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Comments · 64
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Another John Taylor Gatto in the making? :-)
See: https://archive.org/details/Th...
And: http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
More links on how schooling is not about education, and how schooling is a form of (prison-like) adoption:
http://p2pfoundation.net/John_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...Check out John Holt, too. That's all a big reason we homeschool/unschool.
More links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Enjoyed your informative post from the trenches, thanks! Especially your point about teacher incentives. You get what you measure -- so, as you imply, if you incentivize teachers to dumb down kids faster and better, that's what you'll get more of.
Long term, I feel a basic income may be part of the answer:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...As for what you can do in the short-term, it's tough. If you walk away, your (virtually adopted) kids will suffer. And you'll lose your income in a tough economy.. And one less voice for change in the system will be lost. But it's a painful situation if you care about what you do (although you run a high risk of burnout). Don't know what to advise, but at least you are not alone!
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Re:Common sense = none
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Could have predicted it, probably did...
... if I looked up my old slashdot postings from then talking about Gatto and Holt and homeschooling and unschooling.
You wrote: "the entire job of a teacher, particularly a K-8 teacher, is to evaluate students and set good progression goals for that student.
Fairly accurate, but interesting you did not mention activities like communicating information or values in that... Or who sets the "goals" or what they actually are. As John Taylor Gatto says, the problem with most US schools is they are working as designed (originally in Prussia to deliver obedient cannon-fodder soldiers, obedient factory workers, and obedient citizens). So, if you give schools more money, they will only do that job better!
See:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"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?That said, investments in groups like Khan Academy seem worthwhile... One of the few really good Gates Foundation investments perhaps...
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.gatesfoundation.org...The Broad Foundation is making the exact same mistake as Zuckerberg...
http://www.broadcenter.org/An alternative by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"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 -
Moving beyond a compulsory schooling model
Posting to undo mistaken mod.
I left high school in the middle of 11th grade for much the same reasons. In general, unschooling/homeschooling are a great option for many people of all sorts of ability. A "basic income" could also replace compulsory schooling:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...More on the problems with compulsory schooling from a NYS "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"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."By the way, Gatto points out the "gifted" label itself is a scam:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling. Thatâ(TM)s the secret behind short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion punishing our nation. There isnâ(TM)t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as fingerprints. We donâ(TM)t need state-certified teachers to make education happenâ"that probably guarantees it wonâ(TM)t."And also by Gatto:
http://www.bartlebyproject.com...
"By 1973, schools were big business. In small towns and cities across the land schoolteaching was now a lucrative occupation - with short hours, long vacations, paid medical care, and safe pensions; administrators earned the equivalent of local doctors, lawyers, and judges. Eccentricity in classrooms was steeply on the wane, persecuted wherever it survived. Tracking was the order of the day, students being steered into narrower and narrower classifications supposedly based on standardized test scores. Plentiful exceptions existed, however, in the highest classifications of "gifted and talented," to accommodate the children of parents who might otherwise have disrupted the smooth operation of the bureaucracy. But even in these top classifications, the curriculum was profoundly diminished from standards of the past. What was asked of prosperous children in the 1970s would have been standard for children of coal miners and steel workers in the 1940s and 1950s. "More here:
http://homeschooladvocate.org/...And it gets even worse, by others:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary, -
Missing big picture -- see Kohn and Gatto
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teach...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...So much of the discussion of schooling misses the deeper point about the horrible legacy of "Prussian Schooling" and the enormous cost of it in diminished psyches. More humane lternatives are possible.
From the first link above:
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"From Degrading to De-Grading"
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way of compelling them to pay attention or do the assigned readings - and they may even use surprise quizzes for that purpose, keeping their grade books at the ready.
Frankly, we ought to be worried for these teachers' students. In my experience, the most impressive teachers are those who despise the whole process of giving grades. Their aversion, as it turns out, is supported by solid evidence that raises questions about the very idea of traditional grading.
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students.
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
Most of us are directly acquainted with at least some of these disturbing consequences of grades, yet we continue to reduce students to letters or numbers on a regular basis. Perhaps we've become inured to these effects and take them for granted. This is the way it's always been, we assume, and the way it has to be. It's rather like people who have spent all their lives in a terribly polluted city and have come to assume that this is just the way air looks - and that it's natural to be coughing all the time.
