Download 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Software, Web Development & Business from O’Reilly Media

Last week we high­light­ed for you 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media. Lit­tle did we know that we were just scratch­ing the sur­face of the free ebooks O’Reil­ly Media has to offer.

If you head over to this page, you can access 243 free ebooks cov­er­ing a range of dif­fer­ent top­ics. Below, we’ve divid­ed the books into sec­tions (and pro­vid­ed links to them), indi­cat­ed the num­ber of books in each sec­tion, and list­ed a few attractive/representative titles.

You can down­load the books in PDF for­mat. An email address–but no cred­it card–is required. Again the com­plete list is here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

A New Free eBook Every Month from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press

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A Gallery of Visually Arresting Posters from the May 1968 Paris Uprising

In 1968, both Robert F. Kennedy and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. were assas­si­nat­ed, and U.S. cities erupt­ed in riots; anti-war demon­stra­tors chant­ed “the whole world is watch­ing” as police beat and tear-gassed them in Chica­go out­side the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion. George Wal­lace led a pop­u­lar polit­i­cal move­ment of Klan sym­pa­thiz­ers and White Cit­i­zens Coun­cils in a vicious back­lash against the gains of the Civ­il Rights move­ment; and the venge­ful, para­noid Richard Nixon was elect­ed pres­i­dent and began to inten­si­fy the war in Viet­nam and pur­sue his pro­gram of harass­ment and impris­on­ment of black Amer­i­cans and anti-war activists through Hoover’s FBI (and lat­er the bogus “war on drugs”).

Good times, and giv­en sev­er­al per­ti­nent sim­i­lar­i­ties to our cur­rent moment, it seems like a year to revis­it if we want to see recent exam­ples of orga­nized, deter­mined resis­tance by a very belea­guered Left. We might look to the Black Pan­thers, the Yip­pies, or Stu­dents for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Soci­ety, to name a few promi­nent and occa­sion­al­ly affil­i­at­ed groups. But we can also revis­it a near-rev­o­lu­tion across the ocean, when French stu­dents and work­ers took to the Paris streets and almost pro­voked a civ­il war against the gov­ern­ment of author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent Charles de Gaulle. The events often referred to sim­ply as Mai 68 have haunt­ed French con­ser­v­a­tives ever since, such that pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy forty years lat­er claimed their mem­o­ry “must be liq­ui­dat­ed.”

May 1968, wrote Steven Erlanger on the 40th anniver­sary, was “a holy moment of lib­er­a­tion for many, when youth coa­lesced, the work­ers lis­tened and the semi-roy­al French gov­ern­ment of de Gaulle took fright.” As loose coali­tions in the U.S. pushed back against their gov­ern­ment on mul­ti­ple fronts, the Paris upris­ing (“rev­o­lu­tion” or “riot,” depend­ing on who writes the his­to­ry) brought togeth­er sev­er­al groups in com­mon pur­pose who would have oth­er­wise nev­er have bro­ken bread: “a crazy array of left­ist groups,” stu­dents, and ordi­nary work­ing peo­ple, writes Peter Ste­in­fels, includ­ing “revi­sion­ist social­ists, Trot­sky­ists, Maoists, anar­chists, sur­re­al­ists and Marx­ists. They were anti­com­mu­nist as much as ant­i­cap­i­tal­ist. Some appeared anti-indus­tri­al, anti-insti­tu­tion­al, even anti-ratio­nal.”

“Be real­is­tic: Demand the impos­si­ble!” was one of the May move­men­t’s slo­gans. A great many more slo­gans and icons appeared on “extreme­ly fine exam­ples of polem­i­cal poster art” like those you see here. These come to us via Dan­ger­ous Minds, who explain:

The Ate­lier Pop­u­laire, run by Marx­ist artists and art stu­dents, occu­pied the École des Beaux-Arts and ded­i­cat­ed its efforts to pro­duc­ing thou­sands of silk-screened posters using bold, icon­ic imagery and slo­gans as well as explic­it­ly collective/anonymous author­ship. Most of the posters were print­ed on newssheet using a sin­gle col­or with basic icons such as the fac­to­ry to rep­re­sent labor and a fist to stand for resis­tance.

