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Pamela J. Stubbart
educates, writes, and philosophizes
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Info
- Philosopher & EducatorPrimary/Secondary Education | Greater New York City Area, USSummary
I'm an independent educator and philosopher with wide-ranging experiences in teaching, writing, editing, and publishing.
Experience- Sept 2012 - PresentK-12 Education Program Officer / Institute for Humane Studies
I serve as an advisor to young libertarians who are interested in K-12 education careers, and I develop content + programs geared towards them.
- Feb 2012 - PresentEducation Blogger / The Huffington Post
I occasionally contribute to the Education column of the popular news site The Huffington Post.
- Jan 2012 - PresentSolopreneur in Chief / Cognitive Catering, LLC
I'm an oddball solopreneur.
Through my business, I primarily offer freelance knowledge work services (e.g., research, white paper ghostwriting, etc.) and what could best be described as "philosophical consultation."
- Oct 2010 - PresentBabysitter Extraordinaire / Metropolitan Sitters LLC
I babysit (both occasionally and on an ongoing basis) for various Manhattan families.
I aim to engage children of all ages intellectually during our time together.
- Jul 2011 - Jan 2012Commentary Page Coordinator, Teachers College Record / Teachers College, Columbia University
I invited education researchers and practitioners to write short opinion pieces for the Teachers College Record, then fulfilled the demands of our editorial calendar by managing the submission process, preparing the pieces for online publication, and publishing them using a content management system.
I also completed first-round internal reviews of manuscripts submitted to the Record as potential feature articles.
- Aug 2010 - Dec 2011Outreach Fellow / Columbia University Philosophy Outreach
I supported the Columbia Secondary School in its implementation of an ambitious pre-college philosophy curriculum by teaching Introductory Philosophy and Bioethics to 7th and 8th graders.
- Oct 2010 - Jun 2011Services Desk Assistant / Gottesman Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University
I provided excellent customer service to library patrons, completed a digital archiving project, and regularly contributed to the library's blog.
- Jan 2010 - Jul 2010Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy / Yavapai College
I taught philosophy both conventionally and online. Courses included Critical Thinking and Ethical Issues in Health Care.
- Aug 2007 - May 2010Teaching Assistant / Arizona State University
I assisted with courses including Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Ethics, and Applied Ethics. I also taught independently, including Introduction to Philosophy and Introduction to Ethics, both conventionally and online.
- Nov 2005 - Aug 2007Legal Assistant / Siavage Law Group
I supported an office of several lawyers by completing administrative tasks and various special projects as assigned.
- Aug 2006 - May 2007Peer Mentor & Supplemental Instructor / Georgia State University
I helped students to earn better grades in introductory philosophy by holding weekly office hours and study sessions.
Education-
2010 - 2011Teachers College, Columbia UniversityPhilosophy and Education (Doctoral coursework)
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2007 - 2010Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy (Doctoral coursework)
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2005 - 2007Georgia State UniversityBA in Philosophy (Magna cum laude with departmental distinction)
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Honors:General Research Fellowship, Teachers College - Columbia University, 2010-2011 Weinberg Fellowship, Teachers College - Columbia University, 2010-2011 Humane Studies Fellowship, Institute for Humane Studies, 2010-2012 George W. Beiswanger Award (Best Undergraduate Philosophy Major), Georgia State University, 2007 Troy Moore Undergraduate Ethics Essay Contest, First Place, Georgia State University, 2007
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Interests:Education, ethics, philosophy, economics, politics, current events, psychology, economics, technology, nutrition, animal welfare.
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Tweets
- Bizarro dream in which I give birth to tiny, puppy-like daughter, to my great chagrin and regret. Thanks, Monday.May 20, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @HeyVeronica That's dumb, they could have just snorted it. Gotta watch out for blue nostril tho.
- I want this weirdness so bad. http://t.co/xnwvLHYHVtMay 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @nickstamas @tonybgoode @jesselamb pretty excited you guys bc this rainy Sunday is lame as hell but I do have a shower + some Angry Orchard.
- I taught my phone the word whitesaucehotsauce!May 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @myhairisblue I love this. http://t.co/xzPOXzqjW3
- @jasonpbecker @edure yeah, some fake cheeses are that way mostly to be ok for lactose-intolerant ppl, not vegans, but kinda deceptive
- @edure @jasonpbecker It's because many cheeses are cultured with animal rennet, that comes from stomachs. Veg sources available though.
