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Eventually we'll formalize this further by enabling a quick download directly to our brains

(Devil's Advocate) Do you think the boldface part of the above text will be used for education... or "re-education"? The book Brave New World comes to mind.

What education will never be able to teach us is morality.

These days, we commonly confuse schooling with education. I think morality is one of the first things a TRUE education provides. Education is about making something of yourself and understanding how you relate to the world around you, and contemplating the great mysteries, like what comes after death; it's about much, much more than knowing dry facts like "in 1492 Columbus sailed the deep blue".

Education is only tangentially related to schooling now that we have factory schools oriented entirely around producing uneducated automatons to fill job openings in our economy. In the western world, the single most important moral authority for the last several centuries has got to be the holy bible. But since that supreme court case (Everson v. Board of Education), schools have been forbidden to discuss religion/spirituality/supernatural beliefs in any serious context, even though religion has been a big factor in determining the course of just about all western history. I say all this as an atheist - I'm not a christian, but I'm not blind to the non-stop low-level hostility towards religion and supernatural beliefs that goes on in public schools. You can read up on what I'm on about here.

Still, if they start handing out $100 bachelor's or masters' degrees, I'll probably buy one. I never finished college - I had a severe bout of depression and concomitant polydrug abuse 2 years into it when I realized my entire natural childhood was spent in a minimum-security prison and that I was horrified of any social situation that wasn't 100% organized. Since then, my attitude towards school is "never again". I decided that going back to school would probably drive me to suicide. So I only have a high school diploma to my name, and most hiring mangers these days are too stupid and prejudiced to believe I'm qualified to do anything other than clean toilets.

Degrees and titles and official credentials are like police - they're symptoms of a deep problem in society. The more of them you find, the sicker society is - people should be able to learn stuff and behave themselves without official guidance.

But back on topic... thank you for linking to that Bertrand Russell video. I always feel inspired after I hear that guy speak.

AC wrote: "The post-scarcity society is not going to end this, even supposing it does turn from utopian dream to reality. If anything, it will make everything worse, because you'll have more resources with which to bestow your benevolence."

This is just about exactly the point I'm concerned about, as reflected in my sig of: "A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."

And that is the nightmare we are actually living today! People tend to forget about all the nuclear missiles still ready to launch from a computer glitch in decades old hardware from the 1960s and 1970s.

That is exactly why we need some sort of global mindshift to a newer way of thinking in order to survive having discovered all kinds of new sorts of technological "fire" (like nanotechnology, robotics, biotech, nuclear, networked bureaucracy, etc).
http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewmeme.asp?memeid=239
http://anwot.org/

By the way, on "education" which in practice means compulsory state-sponsored mass schooling, see:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

Or also on your theme:
"The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy: Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/13/why-they-hate-our-kind-hearts-too/

No.. here is why: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm The sad fact is the american education system is broken; Even our teachers think so. Funding is always a political issue, but most of th time I also see it as people who are lazy and comfortable not wanting to change..

http://studentliberation.com/hern-emergence-of-compulsory.html
http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

Yeah, I mean, just look at how crappy everything is in Europe. A democratic disaster. Obviously public schooling is the root of all evil.

Hehe that's so cute, the way you can write a one-liner dismissing something in a nice smug way instead of informing yourself about it. All of that is just too much work! Besides, it makes you feel good about yourself like that other guy must just be such an idiot! I mean, actually putting forth a viewpoint and trying to contribute, what was he thinking?! 'Course, you know that's the only way a lot of people ever feel "good" about anything.

This is nothing new, and nothing unique to Stanford. Here's a page from history:

Three decades later at the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, former Chautauqua wizard, began a revolution that would change the face of American university education. ...

Harper, following the blueprint suggested by Andrew Carnegie in his powerful "Gospel of Wealth" essays, said the United States should work toward a unified scheme of education, organized vertically from kindergarten through university, horizontally through voluntary association of colleges, all supplemented by university extension courses available to everyone. Harper wrote in 1902:

The field of education is at the present time in an extremely disorganized condition. But the forces are already in existence [to change that]. Order will be secured and a great new system established, which may be designated "The American System." The important steps to be taken in working out such a system are coordination, specialization and association.

Harper and his backers regarded education purely as a commodity. Thorstein Veblen describes Harperâ(TM)s revolution this way:

The underlying business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted, and reduced to staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests.

Harper believed modern business enterprise represented the highest and best type of human productive activity.

(That page is a chapter in a much larger book about the modern education system, by the way, which is well worth a read in its entirety.)

This is nothing new, and nothing unique to Stanford. Here's a page from history:

Three decades later at the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, former Chautauqua wizard, began a revolution that would change the face of American university education. ...

Harper, following the blueprint suggested by Andrew Carnegie in his powerful "Gospel of Wealth" essays, said the United States should work toward a unified scheme of education, organized vertically from kindergarten through university, horizontally through voluntary association of colleges, all supplemented by university extension courses available to everyone. Harper wrote in 1902:

The field of education is at the present time in an extremely disorganized condition. But the forces are already in existence [to change that]. Order will be secured and a great new system established, which may be designated "The American System." The important steps to be taken in working out such a system are coordination, specialization and association.

