The main result we give in this brief note relates, under suitable hypotheses, the {\phi}-null Osserman, the null Osserman and the classical Osserman conditions to each other, via semi-Riemannian submersions as projection maps of principal torus bundles arising from a Lorentzian S-manifold.Comment: 9 pages, no figur

Fishery resources: between ecology and economy

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Banca dati idrogeologica TANGRAM©: strumento per elaborazioni quantitative di dati per la valutazione delle acque sotterranee - The hydrogeological well database TANGRAM©: a tool for data processing to support groundwater assessment

At the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Milano-Bicocca (DISAT-UNIMIB), a hydrogeological well database, called TANGRAM©, has been developed and published on line at www.TANGRAM.samit.unimib.it, developing an earlier 1989 DOS version. This package can be used to store, display, and process all data related to water wells, including administrative information, well characteristics, stratigraphic logs, water levels, pumping rates, and other hydrogeological information. Currently, the database contains more than 39.200 wells located in the Italian region of Lombardy (90%), Piedmont (9%) and Valle d'Aosta (1%). TANGRAM© has been created both as a tool for researches and for public administration's administrators who have projects in common with DISAT-UNIMIB. Indeed, transferring wells data from paper into TANGRAM© offers both an easier and more robust way to correlate hydrogeological data and a more organized management of the administrative information. Some Administrations use TANGRAM© regularly as a tool for wells data management (Brescia Province, ARPA Valle Aosta). An innovative aspect of the database is the quantitative extraction of stratigraphic data. In the part of the software intended for research purposes, all well logs are translated into 8-digit alphanumeric codes and the user composes the code interpreting the description at each stratigraphic level. So the stratigraphic well data can be coded, then quantified and processed. This is made possible by attributing a weight to the digits of the code for textures. The program calculates the weighted percentage of the chosen lithology, as related to each individual layer. These extractions are the starting point for subsequent hydrogeological studies: well head protection area, reconstruction of the dynamics of flow, realization of the quarry plans and flux and transport hydrogeological models. The results of a two-dimensional distribution of coarse, medium and fine sized material in the first 80 meters of depth are presented here for a study area located within the Province of Brescia (Italy)

Spatio-temporal changes of Munida Rutllanti Zariquiey-Alvarez, 1952 (Decapoda: Galatheidae) in the North-Western Ionian Sea (Central Mediterranean)

The spatio-temporal pattern of Munida rutllanti distribution in the north-western Ionian Sea has been studied. Data were collected during 14 experimental trawl surveys conducted from 1997 to 2010 as part of the international MEDITS project. The hauls were carried out during day-light hours between depths of 10 and 800 m in the spring season. A progressive increase in the abundance index (N/km2) of M. rutllanti was observed from 2000 to 2008, then a sharp decrease was shown in the last two years. The greatest and lowest abundance indices were observed in the Apulian and central Calabrian sub-areas, respectively. The species was collected between 107 and 795 m in depth, with a significant increase and decrease over time in the maximum and minimum depth of finding, respectively. A highly significant increase over time in the mean carapace length was also observed in the whole study area. The widespread occurrence and increasing abundance of this species in the Ionian Sea could be related to the increase in temperature and the variation in hydrographic conditions which occurred in the Ionian basin during the EMT-BiOS phenomenon