Slashdot Mirror

... school teachers have to say about schooling vs education in the USA.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...

http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...

http://www.holtgws.com/whatisu...

"But on the computers, the best thing about them is that they let children go much more self-paced. Except, I usually find they block the 3rd graders from doing 4th grade work, even if their ability and time allows. As someone who never fit in the school time schedule, I would have loved something that let me progress as fast or slow as I wanted."

Decades ago, in public school, probably in third grade or so, I had a substitute teacher literally snatch a Boxcar Children series book out of my hands (which I had picked up from a shelf in the class room) saying I might be assigned to read it in the next grade so he did not want me reading it then. It wasn't ever assigned, and I never did get to finish it -- something about being in a mysterious castle... I can wonder if this was the one -- but it can't be as it was published many years later:
http://books.google.com/books/...

To be fair though, my actual third grade teacher said it was OK for me to read ahead in the science text book, and I read most of it over a weekend or so. She then suggested to my parents they get some science-related booklets, which they did. So, I owe a lot of my early science education to Ms. Kivlen(sp?) as well as Lady Plowden and her collaborators:
http://www.abebooks.com/book-s...

Also, while most math classwork bored me in school with repetitive rote work, one year there was a "programmed instruction" box of math problems where you did a card of problems, and depending on how you did, you would either get a similar card or skip ahead. I rapidly skipped along through that entire box and it was fun and enjoyable. So, such things are also possible just with paper systems. Sadly, that experience with such "programmed instruction" for math was not repeated in other years in school. Still, there were other teachers who I can give credit for letting me have some freedom to learn on my own in various areas (especially computers).

In some ways, not much has changed in many schools as far as schools and their use of digital educational materials. Some teachers are very helpful (like my third grade teacher or John Taylor Gatto), but some are not, and, in any case, the overall compulsory school system works against most individualized instruction because it is designed to mostly turn out a standardized product like canned hams (or compliant worker drones in this case for most kids).

Yet computer technology offers the promise of more, even if it is a promise not yet realized for most kids. I wrote a related essay here:
http://patapata.sourceforge.ne...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

That's one reason we homeschool/unschool to better support more learner-directed inquiry.
http://www.holtgws.com/wh

And that is why schools-as-we-know-them are rapidly becoming obsolete, if they every made any sense at all. See my essay:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

And for general background:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/growingwithoutsc.html
http://www.ecovaproject.org/education.htm
http://archives.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsletterid=21&articleid=195
http://www.patfarenga.com/

I could go on for dozens or even hundreds more links...

As Gatto wrote about the big problem with this "system" we call "public schooling" (contrast with "public libraries") is that:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."

For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options. ..."

People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?

Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.

Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

People start off being able to reason, school stomps it out of most of them:
http://www.alisongopnik.com/TheScientistInTheCrib.htm

Well-rounded (or rather, healthy, which does not always mean being perfectly rounded) human beings are more likely to come out of healthy communities and healthy families...

Some other links;

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by
Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20060710145531/www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm

"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.

The big issue is the difference between "education" and "schooling" which John Taylor Gatto goes into.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

Or John Holt.
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

It relates to, but goes beyond, this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/03/2040253/when-getting-rid-of-college-lectures-makes-sense

The article on Eric Mazur is misrepresentative -- according to him. He doesn't "get rid of college lectures", he turns the lecture time interactive. Similar to what the Intelligent Book tries to make easy, but Mazur's "Peer Instruction" requires much larger changes to your teaching design. You can do large changes with the Intelligent Book if you want to, but it's not required -- you can do something as simple as just putting the live polls in to your existing course, and ask the class questions to spark discussion (that has long been shown to be pedagogically very effective).

I think the John Taylor Gatto argument is founded on a misconception. The "command-type economy" is nowhere near as command-type as you think. Most organisations are not well-understood hierarchical factories, but poorly understood complex dynamic systems. For instance, half the problem in running a hospital is that most of what the doctors and nurses are actually doing isn't documented and varies enormously from ward to ward. At every student employment fair I have seen every employer I have spoken to has valued precisely "self-reliant resourceful readers and critical thinking" over every other skill. And universities -- at least the ones I've encountered (which admittedly have all been world-top-50) -- generally don't do schooling. They take comparatively little care to train students in content that is useful to jobs as the academics that take the classes feel offended by the idea of becoming trainers dancing to an external employer's tune.

