Slashdot Mirror

... The problem is that once you fuck up herd immunity, you've fucked it up for everyone, including the very young, the very old, and those with compromised immune systems. ... In short, and pardon my directness, but speaking as a parent, fuck those who don't get the shots for themselves and their kids right in their entitled, self-centred, arrogant asses. They and their spawn should be given the choice to get them, and then airdropped on a remote island with all the rest of the assholes who think that the chance of their precious little snowflake having a disability is more important than the life of other people's so they can't screw it up for the rest of us.

In short, and pardon my directness, but speaking as a parent, what about those who don't breastfeed their children for at least two years and beyond (WHO advised), and who don't get enough vitamin D, and who don't read about nutrition and "disease proof" their children?
    http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
    http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/infantfeeding_recommendation/en/index.html

And what about all those parents who spread disease by sending their children to day prisons so they can work, rather than homeschooling?
    http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/734486

Not to mention the socio-psychological fallout:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

Should they and their "spawn" be airdropped on a remote island with all the rest of the "assholes" who think that the habit of feeding their precious little snowflake junkfood or putting them in school for convenience is more important than the life of other people's so they can't screw it up for the rest of us?

How many people would that leave in the USA? 1%?

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military [or police] robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"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?"

Alternatives: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392

The current theory of motivation is changing:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

And that is from research on motivation done by the Federal Reserve Bank, MIT, University of Chicago, CMU, and other mainstream groups...

People can be right about a general issue being a problem without their solution being that great. Also, a lot of scarcity in the USA is "artificial scarcity" at this point.

If you read what Marshall Brain wrote, you'll see he is not talking about a "command economy".
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"Everything is free AND everyone is equal." Linda said. "That's exactly how you phrased it, and you were right. You, Jacob, get equal access to the free resources, and so does everyone else. That's done through a system of credits. You get a thousand credits every week and you can spend them in any way you like. So does everyone else. This catalog is designed to give you a taste of what you can buy with your credits. This is a small subset of the full catalog you will use once you arrive. You simply ask for something, the robots deliver it, and your account gets debited."

Let's think about the USA right now in that sense. One third of the US GDP is currently spent on social "welfare" between public and private amounts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_welfare_state

That works out to about US$16,000 a citizen per year, on top of other spending (like defense, infrastructure, etc.). Without raising taxes, a family of four could be getting US$64,000 a year as a "basic income" (without "working") to spend as they saw fit (maybe somewhat less if there was universal sick care access deducted up front). They would have to pay for their own kids' education or instead homeschool, but they would have plenty of money to do so. If people wanted more than that, then they would have to work.

If we really believe in the free market, why not give that "welfare" money every year to everyone of any age equally as a basic income to spend as they want in the market, whether on goods, services, education, housing, or whatever?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Even if some small percent blow their monthly income on liquor or gambling the first day of every month, all their friends and family would have a basic income too, so they would have somewhere to crash. :-) And note that there might be a lot less addictive behavior if people were less stressed about money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

But instead of that vision of "welfare" which is labelled "socialism" or whatever bad word someone wants to call it, we waste much of that money creating a huge bureaucracy to assess "need" (even as it is more and more obvious our economy does not "need" as many people to "work" and so many people are permanently unemployed). Why the economy may continue to implode, btw:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Or we spend the money as a society to have "public schools" that, according to a NYS teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, dumb kids down to fit into a hierarchical productive system with little room for smart or creative people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"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, ent

Also: http://www.google.com/#q=peer+review+as+censorship
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
http://www.suppressedscience.net/censorship-medicine.html

A key point being that keeping information from the public is not the same as modding up (or revising interactively) information like on slashdot. What would slashdot be like if every comment needed "peer review" before it was posted? Instead, slashdot uses after the fact moderation. (Nothing is perfect, of course.)

In general:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=37
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

And from a previously posted link (from 1994 from the Vice Provost of Caltech, and it has probably gotten worse since):
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. ..."

If my housing and food were guaranteed to be paid for ... I'd have endless hobbies and diversions and time-wasters, but I'd not get a job.

You'd be hard to exploit. Factories don't work without people. Many people only take menial jobs in factories because they're better than starvation. John Gatto covers how public schooling trains children to be automatons fit for factory work.

And fill the time with drugs, and with sex, and other "vices". This is human nature.