The Paris upris­ings began with uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, protest­ing same-sex dorms and demand­ing edu­ca­tion­al reform, “the release of arrest­ed stu­dents and the reopen­ing of the Nan­terre cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris,” notes the Glob­al Non­vi­o­lent Action Data­base. But in the fol­low­ing weeks the “protests esca­lat­ed and gained more pop­u­lar sup­port, because of con­tin­u­ing police bru­tal­i­ty.” Among the accu­mu­lat­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic demands and labor protests, writes Ste­in­fels, was “one great fear… that con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism was capa­ble of absorb­ing any and all crit­i­cal ideas or move­ments and bend­ing them to its own advan­tage. Hence, the need for provoca­tive shock tac­tics.”

This fear was dra­ma­tized by Sit­u­a­tion­ists, who—like Yip­pies in the States—gen­er­al­ly pre­ferred absur­dist street the­ater to earnest polit­i­cal action. And it pro­vid­ed the the­sis of one of the most rad­i­cal texts to come out of the tumul­tuous times, Guy Debord’s The Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle. In a his­tor­i­cal irony that would have Debord “spin­ning in his grave,” the Sit­u­a­tion­ist the­o­rist has him­self been co-opt­ed, rec­og­nized as a “nation­al trea­sure” by the French gov­ern­ment, writes Andrew Gal­lix, and yet, “no one—not even his sworn ide­o­log­i­cal enemies—can deny Debord’s impor­tance.”

The same could be said for Michel Fou­cault, who found the events of May ’68 trans­for­ma­tion­al. Fou­cault pro­nounced him­self “tremen­dous­ly impressed” with stu­dents will­ing to be beat­en and jailed, and his “turn to polit­i­cal mil­i­tan­cy with­in a post-1968 hori­zon was the chief cat­a­lyst for halt­ing and then redi­rect­ing his the­o­ret­i­cal work,” argues pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy Bernard Gen­dron, even­tu­al­ly “lead­ing to the pub­li­ca­tion of Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish,” his ground­break­ing “geneal­o­gy” of impris­on­ment and sur­veil­lance.

Many more promi­nent the­o­rists and intel­lec­tu­als took part and found inspi­ra­tion in the move­ment, includ­ing André Glucks­mann, who recalled May 1968 as “a moment, either sub­lime or detest­ed, that we want to com­mem­o­rate or bury.… a ‘cadav­er,’ from which every­one wants to rob a piece.” His com­ments sum up the gen­er­al cyn­i­cism and ambiva­lence of many on the French left when it comes to May ’68: “The hope was to change the world,” he says, “but it was inevitably incom­plete, and the insti­tu­tions of the state are untouched.” Both stu­dent and labor groups still man­aged to push through sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant reforms and win many gov­ern­ment con­ces­sions before police and de Gaulle sup­port­ers rose up in the thou­sands and quelled the upris­ing (fur­ther evi­dence, Anne-Elis­a­beth Moutet argued this month, that “author­i­tar­i­an­ism is the norm in France”).

The icon­ic posters here rep­re­sent what Ste­in­fels calls the movement’s “utopi­an impulse,” one how­ev­er that “did not aim at human per­fectibil­i­ty but only at imag­in­ing that life could real­ly be dif­fer­ent and a whole lot bet­ter.” These images were col­lect­ed in 2008 for a Lon­don exhi­bi­tion titled “May 68: street Posters from the Paris Rebel­lion,” and they’ve been pub­lished in book form in Beau­ty is in the Street: A Visu­al Record of the May ’68 Paris Upris­ing. (You can also find and down­load many posters in the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion host­ed by the Bib­lio­theque nationale de France.) 