The big issue is the difference between "education" and "schooling" which John Taylor Gatto goes into.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

Or John Holt.
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

It relates to, but goes beyond, this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/03/2040253/when-getting-rid-of-college-lectures-makes-sense

"There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side."

Or just because the whole idea of compulsory school is broken:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html (A bit too business focused though and expands school instead of contracts it)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Please see my other posts to this article, including these links and others:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
http://www.iodine4health.com/

The first link suggests that pretty much all autism is related to various issues like you discovered in time (there are just a bunch of them from vitamin D deficiency, to iodine defiency, to lack of omega-3s, to dairy, to toxins of various sorts in processed foods or, presumably, vaccines). From there: "Most neurodevelopmental disorders have common roots. But looking at only one aspect of such conditions will not solve the problem of autism. Current autism research is based on an outdated approach -- one that is something like blind men examining the proverbial elephant. Each researcher works in his or her own silo examining different factors and coming to different conclusions. Research that integrates, synthesizes and examines all the data on causes and potential treatments is practically non-existent. The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)"

The second and third links show why excessive dairy is pretty harmful for most people (even ignoring how most of the world is lactose intolerant). The fourth is something I'm just learning about at the moment (iodine deficiency, where dairy is often a primary source of iodine, so watch out for it without dairy or eating seaweed or supplementing).

Your son is lucky to have you as his Dad. You might want to still monitor for the other health issues and take pro-active steps to "disease-proof" your family on a diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains).

As a four year old, my wife had surgeons open up her belly and take her guts out (and put them back) because they refused to listen to her mother who suggested she had a millk allergy (from an article she read) -- and it turned out, after all the trauma, yes it was an allergy to milk and lactose. Doctors (especially surgeons) seem to be trained to sound very confident even when they don't have a clue (especially about nutrition). Part of how it got that way, starting around 1910:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report

For down the road:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.holtgws.com/

"Teaching yourself is fine, but very few people are capable of doing it properly without a lot of help."

Mostly due to schooling...
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

You may just have had an advantage from natural talent and experience? Or maybe you just eat a better diet or exercise more than others?
    http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

You can see another post I made for links about alternative education.
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34081206

But basically, most young children tend to learn best through interactions with people, nature, exposure to a waide variety of experiences including music and stories, and basic things like playing with sand, water, and blocks. It is on those sorts of things that more advanced thinking is built. Trying to put the cart before the horse may lead to less success, not more. It has been hypothesized that the reason many kids are doing worse in math and science and criticial thinking is that those sorts of general early experiences have been curtailed in favor of early academics focusing on things like early print literacy or early drill of math concepts. So, you might want to research this more, including reading stuff by John Holt (a mathematical person who also studied alternative education).
    http://holtgws.com/

With that said, there are things you can do, like pointing out things. I've pointed out examples of recursion to my kid from a young age (like trucks carrying trucks). And math has been a daily thing by pointing out examples of it in our daily life, including when working with LEGOs. But that is not the same as "lessons" in any kind of formal sense.

A good open-ended site for young kids to learn through play as an example:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/

I agree with you that programming is a good way to approach math. As people talked about on the Python edusig list, "math" can really just be seen as a subset of computation and programming in general (at least within the bounds of whatever most schools teach).

I can also wonder if getting kids indoors more at an early age has made them vitamin D deficient which has led to some learning difficulties? So, even if you use computers with a kid a lot, make sure that everyone is getting enough vitamin D.
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools by Peter Gray; In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more. ... The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children.""