The basic income is enough to keep you alive month to month. If you work a little bit, you could buy more drugs or better drugs (perhaps you'd buy organic cocaine instead of crack cut with draino). If you worked a little bit more, you could have nicer clothes and a better physique (gym membership, basketball league, etc), which might get you more sex.

This is human nature. We are selfish, easily manipulated, and exploitable.

There, fixed that for you.

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
CHAPTER ONE: WAR IS A RACKET

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. ..."

=====

Great poem.

Is a racket why the people "on the other side" "need killing"?

Part of how things got this bad:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm

See also, on the irony of it all:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

"The war play dilemma: what every parent and teacher needs to know"
http://books.google.com/books?id=-loYzCV11JcC

It mentions an unholy alliance from Reagan administration media deregulation leading to boys being saturated with violent content 24X7 between media, food, toys, and apparel.

The version for girls:
"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"
http://books.google.com/books?id=O7NrhdwTeCkC

Good luck. At least these two books will help you understand what you are up agsainst when you dismiss the need for much help. Of course, what kind of help is really useful is a different question...

Other background reading:

"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC

"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health and Happiness"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Nh6qAAAACAAJ

"Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right"
http://books.google.com/books?id=-W_LYnBFIY8C

"Treating Disease With Vitamin D" (since kids are indoors so much at media)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

"In defense of childhood: protecting kids' inner wildness"
http://books.google.com/books?id=MAB3CciL40UC

"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

don't think anyone is arguing to try to teach the WHOLE domain of one field that way. We're talking about the _basics_.

What are the basics? Addition? Subtraction? Multiplication? Can we teach those by rote? (and at some point multiplication tables need to be memorized) Math is a layering of abstraction upon abstraction so which layer gets to be called 'basic'. The layer where you don't even have the tools to communicate concepts effectively? Or maybe Algebra gets to be 'the basics' that we try to help kids 'discover'. What about properties of operations (associative/commutative) how do you get kids to discover all of those in time to actually finish an algebra sequence? Or do we need to try and get everyone to discover what the abstract concept of zero means? How do you pick what the basics are, and how do you handle the general symbolic language and communication skills to get to that point? It seems a fairly arbitrary line to be drawn. Everyone learns differently, and learning methods change as language grasp and symbol usage develop.

The whole 'teach math discovery' idea strikes me as one of these: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/12/06/0124241/I-Just-Need-a-Programmer
Just another idea that is less than useless without an implementation, and the implementation details are friggin' hard with tens of thousands of caveats, corner cases, exceptions and risk. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math where math teaching reform was tried and failed.

What is taught for today's Math is a total joke - kids aren't taught to think, just to mindless follow some "arcane formula". e.g. "Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds."

This isn't a concept/discovery problem in the context of the current discussion, it's a pacing problem and a consequence of putting vastly different types of learners all in the same room and moving at the pace of the lowest common denominator. This is a common complaint of mine but doesn't seem to fit into the current question 'teaching discovery'. Regardless of what teaching method you're using, go too fast and you lose the people that need extra attention, too slow and you lose the ones that don't.

EVERYONE should read these two papers.

* A Mathematician's Lament http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

* The Underground History of American Education http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

I'll take a look at those papers later as they appear fairly long and involved.

> Rediscovering something can be really cool on a one off basis, but there isn't time to do that for the entire body of knowledge nor should we try.

I don't think anyone is arguing to try to teach the WHOLE domain of one field that way. We're talking about the _basics_. What is taught for today's Math is a total joke - kids aren't taught to think, just to mindless follow some "arcane formula". e.g. "Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds." EVERYONE should read these two papers.

* A Mathematician's Lament
  http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

* The Underground History of American Education
  http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

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

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

If you've read John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education you'll know that in the 1800s the people of America were the best educated in the world, and had largely educated themselves.

If you've read John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education you'll know that in the 1800s the people of America were the best educated in the world, and had largely educated themselves.

I keep this link on permanent standby as the last paragraph or two will usually leave those that claim education is fine speechless. Quite frankly, I don't envy you bringing a smart kid up in a world that rewards mediocrity more than merit.
I might sound like a bit of a wanker here(big deal) but I was brought up and treated by all around me as a prodigy. The education system couldn't deal with me and my childhood was absolute misery mostly due to pointless(at least to me) expectations.
Please try to remember that no matter how smart he may be he is still a kid and at times might rather throw a ball, swim in a lake, or do anything at all other than perform for others.
I'm not trying to advise you on child-raising as I am sure you are quite capable and I sincerely hope you don't take this the wrong way.

