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http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...

That said, there are other factors besides sunlight and poor diet (esp. junk food additives etc.) as well as other odd factors like too much vitamin A relative to vitamin D in supplements. Society was more formally structured (with "manners") decades ago, which made it easier to navigate for people on the autistic spectrum. Kids were allowed to be kids a lot more. Mothers spent more time with young kids (including working from home together on farms) rather than farming young kids out to day care and preschool all day. And so on.
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...

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,

VItamin D deficiency, lack of phytonutrients, lack of iodine, lack of omega-3s, excessive preformed vitamin A, lack of early breastfeeding, lack of exercise to move lymph around, artificial ingredients in food, food allergies or lactose intolerance, environmental toxins including heavy metals, and so on could all contribute to weakened immune systems and a build up of toxins in the body leading to mental dysfunction (relative to a historic normal). Examples:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/autism/
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/12/09/breakthrough-discovery-on-the-causes-of-autism/
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-dr-fuhrmans-antiadhd-plan.html

In that mess of possibilities, some small quantity of mercury, aluminum, and other toxins from vaccines is possibly just one more drop in the bucket. Ideally, the bucket is constantly getting emptied by the body (including through the immune system and other cleaning systems) so it does not overflow and lead to things like mitochondrial dysfunction.

But some stuff, like vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and the first few years, is structural about how the brain is wired.

Many people have reported success making thing somewhat better with the above approaches to addressing autism (beyond behavioral approaches as well, like training to read facial expressions better). The oft-vilified on Slashdot Jenny McCarthy's "Generation Rescue" website has some success stories of improvements via better diet and other interventions:
http://www.generationrescue.org/recovery/stories-of-recovery/

Whatever one thinks of the vaccine connection, eating better generally is unlikely to hurt. Although I'd look to someone like Dr. Fuhrman or Dr. Hyman for better general dietary advice than just "gluten/casein free', even as food allergies may be a piece of the puzzle for some kids labelled autistic.

I agree though that parents and guardians of autism spectrum children may often feel desperate, and that is, as you say, a risk for getting preyed on in some way (whether by alternatives or the mainstream).

Good luck with your grandson! Hopefully he can learn to make the most of his unique strengths and connections as "Positive psychology".

Today's schools have become so different from those of a generation ago, making all this even harder. Watch out for "the war on kids", especially the push in many schools to drug boys for wanting to be outside in the sunshine running around playing:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

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

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

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

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

Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/

And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8

See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism

The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.

There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).

Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html

See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im

It's a documented reality: 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, it is essential to do the necessary work and dig deeper to uncover the heart of the problems observed. The numerous failures and pathologies associated with school are predominantly due to it autocratic structure. Because no one wants to voluntarily relinquish power, this fundamental problem is never addressed or even recognized."

"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

See my comment here:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Also:
http://thewaronkids.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_History_of_American_Education

Schooling is not education; you prefer this? http://thewaronkids.com/

http://thewaronkids.com/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

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

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

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.txt

Parents 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

"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/

The difference comes down to the fact that how a person chooses to grow as an individual, or what a person should do to be a good friend, neighbor and citizen, may both have very little to do with how someone else wants to enslave that person to do work for them.

Of course, one person's view of being enslaved (say, to rabid nationalism or even just professional ethics that involve not taking a political position for a personal view of social justice) may be another person's view of progress and social uplift. And work as in "doing productive stuff" and "hard fun" and "making things happen" and "helping others" may well have many good qualities which are irrespective of who is defining the work (and the workplace) and who is getting the fruits of the work.

Still, ask yourself, what would be the "perfect" education for a slave these days? How far away are we from that with our public school system?
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

This is a typical example of the intent behind it connected to the "marketplace" and not personal growth (or even just citizenship):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
"What if the solution to American students' stagnant performance levels and the wide achievement gap between white and minority students wasn't more money, smaller schools, or any of the reforms proposed in recent years, but rather a new education system altogether? That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."

While I completely agree with the title of the article that we should start over with our education system, I disagree with the approach as well as "the marketplace" as a primary aspiration. See my other posts on this article for unschooling alternatives).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34099866
And see this for other real solutions to the jobs crisis transcending marketplace problems resulting from a combination of limited demand through saturation and the falling value of most paid humor labor due to robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives

It's true that eventually black slaves in the USA were kept from learning how to read (though that was not the case at first, only when they were getting uppity). But, what would you want a personal slave in the 21st century be able to do for you, and would reading, writing, and arithmetic be part of it? Sort your emails according to written criterion you supply? Drive your car while reading all the road signs and navigating efficiently? Be good in bed just the way you like it through extensive study of writings on the topic? Have brilliant engaging conversations about whatever you wanted to talk about based on being informed about current events? Build for you a comfortable house without a leaky roof by being able to follow blueprints precisely?