See also:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

And some posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
  http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.htm
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

For the record, I've always loved math and think it can be a very fun and worthwhile profession or hobby. I love broccoli too, but forcefeeding endless amounts of it to people till bursting despite the tears and protests would be cruel and probably would result in them not eating broccoli when no one was looking. How do we get people to enjoy thinking well and eating healthy? Good question. But people do have answers, if you look.
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

which is dumbing us down: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Give them more money, and as NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, they will only do that job better... We need to change the whole paradigm...
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.holtgws.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

At least everyone in Cuba have access to medical care.
    http://www.hr676.org/

On your points:

"Go to work,"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

"send your kids to school."
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/

"Follow fashion,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

"act normal."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

"Walk on the pavements,"
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about (shows how unusual that is)

"watch T.V."
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
http://www.tvturnoff.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

"Save for your old age,"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

"obey the law."
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

"Repeat after me: I am free."
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

Any more? :-)

"She used to enjoy discussing literature, now she only reads what's safe. I've got a lot of un-teaching to do, as a result. Perhaps there's a valuable life lesson burried under the pile of lost assignments this teacher never graded, ..."

Unschooling?
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

That schools are unreformable?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
    Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

That schools are more and more like prisons every year?
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Sorry, you do not seem to know the first thing about homeschooling/unschooling based on any research or first hand experience. On what do you base such harsh opinions of two million or so homeschoolers in the USA? No doubt you could find some examples of what you say, same as I could find endless examples of school bullying (which is much more common), but are you suggesting the vast majority of homeschooled kids are suffering socialization problems? Are you suggesting that learning only to socialize with same age peers of roughly the same age and social class and one authoritarian teacher, trapped with no option but to return day after day, is your ideal of social skills learning, as opposed to learning to interact with people of all different ages in all different situations? If so, why are homeschoolers getting preferred admission to many colleges these days?

Just one of many starting points if you wish to break out of your schooling rut and really learn:
http://homeschooling.about.com/od/socialization/Socialization_How_to_deal_with_it.htm

Another place to start:
http://www.holtgws.com/teachyourown.html
"...I have used the words "homeschooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make "learning" happen and in which nothing except "learning" ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution, one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions. We can imagine and indeed we have had human societies without schools, without factories, without libraries, museums, hospitals, roads, legislatures, courts, or any of the institutions which seem so indispensable and permanent a part of modern life. We might someday even choose, or be obliged, to live once again without some or all of these. But we cannot even imagine a society without homes, even if these should be no more than tents, or mud huts, or holes in the ground. What I am trying to say, in short, is that our chief educational problem is not to find a way to make homes more like schools. If anything, it is to make schools less like schools."

As to public school indoctrination, that is well documented here by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Or here, also by Gatto:
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Are you too a prime example of schooling to lash out so fast with no research behind your points, convinced you are right because you were told by authorities in school that school was best for you?

Still, the fact is, up until recently I used to believe much of what you are saying here. So, don't feel too bad. But please at least try to learn a little more about educational alternatives and why the current schooling system we have is essentially broken beyond repair. Is this is the kind of socialization you are saying is better than children being around people who truly care for their emotional and intellectual growth and have the time to help with it?
"The War on Kids - Trailer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II
Note the great socialization experience during the SWAT raid... Is that what

Off to a good start. To build on it, see my other posts here and http://www.alfiekohn.org/ and http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Related stuff with more links (my me):
"College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student
protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why aren't you homeschooling/unschooling then?
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

If you "saw the spark in these kids eyes extinguished" why not move to somewhere less affluent (cheaper) to live if you have to so you can make homeschooling work? Why pay so much taxes for "good" schools that are really just fancy prisons?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
And often lead to a lifetime in fancy prisons?
    http://disciplinedminds.com/

See also:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

But if homeschooling absolutely can't work for you, see also AERO, the Alternative Education Resource Organization for lots of other possibilities that don't kill off creativity so much:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

(From a parent in a family that has given up a bunch of material stuff to homeschool and hopefully keep that spark alive...)
   