For more of the history of school: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

If you are an educator then the book linked above is a must read. The chapter entitled Intellectual Espionage is a must read for those who love standardised testing.

For more of the history of school: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

If you are an educator then the book linked above is a must read. The chapter entitled Intellectual Espionage is a must read for those who love standardised testing.

For more of the history of school: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

A key section is here:
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-uhae-16.html
as part of another archive:
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/gatto/gatto-arch.html

They're depressing for kids too. But it's all part of the game - check out the Underground History of American Education.

We're seeing how money and markets can be transform a society into a society of serfs, any system can be gamed, transformed and abused, how so many people can't see this is disturbing.

How most people can't see this is quite a mystery unless you are willing to entertain the idea that people are not naturally this blind and must be trained to be this way. Then you realize this is the main reason for having a government-run public school system. The mystery then disappears but a sense of relief is not forthcoming, because it took a few generations to make things this way and may well take a few generations to begin to undo the damage.

I think you are still missing Gatto's main point here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

And the same might be said about Chomsky.

If there are no "evil goals" behind the school system, then what about this?
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 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ... The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among wor

I think you are still missing Gatto's main point here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

And the same might be said about Chomsky.

If there are no "evil goals" behind the school system, then what about this?
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 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ... The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among wor

"In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers."

Well, if we can move past your medical diagnosis of Gatto's mental state, you have just restated his main point.

He never says teachers are all evil. Most of them are, like you say, well-meaning. What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it and how it operates as a system (relative to our current needs -- he says it may have been a reasonable tradeoff when it was invented in Prussia in the 1800s).

To cite the most famous example of authoritarianism gone to extremes, was Nazi Germany filled with 100% evil Germans to make it work? No, most Germans were well-meaning people, and nice to their children and neighbors, very patriotic, and so on. It was the equivalent of some weird sort of social storm, and also a bit of a pyramid scheme. It was just the overall system that was insane from a human perspective (even granted it had some very nutty people at the top, but that's part of the problem too, how it got that way).
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

So, sure, every aspect of school that does not work to the child's obvious benefit is "regretted", as you outline examples of how it is regrettable that how children are taught has no relation to how kids learn or how they need to learn to be active participants in a democracy.

But the end result is to turn schools into a form of prison at this point. Granted, children are not physically gassed or worked to death like in Nazi concentration camps (even if some do die from the mental equivalent, as demonstrated by the high teen suicide rate or even now the obesity rate, probably partly from stress).

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

So, really, you've just made Gatto's point. And perhaps you've reflexively done an ad hominem attack on him so you did not have to think about what he says in detail? S

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart—unless a culprit runs afoul of the media—an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This i

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

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

On your points:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any more? :-)

This reminds me of the disaster that took place in Kansas City a few years ago. It was summarized by the irreplaceable John Taylor Gatto:

Suddenly the district was awash in money for TV studios, swimming pools, planetariums, zoos, computers, squadrons of teachers and specialists. "They had as much money as any school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who directed a postmortem analysis, "It didn’t do very much." Orfield was wrong. The Windfall produced striking results:

Average daily attendance went down, the dropout rate went up, the black-white achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated after ten years of well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning. A former school board president whose children had been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark’s takeover said she had "truly believed if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see dramatic results educationally." Who is the villain in this tale? Judge Clark is. He just doesn’t get it. The system isn’t broken. It works as intended, turning out incomplete people. No repair can fix it, nor is the education kids need in any catalogue to buy. As Kansas City proves, giving schools more money only encourages them to intensify the destructive operations they already perform.

Because unguided independent study by an uneducated person doesn't work for the overwhelming majority of people.

True, and this is where family members (immediate or extended), friends, clergy, and others can help a child learn the self-direction and discipline to learn on his own. Do you really think the best way to raise a child is by bussing him to some dreary warehouse where he'll be placed under the arbitrary authority of some adult stranger for 8 hours a day? Please.

You should check out this book. The author (an award-winning elementary school teacher who has since renounced compulsory schooling) has put it up online, free as in beer. Underground History of American Education.

The market for inexpensive education is crowded out by government schools, which serve to indoctrinate, not educate.