Harper and his backers regarded education purely as a commodity. Thorstein Veblen describes Harperâ(TM)s revolution this way:

The underlying business-like presumption accordingly appears to be that learning is a merchantable commodity, to be produced on a piece-rate plan, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted, and reduced to staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests.

Harper believed modern business enterprise represented the highest and best type of human productive activity.

(That page is a chapter in a much larger book about the modern education system, by the way, which is well worth a read in its entirety.)

Your comment reminds me of: http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
    And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars --- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
    It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism."

Anyway, the new battery sounds like an impressive innovation if it proves out in production. There are many innovative peopel at IBM Almaden; it is truly an amazing accomplishment. With that, and hydrigen storage in metal hydrides, both useful for storing intermittent renewable energy, and maybe hot or cold (LENR) fusion, our society is well on its way to ensuring an abundance of energy for all for basic needs.

As much as this New York teacher wanted this to be ironic, I can taste the truth in his words.

He wasn't being ironic. Shortly after being selected New York State Teacher of the Year he publicly resigned because he believed his profession was inherently harmful to children.

Then he wrote a book detailing the history behind the design of modern education

Thanks for the reply. One can wonder sometimes if there are other factors like ideology or a current relative distribution of power that some people think more important than either happiness or material productivity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

But, it may overall just be more easily explained by ignorance. Or possibly because what plutocratic management is so often about is not encouraging high absolute levels of productivity or creativity in a society but in getting productivity and creativity focused on narrowly defined business objectives -- objectives that benefit those who already socially have control of a lot of resources and claim rents from them? So, even if absolute productivity is lower with "carrot and stick", it is productivity those who claim rents can benefit from... Of course, that explanation would not sit well with the high priests of unfettered capitalism or their most devout followers:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/

"The great unsolved problem is: people need to work for their keep (in some fashion) to feel spiritually fulfilled. In a post-basic-need-scarcity world, how does that happen? Because we've seen, over and over again, that society basically disintegrates if people don't feel like they've worked for the things they have."

Humans naturally come up with their own things to do. It is actually social institutions like compulsory schooling that beats that out of them. See John Taylor Gatto's writings, for example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates ..."

Just trying to be a good parent to young children can pretty much take as much time as people can put into it.

Look at how people used to live for some other ideas:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If what you said was true, then why do not all the rich people in the world disintegrate (given most have inherited a good share of their wealth and power)? Why would they give money to their children? Why does Bill Gates still do things when he has so much material wealth? Why did Richard Stallman keep doing stuff after he got a MacArthur Genius award and could have just sat on his backside?

What does it mean to work for something? Is it really a big problem that people generally get their air for free?

I'm not saying there is not truth to your point, because it is true that people need meaning in their lives. I'm just suggesting the issue of gaining meaning solely by overcoming material scarcity does not generalize as broadly as you suggest. See also, for some middle ground:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

Those are reasons why we may choose not to automate stuff even when we can...

"There's still a minimum level of money you have to pay someone so that they are willing to be creative for you. Although after a certain point, most people are not motivated by money anymore, so throwing more of it at them leads to diminishing returns."

Good points, thank. So often there is a confusion between the notion of money (or other resources) as *enabling* creativity as opposed to money as *rewarding* creativity. And as you say there, the issue with money becomes getting people to be creative for *you* (where it is true, the concept of money can help), as opposed to maximally creative for themselves or the world, where it turns out money tends to hurt (beyond, of course, the fact that people who are deprived often find their creativity directed at best only to survival).

Example:
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/06/how-to-build-a-career-as-an-artist/
"The starving artist routine is total bullshit. I know because I did it. Once you know that you are not going to make rent, you can't really make art. Because your sense of self-preservation insists that your brain focus on the possibility that you will be out on the street. Your brain cannot stop solving that problem long enough to solve the problem of what is truth and beauty. Here are some things I did while I was becoming a writer: I ate only bagels because I didn't have enough money for anything else and then I got anemic and had to go to the doctor but I didn't have health insurance so I had to lie and say I did in order to get the iron pills I needed so that I didn't pass out from exhaustion the moment I woke up in the morning. Believe me, I was not making great art during this period."

Yet:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

So, yes, as far as creativity is concerned, a money based society (where all food is under "lock and key" like Daniel Quinn call it) can use money to say what people will mostly be creative about, accepting that they will in general be much less creative overall if controlled that way. Even self-employed artists often fall into a rut where they keep making more of the same stuff that paid well last time, rather than trying to reach towards new ideas like they might have done before they were financially successful.

And in general, creativity may not be very important to our current system:
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 h

We already spend too much on public schools.

The purpose of public schools it to keep the public ignorant.

Let's leave education in the US running as usual, and let's keep doing what we are doing and give kids all the freedom they want. It seems to be working wonders for us, right, right?