Babies are born knowing how to learn; people only need to relearn that if it has been stomped out of them, as is done through most conventional compulsory schooling. This is not to disgree that college can also be an effective filter for businesses to use to obtain compliant workers who know certain basic skills and who also are unlikely to seriously challenge authority. Related links:
    http://ilabs.washington.edu/news/scientist_in_the_crib.html
    http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

Thanks for trying it. I appreciate any frank feedback. I agree it could be improved (we did make the source available under the GPL -- there is a lot under the hood, like the various models). We ran out of funds to continue it and had to take jobs at IBM to pay back money we had borrowed for living expenses to develop it (and that killed any momentum we had on it). As two middle class people, my wife and I poured more than six person years of our time into that to try to help kids have some better educational tools (back when people were still questioning why there were few non-violent simulations out there or stuff girls might like or even organic agriculture or environmentalism). There is a lot more to that program for teenagers and adults when you get into it (too much, really), and remember, this was written about fifteen years ago. I could do way better now. It was mainly just too ambitious -- it does all sorts of scientific-related things moving through three levels of increasing abstract representation (direct manipulation, inspecting, graphing). It's much more a simulator (microworld, see Papert) than a game (there is no score etc..)

PlantStudio is another program that came out of that approach, that also should run under Wine, and is a step forward in interface (for the time), and many people have liked, though again it is dated.
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Downloadable here:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/download_new.html
Between the two, PlantStudio, which uses the same basic algorithms but with a simpler interface focused on just one thing, generated much more excitement (but we were unable to follow it up much as we were busy working at IBM). Examples of user comments from back then:
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
"An excellent example of educational expertise.... It is an excellent adjunct for general modeling, especially in the creation of scenes."

So, we were learning. But it got cut off because, back then, it was hard to get any funders to see the value of educational computer simulations (especially ones that were open source). That's what's great about NASA finally putting money into these sorts of things.

I have Java ports of both those partially complete (don't know if they will ever be finished, because, as you suggest, the GUI could be improved, which makes a straight port kind of pointless, but means more work to redesign it).

By the way, on good parenting and education without too much "grounding" or "bribes" or very much forcing kids to learn stuff they don't want to study right then: :-)
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:

Gatto:
    "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
    http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

Illich:
    http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
    http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html

John Holt:
    http://www.holtgws.com/

Collections of links by me on this:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/

NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."

The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."

With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the

Three people who talk about education:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.holtgws.com/

From the first, Dr. David Goodstein:
"""
      We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
      It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
"""
   

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."

I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:

"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html

"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

Now, that is a very inflammatory subject title, so let me explain what I mean.

I was glad to see a previous comment referencing John Taylor Gatto. I do not see Gatto's name in the PDF document. Neither do I see John Holt's name. The fact is, the purpose of "schooling" (which is not the same as "education", and you would expect a mathematician to be more precise in a use of terms) is precisely to do what the mathematician decries at the end: "And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds-- a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."

Education in the USA will not improve until people like this mathematician accept that what he said is the intentional purpose of schooling in all subjects for almost all children. See things like:
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the Year
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
or:
    "The Big Crunch" by Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost Caltech
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
or:
    "Growing Without Schooling" about John Holt's work, including failed attempts to reform schools
    http://www.holtgws.com/

At this point, it is people like Paul Lockhart who are the problem. People who think school is about education, when it is about socialization in a certain way intended for the most part to produce compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers. School is for fish. Curriculums are race tracks. And "class rooms" are literally to build social classes through selective breeding by genetics. Those are the origins of all those terms, at least according to Gatto, and, again, you would expect a mathematician to be precise about the origins and use of terminology.

With all that said, of course Paul Lockhart is right about how to improve mathematics education. But, it will never work within a Prussian-derived school system with no interest in truly educating children, despite every person who works at a school calling themselves an educator, and despite the truth that most of the people in schools might be fine educators if given the chance and a few years of untraining of their bad habits.
    "The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance"
    http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Anyway, sorry to be so harsh on you, Paul. Read "Disciplined Minds" and start building a social network to help you and them and others break out of the prison around you:
    "Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

The good news is, you have already taken the first step of getting out of the prison others have forced you to build for yourself.

John Holt: "Escape from Childhood"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Childhood
http://www.holtgws.com/escapefromchildh.html
"Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.

No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take form someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.