Per­haps the co-option Debord pre­dict­ed was as inevitable as he feared. But like many rad­i­cal U.S. move­ments in the six­ties, the coor­di­nat­ed mobi­liza­tion of huge num­bers of peo­ple from every stra­ta of French soci­ety dur­ing those exhil­a­rat­ing and dan­ger­ous few weeks opened a win­dow on the pos­si­ble. Despite its short-lived nature, May 1968 irrev­o­ca­bly altered French civ­il soci­ety and intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture. As Jean-Paul Sartre said of the move­ment, “What’s impor­tant is that the action took place, when every­body believed it to be unthink­able. If it took place this time, it can hap­pen again.”

via Dan­ger­ous Minds/Messy N Chic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Strik­ing Posters From Occu­py Wall Street: Down­load Them for Free

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

Bed Peace Revis­its John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Famous Anti-Viet­nam Protests

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

Watch Orson Welles’ First Ever Film, Directed at Age 19

“It’s noth­ing at all. Absolute­ly noth­ing. It was a joke. I want­ed to make a par­o­dy of Jean Cocteau’s first film. That’s all. We shot it in two hours, for fun, one Sun­day after­noon. It has no sort of mean­ing.”–Orson Welles

The Hearts of Age may have indeed been a lark when it was shot in 1934, but giv­en that one of the two teenagers went on to direct Cit­i­zen Kane sev­en years lat­er, no doubt it’s worth a sec­ond look.

Like all things Welles, his 19-year-old life was much more fan­tas­tic than most high school grads. Though he and school chum William Vance shot the film at their alma mater, the Todd School in Wood­stock, Illi­nois, Welles had grad­u­at­ed three years ear­li­er. Accord­ing to Sens­es of Cin­e­ma, Welles

had spurned a schol­ar­ship to Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, vis­it­ed Ire­land on a sketch­ing tour only to talk his way into per­form­ing for the Dublin Gate The­atre, writ­ten detec­tive sto­ries for pulp mag­a­zines, and trav­elled through Lon­don, Paris, the Ivory Coast, Moroc­co and Seville, where he spent an after­noon as a pro­fes­sion­al bull­fight­er. After return­ing to Amer­i­ca in 1933, intro­duc­tions to Thorn­ton Wilder and Alexan­der Wol­cott led to a posi­tion in Kather­ine Cornell’s tour­ing reper­to­ry com­pa­ny. Welles toured with the Cor­nell com­pa­ny from Novem­ber 1933 to June 1934, appear­ing in three plays and mak­ing his New York debut as Tybalt in Romeo and Juli­et.

Back in Wood­stock to spon­sor a the­ater fes­ti­val at the school, Welles and Vance bor­rowed a cam­era from their old prin­ci­pal and shot this eight minute short.

William Vance, Welles’ friend and co-direc­tor, kept the only copy until he donat­ed it to the Green­wich Pub­lic Library, where film his­to­ri­an and writer Joseph McBride dis­cov­ered it in 1969. McBride then wrote about it in Film Quar­ter­ly and the secret juve­nil­ia of Welles was out of the clos­et. (“Why did Joe have to dis­cov­er that film?” Welles was quot­ed as telling his cam­era­man).

Nev­er entered into copy­right, it’s a pub­lic domain film and so has been avail­able on var­i­ous plat­forms for years. (I saw it in the ‘90s as part of a “before they were famous” short film fes­ti­val with stu­dent work by Lynch, Scors­ese, and Spiel­berg).

The short indeed looks like a par­o­dy of sur­re­al­ist film, a bit like Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet as Welles intend­ed, but with a bit of René Clair’s Entr’Acte and some good ol’ Eisen­stein­ian mon­tage thrown in.

Welles appears in heavy stage make­up as a rich, old­er man in a top hat and cane, look­ing not too far from the elder­ly Charles Fos­ter Kane. His then girl­friend and future first wife Vir­ginia Nichol­son plays an old hag who rides for­lorn­ly back and forth on a bell. There’s a clown in black­face played by Paul Edger­ton, an Indi­an in a blan­ket (co-direc­tor William Vance in a cameo) and a Key­stone cop, which some web­sites say is also Nichol­son. But Charles “Black­ie” O’Neal is also cred­it­ed as a per­former with­out a role and he indeed may be the actor play­ing the Key­stone Cop. (O’Neal, by the way, would lat­er be father to Ryan O’Neal.)