We are not even close to giving public school students all the freedom they want. If we were, public schools would resemble the Sudbury Valley School more than the minimum-security jails they are now. If you are worried that K-12 children in public schools have TOO MUCH freedom, then you should probably be sure you're sitting down before I tell you about the Sudbury Valley School.

A few quick stats:
- ~200 students, 9 faculty.
- No academic requirements. No grade-years. No grade-scoring. Students are not even required to learn to read or add/subtract.
- No classes or curriculum.
- Students choose what they want to learn and in what order. All students freely interact with all other students and faculty.
- No armed guards (police). No non-teaching faculty.
- No penalty for showing up late or leaving before closing time. No need for "a good reason" to not show up at all.

Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? The results may surprise you:
- Between 65-80% of Sudbury alumni go on to graduate from college.
- In 30 years of operation, Sudbury has never once seen a child who did not learn to read of his/her own free will.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Excerpt From An Excellent Book

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.

Actually, many of them were essentially self-employed farmers and craftspeople, so they had flexible schedules:
"Noam Chomsky: Wage Slavery = Chattle Slavery"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oztdRo9GLLk

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
"However, self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869 The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South""

Wonder why that fact was not emphasized in your history class? NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says:
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."

We have not just lost what we had. We have lost the memory of what we had...

As John Gardner says, every generation must learn again for itself what the words on the monuments mean...
"Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society"
http://books.google.com/books?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C

"Its a nice rosy thought but we really don't have the unlimited energy you speak of; or if we do we haven't the ability to transport it where we need it and concentrate it enough for many of the applications our society has come to depend on."

"GE: Solar Power Cheaper than Fossil Fuels in 5 years"
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Also, maybe:
"NASA seriously believes in Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)"
http://mnispel.net/neengineer/?p=320
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2832338/posts

And:
http://energyfromthorium.com/

And there are others. Energy is not a big issue if we want to solve that. Lack of imagination, will, and social consensus is more of the problem:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

As well as the diversion of most of our resources into guarding, competition, and war...

As to your quote, I answer it with another quote: "The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best." :-)

Also, who is to judge what "best" is?

Clearly, even third rate is soon going to be enough to create WMDs (like the biotech, nanotech, or microrobotic equivalent of what script kiddies do with computers). So, we still need to figure out a way to make a world that works better and better for more and more people (including by reducing violence through healthier nutrition); see for example:
"Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime

Also, if the brains of the masses are dulled in the 21st century, it is in large part because the "best" put in place systems to make them that way through compulsory schooling; see John Taylor Gatto's writings:
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?"

How much our resources do you think are currently consumed by guarding, competition, and warfare? I'd suggest over 90%... See for example:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. Ther

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

You don't need fancy buildings and whizzbang gadgets to teach, you simply need inspiring people.

You're referring to "parents", right?

I know the standardized system devalues the contributions parents make to their children's education, but for the first several years parents make an enormous contribution to the molding of their offspring.

The real success of the public system is in the systematic removal of parents from the process. Makes it much easier to mold people's thinking patterns...

John Taylor Gatto says to keep your kids out of school for as long as possible. Skipping Kindgergarten, first, and second grades are most important.

Wow!

Decades ago, in ninth grade biology class, I asked my biology teacher how a Hydra (or other creatures) knows how to form its shape from cells, but he hemmed and hawed, and essentially would not admit that he did not know, or even that no one knew. We had been supposed to look at some Hydra in class, but they never arrived or something like that. I later studied Hydra in Ecology and Evolution grad studies, but people still did not quite know how they formed their shapes.

A couple lessons there for me I guess including the one about some teachers and authority:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

In pretty much every other way he was a great teacher from my point of view back then though (aside from not being willing to admit he did not know something), because he went covered a lot of material in an interesting way, and was obviously very proud of his knowledge. He definitely sparked my interest in biology with the way he ran the class, the way he handled that question aside. Anyway, thanks for everything Mr. Nast -- one of your students went on to biology graduate studies and making biology-related software made possible by the great job you did in some blue collar high school on Long Island.

Plants work somewhat differently from animals though. My wife and I implicitly used some of the ideas related to auxins etc. in this software we wrote to breed virtual 3D plants:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

"Who needs a free thinking population when you are on top ..."

As John Taylor Gatto wrote:
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 enterprisesâ"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."

But with that said, there is a lot of life in the cracks of our society

There is even a lot of happiness:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html
"Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up."

So, while one can dwelle on the negative, there can be a lot of positives one can look at too. Example:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcit

How do you fit him into the American school system?

If you have a shred of decency/humanity/mercy within you, then you don't. Maybe some reading or also some more reading will help to make the point. Public school in the USA basically amounts to training in subservience and passivity. This one is likely to have a great deal of friction with it.

Otherwise having him instructed in a martial art would be a great start. It will provide two benefits: discipline and focus, and the ability to deal with bullies who will hassle him because he stands out.

The problem is with the teaching, people are taught very poorly... They are not taught general concepts, they are taught specific of particular applications so if they were to learn Libreoffice people would complain that it's not what working environments are using.

