Mar 1, 2017

Exposing the “Critical Thinking” and “Lifelong Learning” Shibboleths of Minneapolis Public Schools Officials Ed Graff, Susanne Griffin, and Macarre Traynham with My Daily Demonstration of Features That They Exercise Only in Verbal Parlance

A Note to My Readers

For the education establishment, including those at the Minneapolis Public Schools such as Superintendent Ed Graff, Deputy Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin, and Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Macarre Traynham, “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning” are mere shibboleths that have no grounding in reality.   They are mantras, learned from those intellectual university campus lightweights---  education professors---  who have vitiated K-12 education for decades, denying students the knowledge-rich education that they deserve. 
 
I have demonstrated on these pages, and am emphasizing in my nearly complete book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect that the facts pertinent to the university-based training of these decision-makers reveals little of academic substance, that their actions indicate that they do not welcome critical analysis of their own processes, and that their personal knowledge base is slim for those who claim to be proponents of lifelong learning.
 
Meanwhile, many gadflies in the putative education change crowd (witness Ted Kolderie, Jay Haugen, Jeff Ronneberg, Lisa Snyder, Les Fujitake, and Lars Esdal) ironically cling to the same outworn sloganeering, placing a technological cloak on their current iterations of education professor-speak.
 
Thus it is that I present to my readers just one of many of my daily exercises of critical analysis and lifelong learning.  Even as I am on the throes of completing another book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, which is powerful testimony to my lifetime of learning and features abundant critical analysis;  I remain active in my formal Ph. D area of scholarship focused on East Asia, especially on Taiwan.
 
Please read now a summary of a talk that I will be giving on 25 March 2017 to my friends at the Reading Yams group at the University of Minnesota.  This wonderful group has asked me to speak, along with another learned presenter, on that day.  There is a great deal of critical analysis and ongoing learning apparent in such gatherings that put the likes of those infesting the education establishment and too many of those in the education change crowd to shame.
 
Here take insight into my ongoing life as a critical analyst and lifelong seeker of knowledge:
 
Gary Marvin Davison 
 
Description of Topic for Reading Yams Talk on 25 March, with Professional and Personal Information 
 
PART ONE
 
Description of Topic for Reading Yams Talk on 25 March
 
My talk on 25 March will assert the case for the national uniqueness of Taiwan from a historical perspective.  I will present an overview of Taiwanese history, and in the course of that presentation I will indicate the unique and formative experiences of the Taiwanese people, from the arrival of Austronesian people about 4,000 BCE forward.  Subsequent to coverage of the entry of these yuanzhumin or yuanzhu minzu, I will proceed to an analysis of the impact of the Dutch, Zhang family, Qing, Japanese, and Guomindang (Kuomintang) periods of control.
 
I will argue that with the brilliant superintending of democratization by Li Teng-hui, the creative aspiration for self-government by the Taiwanese people, which had lain like a volcano beneath the surface of these periods of external control, burst into the open and gave life to an assertion of national  consciousness that will endure, now and in the near future as the expression of de facto nationhood, and in the course of time as the spirit of a de jure and internationally recognized independent nation.
 
My comment at the end of many of my works is the following: 
 
If the Taiwanese people should ever declare independence, such a declaration could only be dishonored through the force of arms, under the watchful eye of an international community that chooses to side with military might over historical right. 
 
PART TWO
 
Personal and Professional Information  
 
Gary Marvin Davison was born in 1951 in Dallas, Texas, USA, and graduated from high school in Houston, Texas, after short periods of familial residence in Missouri and Arkansas.
 
He received his B. A. in political science, with other concentrations in history and psychology, from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, in 1973.  He received his M.A. in Chinese history from the University of Iowa in 1979;  and his Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota in 1993.
 
Dr. Davison has in the course of those years of academic training, and in the aftermath of attaining the doctorate, taught in a variety of situations, emphasizing work with inner city youth but also teaching in a prison, in a rural high school, and for a total of five years in the lecture halls of the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota when pursuing graduate degrees at those institutions.
 
Gary has lived for three periods (1980-1981, 1985, and 1988-1990) in Taiwan and has returned for prolonged visits in 1995, 1998, 2003, and very recently, in December 2016.  During the 1980-1981 phase, he taught English as a Second Language;  and during 1988-1990 he gave lectures using the medium of Mandarin Chinese for the Fulbright Foundation, conveying information useful for Taiwanese students aspiring to attend graduate school in the United States.
 
During this period of 1988-1990, Dr. Davison lived for a year in Taipei (son Ryan Davison-Reed was born at Taiwan Adventist Hospital near the end of the Year of the Dragon, on 30 January 1989) before moving to Tainan City for the second year.  During the months from July 1988 through August 1989, Gary daily rode first his bicycle then his motor scooter to a village in Guantian Xiang, where he formed great friendships with Taiwanese farmers and learned about their lives in the context of Taiwan’s rapid economic development.  He also corresponded with and interviewed Academic Sinica and university scholars and officials at all levels of governance in Taiwan and collected vast reams of oral and written material for his dissertation, Agricultural Development and the Fate of Farmers in Taiwan, 1945-1990. 
 
Dr. Davison has always combined a keen interest in teaching students at the K-12 level with the training and production of a university scholar.
 
He has written numerous books, including the following:
 
Culture and Customs of Taiwan (Greenwood Press, 1998 with coauthor [and wife] , St. Olaf College Professor Barbara Reed)
 
A Short History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence (Praeger Press, 2003)
 
Tales from the Taiwanese (Libraries Unlimited Press, 2004)
 
The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2004 (Minneapolis Urban League, 2004)
 
The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2008 (Minneapolis Urban League, 2008)
 
A Concise History of African America (Seaburn Press, 2008)
 
 
Gary is currently assembling material for two nearly complete books, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect;  and Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education .  Gary has also conducted interviews for the production of another book, The History of the African American Community of North Minneapolis.
 
Dr. Davison has for twenty-four years served as Director of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for economically challenged youth in North Minneapolis. 
 
Gary avidly reads scholarly literature and news sources in English and Chinese on matters pertinent to Taiwan and is contemplating a variety of topics for future works, including an update of A Short History of Taiwan:  The Case for Independence.

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