Oddly, when educators are shown that it doesn't have to be this way, some react with suspicion instead of relief. They want to know why you're making trouble, or they assert that you're exaggerating the negative effects of grades (it's really not so bad - cough, cough), or they dismiss proven alternatives to grading on the grounds that our school could never do what others schools have done.
The practical difficulties of abolishing letter grades are real. But the key question is whether those difficulties are seen as problems to be solved or as excuses for perpetuating the status quo. The logical response to the arguments and data summarized here is to say: "Good heavens! If even half of this is true, then it's imperative we do whatever we can, as soon as we can, to phase out traditional grading." Yet many people begin and end with the problems of implementation, responding to all this evidence by saying, in effect, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we'll never get rid of grades because . . -
Re:The original affluent society & the future
"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."
I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.
Most (95%?) of the labor hours expended today in the USA tend to be about guarding, engaging in non-productive make-work, or is just destructive or competitively wasteful, or is trying to compensate for the other ills of the society from the previous problems. For example, most heart surgery is apparently worse than useless according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Most schooling is harming kids according to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Most farming (mainly for animal product production) is killing us and destroying our land:
http://www.ravediet.com/reviews.html
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Much policing related to drug laws is destroying our communities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Most of US military use is making us less safe:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/law-and-security/torture-on-tv/less-safe/
http://www.cato.org/store/books/power-problem-how-american-military-dominance-makes-us-less-safe-less-prosperous-less-free-har
Most computer software development is unneeded; for example IBM had a perfectly good in-house Forth they could have used as a command line interpreter rather than pay Bill Gated for MS-DOS which he bought from someone else. Most Wall Street computerized trading is of little-to-negative social value (just high stakes zero-sum horse racing and putting the whole unregulated derivatives system at risk of systemic collapse).
Most college degrees are not worth it either economically or educationally:
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/why-college-may-not-worth-133900551.html
I could go on... And on.. And on...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.htmlSo, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)
My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com
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Just say No! Obligatory John Taylor Gatto quote
http://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."
Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"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. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.htmlPushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon -
Healthy people come from healthy societies
People start off being able to reason, school stomps it out of most of them:
http://www.alisongopnik.com/TheScientistInTheCrib.htmWell-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. -
Re:Teachers already have performance reviews
"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 -
This is really amazing...
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.htmIn 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 -
Re:From Degrading to De-Grading by Alife Kohn
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.htmDid 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 -
Re:$5B spent on education "reform"
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Re:See also "The War on Kids"
There is no current "overpopulation" problem. Almost every human produces more than they consume. See Julian Simon's writings, for example:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/There is also room for quadrillions of people in space habitats in the solar system built from asteroidal ore, even if the Earth itself might be deemed at some point by some people to have, for aesthetic reasons, too much of a crowd. So, that notion of "overpopulation" is just bunk for an advanced industrial society such as ours. We can produce lots of energy and recycle resources and prevent or clean up pollution if we want to, the problem is that our mainstream economic system does not properly account for externalities. Mainstream economics is broken, not the idea of the more the merrier.
So, since children are net producers over their lives, my your logic, should not parents be credited from society with a lot of money for having a child or raising a child?
You are also pushing some notion of merit pay or punishment fines, trying to somehow turn parenting or being a child into a series of economic calculations. But for any job involving creativity, it turns out that merit pay reduces performance. That is what research really says, despite conventional wisdom that says something else. See:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJcOr:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htmSo, IMHO, your analysis and recommendations are based on two very flawed assumptions about both resources and motivation. However, your suggestions are in accord with the kind of implicit and explicit curriculum in most schools. So, your plan in itself probably a result of schooling and the ideas about "human nature" it embedded in you, like people do not do things without external motivations.
Also, as you probably believe in a "free market" based on your approach, why should money be forced to be spent through specific places that call themselves schools? Why not let parents decide how best to spend the funds, including by just having the time to spend with kids educating them? Why create and support soulless institutions to raise children instead of prosperous families and healthy neighborhoods?
Related as an alternative if you really want to follow your free market suggestions to perhaps better conclusions:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had right up until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education. It didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see."Although as I believe in the importance of a redistributive "basic income" as a right of citizenship in our society, I still think each citizen is going to need a monthly check to make the free market work, especially as robotics, automation, better design, and voluntary social networks displace more and more paid work. That's another assumption implicit in your analysis -- that there will be "jobs" around for these kids and that productivity as citizens will be measured in monetary terms.
http://en.wik -
See also "The War on Kids"
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.htmlOr a more general basic income...