You see half of the problem. That much I can say with certainty. But do you see why it is not going to be solved, why those who make the decisions and control the curriculum, who could solve it in short order, will never voluntarily do so?

Can you take the next step and see the other half? It's simple: it is 100% deliberate. The "educators" have thoroughly explored psychology and development and the learning process. They cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for why the average American is frankly so damned stupid, docile, and undiscerning. For example, they know that students taught to read via phonics greatly outperform those taught with the "whole word" methods. Those taught with phonics are often several grade levels ahead of their peers. Yet which method do they push? Whole-word. Because then you have to be taught and cannot reason it out on your own.

The US school system was built on Prussian-style schooling. The entire purpose of it is to produce (like a factory) citizens who are just smart enough to perform useful, non-trivial work yet dumb enough not to look too deeply into things, not to enjoy learning, not to have natural curiosity, not to discover things on their own because they were taught to depend on someone else to hand knowledge to them. Definitely, above all else, they are not to have the capability of the kind of critical and abstract principle-based conceptual thought (what one may call a classical philosopher) that would make them tough-minded, independent, and able to individually question the social order in which they are asked to participate.

The wealthy businessmen who established the American school system we know today were, in the beginning, extremely open and up-front about their intentions. They quite plainly stated that it was about control. They admired the Hindus, the way the tiny minority of Brahmins could maintain control over all the lower castes, the way this was done through forced "education" and learned subservience. What they most strongly feared, right at the height of the Industrial Revolution, was "overproduction" - the idea that the independent, entrepreneurial, individual spirit that defined America had to be destroyed or else the factories with the massive investments put into them would have to compete with many different small businesses. This was a time when most men had a trade and a business and were their own boss or aspiring to be. It is not compatible with the concentration of wealth and top-down administration of large corporations.

The very finest reference available for this subject is John Taylor Gatto. To stand up and speak out as he has done requires some actual guts (notice how rare that is these days?). He also has an entire book on the subject available online for free.

African-American children also are herded into some of the most disgracefully horrible K-12 "schools" in the developed world. I'm not a fan of AA, but I do believe that government-run "education" has so miserably failed all children - especially minority children - that it needs to be seriously rethought.

Education has at least three aspects, in decreasing order of importance:
* Personal growth in a variety of ways (including spiritual);
* Learning what you need to know to be a good citizen participating in political life (including voting);
* Preparation for doing specific useful vocational work.

Modern schooling has so degraded the notion of education that most people think it is mainly about the third item, and that is the example you drew from. There is also a fourth aspect in practice of schooling that has to do with obedience and conformity, which is actually what most school time is spent on, whatever the purported subject:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

Did someone need to grade you on how you talked when you were a toddler for you to imporve? Does someone need to give you a grade on sex? Does someone need to give you a grade on your slashdot posts? Does someone need to give you a grade on being a good friend or neighbor? Yet you probably improve in all those areas the more you do them. The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. You need *feedback* to improve, and that feedback can come in a variety of ways, but you don't need grades. Grades are a problematical form of feedback for the reasons listed, as well as because they tend to be so linear but performance is usually multi-factorial.

If I was a hiring manager, at least in the realm of software, I'd look at what projects a person has done (especially as hobbies) and talk to him or her about them. What relation does an "A" or even an "F" in a computer science class have to do with caring about crafting good software to solve important problems to meet society's unmet needs? Grades can say a lot about obedience, it's true. But even them, how much of a "yes" man or woman do you want your employees to be?

You do indirectly bring up the issue of certification, and for some things I'm not against it, as long as it certifies ability more than hoops jumped through and the certification process is decoupled from the instruction process (which it usually is not in schools). But even certification can be problematical, because who decides what makes a good Microsoft systems administrator say? Are the best Microsoft systems administrators the ones who say, "I never learned this stuff because you should switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD"? :-)

Ideally though, we'd move beyond having hiring managers altogether:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/

Thanks for the thoughful reply. I probably would have written much the same ten or so years ago, before reading Kohn and Gatto and Holt and others, and doing unschooling with my own kid. It's hard to break out of the mindset that school has spent so much time forming -- that we need schooling.

Something else related by Gatto:
"The Art of Driving"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifl

Education has at least three aspects, in decreasing order of importance:
* Personal growth in a variety of ways (including spiritual);
* Learning what you need to know to be a good citizen participating in political life (including voting);
* Preparation for doing specific useful vocational work.

Modern schooling has so degraded the notion of education that most people think it is mainly about the third item, and that is the example you drew from. There is also a fourth aspect in practice of schooling that has to do with obedience and conformity, which is actually what most school time is spent on, whatever the purported subject:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

Did someone need to grade you on how you talked when you were a toddler for you to imporve? Does someone need to give you a grade on sex? Does someone need to give you a grade on your slashdot posts? Does someone need to give you a grade on being a good friend or neighbor? Yet you probably improve in all those areas the more you do them. The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. You need *feedback* to improve, and that feedback can come in a variety of ways, but you don't need grades. Grades are a problematical form of feedback for the reasons listed, as well as because they tend to be so linear but performance is usually multi-factorial.