- RT @felixsalmon: SHOCKER: The world’s first “stock exchange for art” has gone bust http://t.co/rLc8ti9GMT #neverwouldveguessedMay 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @TheGattoniCelli It doesn't really matter. I used to block/report them but just becomes a waste of time.
- RT @carriemurph: Take my online poetry workshop? - I am teaching an online beginner’s poetry workshop with the Writer’s... http://t.co/6gMZ…May 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @LaughingStoic get a sodastream, duh.
- @EricDumbTweets I, I, I LOVE YOU LIKE A LOVE SONG, BABY
- ok I already did all the rainy day things: napping and ordering delivery. what now.May 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @briandavidearp: If there WERE racial differences, this would not validate race-ism: facts/values are more complicated than that http:/…May 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- this day started off awesome but now it's still raining and it's making me sad.May 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @TheAlexKnapp they won't be, bc of tyrannical public ed ;)
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Posts
- Mar 15, 12
Last week, I devoured Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha’s brand new book, “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform your Career.” It couldn’t have come out at a more appropriate time for me personally, given that I have abandoned academic aspirations, left grad school, quit a boring publishing job, and launched a tutoring service, all in the last six months.
“The Start-up of You” is pretty good; it contains lots of relevant anecdotes and reads easily as it inspires. I expect that it’s largely preaching to the choir, though: while readers may not have previously had a worked-out theory of conducting one’s career like a start-up, they are likely those who were already mostly convinced of the value of continuous professional and personal self-improvement.
Its main messages are fairly simple and somewhat repetitive: The work world will continue to change rapidly whether you like it or not, constantly invest in yourself, constantly invest in your social network, reassess your level of risk aversiveness by thinking clearly about what’s at stake in pursuing new opportunities and which possible fallback options are available to you.
Above all, though, I think the most important takeaway of the book consists in one simple but powerful insight — that “adaptability creates stability.”
A person might think that she can create and preserve stability in her finances, family life, retirement situation, etc. by committing to a particular job or line of work. However, the times they are a-changin’, in ways that often make this kind of commitment imprudent. Teachers and other government employees thought that they were pursuing stability in their seniority-based career ladders, but public indebtedness threatens their pensions. Doctorate holders earned their PhDs partially in the expectation that decent academic employment would later become available to them, but the adjunctivization of academia continues at a rapid clip. My father as a young man forwent college and put his nose to the grindstone at IBM, even relocating a family for them, only to have his division sold off (and his friends laid off) countless times over the past 15 years. Of the many people put in these and similar positions, some swim by actively developing new skills and finding new outlets for the old ones, while others sink by crossing their fingers and hoping things will just work out somehow.
As such, the cardinal virtues for navigating the turbulent waters of globalization, rapid and radical technological development, and uncertain political climate aren’t loyalty and commitment at all, but adaptability, flexibility, and openness to opportunity and change.
“The Start-up of You” is about work. But adaptability and openness to change are qualities that serve humans well across the board, because work is not the only sphere of our lives that we find constantly in flux. Our work lives both contribute to and reflect a wide variety of other conditions: communication tools, living arrangements, transportation systems, family structure, leisure activities, agricultural practices, etc etc etc.
There is a book that discusses change very broadly, and the advantages of adapting to it. This book is Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies” (1998). I read it last July and haven’t been able to stop thinking through its (*cringe*) life-changing lens ever since.
Postrel clearly establishes and discusses in various contexts the important distinction between “statisists” (as in “stasis”) and “dynamists.” A statisist resists the future and seeks to preserve features of the present with ill effects, either out of a misguided desire for stability (this characterizes reactionaries, usually politically conservative) or a desire for control (this characterizes technocrats, often politically liberal). A dynamist, on the other hand, believes that “human betterment depends not on conformity to one central vision but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error.” For a good synopsis of the book, visit Dynamist.com.
Those who believe in the vision and advice put forth in “The Start-up of You” are dynamists at heart. They aspire to make the best of ever-changing conditions, as skillful surfers on inevitable waves of uncertainty. Individuals running their lives like start-ups seek opportunity in whatever form it presents itself and take appropriate risks, knowing that life and change are somewhat risky whether you acknowledge it or not. They envision multiple paths that the world and their lives can possibly take, and nimbly navigate these paths as necessary, for fun and for profit.