We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right largely for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away from us. Indeed, as far as I know, it has never been written into any body of law. even the writers of our Constitution did not mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. it did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people's minds, what they thought and knew. That idea would come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education."

The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.

It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
    http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."

People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.

Another related essay:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri

Not familiar with that one, so I had to look it up:

Hanlon's Razor (or Hanlon's Law) is a corollary of Finagle's law. Hanlon's Razor says "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

That's a pretty easy way to deal with the inconvenient truth of the matter: thumbs in your ears, "la la la la, I can't hear you", never even considering the evidence. The rich get richer, the middle class disappears and defends the massive wealth transfer anyways.

Gatto has made an incredible contribution to understanding the reason schools function the way they do. Also recommended is the life work of John Holt.

You've passed Mind-Fsck 101, apparently. :)

School was a big part of the problem, because they led me to believe that I knew how to read, when that certainly wasn't the case. When I started to examine criticisms of the system, I realized that government schools are not supposed to 'educate' - they exist for the purpose of making 'teh masses' manageable.

Look up Gatto's essay, 'The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher', or read his 'Underground History of American Education' (available for free at his website, linked above). Or look up some books by John Holt, whose message was very similar to Gatto's, but 30 years earlier.

You think maybe the rest of the students might be there to learn something?

Most of them are there because they have to be.

My daily refrain for about ... 5 years was, "do I have to go to school today?" I hated school, and I was good at it. My teachers tried, but it was almost as if the system was designed to keep all of us from ever gaining any traction.

Only after I graduated from teh college did I realize how right I was. Picked up a copy of Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher, and realized that I'd never really learned how to read. I did just fine with the multiple-choice tests, but comprehension was another matter entirely. I do alright with certain non-fiction books, but I can't read fiction worth a damn.

John Holt recognized the scam 50 years ago - How Children Fail was published in 1962, iirc. Holt's How Children Learn gives some good strategies for working within the system...

Sure, once you read this library of books I'm going to suggest in order to support a self-evidently absurd claim.

I'm waiting for a list. In the mean time, John Holt's life work also supports the charge that government schools are specifically designed to prevent children from achieving their full potential.

What does that [growing gap in worker/executive pay] have to do with this topic, other than your attempt to draw in a tangential issue that upsets you?

It is further evidence supportive of the charge that an undeclared state of class warfare is being perpetrated against the American middle class.

"Free, dynamic, equal, pick two"

I'm sorry - I don't get how the three qualities are mutually exclusive. Please link or explain.

You just argued that all labor-saving technology is bad.

Try again - click on the 'parent' link in your comment above, and re-read what I actually wrote. Or download Chomsky's talk, and listen to what he said. The bit about subsidized agriculture is in the first 1/2 hour.

Like the other guy said, sorry, I didn't realize you were an idiot. Either get back to me with some links, or HAND. :)

The entire book is worth the time it takes to read it:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m

He comes at the issue from a particular mindset, so I don't always agree with him on minor bits of philosophy, but he's got the gist of it and has researched the history well.

See also the writings of John Holt; who after 20 years of trying to reform the system finally figured out that it was irredeamable by design and founded the modern home schooling movement:

http://www.holtgws.com/index.html

I was home schooled before John had his conversion and my family actually fled the country for the better part of a school year while the lawyer worked things out. One of the best experiences of my life.

KFG

The US systemis filled with mediocre teachers because of the low pay. I spent my school days bored out of my mind...

Teachers are very well paid for what they do, which is to prevent most their students from ever discovering personal power. Every single one of your classmates was "bored out of [their] mind" too - you just managed to find a way to make something of yourself, in spite of the government's attempt to dumb you down too. Most of our peers aren't quite so fortunate, for whatever reason.

Read Gatto's essay The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, or his book The Underground History of American Education (available for free online at his website).

Or one of Holt's books - How Children Fail or How Children Learn, for example (incidentally, is that your picture on the schoolbus? :).

The government school experiment is a good example of a cascading system failure. The first teachers came from classical american education, where learning was the learner's responsibility. The first school reform was to transfer responsibility for educational institutions from "the public" to "the government", and it's been all downhill from there.