If I was a hiring manager, at least in the realm of software, I'd look at what projects a person has done (especially as hobbies) and talk to him or her about them. What relation does an "A" or even an "F" in a computer science class have to do with caring about crafting good software to solve important problems to meet society's unmet needs? Grades can say a lot about obedience, it's true. But even them, how much of a "yes" man or woman do you want your employees to be?

You do indirectly bring up the issue of certification, and for some things I'm not against it, as long as it certifies ability more than hoops jumped through and the certification process is decoupled from the instruction process (which it usually is not in schools). But even certification can be problematical, because who decides what makes a good Microsoft systems administrator say? Are the best Microsoft systems administrators the ones who say, "I never learned this stuff because you should switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD"? :-)

Ideally though, we'd move beyond having hiring managers altogether:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/

Thanks for the thoughful reply. I probably would have written much the same ten or so years ago, before reading Kohn and Gatto and Holt and others, and doing unschooling with my own kid. It's hard to break out of the mindset that school has spent so much time forming -- that we need schooling.

Something else related by Gatto:
"The Art of Driving"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifl

Yet, a great many of them refuse to think.

I don't know if it's refusal. I am beginning to suspect that they really just don't know how. The ability to think and act upon those thoughts is gone in most people. Something has gone wrong. Maybe it's the schools or maybe even the flouride. My money is on TV.

At the same time that it's amazing what people can do when they really have to, it's also shameful that most won't until the condition of "really have to" is satisfied.

It's mostly the schools. If not for them, people would know how to critically think and deconstruct what they see on TV, how to put it into perspective, how to recognize the various propaganda and rhetorical techniques. Though I'll add that if we didn't live in an anti-intellectual culture, if being intelligent and perceptive and wise were "cool", we'd hardly know this problem at all.

John Taylor Gatto is the finest available resource for this subject. An entire book of his, The Underground History of American Education explains a great deal of the problem. I highly recommend reading it. It's something everyone should read, particularly parents but also anyone who really wants to understand how we ended up with the society we know today. It is the product of much social engineering, not the way people inherently are.

I still think the problem is a little deeper. It's not that people aren't taught how to think. It's that people are passive followers who won't learn how to think until and unless someone else decides to give them that knowledge. They will not take it and claim it as their birthright whether anyone likes it or not. It is not unwise to stand between them and it. There is no self-sufficiency in most of them. They don't know how to assert control of their own education. Instead they entrust it to strangers. Just think about that. The average person wouldn't trust a $100 bill to a bunch of unaccountable strangers. Their education and the degree that it determines how their lives will be is vastly more important.

Seen this by Gatto? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

If one looks back into the (underground) history of american education, one will discover that people like Gates have ALWAYS been leveraging private money to redirect how public education dollars are spent. While Gates is (probably) doing this out of the goodness of his heart, the old robber-barons were doing it to socially engineer themselves a workforce for their assembly lines.

Some books related to your excellent points:

"In defense of childhood: protecting kids' inner wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations."

"Last Child in the Woods"
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
"In this influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation--he calls it nature-deficit--to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression."

"Underground History of American Education"
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."

And a TED Talk:
"Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

We've taught our kid early on to use a sharp knife to cut up vegetables and fruits, in part because US emergency medicine to deal with knife injuries is far better than US medicine to deal with chronic health problems that come from not eating enough vegetables and fruits. Related:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffJAePZFg90

Unfortunately, we listened to advice from doctors to "protect" our kid (and ourselves) from the sun and ended up with vitamin D deficiency and related health issues.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions//kids_fall_short_on_vitamin_D.aspx

We're slowly learning. There is a l

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 fewest people get hurt in the process."

I wrote that essay after working towards some FOSS tools to make it easier for kids to get into programming.

Also related:
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."

And, speaking as someone who has been using computers for thirty years, and while thinking everyone should ideally have a baisc computer literacy to be an informed citizen, how many programmers does the world really need? Kids are smart. They know there are fewer and fewer "good" jobs in technology for all sorts of reasons.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://community.dice.com/t5/Tech-Market-Conditions/Alice-Dice-s-claim-of-4-Unemployment/td-p/235866

From:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daught

Maybe you would prefer to read this, by John Taylor Gatto, about the socioeconomic system the US drones are defending?
    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 enterprise -- 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."

Why not just get the robot drones to do the work instead of using them against opponents of a rapacious short-term-empire-minded social system based around the USA? And maybe get more people to accept that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" is not so much "Because we are free" but rather more of "Because we support their oppressors"?

See also, for something written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC:
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
    It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
    A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."

"I am well aware of its shortcomings,"

Which include drugging children, suspension of civil rights, terrorizing kids, fostering a climate of bullying, breaking the bonds between children and their families, damaging the teachers in other ways, destroying intrinsic motivation, boring people, keeping people from reaching their full potential by wasting years of their lives, and so on...

Do you have alternative proposals?