“The Start-up of You” mostly reads like a manual for improving one’s own prospects in a benign, rather than sociopathic, manner. However, Hoffman and Casnocha make a critical point in passing, and it deserves to be emphasized: running your life like a start-up (i.e., adapting to change) has important benefits not just for you, but for society. What we don’t need is a bunch of people unproductively and unhappily clinging to the past. What we do need is intrepid thinkers, makers, and doers, all vigorously exploring the futures that are emerging, inside the physical or virtual workplace and out. “The Start-up of You,” then, is really about the future and its friends — and the personal and social reasons you have to become one.
- Feb 29, 12
Dear readers, In case you hadn’t seen this on Twitter or Facebook or G+ already, just wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll now be sharing most of my education-related content over at the Huffington Post. Occasional book reviews and other miscellany will still appear here. Thanks for following! pjs
- Jan 09, 12
Recently, my good buddy Jason Becker shared this article with me over here. An excerpt:
New Hampshire’s Republican-dominated Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto Wednesday to enact a law letting parents request an alternative curriculum for any subject they object to, legislation that critics say could limit children’s access to a comprehensive and quality education.
H.B. 542 initially passed by the state House and Senate last year, and was promptly vetoed by Lynch in July. In a statement explaining the decision, the governor wrote that the law — which allows parents to pull their children out of “objectionable” courses if they can finance the cost of instilling an alternative curriculum allowing the child to meet state requirements for education in that particular subject – does not clearly define what material can be considered objectionable, potentially giving individual parents the right to veto any lesson plan developed by a teacher.
The question of the cost of the bill is important, but let’s set that aside for now. The thing that interests me most about this is whether there are good moral reasons to object to such a policy.
Ideally, every student everywhere would receive a well-rounded, content-rich education facilitated by expert teachers. Of course and obviously, there are eight zillion political, moral, practical, epistemic, etc reasons why this is not the case. We instead inhabit a very imperfect world in which many actors with diverse values and beliefs act in generally well-intentioned but often ineffective and conflicting ways to create and sustain education as we know it.
So I think we can and should take a non-ideal perspective on matters of policy such as this (forgive me for not attempting to define the non-ideal here. Hopefully the concept is somewhat intuitive). In this, I take my cue from Harry Brighouse and his thoughtful, unconventional discussions in On Education, the work which has most colored my thinking, well, on education in the past year or so.
Instructive here is Brighouse’s position on religion in schools. Basically, he thinks that people in the U.S. have kind of fetishized the separation of church and state, by insisting that state funding not go to religiously-affiliated schools, because this results in a polarized set of educational alternatives: thoroughly secular public schools, and virtually unregulated religious private schools. Religious moderates (who far outnumber extremists) find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding what to do for schools, and with some frequency end up choosing the arguably worse option of private, unregulated religious schools. From a big picture perspective, it would be better for children’s autonomy if some state funding were allowed to flow to religious schools in exchange for their cooperation on matters of basic education quality. This would draw many religious moderates back into the fold of public education, to the benefit of their children and society.
I want to take a similar position on the new NH law about the parental right to opt their children out of objectionable lessons. Context matters — we must compare the new law to the alternative state of affairs that would actually obtain in the absence of the law, not to some imaginary ideal. While we, the secular or those who otherwise disagree with would-be opt-outers, may dislike that some children will miss out on what we hold to be essential lessons, those children are ultimately likely to benefit from being kept in public schools even if they don’t benefit from each individual lesson on offer there. Public schools will still generally provide a more intellectually and socially diverse environment for learners than private schools or homeschooling (which relevantly, in NH, appears to be virtually unregulated).
So, to objectors to this policy, I would put the following serious and not rhetorical question: Would you really prefer that students migrate away from public schools and into the isolation of private and home schools rather than sit out a lesson on sex or evolution? Given hard thought, the answer to this on critics’ own terms based on their own values, may well be “no.”
- Jan 03, 12
I’m almost done with Martin Seligman’s well-known book of positive psychology, Authentic Happiness (2003). It’s been a very good read — although I was familiar with many of the relevant research findings, from my various internet travels (and Barking Up The Wrong Tree in particular), Seligman puts it all together and lays it out in a way that makes thinking about happiness much less muddled. Although I wasn’t excited to take a quiz that revealed my strengths (and, by extension, weaknesses…), this was a solid end-of-the-year/beginning-of-the-year choice: sciencey and self-helpy in equal proportions.