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.htmlSee also:
http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt -
Re:make your own opportunities
Schools don't train , they educate
Not the schools I went to.
The word education is derived from the Latin "educare" which literally means "to draw forth from"
-The savvy communicator: three ways to connect your information to their reality
Standardized, age-separated schools treat kids as if they're all ready to learn the exact same thing at the same time. The Socratic approach to education involves helping the individual discover their world.
Here's that essay that you didn't bother to look up: The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher. I know people can't click on every link they see, so here's a section that discusses the implications of the seven lessons Mr. Gatto taught in his standardized government school:
II.
It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-
schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the
best of my student's parents, only a small number can imagine a
different way to do things. "The kids have to know how to read and
write, don't they?" "They have to know how to add and subtract, don't
they?" "They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep
a job."Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the United
States; originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from
regimentation made us the miracle of the world, social class boundaries
were relatively easy to cross, our citizenry was marvelously confident,
inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for
themselves. We were something, we Americans, all by ourselves, without
government sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and
social agencies telling us how to think and feel; no, all by ourselves
we were something, as individuals.We've had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War and such a society
requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling to maintain
itself. Before the society changed, schooling wasn't very important
anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it and only as much as an
individual wanted. People learned to read, write, and do arithmetic
just fine anyway, there are some studies which show literacy at the time
of the American Revolution, at least on the Eastern seaboard, as close
to total. Tom Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population
of 2,500,000, 20 percent of which was slave and another 50 percent
indentured.Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading,
writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as long as
the audience is eager and willing to learn.schools preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach them
the seven lessons I've just taught you.(emphasis added)
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Re:Above All Else
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. -
Are mainstream schools harmful?
"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.txtAs 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 -
Re:So close...
"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.htmlAnd 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.htmlThat 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.
-
Obligatory Gatto on schooling's purpose...
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?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 -
Re:Be careful who you judge and for what...
Compulsory education in the USA was not "normal" until the last hundred years, and has a lot of negative side effects beyond being a major vector for communicable disease:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txtParents can choose to avoid compulsory school by homeschooling or using alternative schools or tutors with more flexibility, which is how most of humanity has been educated for most of time.
You're also saying parents have less control over choosing to breastfeed for two years or choosing to feed their kids whole foods (vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, water, plus a few supplements like vitamin D) instead of junk? Less control than what? If so, why is this? Are their any commonalities between magic bullet thinking like with vaccines and other aspects of our society that relate in a refusal to invest the time and effort it takes for true health both as individuals and as societies building healthy infrastructures? Such as: http://www.bluezones.com/
I'm not saying these things are not difficult to some degree -- more difficult than going with the mainstream profit-drive flow of US society, I'd agree. But, so what? If people are going to condemn others and suggest they be dumped on an island somewhere for posing a health risk, where do you draw the line?
Also, is this the standard you use for vaccine safety and effectiveness?
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401
"Critics point out that CROs can come with built-in problems. Conflicts of interest can arise when CROs are paid royalties only after a drug is approved rather than being paid a set fee that is independent of how safe or effective the drug turns out to be. Problems can also arise because CROs know that favorable findings mean that research into a test drug will continue, and they may also believe that results that please the hiring corporation can lead to future contracts. "[C]ompanies know that the farther the compound moves through the research cycle, the more money they can raise," Nature reported. Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs."Have you given any of this any thought before? For a long time, neither had I...
Anyway, the bottom line is that it is almost certain that the poster I replied to meant well with that comment. I'm just following through on the logic expressed there. You seem to think then that we should draw the line on "cheap" things? So, it's OK to feed kids junk and to send them to physical and mental disease factories because that is the cheap and conventional thing to do? Well, that's your right in the USA, I guess. But the original poster is suggesting rights be taken away for people for not submitting their children to essentially medical experiments with new vaccines some of which have had only limited trials in foreign countries by profit-making organizations with conflicts-of-interest -- and implies that is great parenting, but mentions nothing else about keeping kids healthy. So, anyway, again, if we are going to talk about exiling parents and their "spawn" for living differently than the mainstream who submits their children to day prison brainwashing, who feed their children a lot of junk food (obesity is a big problem in the USA), who can't be bothered to breastfeed for two years or more, and who without question inject their children with any stuff some companies in foreign nations tell us is "safe", then what should the standard be for exiling families for "bad" parenting and a wanton disregard for public health and safety?
Actually, I'm starting to think th
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Most autism is from such things?
