HOW HIGHER EDUCATION BECLOWNS ITSELF.

Professor: Small Chairs in Preschools Are Sexist, ‘Problematic,’ and ‘Disempowering.’  I can't make this kind of stuff up.  Kat Timpf supplies suitable mockery.

Even if talking with chairs were normal, I would still say that this seems pretty crazy. That physically small chairs are the standard for physically small people seems . . . well . . . standard. What do these preschool kids need, giant barcaloungers? To finger paint in? So that no one feels disempowered by a piece of furniture? That would be a great use of taxpayer money?

Here's the opening of the abstract. "This philosophically driven work is intended to trouble the position of the small chair in early childhood settings. It is theoretically driven by an aspect of sociological and cultural theory called hauntology, and by the theories of new feminist materialism."

Apparently I was never clever enough to make up my own research practices, in which an extended literature review could constitute an entire article, without any testable propositions or data collection.  "The methodological approach is intra-active and diffractive."  Nor did I think of taking a self-portrait near a steel mill rather than gathering information about the machinery therein and the shipments therefrom.  "As part of her research, Bone even visited an IKEA furniture store so that she could sit in child-sized chairs. Included in the article are two pictures of Bone sitting in small chairs. The author also included a brief account of the experience." I have no doubt, none at all, that this professor offers at least one class that would satisfy a diversity and oppression requirement in the States or Canada.  Has the intersectionality disease infected Australia as well?