That's only been the case for the last 60-80 years or so. Public education has been around a lot longer than that. Read http://www.johntaylorgatto.com./

Not all home-schooled children are from wealthy families.

So what about kids from families who are themselves uneducated? Uneducated people aren't exactly about to home-school their own kids. That's why we have public education: to get everyone educated, to make a better democracy, instead of being stuck with Feudalism with uneducated peasants working for peanuts and an aristocracy running everything.

In addition, public education seems to work just fine in most of the Western European nations, like Germany. Of course, they don't do a lot of the stupid stuff we do, like mainstreaming (where you stick the smartest kids in the same classes as the dumbest kids), busing (wasting time and energy busing kids to different school districts than the ones they live in, in an effort to "increase diversity", but only succeeding in sending wealthier kids to crappy schools), and tenure (where really crappy teachers have total job security no matter how bad they are and how little they teach). As a result of a more-educated populace, those countries don't have many of the social problems we do, and have a less-corrupt government that is more effective. Not perfect, but a lot better than the mess we're dealing with.

Sadly, all too true.

The most important people in society are paid peanutes, while the most useless, who produce nothing of lasting value, the entertainers, are severly overpaid.

See: The Underground History of American Education, for the indoctriniation, ^H^H^H, education of America.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

Keeping the otherwise arbitrary and ornery masses calm without employing aggressive tactics that erode their rights is less important than what now?

Sadly, all too true.

The most important people in society are paid peanutes, while the most useless, who produce nothing of lasting value, the entertainers, are severly overpaid.

See: The Underground History of American Education, for the indoctriniation, ^H^H^H, education of America.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

Modern schooling was designed to inhibit education, not further it.

Once you realize that then everything starts to make sense.

These posts of mine lead to endless links about what is wrong with the current schooling system at all levels:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

But key ideas can be found at these links:

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

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

      "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

      "We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: REVISITING THE IDEA OF COLLEGE"
      http://unconventionalideas.wordpress.com/?s=wizard

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

And there are many more I link to in the posts, but these are starting points.

It would take years to read through all the references I link to in the three posts (and it has. :-)

AERO is one place that catalogs most of the alternatives:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

> Same with FTL. Our current method of going faster is to simply accelerate more. General relativity tells us that that approach won't work even for reaching C, much less exceeding it.
> So, we need a workaround.

You DO realize we live in more then 4 dimensions, right?

The physical dimension is only the "bottom" that we are normally perceptive too. The speed of light is not a barrier in higher realms, and is easily "broken" in them.

The workaround is:
1. Shift to another dimension
2. Travel
3. Shift back to physical dimension

> A pet hypothesis of mine is that perhaps as an object with mass approaches C, conventional laws of physics break down and we need a whole new set of physics to figure out what happens at those velocities.
Yes, the same way conventional laws of physics break down at the micro (Quantum Mechanics), they break down at the macro (General Relativity).

> sense that they don't violate what we know about physics.
That's the biggest hurdle at the moment. Scienctists knows jack about physics and meta-physics outside the normal 4D as they are still missing 2 fundamental forces. Until we can answer _basic_ questions such as: "What is electricity? What is gravity? What is magnetism? What is light? What is time? What is the soul? What is the source of all these things?" our understanding will be limited to simply _using_ them.

> The empirical evidence strongly suggests that traveling at or above C is, indeed, impossible.
Humans are currently limited to sub-light speed until the 24th century, as they have not learned how to be responsible with what they _already_ have. When you still have people who live like kings and throw whatever they don't want away (America), people whose daily existance is starvation (Africa), people arguing over who's God is "right" by killing everyone who doesn't agree with them (Islam), ignorant pseudo skeptics who have made a Religion of out atheism (Randi) ( http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/skeptic.htm, http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/talk/talk.html, http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/Introduction.htm ), the brainwashing of the public school education, er, sorry indoctrination system ( http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm ) humanity will never make progress on _External_ knowledge until they first learn the source of ALL (internal) wisdom: KNOW THYSELF.

As we spiritually grow up, FTL and time-travel will naturally open up.