Please see my other posts to this article, including these links and others:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
http://www.iodine4health.com/The first link suggests that pretty much all autism is related to various issues like you discovered in time (there are just a bunch of them from vitamin D deficiency, to iodine defiency, to lack of omega-3s, to dairy, to toxins of various sorts in processed foods or, presumably, vaccines). From there: "Most neurodevelopmental disorders have common roots. But looking at only one aspect of such conditions will not solve the problem of autism. Current autism research is based on an outdated approach -- one that is something like blind men examining the proverbial elephant. Each researcher works in his or her own silo examining different factors and coming to different conclusions. Research that integrates, synthesizes and examines all the data on causes and potential treatments is practically non-existent. The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)"
The second and third links show why excessive dairy is pretty harmful for most people (even ignoring how most of the world is lactose intolerant). The fourth is something I'm just learning about at the moment (iodine deficiency, where dairy is often a primary source of iodine, so watch out for it without dairy or eating seaweed or supplementing).
Your son is lucky to have you as his Dad. You might want to still monitor for the other health issues and take pro-active steps to "disease-proof" your family on a diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains).
As a four year old, my wife had surgeons open up her belly and take her guts out (and put them back) because they refused to listen to her mother who suggested she had a millk allergy (from an article she read) -- and it turned out, after all the trauma, yes it was an allergy to milk and lactose. Doctors (especially surgeons) seem to be trained to sound very confident even when they don't have a clue (especially about nutrition). Part of how it got that way, starting around 1910:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_ReportFor down the road:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.holtgws.com/ -
Links on problems with peer review
Also: http://www.google.com/#q=peer+review+as+censorship
http://www.counterpunch.org/mazur02262010.html
http://www.suppressedscience.net/censorship-medicine.htmlA 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.htmAnd 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. -
Mentor, not teacher...
And such relationships can work both ways.
You've made an excellent argument for learning from knowledgeable other people with hands on experience about some area of interest, but, sadly, such people can only rarely be found in conventional schools...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.htmlAnd you ignore the other baggage professional teachers come with:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/Why not just watch a video series instead, and ask questions online?
http://www.learner.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.explorelearning.com/Of find some other alternative arrangement, including knowledgeable mentors among family, friends, or in the community?
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeschoolingIs that really going to be that much worse than trying to learn from most "teachers" (who if you've ever been aroudn teacher training programs, you would see generally know little about math, science, and technology), as well meaning as most of them may be? The first thing most schools do is destroy a child's natural ability to learn and natural creativity:
http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=relatedHere is an alternative funding model for hiring private tutors or having neighborhoods again where people have time to share their knowledge freely, based on just giving public school funds directly to the parents:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
-
Re:Heck
"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/ -
Re:Jobs (homeschooling)
How about homeschooling? That helps people escape the "two income trap".
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
"Middle-class parents are stretched thin these days. Between health care costs, child care hassles, looking for a home in a good district, and paying for college, raising a child is becoming increasingly expensive. Little wonder, then, that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed. And the danger is growing worse by the year: In 2002 1.6 million people filed for bankruptcy, many of those middle-class parents. a record . As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
In the face of such hardships, many families have sent both parents into the workforce to try to make ends meet. After all, surely if both parents work full-time it shouldn't be hard to ensure financial security, right? Wrong, say authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, in their book, The Two Income Trap. Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""So, you can live somewhere cheap to live where you can work less and homeschool.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.htmlWe do that ourselves.
On math, see:
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools: In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
"The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children."You and hundreds of millions of others (plus me for a long time) have been scammed about schooling.
But sure, a rural lifestyles has its pros and cons.
-
Peter Gray: The Case for Teaching Less Math...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools by Peter Gray; In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more.See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.htmlAnd some posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.htm
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.htmlFor the record, I've always loved math and think it can be a very fun and worthwhile profession or hobby. I love broccoli too, but forcefeeding endless amounts of it to people till bursting despite the tears and protests would be cruel and probably would result in them not eating broccoli when no one was looking. How do we get people to enjoy thinking well and eating healthy? Good question. But people do have answers, if you look.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/ -
Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?
"The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work."
First off, you don't have to be an "anarchist" to say what is happening to children in most mainstream compulsory schools is very wrong, between the extreme authoritarianism, the drugging (even though through prescription), the violation of civil rights, the rampant bullying, the lack of privacy, the prison-like atmosphere, the lack of choices, and so on:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/It's not anarchism to say that some place smells like fascism and we can do better in a democracy...