Anyway, after you have mulled the idea over for a while, you may get past a knee-jerk reaction. It's hard to admit how much big institutional systems have harmed us, even when we have "succeeded" in the world they have shaped.

From New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we? ...
    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. ...
      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 me -- 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."

http://thewaronkids.com/

Compulsory school already is essentially a day prison, or, as this superintendent points out, in some ways worse.

Homschooling is becoming an option for more and more... But ultimately, we need a change like giving the funds directly to parents instead of the schools so the free market can supply the educational services (or the family), as I outline here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

Or a more general basic income...
    http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html

See also:
    http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Oh noes, the corporate machines won't hire me.

you end up too free-spirited for a business to hire you,

There, fixed that for you.

Government schools train people to be cogs for the machine (ref: John Taylor Gatto. "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" essay is also very good, and is on any number of sites). Some people rebel against being slotted into a position in life (the group you refer to who "crash hard" at age 25), while others recognize the game and make their own rules.

One must "learn the rules" in order to avoid the cog/machine outcome in their life. Gatto's Underground History of American Education (free at the site above) is a good start. :)

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25?pagenumber=2
    "Commentary: China's economy will surpass the U.S. in 2016 [based on PPP] ...
    This is the result of decades during which China has successfully pursued economic policies aimed at national expansion and power, while the U.S. has embraced either free trade or, for want of a better term, economic appeasement.
    "There are two systems in collision," said Ralph Gomory, research professor at NYU's Stern business school. "They have a state-guided form of capitalism, and we have a much freer former of capitalism." What we have seen, he said, is "a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That's very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages."
    The next chapter of the story is just beginning. ..."

See also:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation

What tinkerers related to science and technology can do though?
    http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
    http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/

This reminds me of general issues with operant conditioning; you can't get a being to do something it won't normally do, but you can change the probabilities of different behaviors.

However, people are more complex than most other animals; it's hard to say how interventions can change the social dynamics. Just losing a war may have led to social change in Japan and German through introspection, regardless of what the USA did as an occupying force? How could one tell which was the bigger psychological issue, losing or being occupied?

I agree with the general idea in this thread that taking a strong state like in Germany or Japan and shifting its direction somewhat after a major military loss (towards making it less belligerent militarily) is different from forming a stronger cohesive system in the first place like in Afghanistan. Or, in the case of Iraq, there you had a long term civil conflict suppressed by an aparently strong state, and when destroying the state (as the USA did, although often things can be more hollow then they appear), then the civil conflict broke out (a religious minority dominating a majority leading to reprisals etc.).

On finding good situation-specific balances between meshworks and hierarchies:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

By the way, this says Rikyu was seventy at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sen_no_Riky%C5%AB

If you look at the UK, that was the world's previous (before the USA) big undisputed empire, and look at what the people are like now. That is maybe the future of the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we [in the UK] are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

And part of why:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Thus the war on kids (through schools, originating in Prussia for military reasons) to turn them into soldiers and workers for a military-industrial complex, which is its own form of secular religion:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

just modded you off-topic, when I meant to give a +1. Whoops - sorry about that. :)

. I found Algebra and Trigonometry were a lot more interesting when I was trying to work out problems I could see a purpose behind, rather than the stock story problems in text books.

John Taylor Gatto has essays about this phenomenon. The Seven Lesson School Teacher has this passage:

A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the other
day:

            "What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest
idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn't
idiosyncratic -- that this is some system to it all and it's not just
raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That's the task, to
understand, to make coherent."

            Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion.
Everything I teach is out of context... I teach the unrelating of
everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of
planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural
drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests,
fire drills, computer languages, parent's nights, staff-development
days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers you may never see
again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the
outside world... what do any of these things have to do with each
other?

            Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its
sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions.
Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger
they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed
off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is
that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon
derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to
leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails
learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too
many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest
relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an
expertise they do not possess.

            Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek,
and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning.
Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences, and the school obsession
with facts and theories the age-old human search lies well concealed.
This is harder to see in elementary school where the hierarchy of school
experience seems to make better sense because the good-natured simple
relationship of "let's do this" and "let's do that now" is just assumed
to mean something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned
how little substance is behind the play and pretense.

"Most of the "decent" school districts are turning out plenty of intelligent graduates (myself and I'm sure you are included)."

That depends on what you mean by "intelligent" and "decent" as well as whether intelligence by itself, apart from wisdom, virtue, compassion, self-directedness, cooperativeness, spirituality, and so on makes for a joyful, secure, meaningful, involved life?

A lot of this has to do with being "learner-centered" and focused on creating healthy communities.

For example, we lived for a while in a "top 10" school district (Chappaqua) but it had had a high teen suicide rate, and kids who did not want to go onto college were being tracked there even if they had other aspirations (like my wife's dental hygienist who said the school system essentially forced her to go to college when what she wanted to be was a dental hygienist). Is that a "success" when you force all kids, regardless of interest, to go to college and take on college debt? Is that a "success" when a lot of kids are killing themselves, developing eating disorders, displaying a lot of aggression, are on psychoactive drugs to manage what are labeled behavior problems, and so on? It was one of the least healthy communities we have lived in, even with the most money, and with the Clintons moving in after us (the place went downhill faster then people said).

The fact is, if you came through a typical schooling process, even private school, you were in some sense intellectually and emotionally mutilated, even to the point of being indoctrinated to see that type of mutilation as a good thing. See:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

As with any kind of child abuse, especially when done systematically and with claims of being helpful, such as with female genital mutilation (FGM), it may take years, or maybe never, for a mutilated individual to accept what happened in Prussian schools and how morally wrong it was.

As Gatto says:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:
"Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of i

"You're right that Bill doesn't yet seem to understand or address the root of the problem, but the real problem is coming from parents that don't care. Their children are the most in danger of getting a poor education. They are also the children most likely to become involved with crime, get pregnant, do drugs and generally have a poor shot at getting ahead in life. If you want to fix the system, you need to change the parents or the children's environment, ie food, shelter and guidance."

The real problem is compulsory education was designed in Prussia in the 18th century to dumb down children,and then adopted int he USA later, and when you give such schools more money, they only does that dumbing-down job better; see NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://thewaronkids.com/

Why not just give the money to the parents?
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

And if they can't be trusted with the money, what does that say about the school systems that raised the last generation?

New York State spends about US$20K per child per year on public school. For a family with two kids, that's approaching the median household income in the country. How many parents would be better parents if they did not have to work and had more time for their children and civic responsibilities? In what I propose (just give the money to the parents), parents could afford to send their children to any private school if they did not want to homeschool themselves. So, that addresses your point about changing the home environment and the parent's circumstances.

A better, more general idea is a basic income of US$2000 per person per month in the entire country (essentially social security and medicare for all from birth).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

That said, schools are full of caring adults -- but the system generally grinds them down and limits their options... So, this proposal would ultimately be better for school teachers and administrators, too.

"Luckily for Billy, foresight and technical expertise account for very little, while marketing and image mean everything, and THAT, at least, he is very good at."

Being born a multi-millionaire and dumpster diving for OS listings may have helped too...
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837221
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837517

That said, Bill Gates still has been something special beyond that. I don't think those were enough. I just hope someday Bill Gates takes some time off the time pressure of financially obesity and studies stuff like Howard Zinn's writings, John Taylor Gatto's, or John Holt's or thinks hard about the future implications of technological abunance on the economy and education.
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"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."

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? ... 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."

So, yes, give schools more money and they will do this even better:
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/

I suggest just give the money as a basic income to the parents instead...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."

Some other points on: "It's ridiculous to think we don't need self defense, in the same way that it's ridiculous to ban guns and weapons and tell people violence never solved anything (French taxation without representation. British taxation without representation. Slavery in America. Slavery in Haiti. Hitler. Stalin. Japan's expansionism. It goes on)."

History is tricky, because one can always pull out a situation where people have let things get really bad because they would not consider other alternatives and then say, see, violence was the only answer.

Egypt had a revolution without a war just now. India had one decades ago. Why not France eventually?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

Canada secede from Britain without a shot being fired, has a better health care system than the USA, and treated its native people better. What did the US revolution accomplish in that sense?

The British abolished slavery without an internal civil war.

The British said they would abolish slavery if they won the American revolutionary war, so was it good that the rich white Americans won? Something like a third of the people left the country (mostly to Canada). (I'm not saying there were not legitimate grievances.)

If the South had been allowed to secede from the Union, could things have ultimately been better for the Blacks than the grinding poverty and economic abuse they got after the Civil War, since the South would have toppled eventually over slavery.? See also the previous point. Also, slavery might not have been possible without all the people making fancy weapons to use to enslave people like Columbus did.

Haiti was in a sense destroyed by capitalist ideology and greed more than weapons:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

How are you going to ensure the weapons are not in the hands of greedy capitalists?

Nazi Germany was a pyramid scheme that would have fall apart pretty soon anyway:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

It also was a reaction to reparations related to a previous war, and that war itself was related to compulsory schooling. Abolish compulsory schooling and maybe we would not need so much war machinery? From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done."

The USSR crumbled in large part because of a people's revolution in the 1990s (even as the USA likes to take the credit). Still, had it not engaged in a foolish arms race with the USA (or had the USA not been so provocative) the country that put the first satellite in orbit, that put the first man and woman into space, that put up the first space station, that invented phage therapy, that country might have been a much happier place. But every time doves in the Kremlin said, maybe the USA people are not so crazy, the USA would push another round of weapons and the hawks would say, see I told you so, and the doves would get purged. Who was at fault there?

On Japan, well true they had a messed up culture in a lot of ways and did a lot of evil things in other countries -- but it was a militaristic culture of the kind you are celebrating (Samurai). The USA also attacked Japan economically (shutting of oil flows) before Japan attacked at Pearl

Kids have a way of living up to people's expectations.

This is called the Pygmalion effect:

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform. ...

The Pygmalion effect is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people with poor expectations internalize their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly.