Seligman does well basically to refuse to engage in the endless philosophical debate over what happiness is, exactly. And he does seem to have taken seriously, and largely accomplished, his goal of providing a descriptive account of the constitutive elements of happiness and how to achieve and sustain them. In other words, Seligman does not suggest that the body of evidence regarding happiness necessarily has normative force for all readers; you may have some reasons — prudential and/or moral — not to do some of the things that conduce to happiness. (For example, you may have a principled commitment to retributive justice such that you reasonably choose not to forgive some wrongdoers in your life, even though research shows that forgiveness is an important element of happiness).
However, I’m worried that Seligman’s descriptive task goes notably off the rails towards the beginning of the book, in the midst of a cursory discussion of positive emotions. Seligman describes his friend Len who, despite “having made it big both in work and play,” remains “constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity” (p. 34–35). Although Len is a high achiever, his achievements don’t do as much to make him feel as great, good, joyful, etc. as they would for most other people. Yet, Seligman maintains that, like Len (who eventually finds a compatible spouse for his “chilly” personality), “a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion.”
This will come as welcome news to anyone who, like Len (and Seligman), finds himself on the low end of the positive emotion scale. But why believe it’s true? To claim that happiness doesn’t require much positive emotion is to commit to one particular — and controversial — normative conception of the best kind of life for a human being. Seligman has, in essence, defined away the possibility that happiness consists primarily in the positive emotions. It may be true that we can’t change where we fall on the positive emotion scale, and that it’s better to focus on what we can change than what we can’t. But Seligman’s statement is quite strong: happiness is ultimately independent of how much positive emotion one experiences. This entails a thick, normative, and controversial account of happiness; a matter that ought not to be settled by postulation.
Without having given it too much thought, I have the following pretheoretical view: Positive emotions either aren’t an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, or they are. If they aren’t, then why pay special attention in the book to people who don’t experience many of them, and point out their ability to partake in other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life (e.g., achievement)? On the other hand, if positive emotions are an important part of the good/flourishing/happy life for a human being, then those with low positive affect have reason to want them, apart from the other facets of the good/flourishing/happy life they may have achieved, even if this is a difficult or even impossible task.
For those who tl;dr-ed, here’s the gist: Seligman claims to be providing a descriptive account of happiness, and not a normative one. However, in his extending the umbrella of happiness by definition to potentially cover those with somewhat or even drastically low positive affect, he makes important assumptions about the happy (or “good,” or “flourishing”) life for a human being. This isn’t necessarily bad or wrong, but it isn’t value-free.
In my opinion, it is better to keep the positive affectivity and achievement/satisfaction/etc. components of happiness entirely distinct, calling neither by itself “happiness,” for the sake of conceptual clarity. More on this later, maybe.
- Dec 16, 11
I have another post up at Kosmos: “Teaching Advice: Teaching to the Situation”
- Dec 13, 11
Common sense may suggest that increases in social welfare are more easily obtained by focusing resources on the mentally and/or physically handicapped, rather than using those resources instead to marginally improve non-handicapped individuals’ lives. The capabilities approach, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, would also imply that resources are well-spent when devoted to expanding the substantive freedoms and abilities of the handicapped.
You might think that improving the situation of the handicapped is an area in which non-utilitarian social welfare theory agrees with utilitarianism: if the handicapped are not so happy, and we know how to make them happier, and can do so efficiently, then we should. (Using a non-technical conception of utilitarianism here; feel free to question it).
But then Eric Barker comes along and shares, on his excellent Barking up the wrong tree blog, that an academic study’s “Results seemed to demonstrate essential equivalence in life satisfaction for handicapped, retarded, and normal persons.” Notice that the study’s subjects are members of the actual world, where accommodations for the handicapped exist, but not as extensively as social model theorists and other disability advocates request.
Assume that there is some truth to these findings (which I believe are consistent with a number of prior studies). Do they give us a reason to accept the capabilities approach, according to which the handicapped may still lack important capabilities and/or suffer from a false consciousness, etc. that makes their lives still less than good enough? Or should these findings about the life satisfaction of the handicapped assuage our former guilt for not having done enough to improve their lives?
In particular, I am trying to think about these findings in terms of their implications for expenditures on special education, which are large but difficult to measure and highly controversial (here’s a relevant recent post from Education Next). If the goal or purpose of education is rightly happiness, as Nel Noddings and others have suggested, then are extreme special education measures warranted if the handicapped turn out relatively happy without them? Or is this a repugnant conclusion that suggests that the proper goal of education is something other than happiness?