The government school is corrupt because it places all responsibility for learning on the teacher. The first generation of government school students did well because their teachers had been "properly educated" in the traditional American manner. But every generation of teachers has been a little bit worse than the one before, because the system Doesn't teach children that it's their responsibility to teach themselves whatever they want to learn.

Now, 150 years later, many new teachers are frickin idiots. I had a date some years back with a girl who'd just gotten her teaching certificate, and felt sorry for whoever ended up in her class.

All part of a grand scheme to depower 'the masses' (that is, 'us').

Public education is underfunded.

Public schools do not educate, according to reformed schoolteachers like John Gatto and John Holt. If they did, the populace wouldn't take the crap that 'we' do - teh masses would know how to recognize tyranny when it happened, and find a way to circumvent it.

The government is in debt because of the tax "cuts" Bush pushed through.

The government has been in debt for a very long time - Johnson started printing money to pay for Vietnam, and there was no turning back. Clinton only balanced the budget by borrowing money from social security. If the government had to abide by the same accounting standards as corporations, there would have never been a 'surplus', and the current deficits would be much, much worse than the numbers they currently put out.

Our medical and college education costs are out of reach because ... because the government subsidizes college, and has sent all the low-skill jobs (that used to pay well) to Mexico and Asia, and has looked the other way while corporations imported Mexicans for the jobs that couldn't be moved. College has, therefore, become the new highschool diploma, not that the original ever meant anything in the first place...

we're spending our money on things like the War on Drugs(which just makes illegal drugs more expensive)

If not for the war on drugs driving up prices, how could the various black-op agencies finance their nefarious operations? Read something about Clinton being in on cocaine smuggling through Arkansas - seems like a possibility to me...

and the War on Terror(abject failure due to our inability to concentrate on the nation that actually caused the terror).

You are refering to the traitors in the whitehouse, right?

The United States has the lowest tax levels of the Western world. We also have the highest debt and the worst healthcare. There is a connection.

'Highest debt' is because our Feral Government has had free reign to "print" money for its various programs for 35+ years, and no one's had the ability to call them on it. See Ron Paul's The End of Dollar Hegemony.

'Worst healthcare' is because a certain kind of doctor lobbied themselves a monopoly, and the government set the rules such that employers paid their employees' healthcare bills (wage ceilings during WWII led companies to pick up their workers' doctor bills). Medicare was created to pay for retired workers who'd gotten accustomed to the 'health insurance' paradigm, and that program's costs have been spiraling out of control ever since. See 100 Years of Medical Robbery and Real Medical Freedom.

Great story. Thanks for sharing it.

The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.

I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.

Holt wrote a couple books - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.

I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.

Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."

Great story. Thanks for sharing it.

The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off [d]espairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.

I think it's important to also note that the government's compulsory schooling system treats all children the same, no matter their interests. John Holt realized while team teaching in the 1950's that most of his students were bored and frightened - bored because they didn't care about the current lesson, and frightened because the authority figure was making demands of them. According to Holt, the children were intent only on trying to figure out what the teacher wanted, and whether they should try to give it to them.

Holt wrote a couple books - How Children Fail (1964!), How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, etc. At first he tried to fix the schools. Then he gave up, and became an advocate of "unschooling", where the child chooses what and how they want to learn. Doesn't work for all children, but it does work spectacularly well for many.

I myself was tied down for years in "school" - 11 years of government schools, 2 years of private high school, 3.5 years at the university. On the one hand, I'm kinda bitter about all the time I was locked up, but on the other, I realize that it's hard to appreciate spring without a long, cold winter.

Also see Gatto's Seven Lesson Schoolteacher: "The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children
not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it
appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle..."

Except the real solution is to get rid of compulsory schooling entirely and get people doing "unschooling",
    http://www.unschooling.com/
and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).

See for example John Holt's writings:
    http://www.holtgws.com/index.html
or John Taylor Gatto's:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
or any of many other radical school reformers.

All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.