Although he dis­missed the film, Welles’ pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with death are here, right at the begin­ning of his career, with sui­cides, coffins, skulls, and grave­stones fea­tur­ing promi­nent­ly. And though it’s no mas­ter­piece and hon­est­ly a bit of a mess, it shows a direc­tor inter­est­ed in exper­i­ment­ing with film, with humor, and the won­ders of make­up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Clas­sic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Dark­ness & More

Is It Always Right to Be Right?: Orson Welles Nar­rates a 1970 Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion That Still Res­onates Today

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

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

Franz Kafka’s Existential Parable “Before the Law” Gets Brought to Life in a Striking, Modern Animation

“Before the law sits a gate­keep­er. To this gate­keep­er comes a man from the coun­try who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gate­keep­er says that he can­not grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in lat­er on. ‘It is pos­si­ble,’ says the gate­keep­er, ‘but not now.’ ” So begins Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a short sto­ry first pub­lished in 1915 but still res­o­nant just over a cen­tu­ry lat­er.

It takes no great inti­ma­cy with the work of the man who also wrote the likes of “The Meta­mor­pho­sis” and The Cas­tle, which ulti­mate­ly drove his name into the lex­i­con as a byword for absurd­ly intran­si­gent bureau­cra­cy and the irony of strug­gling against it, to fig­ure out whether the man ever does get to see the law. Most read­ers now first encounter the text of “Before the Law” when they read a priest telling it to Josef K, pro­tag­o­nist of Kafka’s posthu­mous­ly pub­lished 1925 nov­el The Tri­al. Some see it before they read it in the form of the pin­screen ani­ma­tion (by Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er, the mas­ters of that recher­ché art) that pre­cedes Orson Welles’ polar­iz­ing cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of the book.

A few years ago, the Barcelona-based ani­ma­tor Alessan­dro Nov­el­li cre­at­ed his own update of the para­ble, The Guardian. Using a mix­ture of two- and three-dimen­sion­al ani­ma­tion in a stark, line-drawn-look­ing black and white, it envi­sions the man (sport­ing a thor­ough­ly mod­ern beard and pair of severe­ly tapered pants) and his jour­ney through moun­tains, woods, and cities to the gate. Once he reach­es it, his life­long stand­off with the gate­keep­er opens up a num­ber of unex­pect­ed visu­al realms, tak­ing us atop a chess­board, inside an alarm clock, beside falling domi­nos, deep under­wa­ter, and up into the night sky.

Unlike Alex­eieff and Park­er’s straight adap­ta­tion, The Guardian extends the sto­ry: Kafka’s stern sen­tinel and his utter­ly impass­able por­tal turn into a chal­lenge aimed more at the man’s for­ti­tude. “Wher­ev­er it is you go to now,” says the gate­keep­er after he has final­ly giv­en the aged and weak­ened pro­tag­o­nist his chance, “remem­ber this gate, and that this gate exist­ed and was opened just for you. Yet you nev­er found the strength to cross it.” In Kafka’s orig­i­nal, when the gate clos­es, it clos­es with an exis­ten­tial final­i­ty; in Nov­el­li’s it re-opens “for the ones who will come. For the ones who will be brave.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kafka’s Para­ble “Before the Law” Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles & Illus­trat­ed with Pin­screen Art

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Watch Franz Kaf­ka, the Won­der­ful Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Franz Kaf­ka Sto­ry Gets Adapt­ed into an Award-Win­ning Aus­tralian Short Film: Watch Two Men

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

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.

Philographics Presents a Visual Dictionary of Philosophy: 95 Philosophical Concepts as Graphic Designs

We so often hear pic­tures described as worth a thou­sand words apiece, but the Philo­graph­ics project seems to have found a way to increase that val­ue by at least 27,218. Or it has if you believe its blurb from Co.Design: “It takes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy 28,250 words to explain the wool­ly con­cept of rel­a­tivism. It takes Genis Car­reras 32 words and a sin­gle image.” When the Girona, Spain-based graph­ic design­er har­nessed his pro­fes­sion­al back­ground in graph­ic design to his inter­est in phi­los­o­phy, some­thing hith­er­to unseen result­ed: a visu­al dic­tio­nary of phi­los­o­phy.