--
"Mind, not Space" is the FINAL frontier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The problem we have here, in my opinion, is that we have an educational system that has been rewired to produce more conformist drones and fewer critical thinkers."
See John Taylor Gatto for the details:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
   

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

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

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

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

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

Your assertions are unsupported, and at odds with Mr. Gatto who has supported his views at length in his book: "The Underground History of American Education" (full text, site may be down). Your points also do not address his points in his essay "Nine Assumptions of Schooling (and Twenty-one Facts the Institution Would Rather Not Discuss)"

When you have spent decades teaching in a public school, won a statewide "best teacher of the year" award, and written a book on the history of education which required years of research, (or just support your points with better evidence) then perhaps your opinions might be given equal weight to those of Mr. Gatto on this subject. As it is, you are just some guy on the internet flinging accusations of crackpottery at a better man with a better argument and better evidence.

To get back to the topic at hand, here is a section from Gatto's article: "Confederacy of Dunces the Tyranny of Compulsory Schooling"

Mass dumbness is vital to modem society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult. If you don't believe this development was part of the intentional design of schooling, you should read William Torrey Harris's The Philosophy of Education. Harris was the U.S. Commissioner of Education at the turn of the century and the man most influential in standardizing our schools. Listen to the man.

"Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred," writes Harris, "are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom." This is not all accident, Harris explains, but the "result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." Scientific education subsumes the individual until his or her behavior becomes robotic. Those are the thoughts of the most influential U.S. Commissioner of Education we've had so far.

The great theological scholar Dietrich Bonhoeffer raised this issue of the new dumbness in his brilliant analysis of Nazism, in which he sought to comprehend how the best-schooled nation in the world, Germany, could fall unde

If you're familiar with the founding principals of the public education system this isn't a surprise. Schools were intentionally designed by early 20th century psychologists to reduce creativity and increase conformity.

If anything, it's surprising that it took this long before this effect started to manifest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are far worse than that and it is definitely by careful design.

In fact I'd say that the public schools bear more responsibility than anyone else for the widespread ignorance and gullibility that these scammers feed on. A truly tough-minded population familiar with critical thinking, logic, and argumentation would not so easily fall for these scams. They also wouldn't support anything our politicians of today are pushing for. So you see that'd be really inconvenient for our increasingly centralized society *spits*.

That's good, but not everyone has non-religious private schools in their area - and I don't see how sending your child to a private Catholic school is anything more than a different kind of "institutionalized madness".

Then you can home-school. Or you can move to another location that has appropriate schools. These are not insurmountable problems. If you care enough, you'll find a way. If you don't, it'll be "too hard" because of this-and-that.

Further, his children would probably have a far better life if he dropped two of those jobs, sent them to public school, and then spent afternoons and evenings with them. Children need their parents far more than they need private school, and heck he could even do some after-class homeschooling.

I'd say you're not in a position to determine this about someone you have never met. Feel free to assume he's so stupid that he never thought about that, and never arranged his schedule accordingly if that gives you some kind of pleasure ("if only he were as smart as you", right?). I won't bother trying to convince you otherwise since a complete lack of evidence didn't prevent you from forming a conclusion, so you have already abandoned reason. It follows that reasoning with you would be futile.

I can see that you played a little CYA there, so you can make your unfounded judgment while retaining an excuse for it, so I'll address that next. Incidentally that excuse would be both a failed attempt to prevent me from saying what I just said, and a successful attempt to justify/rationalize your judgment in your own eyes. At any rate, we are talking about an individual, not a statistical sample or an extrapolation therefrom, so your use of "probably" is a weasel word in this context. It does not change what I just said. It also doesn't change what you said.

I do not know the answer to this. It is pure speculation only (see how unambiguous that was?). But all of this makes me wonder whether you have children of your own that have been put through the meat-grinder that is our public schools and felt a bit guilty at my description of them. If so, then perhaps you saw them become more irritable, more superficial, and more dependent on others emotionally and practically as the years went by. Maybe you wonder whether those extra material luxuries were really worth avoiding the expense of relocation or alternate schooling. That would certainly explain the need to make things up about an honorable man whom you've never met.

Here's what I think you would really find edifying. They're both by another honorable man named John Taylor Gatto. The first is an essay called The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher. The second is a full-length book available online for free called The Underground History of American Education. Enjoy.

I believe that where we screwed up big-time was when we ever allowed the government to have any input whatsoever into how we educate our children.

Actually, I have to disagree on that part. Probably because my girlfriend is a teacher, just starting, and I've seen the incredible amount of effort that goes into showing teachers how to teach right. There's a whole science behind that, and not with the best instincts can you be as good as a good teacher.