The future is not to still idealize Prussia and even earlier empire building aspirations back to Plato
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20 031028151034651
which developed these techniques of "education" but instead to look into the future, where people start asking questions like "why work?"
    http://www.whywork.org/
and how to structure an economy when "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain":
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

(Sorry to read about your loss, and it sounds like you were doing a lot of great things together, just needed more time to go even further.)

Public school is but one alternative today. I have home schooled my kids and know first and the benefits. Luckily today there are some great resources on the net. My first read was John Holt. He has taught from kindergarden to Harvard. He started off trying to change the system from within in the early 60s to advocating homeschooling in the late 60s. I still love the book title _burn the schools, save the children_.

A blistering attack on public schools by the NY Teacher of the Year John Gatto - can be found in his acceptance speech Ouch.

Is home schooling for everyone? No.

But is is an alternative and a great one at that. Read lots.

a democracy has to preserve at least some capacity for thought in its citizens (elections and all).

Er, you mean that democracies only function to your spec if there is "some capacity for thought in its citizens". Sure, I'd like a smart, issue-oriented electorate, too. But fact is, in a world in which power is disposed of by popular vote, it's obviously in a candidate's best interest (as far as getting elected goes) to keep the populace ignorent and uncritical -- if he can somehow manage it. School boards in conjunction with mandatory schooling provide precisely that power.

(There was a fascinating article about 12 years ago in a mainstream mag called "Why Can't Johnny Think?" which outlined exactly why it's in your average schoolboards members' personal self-interest to keep the electorate docile, ignorent and uninterested.)

You may have noticed there are an awful lot of /.ers who complain about the American electorate. Every time a YRO article hits the main page, you can expect laments about how the general public doesn't see what all the fuss is about as their rights are eroded. Now, maybe you disagree with that sentiment. Perhaps you think the American people are an involved, interested, vigilent electorate passionately participating in the Great Experiment of democracy. OK, then we would have to agree to disagree. But if you do concede that not all is well in the American electorate, I would like to propose an alternate explanation.

I say "alternate" because the standard /. assumption is that the populace is stupid or lazy. My proposal is that they have had been indoctrinated.

Again, please explain. While I have seen more than my share of corruption in individual school administrations, I don't see where the corruption is in the system itself.

Hello? We were discussing WAVE? The product that school administrators argue they need to keep their schools safe?

But of course, that's the tip of the iceberg....

When schools become used as a political tool, it is a Bad Thing. But I'd like to see your evidence that school has become a propaganda tool.

L ies My Teacher Told Me (I'm not suggesting giving amazon.com money, but if you check out the "also boughts" on the bottom of the page you'll get a bunch of books focusing on other academic areas besides US history.) The book is an examination of, among other disturbing things, how twelve of the most popular US history texts used in HS classes were edited to make certain groups in the US look less bad. For example, the Deep South states insisted on a more flattering (of them) depiction of the Reconstruction (following the Civil War.) Similarly, famous people who had (now) unpopular political or religious positions are depicted without reference to, for instance, being communists or deists or supporters of the KKK.

The State has been editing your text books. Get used to the idea.

And what else is the bid to have Oklahoma schools teach creationism but an attempt at state sponsored propaganda? The people who have seized the reins there have an agenda for how they'd like people to think. Don't kid yourself that it's purely a love of Christianity which moves those people. They know that if everyone grows up thinking Christianity is more valid than other religions (which don't get their origin myths put in science text books) and, heck, just as valid as science, and Christianity (as practiced widely) teaches that Christians are better than unbelievers, Christianity becomes a virtuous trait in a candidate -- as has already happened (the Boston Globe had a nice article on it if you hadn't figured it out for yourself). Promulgating Christianity in schools is a good way to make sure eventually only Christians are elected to office.

Oh, that's right, you don't provide any.

Actually, I think I just did. Kindly remove your foot from your throat.

Far better to have a child taught by a trained professional than by someone who, in the end, may well not know much more than the student.

Really? Who'd you learn that from, a trained professional?

There are a growing number of people who have come to the conclusion mass-produced education is of necessarily inferior quality, completely aside from any liberties your government is taking with the content.