My mother works as a substitute teacher. She takes troubled kids that every else badmouths, treats them with respect, and gets them to open up, stop being disruptive, and actually start learning. If a teacher is having problems with kids, it is as much an indictment of the teacher as it is of the kids.

That's cool. I think this story is an indictment of the compulsory nature of the system. Children find it hard to care when their so-called "education" is done to them under threat. John Gatto experimentally found a way to help cultivate his student's diverse interests. I highly recommend his books, or search for "the paradox of extended childhood" (mp3) at archive.org.

People's feelings about this change sometimes change in different points in their lives...

This is not to deny there is some truth in what you say, echoed by Chris Hedge's point in his book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Force_That_Gives_Us_Meaning
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/War_Gives_Meaning.html

Still, war is only one thing that can help people find meaning in life. How about the issue of worrying about a big solar flare or a supervolcano? If you really want a challenge, why not help solve those sorts of issues? Or help design better space habitats? Or improve cold fusion reactor designs to power space craft? Or figure out how to get everyone on the planet fresh vegetables and fruits so they can afford to eat like Dr. Fuhrman suggests? Limiting the scope of your ambitions to fighting ironic wars with superweapons seems, well, not very ambitious. :-)

War is also a racket, by the way, just to be sure you know, acording to a very decorated military man:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC, Retired
WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. .."

So, you want to go to war to line some rich guys pockets?

Apparently, compulsory schools were mainly created to indoctrinate people to be part of the war racket, and to ensure they were trained to not see how they were being used. See either of:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1

For the true elite, "education" must be avoided ( homeschool instead!! ),
because it is so profoundly destructive to one's potential.

LEARNING, however, MUST be pursued...

THIS is partly a product of "education":
http://news.icanhascheezburger.com/2010/11/17/political-pictures-graveyard-of-america/

The reason for that, is that anyone with true genius, or true integrity,
who is in the possession of the education establishment is felt to be a threat to its authority,
and is crushed/broken.

John Taylor Gatto, NY State award winning teacher:
~you can't manipulate a child who is certain of their validity
into performing in ways that make the institution important:
only an insecure, dependent child can be so manipulated~

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" ( Stephen R. Covey ) pointed out, bluntly,
that before the civil war, it was CHARACTER that people cared to push their development of,
but after either the civil war or WW1 ( can't remember which ),
that changed from character/integrity to personality-status.

In a personality-status system, the highest quality people can't win, to begin with,
because the game doesn't reward integrity, it rewards personality-status!

Did you know that Benjamin Franklin had only a couple of years of "education"?

Read John Taylor Gatto's in-depth book on how "education" was engineered
( based on the Hindu lower-caste "education" designed to PREVENT threat to upper-caste status)
and why:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

More pervasive "education" is proven ( through draft records ) to LOWER literacy,
( actually read some of the stuff written by uneducated slaves,
and you will be challenged to match some of them!
Learning was pervasive, but "education", or manufactured dumbing-down, wasn't. )
and the education system was paid-for, originally, by the coal industry,
which wanted to wipe out independence/initiative from the worker pool.

If you want to hire the best for the company
& the best for the work,
you have to

1. accept that you can't change their character/nature, but can change someone's skillset
2. find the ones with the character/nature who are good
3. find, of those, who can, with training/education, do the work, &
4. challenge 'em
"trial by fire" -- "Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines"
( David H. Freedman, senior Forbes editor )
to discover who's really right to invest in.

The western paradigm that people should be hired if they've the skill,
and fired if their character/nature doesn't change to become convenient to the administration,
is defective.

The Japanese paradigm ( European, to some extent, too ), that
you aren't going to change anyone's nature,
you've got to start with the right people,
and then train 'em up to having the skillset needed of them...
is more a long-term/strategic kind of thinking....

The Marines consider HR to be what controls the quality of the corps's future,
so ONLY superstars are allowed to do hiring work, as a strategic determination.

Normal culture, among the Americas, however,
is that one shovel the worthless ones into HR,
and deal with the consequences with arbitrary firings & waves of layoffs.

Which ALSO is a product of the institutional mentality "education".

Reap what you sow!

As for how anyone could succeed without a degree, nowadays, simply get & work through a copy of
"The Definitive Business Plan, 2nd edition" ( Richard Stutely ),
and its companion book on the definitive financials, what smart managers do with the numbers,
"Presenting to Win, 2nd edition" ( Jerry Weissman )
Corps Business ( listed above )
"Organizing from the Inside Out" ( Julie Morgenstern )
"The New D

From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

Also:
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."

A related post I made here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/98e7c08690c377cf

And from eetimes:
"Engineering: The next generation"
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daughters from entering the profession. Their reasons vary, but most have reached the conclusion that globalization has made it impossible to build a career, much less make a living, as an engineer.
This is a sad state of affairs. One result is that too much talent has been diverted to unproductive pursuits lik

I think you make an excellent point. However, consider this point by John Taylor Gatto:
  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."

See also my other comment to this story.
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34976334