- Nov 27, 11
Last month, I read the article “Love and Anarchy” by Vivan Gornick in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was adapted from a recently released book titled “Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life” by the same author. Because the essay was intriguing and, honestly, quite sexy, I quickly purchased the full book on Kindle.
Emma Goldman, anarchist, feminist, and free-lover, was a real character, to say the least. She was well-known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for her fiery, eloquent, prolific lectures on both the political and the personal. As her biographer repeatedly stresses, Goldman’s staunch belief in freedom was not the product of reason but of emotion; she felt oppression in all its forms especially profoundly, and she felt the need for genuine and far-ranging freedom with an intensity foreign to all except her closest anarchist comrades; as such, Goldman’s lectures apparently conveyed moods more than arguments. This type of anarchism is interesting, for it stands in stark contrast to the kind of academic anarchism with which I’m familiar (although ultimately I can’t get on board with this emotional anarchism; a topic for another time).
However, Goldman’s across-the-board emotionality, elations and depressions and all, seems more exciting and less maladaptive in the short essay than it did in the full book. Although Goldman was an ardent proponent of free love and open marriages, she was prone to bouts of jealousy and therefore never able to put her ideals into a stable practice. To get a little Freudian, Goldman seems destined to perpetually yet unsuccessfully search for male affection to replace that which was lacking from her father. Hers are not the romantic liaisons of a liberated woman so much as a psychologically imprisoned one; the recounting of Goldman’s romantic history is thus more painful to read than it is enrapturing.
Indeed, the revolutionary’s entire life, and not just her love life, was cyclical and tempestuous in its swings between hope and despair, joy and sorrow. For this reason, the biography becomes slightly tedious to read — up and down, up and down, rinse and repeat. I don’t think this is the fault of the biographer, though, and is rather to her credit insofar as she accurately conveys Goldman’s bipolar moods.
Incidentally, this book serves as an effective way to learn about the political climate in this time period if you’ve all but forgotten everything about it you learned in school, like me. While the prose tends towards the over-the-top flowery, this may be necessary in order to capture the over-the-topness of Goldman herself. Not a must-read, but recommended, particularly to those with an interest in the (possibly pathological) psychology of radical politics. You could have no better character study than Emma Goldman.
- Nov 20, 11
In case you missed it, I had another guest post up at Kosmos recently on the topic of transferring graduate schools.
- Oct 18, 11
Today, some grad school advice I wrote for Kosmos went live.
Check it out: Thinking About Academia Like An Economist
- Oct 05, 11
I recently began reading Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, picked up on a whim from the library. Menand makes an excellent point in passing about so-called “great books” curricula (aka “general” or “liberal” education, and possibly “common core”), a point which I had not previously seen made explicit in the various blog posts, book excerpts, etc. that I’ve encountered on the subject. Here goes, in my own words:
The teaching of traditionally revered texts may be justified in at least two ways:
- The books/ideas comprising the canon of western higher education are, in fact, better than those which are excluded. We continue to teach them because a good education exposes the young to “the best which has been thought and said” (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy).
- The books/ideas comprising the canon should continue to be taught simply because, historically, they have influenced society so much. Like it or not, students need to be made familiar with these texts in order to more fully engage with other pieces of culture, and broader segments of society. As such, this bank of common social knowledge opens up opportunities and ways of life that would not otherwise have been available or salient to students who don’t receive a thorough cultural education outside of formal schooling.
I’m going to name these the de jure and de facto (respectively) justifications of great books, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Menand associates the de jure justification with Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, and the de facto justification with E.D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know (making me much more sympathetic to the latter author, who I had previously — and apparently erroneously — taken for a snobby elitist).
N.B. that the de jure justification of great books seems prima facie to commit its proponent to some sort of objectivist view about value (and at least rules out thorough forms of subjectivism about value, including even aesthetic value). The de facto view is agnostic in this respect, and is compatible with both objective and subjective theories of value regarding the cultural artifacts at issue. For this reason, the de facto justification of great books curricula can probably attract more supporters than the stronger, narrower de jure justification.
So the really interesting question becomes: In practice, is it really possible to teach great books the de facto way, presenting them to students not as possessing any magical intrinsic goodness, but simply as constituting useful gateway to cultured life? If so, then a major objection to de facto-justified great books curricula — that they are implicitly racist, sexist, classist, etc. — can be at least partially dispelled. However, if in practice students do not or cannot fully grasp that great books are merely a kind of sociocultural currency, or if great books tend to edge out non-traditional texts from the curricula, then even the de facto justification may be in trouble.