That said, public schools in the US are probably the mess I keep hearing about. That does not mean the entire concept of a public school is bullshit, just because one specific implementation of it is. Have you ever seen public schools outside the US? Say, in countries that are famous for good schools, such as the scandinavian countries?

The funny thing about girlfriends is that unless you are very careful and unusually aware, then as you are "getting into them" so to speak, they are also getting into you. I am forced to consider you a biased source for that reason. Besides, this is a US story and I am speaking about US schools. Therefore it is I who must ask you if you are familiar with US public schools, and it would seem the answer is "no".

Psychological abuse and humiliation is a staple of US schools, both institutionalized and from other students. It's an integral part of the design. You need a population whose spirits have been broken at an impressionable age before you can embrace authoritarianism.

The main purpose of public schooling in the USA is to create a large underclass of people who are just smart enough to perform useful productive work, and just dumb enough not to think critically or question anything or become very curious. The Carnegies and Morgans and others who backed its founders in the 1800s were amazingly honest about this.

Under this system, the fact that most Americans are short-sighted, egotistical, hedonistic, and emotionally childish is considered a bonus feature. It makes them docile and easy to rule. It makes them feel overwhelmed just living their own lives. It prevents them from being sophisticated enough to understand the Hegelian Dialectic ("Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis" aka "Problem, Reaction, Solution"), bread-and-circus, propaganda techniques, and other tools used to expand and maintain state power.

If you really, truly want to understand public schooling in the USA, there is absolutely no better reference than John Taylor Gatto. He has an essay available here and a complete book, available for free online in its entirety, available here. I think you will find these to be quite an eye-opener.

The section called Intellectual Espionage is a real eye opener. It's worth reading just to see what the average fifth grader was doing 100 years ago.

I hate to say this, but: this. It isn't conservatives, it isn't liberals, it isn't even anything that would be today recognized as "progressive", because all political philosophies have shifted so far in the past hundred+ years as to be unrecognizable.

What it is is a hundred-year-old meme program still running in an environment that falsifies every underlying assumption the program is built on, and until we flush it out of our system, we're not going to have any radically different results.

I strongly recommend The Underground History of American Education. You do not have to agree with the author's prescription to understand and agree with the diagnosis, which I find well-researched.

What exactly do schools really teach in the first place? Would we be better off without it?

Good Lord. That dip was New York State Teacher of the Year?

Not every parent is capable of, nor interested in, schooling their own children, and the kids would not learn much.

You're jumping to conclusions when you assert that learning nothing is worse than the status quo.

If, in fact, what's learned in school is a net negative then learning nothing would be an improvement.

What exactly do schools really teach in the first place? Would we be better off without it?

Born with a silver spoon in your mouth?

You couldn't possibly be more wrong about me.

Private schools are not the right answer either. The entire premise of "school" need to be reexamined.

Automation, better design, voluntary social networks and limited demand mean that the value of most human labor is rapidly decreasing. Implicit in your comments is the assumption we need everyone to be working to produce all the goods and services we need (or want). But, that assumption is less and less true. Depending on who you believe and how you define unemployment, unemployment in the USA right now is somewhere between 10% and about 25%. Further, compared to a century or two ago, when children worked in factories and mines, and practically no one "retired", and practically no one went to college or graduate school, and people worked 70 hour work week (in factories or on farms), unemployment now could be thought of as 50% to 75% or higher compared to a century ago. The fact is, compared to then, essentially nobody in the USA is working, and those who work are not doing very much of it. It's true that if you go back to hunter/gatherer times (see Marshall Sahlins), you'll find a similar pattern (only some worked, and then it was not very hard).

For example, look at this video of a robot arm throwing a cell phone into the air and catching it, and tell me that most human labor will be needed in manufacturing in twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Even China is starting to have issues with manufacturing unemployment. How long before many services go the same way as agriculture and manufacturing? Yet our entire schooling system is still oriented around turning out mostly factory workers and soldiers.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

Anyway, so I think current trends show that work has long been going away (even as demand has increased greatly up to a point). Further, in the USA, most people have long gone past the point of diminishing returns for more stuff and bigger homes to the point of negative returns (due to the destruction of community and family) -- even as some 10% to 20% of the US population has been left out of that and is relatively impoverished and would benefit greatly from more stuff.
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/

The happiest places in the world usually have both material abundance and strong social programs:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7585729&page=1
"According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and authored by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life, according to Delamothe. "

Some related links:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm