Pedagogy on emsenn.net

Adultism

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adultism is the systematic discrimination against young people by adults. The term was introduced in its current sense by psychologist Jack Flasher in a 1978 article, where he defined it as the abuse by adults of the greater power they have over children. It names not individual acts of unkindness but a structural condition: the set of behaviors, policies, and assumptions through which adults exercise unquestioned authority over young people and through which the perspectives, capacities, and interests of children are treated as subordinate to those of adults.

Misopedy

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Misopedy is the hatred or denigration of children and childhood. The term derives from Greek miso- (hatred) and paidos (child). Unlike individual acts of cruelty toward children, misopedy names a structural condition: the systematic devaluation of childhood as a category, the treatment of children as pre-persons or incomplete adults, and the exclusion of young people from political agency and self-determination.

Toby Rollo, a political theorist at Lakehead University, has developed the concept’s most sustained theoretical treatment. In “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child” (Settler Colonial Studies, 2018), Rollo argues that the relationship between misopedy and European colonialism is not an analogy but a structuring principle. The conceptual apparatus used to justify colonial domination — the savage as child, the colonized as requiring tutelage and civilization — is itself rooted in the prior subordination of actual children. Modern colonial thinkers inherited the conceptual legacy of misopedy: the figure of the child as sinful, bestial, or irrational provided the template through which Indigenous peoples were categorized as unfit for self-governance.

Bauhaus Pedagogy

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bauhaus pedagogy, as drawn on by visual engineering practices, contributes five principal constraints. The Bauhaus is treated here not as a historical style to emulate but as a source of portable perceptual tools — methods for constructing intelligible relations that can be read as structure.

¶Methods and approach

The Bauhaus approach to design education treated form as perception training. Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook [@klee1925] worked with point, line, and plane as operators in a relational field — not representational tools but ways of disciplining seeing by working with minimal units and their relations. László Moholy-Nagy extended this into photography, typography, and material experiment [@moholynagy1928], treating letters as constructed forms that participate in the composition rather than transparent vessels for language.

Snowflake Day and AI

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is Snowflake Day — a day all about snowflakes. Snowflakes are a great excuse to talk about how complex things can grow from simple beginnings, without anyone “deciding” what the final shape will be.

A snowflake starts with something tiny: a speck of dust floating in a cloud. This dust is not special or beautiful. In fact, it is a little bit of dirt. But without it, no snowflake can form at all. Water vapor in the cloud freezes onto that speck, layer by layer. As the snowflake falls, it passes through different parts of the cloud. Some areas are colder, some warmer. Some have more moisture, some less. These changing conditions shape how the ice grows. That is why no two snowflakes look exactly the same. The laws of physics are the same for all of them, but the path each one takes through the cloud is different.