Citations as to drop out rates for alternative schools? And also think it through. What is even the problem of "dropping out"? What are kids missing that has any relevance to their lives these days? Having access to more schooling? Having a "good job" when most jobs are becoming obsolete? Something by an anarcho-socialist:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.htmlDo kids "drop out" of going to the public library or using the internet?
My comments on that:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.htmlOn your point on 21st century curriculum goals, as Gatto says here:
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.So, your outlining a good curriculum in terms of aspirations means very little... That's why it is incorrect to say society has discarded the model of schooling designed to make human beings into machine-like reliable workers, soldiers, and consumers. It's still there, in the medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhanLet's go point by point through what you quote:
Creativity and Innovation -- how can you learn that in what is essentially a prison atmosphere with a weird mix of authoritarianism and intense peer pressure you can not avoid (like by staying home or going to the library or picking who you want to hang out with), whatever the course work entails?
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving -- how can you learn that when every question has a "right" answer, and you are not even allowed to get any significant practice about deciding what questions are worth studying because the curriculum has it all laid out for you on a schedule, and you have to pass a standardized test on it?
Communication and Collaboration -- As I linked to for Alfie Kohn, the process of grading damages any attempts at that...
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Schools are doing what they were designed to do...
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 -
How free&happy&healthy is capitalist Europ
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--.htmAny more?
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Re:Going beyond vouchers
If you trust kids to learn, and trust parents to usually have their kids' best interests at heart, then you can see that parents of older children can hire tutors, acquire learning materials, visit homeschool resources centers, and so on, to create good learning experiences. Here is a labor of love by Salman Khan over the past few years to create 1000 educational videos that step-by-step cover most of the information about math and science most kids would ever learn in high school:
http://www.khanacademy.org/The fact is, as John Holt or John Taylor Gatto have said (both celebrated teachers with decades of classroom experience), most of what teachers know is how to manage a classroom of twenty children of roughly the same age and background and how to maintain discipline in the room. That's it. That is 90% of what most teachers have been taught. And they do it in all sorts of ways (including things like cutting sarcasm). Some teachers know more, like Jaime Escalante. Most do no.
Here is a study that shows that not only do most elementary school teachers know next-to-nothing about math, but the less math kids are taught in school, the better they are at it:
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools"
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schoolsKids should be learning because they want to, not because they are forced to. For example, a person of any age can learn to read in about 50 contact hours if they really want to, or a school system can spend thousands of hours trying to pound literacy into a child and still produce functional illiterates (as is the case with many US high school graduates). The same goes for many other subjects.
The fact is, when someone learns math or chemistry, especially today with so many great video resources,
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
almost all of the learning is done by kids themselves. Plus, parents can learn together with kids. And kids can learn together with other kids at the local library or through the internet. And old school buildings could be repurposed as learning centers.Can this all be better? Sure. Let's put learning resource centers (or just better libraries) on every street corner, where anyone can go there at any time to get help learning whatever they want to learn about, whether reading, chemistry, carpentry, or cooking.
So, let's say that some parents send their kids to the cheapest private school and "keep the change". Are most kids going to be much worse off than they are now? About half of all kids in the USA can't even graduate from high school for one reason or another. Could it be that much worse?
Also, see my other comment in this thread.
One thing to watch out for. Like most people in the USA (myself included), you've been exposed to decades of propaganda by schools that schools are the solution (and the only solution) to making society work. What if some of that was self-serving?
Also, even assuming what you said was true, that you need some "specialist" to teach you chemistry (my kid and I just watched entire "The World of Chemistry" series at Learner.org, essentially with a Nobel Prize winning society as our chemistry "teacher"), what other lessons are teachers teaching that you don't want your kid to learn?
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
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 fo -
Re:Public schools (you'll never know)
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in:
* only doing what someone in authority tells you to do;
* only socializing with people of a similar age, similar mental abilities, and similar social class;
* doing stuff no matter how stupid or pointless you thought it was just because some authority told you to do it or else;
* had more chances to think up your own things to do with people you picked;
* had more chances to work with both your hands and brain;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1
* and so on.See New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
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.
"""See also his:
"State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"""
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
"""And that last is part of what happened to Jaime Escalante. While he may not have understood the bigger picture, he deviated from the lessons, and was ultimately replaced, whatever the results.