But, hey, this is other people. You went to (or are going through) ~12 years of schooling in the US, right? Think for yourself. Look back on your own experience and ask "Hey, did I learn a lot? How does it compare to what I learned on my own? How does it compare to what I learned from other people?" Ask yourself "Did I like being in school? Did it engage my intellect and introduce me to new things? Or did I sit either bored or terrified in most of my classes wishing I could be somewhere else, doing somewhere else?"

If you can answer, "Heck, yes, school was great; I'd go back in a heartbeat; I never felt so intellectually awake; I learned so much!" then more power to you.

If you can't, I ask that you listen to what I have to say with an open mind. If nothing else listen to this:

What they did to you was wrong. They had no right. It could have been different. It could have been better. Having to spend your childhood in a state-run or state-authorized institution being told the state's version of reality was wrong.

Correct. Now, how do you propose to fix the economy such that this is not so?

I don't. We abolished slavery even though it savaged the economy. This is a matter of civil right, of human rights. The fact that fixing the problem would be bad for business is hardly an excuse for business as usual. Efficacy is never a justification for the abrogation of liberty.

Indeed it has. Mainly because it's a hell of a lot safer than our schools at the moment.

I suggest you go speak with some more homeschoolers before speaking for them. Start with a subscription to Growing Without Schooling, or perhaps attend their conference.

But that's a problem with the schools, not the system.

When, precisely then, does a problem with schools become a problem with the system?

But to destroy the idea of state-mandated schooling in whatever form?

Precisely.

That will destroy us more surely than the current system will.

What evidence do you have for that? Or is that just "what everyone knows"?

Can you think of any forces in your life which would benefit by your believing that uncritically?

I suppose it merits pointing out that the nations which are starting to catch up to our lead and even pull ahead all run mandatory schooling programs, most even more restrictive and "fascist" than the ones you find in the U.S.

Oh, don't worry. In three generations (~90years) they'll be in exactly the same boat as we are now.
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(Putting aside for a moment the "This is worth a 100?!" question...)

Look. The problem of hyper-reactive teachers/school administrators is systemically inherent . If you think the problem is bad now, just wait! It will proceed to get a lot worse. There are no forces working to reduce how hyper-reactive teachers are. There are forces (teacher accountability, parental economics, political grandstanding, etc.) which drive this process, but the only faction which cares to object is the students themselves and maybe a few geeks.

So if you are a parent, and you object to your kids being treated like this, you have two choices:

1. Put up with it, and convince yourself that it's not all that bad.
2. Pull your kids from school. From all schools.

If you're a Conscientious (Schooling) Objector, you're in good company. Go read Teach Your Own by John Holt, contact Growing Without Schooling here, check out this portal for everything homeschooling. There's only several zillion resources for someone determined not to submit their kid to an institution they do not approve of.

Parents, stop whining about the system. If you don't like it, opt out.

P.S. If you think being schooled fscked with your head, and you've been working on getting over being institutionalized, there's an email list for people you. It's on OneList. Find it for yourself if you're interested.
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(Putting aside for a moment the "This is worth a 100?!" question...)

Look. The problem of hyper-reactive teachers/school administrators is systemically inherent . If you think the problem is bad now, just wait! It will proceed to get a lot worse. There are no forces working to reduce how hyper-reactive teachers are. There are forces (teacher accountability, parental economics, political grandstanding, etc.) which drive this process, but the only faction which cares to object is the students themselves and maybe a few geeks.

So if you are a parent, and you object to your kids being treated like this, you have two choices:

1. Put up with it, and convince yourself that it's not all that bad.
2. Pull your kids from school. From all schools.

If you're a Conscientious (Schooling) Objector, you're in good company. Go read Teach Your Own by John Holt, contact Growing Without Schooling here, check out this portal for everything homeschooling. There's only several zillion resources for someone determined not to submit their kid to an institution they do not approve of.

Parents, stop whining about the system. If you don't like it, opt out.

P.S. If you think being schooled fscked with your head, and you've been working on getting over being institutionalized, there's an email list for people you. It's on OneList. Find it for yourself if you're interested.
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