“I start­ed the project two years ago with the inten­tion to merge the world of phi­los­o­phy and graph­ic design,” writes Car­reras on the page of the Philo­graph­ics Kick­starter dri­ve, which raised £65,217 in 2013. “In the begin­ning it was a set of 24 posters, explain­ing philo­soph­i­cal the­o­ries like Dual­ism, Free Will, Exis­ten­tial­ism or Ide­al­ism using only shapes and colour. But so many impor­tant ‘isms’ were left out that I decid­ed to add more designs to the col­lec­tion. Today the project con­sists of 95 designs, each of them depict­ing a dif­fer­ent ‘ism’ using a unique com­bi­na­tion of geo­met­ric shapes, col­ors and a short def­i­n­i­tion of the the­o­ry.”

The video above shows some exam­ples, more of which you can browse one-by-one at Stu­dio Car­reras’ site, which also sells art prints, post­cards, and the book Philo­graph­ics: Big Ideas in Sim­ple ShapesBrain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va calls the results, which look a bit like the kind of high-design mid­cen­tu­ry paper­back cov­ers that have late­ly come back into vogue, “a play­ful and thought­ful cel­e­bra­tion of sym­bol­ic and metaphor­i­cal think­ing — that dis­tinct­ly human fac­ul­ty that is the hall­mark of our imag­i­na­tion,” and one meant to “tick­le our curios­i­ty and spark deep­er inter­est in influ­en­tial the­o­ries of human nature and human pur­pose that those of us not for­mal­ly trained in phi­los­o­phy may not have pre­vi­ous­ly been inspired to explore.”

These images cer­tain­ly make the famous­ly wordy field of phi­los­o­phy — and one so often lam­pooned for that wordi­ness — infi­nite­ly more invit­ing for the philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined visu­al thinkers among us. If Car­reras is con­sid­er­ing Kick­start­ing anoth­er edi­tion of Philo­graph­ics posters, might we sug­gest black­light ver­sions? Dorm-room philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions the world over may attain a new lev­el of rig­or as a result.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

Phi­los­o­phy Explained With Donuts

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 Unified Theory of Mental Illness: How Everything from Addiction to Depression Can Be Explained by the Concept of “Capture”

David Kessler–once the Com­mis­sion­er of the F.D.A., lat­er the Dean of Yale’s School of Med­i­cine, and even­tu­al­ly Dean and Vice-Chan­cel­lor at UCS­F’s pres­ti­gious Med­ical School–pub­lished a book called Cap­ture: Unrav­el­ing the Mys­tery of Men­tal Suf­fer­ing. A best­seller, the book makes the case that all men­tal illness–everything from addic­tion to depres­sion to artis­tic obsessions–can be explained by an under­ly­ing mech­a­nism. That mech­a­nism, the key to treat­ing men­tal ill­ness, is known as “Cap­ture.”

To get a brief intro­duc­tion to Kessler’s uni­fied the­o­ry of men­tal ill­ness, watch the ani­mat­ed primer above. It comes cour­tesy of The Atlantic. Get more back­ground on Kessler’s book by read­ing this review in The New York Times.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

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

By now, most peo­ple are famil­iar with the term “school-to-prison pipeline,” the descrip­tion of a sys­tem that fun­nels trou­bled stu­dents through dis­ci­pli­nary pro­gram after pro­gram. Deten­tions, sus­pen­sions, and often expul­sions fur­ther aggra­vate many stu­dents’ already dif­fi­cult lives, and send them “back to the ori­gin of their angst and unhappiness—their home envi­ron­ments or their neigh­bor­hoods,” writes Car­la Amu­rao for PBS’ Tavis Smi­ley Reports. Harsh dis­ci­pli­nary poli­cies don’t actu­al­ly change behav­ior, and “sta­tis­tics reflect that these poli­cies dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get stu­dents of col­or and those with a his­to­ry of abuse, neglect, pover­ty or learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties.”

In short, stu­dents come to school with sig­nif­i­cant stress­es and set­backs, and are them­selves treat­ed as prob­lems to be quar­an­tined or forced out. But why not instead teach those students—why not teach all students—effective means of cop­ing with stress and set­backs? I can think of almost no more use­ful a set of skills to car­ry into adult­hood, or into a trou­bled home or neigh­bor­hood sit­u­a­tion. As the CBS This Morn­ing seg­ment above reports, one school in Bal­ti­more is attempt­ing to so equip their stu­dents, with a yoga and med­i­ta­tion pro­gram dur­ing and after school that takes the place of deten­tion and oth­er pun­ish­ments.

The Robert W. Cole­man Ele­men­tary School adopt­ed a twice-a-day yoga and mind­ful­ness prac­tice dur­ing school hours for all stu­dents, called “Mind­ful Moments”; and an after-school pro­gram called Holis­tic Me, which “hosts 120 male and female stu­dents,” writes Newsweek, “and involves yoga, breath­ing exer­cis­es and med­i­ta­tive activ­i­ties. Dis­rup­tive stu­dents are brought to the Mind­ful Moment Room for breath­ing prac­tices and dis­cus­sion with a coun­selor and are instruct­ed on how to man­age their emo­tions.” As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed on this site, these kinds of activ­i­ties have been shown in research stud­ies to sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce stress, anx­i­ety, and depres­sion and to improve con­cen­tra­tion and mem­o­ry.

In the Holis­tic Me pro­gram at Cole­man, “which focus­es on prekinder­gar­den through fifth-grade stu­dents,” admin­is­tra­tors already noticed a dif­fer­ence in the first year. “Instead of the stu­dents fight­ing or lash­ing out,” says prin­ci­pal Carlil­lian Thomp­son in the video above, they start­ed to use words to solve their prob­lems.” None of the stu­dents in the pro­gram have received sus­pen­sions or deten­tions, and many have become lead­ers and high achiev­ers. The pro­gram was found­ed in 2001 by broth­ers Atman and Ali Smith and their friend Andres Gon­za­lez, all Bal­ti­more locals. In the past 15 years, their Holis­tic Life Foun­da­tion and its part­ners have offered a vari­ety of enrich­ment activ­i­ties but focused pri­mar­i­ly on yoga and mind­ful­ness prac­tices.

Using these tech­niques, stu­dents learn to resolve con­flicts peace­ful­ly and to reduce the amount of emo­tion­al tur­moil in their lives. Rather than fur­ther alien­at­ing or trau­ma­tiz­ing already stressed-out kids, this kind of inter­ven­tion pre­pares them for aca­d­e­m­ic and social resilience. The foun­da­tion has rapid­ly expand­ed since 2015, receiv­ing fed­er­al fund­ing and deliv­er­ing pro­grams to Char­lottesville, Min­neapo­lis, Madi­son, and abroad. It may not have changed the course of “school-to-prison pipeline” poli­cies just yet, but it has shown a con­struc­tive way for­ward for oth­er schools like Baltimore’s Pat­ter­son High, which has adopt­ed a 15-minute yoga and mind­ful­ness prac­tice at the begin­ning and end of each day for every one of its stu­dents.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

 

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

Learn Islamic & Indian Philosophy with 107 Episodes of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast

We post copi­ous resources for the study of phi­los­o­phy on this site, such that you can obtain a full col­lege-lev­el sur­vey under­stand­ing of the sub­ject on your own by tak­ing the many free class­es, lis­ten­ing to the many free lec­tures and pod­casts, and read­ing the many free texts, ebooks and com­men­taries you’ll find here. But sev­er­al of our posts have met with a sim­i­lar read­er objec­tion: where is the East­ern phi­los­o­phy?

The ques­tion could also be put to almost any aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment of phi­los­o­phy. One answer I’ve often heard dis­miss­es it alto­geth­er. Phi­los­o­phy, some say, devel­oped in the West, first in ancient Greece, then in Rome, the suc­ceed­ing Chris­t­ian empire, and the sec­u­lar age that fol­lowed. It is a Euro­pean pur­suit and tra­di­tion. Oth­er cul­tur­al­ly par­tial crit­ics, who wish to appear enlight­ened, are will­ing to con­cede that “the world’s Mus­lims,” as Richard Dawkins tweet­ed a few years back, “did great things in the Mid­dle Ages,” at least pro­vid­ing a crit­i­cal bridge between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Scholas­ti­cism.

Islam­ic philoso­phers like Avi­cen­na and Aver­roes kept in dia­logue with the Greeks after Europe had for­got­ten them, and pre­served the only work of Aris­to­tle we have. But that was then. What have they done for us late­ly? Atti­tudes like this, argues phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Peter Adam­son, are prej­u­dices with lit­tle basis in fact, and part of the rea­son for a dearth of high-qual­i­ty, acces­si­ble East­ern phi­los­o­phy resources in Eng­lish. Adam­son, who has made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the study of phi­los­o­phy online with his pod­cast, His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, fills in the gap with his series on Islam­ic and Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in sev­er­al parts.

For­ma­tive Peri­od—25 episodes

Phi­los­o­phy in Andalu­sia—25 episodes

East­ern Tra­di­tions—25 episodes

Begin­ning with phi­los­o­phy in the Islam­ic world in Episode 171, “East­ern Tra­di­tions,” at the top, Adam­son cov­ers “influ­en­tial thinkers of the twelfth cen­tu­ry like Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Suhrawardī, focus­ing on their lega­cy in the East­ern realms of cen­tral Asia and Per­sia, mov­ing on to the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and end­ing with devel­op­ments in twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry phi­los­o­phy.” Against dis­mis­sive claims like Dawkins’ that these cen­turies were “a time of intel­lec­tu­al and sci­en­tif­ic decline in Islam­ic civ­i­liza­tion,” Adam­son argues they were “in fact a time of remark­able achieve­ment in fields like log­ic and astron­o­my as well as the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines of phi­los­o­phy.” See all three parts of the Islam­ic Phi­los­o­phy series above.

Adam­son shares the intro­duc­tion to Indi­an phi­los­o­phy, just above, with NYU’s Jonar­don Ganeri, and the two lay out a case for the tra­di­tion as “pri­mar­i­ly a way of life and search for the high­est good.” As usu­al, Adam­son brings on guest schol­ars and pro­vides a list for fur­ther read­ing on the podcast’s site. And as usu­al, his his­tor­i­cal frame­works are rig­or­ous and very well-researched. This series breaks into two main cat­e­gories (below). The sec­ond part of the series focus­es on the devel­op­ment of a for­mal tra­di­tion, the “sūtra (lit­er­al­ly ‘thread’)… a genre of writ­ing in which ideas were set forth in brief, apho­ris­tic form. Var­i­ous sūtras were tak­en as author­i­ta­tive and foun­da­tion­al for numer­ous schools of Indi­an thought, which devot­ed fur­ther com­men­taries to the sūtras.”

Ori­gins—17 episodes

Age of Sutra—15 episodes

As he has done with many of his oth­er series, Adam­son has adapt­ed the Islam­ic Phi­los­o­phy pod­casts in book form, Phi­los­o­phy in the Islam­ic World: A his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy with­out any gaps, Vol­ume 3. His even-hand­ed­ness and eru­di­tion make this series a joy to lis­ten to, though he’d also encour­age us to read the philoso­phers he dis­cuss­es, if pos­si­ble. If you’re new to read­ing phi­los­o­phy, or to Adamson’s pod­cast, you’d do well to read his recent­ly post­ed All 20 ‘Rules for His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy,’ which he has brought togeth­er in one place as “guide­lines encap­su­lat­ing what I see as good prac­tice in study­ing the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy.” (Rule 8: “Read the whole text.”)

Many of these guide­lines rub up against the cur­rent ortho­dox­ies, assump­tions and, frankly, snob­beries of some con­tem­po­rary aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy. Among these, “Rule 14: Take reli­gion seri­ous­ly” and “Rule 15: Be broad­mind­ed about what counts as ‘phi­los­o­phy.’” And for those who not only dis­miss but also embrace entire cul­tures’ philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions for one defin­ing reason—Indian thought is “spir­i­tu­al” or “non-vio­lent”; Islam­ic thought is “tol­er­ant” or “intolerant”—Adamson offers Rule 18: “don’t essen­tial­ize.” As becomes clear on even a cur­so­ry lis­ten to the pod­casts in these series, what we tend to believe about “non-west­ern” phi­los­o­phy oper­ates far in excess of what most of us actu­al­ly know about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Learn The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 247 Pod­casts (With More to Come)

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

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

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