As Gatto says at the end there:
"""
A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children -
Agreed, schools are for dumbing us down
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""Illich:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.htmlJohn Holt:
http://www.holtgws.com/Collections of links by me on this:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.htmlWhy not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html -
John Holt said much the same decades ago...
See John Holt's books here (he was a long time school teacher):
http://www.holtgws.com/NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says the whole point of schooling is to dumb most people down:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."The whole point of those early lessons is to waste kids' time and dumb them down. As Gatto says elsewhere, it was all worked out in public to create and industrial utopia and powerful nation-states with strong armies. He calls it a "conspiracy against ourselves":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."With the internet, we could have "learning on demand", not "learning just in case". My essay on that:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. -
Schooling and education have little relation...
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:
"""For more on the history of schooling in the USA:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htmFor more on the history of schooling globally:
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance "
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists.The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here:
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
"""Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible
-
Missing the point; schools exist to dumb down...
See: "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487The primary reason school was created was to dumb people down as a form of social control to create factory workers (and soldiers) for a 19th century factory-based economy, according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. 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--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
"""Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
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.
"""So, that's why pouring more money into schools does not work, because they just do this dumbing down process better. Oh, you may get kids stuffed with more facts, you may get kids with better grades, you may get kids who are better are regurgitating state doctrine, but you won't get good human beings who can have a happy whole life. A whole person comes from an engagement with the whole of life, not from doing paperwork all day in a minimum security day-prison from ages four to eighteen. The entire system must be changed from assumptions through practices, and school is so resistant to fundamental change that the best approach is probably just to shut it down entirely and start over in new ways using the same resources in entirely different ways.
For example, the central pillar of most schooling, grading, is harmful to children and communities in all sorts of ways:
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships -
Moving beyond irony and despair
As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htmIt's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
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 that is reflected in the dominant mythology of the USA:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47And US foreign policy around the world has actively tried to destroy anything that might have emerged as a possible alternative good example. For example, the first September 11, in 1973, in Chile:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006458.htmlSo, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum?
So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.
As for robots, they
-
Re:Gatto: Schooling is a form of adoption...
If John Taylor Gatto is a paranoid lunatic, how was he New York State Teacher of the Year, and how did he teach in NYC public schools for about thirty years? And what does that say about schools? More by him on how the real curriculum of school has nothing to do with the informational content dispensed:
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.
"""Neither he, nor I, would dispute that there are many, many amazing, caring, wonderful human beings who are teachers at all levels, who try their very hardest to help students grow. But the system is set up against that. See:
"Power ÷ 22"
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 Ed -
Fixing a problem for a person or a community?
While good advice for the individual, it doesn't fix the bigger problem of the bully moving on to bully someone else, as well as the bully often being an unhappy person for various reasons (like bullied in their past). There is a lot to be said for well functioning communities too. Example of advice for the community:
http://www.beyondbullying.com/whatyoucando.html
"""
You can help to stop bullying in your school. Check your own behaviour. Refuse to be involved in any bullying situation.
Do not allow someone to be deliberately left out of a group.
Encourage a bullied pupil to join in with your activities or groups.
How To Challenge Bullying Behaviour
If You See Someone Being Bullied:
Do not smile or laugh.
Tell a member of staff what is happening.
If you can, tell the bully to stop what they are doing.
If you can, show the bully that you disapprove of his or her actions.
If you do nothing when you see bullying, you may be allowing it to happen, or even encouraging it
"""This biggest problem with school bullying is that compulsory schools themselves are usually bullies and demonstrate that all the time by the authoritarian environment. So, you get a lot of what the school intentionally or not teaches.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt -
The implications for the health risks of school?
School is often boring for many people. Is this study proof that compulsory schooling is bad for most people's health?
See also:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583Other links:
"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 -
Structural solutions here: basic income, etc.Many solutions are listed here: "Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
"""These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:
- temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
- government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
- a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
- improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
- a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
- a shorter work week (like tried in France);
- rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
- alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
- increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
- intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
- more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
- more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
- more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).
Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.
The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un
-
Re:That's totally wrong.
"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."
I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:
"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me -
Re:The Nineteenth Century Called...
It's ironic your tagline says "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging". Compulsory education was created precisely to have an underclass to in your words "grind into the machinery of the economy"; see John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
So, unschooling is really about stopping the digging. But it sounds unbelievable at first because of "cognitive dissonance":
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986 -
Re:Sounds like...
What does "schooling" have to do with "education"?
http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html
"""
1 don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, though it does not "educate;" that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
"""For what schools really teach, see:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
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.
""" -
The kids are finally getting a chance to learn...
Words by John Taylor Gatto, 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The second lesson I teach is your class position. I teach that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done to their kid without a fight.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good sports. If I do my
job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place."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." -
Re:Coping with depression
Some collected thoughts on building meaning and happiness in life.
People are like trees that need roots to keep from falling over in the storms of life. Those roots come from all sorts of relationships to people, places, ideas, causes, experiences, and so on. When we lose a root (a relationship), sometimes we can grow another. People with shallow roots are more likely to fall over from a storm of life -- but some storms are worse than others, and sometimes trees fall over for no obvious reason.
The book "Descartes' Error" is about how emotions underlie all "logical" thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_ErrorHappiness (and meaning) in life comes from various directions:
* sensuality
* helping others
* a sense of "Flow" in what we do, even if it is "hard fun"
* human relationships, including parenting
* humor
* creating things we love, and maybe even destroying things we hate (a tricky thing)
* preserving a pattern important to us
* probably many others?
The first three are from this guy's book "Aging Well":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_VaillantBut watch out for progressive desensitization and "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508Addictive-looking behavior otherwise often has more to do with the environment than the person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_parkHow we look at time has a lot to do with happiness, too:
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.htmlIt is often better to build on strengths than try to eliminate weaknesses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychologyAlfie Kohn has a lot to say about eliminating competition and grading from our lives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_KohnGood sleep, pleasurable exercise, a relationship to nature, education-on-demand instead of education-just-in-case, and eating right help a lot:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/feature-articles/levine-office-of-future.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/Solar panels and a basic income are ways forward towards a happier global society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income -
Re:back in my day
"Still, this is a simple solution. Kids don't need class."
There, fixed that for you.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/homeschool.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.school-survival.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school -
Another teacher's take
Read "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto is an award-winning schoolteacher in New York State, and he takes much the same anaylsis as Lockhart does for math to the entire industry of education. Only Gatto wrote his piece in 1992. http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
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That mathematician is clueless :-)
Now, that is a very inflammatory subject title, so let me explain what I mean.
I was glad to see a previous comment referencing John Taylor Gatto. I do not see Gatto's name in the PDF document. Neither do I see John Holt's name. The fact is, the purpose of "schooling" (which is not the same as "education", and you would expect a mathematician to be more precise in a use of terms) is precisely to do what the mathematician decries at the end: "And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds-- a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."
Education in the USA will not improve until people like this mathematician accept that what he said is the intentional purpose of schooling in all subjects for almost all children. See things like:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the Year
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
or:
"The Big Crunch" by Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
or:
"Growing Without Schooling" about John Holt's work, including failed attempts to reform schools
http://www.holtgws.com/At this point, it is people like Paul Lockhart who are the problem. People who think school is about education, when it is about socialization in a certain way intended for the most part to produce compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers. School is for fish. Curriculums are race tracks. And "class rooms" are literally to build social classes through selective breeding by genetics. Those are the origins of all those terms, at least according to Gatto, and, again, you would expect a mathematician to be precise about the origins and use of terminology.
With all that said, of course Paul Lockhart is right about how to improve mathematics education. But, it will never work within a Prussian-derived school system with no interest in truly educating children, despite every person who works at a school calling themselves an educator, and despite the truth that most of the people in schools might be fine educators if given the chance and a few years of untraining of their bad habits.
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651Anyway, sorry to be so harsh on you, Paul. Read "Disciplined Minds" and start building a social network to help you and them and others break out of the prison around you:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/The good news is, you have already taken the first step of getting out of the prison others have forced you to build for yourself.
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Re:Check your premisis...
Well, Medicare is pretty efficient in terms of low administrative overhead (in part from the cost-effectiveness of buying in bulk with less paperwork).
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2006/06/policy_why_medi.htmlBut I agree with you on Gatto, but for different reasons.
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651Schools are efficient, but what they are efficient at doing is dumbing people down for 19th century factory work of a type which barely exists now (among other things schools do to make the average person part of a certain kind of repressive social machinery).
Links for those who are new to Gatto's writings:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htmFrom the second link: "Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You don't have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient."
None of the candidates have put this on the table directly. Even vouchers don't address this issue unless you get the money in your pocket for homeschooling.
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True cost of a Princeton education in the OLPC era
The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.
It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."
People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.
Another related essay:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."