Remember, the Egyptians must have had many very technically skilled slaves (for the time) to build the pyramids. Slavery is not incompatible with some forms of learning. Even if eventually the slaves might choose to revolt in some way:

"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.html

Do kids "drop out" of going to the public library or using the internet?
My comments on that:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

On 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. ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life. ..."

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_McLuhan

Let'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...

"All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably."

How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?

I'd say those links were about trying to find a more appropriate balance between meshworks and hierarchies than authoritarian schooling represents. From Manuel DeLanda:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year and how did he teach for so many years in public schools? :-)

Also, it seems like you are admitting kids don't get to practice either freedom or democracy in mainstream public schools. So, how are they supposed to learn to do those things when they turn 18 and can vote?

If the schooling idea is so great, why is creativity plummeting?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1159241/The-Creativity-Crisis

Is this guy, knighted by the Queen of England for services to education, an anarchist?
"Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
"The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (used to classify children for potential job training), national curriculum set for each grade and mandatory kindergarten."

A link from there to a documentary on Prussian Schooling:
http://www.quantumshift.tv/v/1198046178

How come the people who started Google went to Montessori schools?

Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict “ideological discipline.” The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Have you looked at this?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

How do you evaluate schools on how creative or cooperative or democratically-oriented or critical thinking or kind or helpful or healthy or resilient most kids are after they come out of them?

Please see my other comments to this article on the need for fundamental paradigm change. Better learning materials (while a nice thing) won't fix the overall problems that people like John Taylor Gatto or John Holt have written about. Schools as they are seem very good at subverting good content (see the history of Lego/Logo), which is part of why they so naturally take potentially liberating computers and turn them into surveillance systems...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/webcam-spy-scandal-broadens/

Still, I agree with you that more open source text books and other materials would be a good thing.

But see also:
"Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteachers-Compulsory/dp/0865716315

Or "The War on Kids":
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

Until schools lose the compulsion and become more a mix of all-age learning community (more like public libraries and craft centers) they will have deep, deep problems as far as what we need to have a healthy democracy...

You wrote: "I think I was the only person in Detroit to see it coming. I looked at what japanese cars were out there, the build quality, mileage, price, etc.then looked at the insane detroit horsepower wars with ancient car designs, just throw more pushrod engine at the situation.. I went "these people are all loony tunes crazy" and quit."

I guess part of the problem with predictions is where does it leave the individual who believes them when it is so out of step with what everyone else believes? There you felt you needed to quit your job because your accurate beliefs were so far out of touch with the self-delusion (though presumably you moved onto something better, but for many, that may be the end of a profitable career). In the 1970s, Amory Lovins was one of the people who predicted oil shocks and said, all externalities considered (including security costs and pollution), renewables where cheaper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

For some people, they turn that prediction into money through investments (though it takes money to make money, plus business savvy, luck, connections, etc.). Although sometimes that entails other ethical compromises.
"From Predators to Icons; How to succeed as an entrepreneur : The New Yorker"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/9b81e569f28d8739

But for most people, there is not much you can do with that knowledge (other than, as you did, on a very local scale). My wife had a related metaphorical idea, of moving above the scene of the world and having a great vision of what was "reality", but then that vision not always being that helpful when you come back to Earth. As I said elsewhere, what good does it do to the fly to know the chemical composition of amber? Still, there may be some use, since people are not flies and have more capacity to act (like you did, to improve your local self sufficiency). A related post by me that touches on some of that:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db

Still, as I heard recently, talking about alternative stuff can help create small communities of practice, that are working towards common goals, or at least inspire others to think about stuff going on in that area. For example, Home Power Magazine has long been an inspiration to me.

Also, the trends are not all bad. I predict that between curing vitamin D deficiency (Dr. Cannell) and people eating more whole foods (Dr. Fuhrman) the USA may save upwards of a trillion dollars a year in medical costs. Just one supporting point:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
So, that's good news to go with the bad. The future is a mix of both. What's really crazy is that, if you realize that, giving health care (including nutritional counseling and access to whole foods) to everyone in the USA is really affordable.
"Eat an Apple (Doctor's Orders)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/business/13veggies.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=business

So, it is sad to see all the misinformed arguing and all the needless suffering, whether of sick people with preventable disease, accomplished machinists and toolmakers who lose their chance to make lots of useful stuff, or even kids suffering in prison-like schools.
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
One alternative public school is documented here (and AERO lists many alternatives)

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

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

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

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

So true a poem, and so sad; a recent related documentary:
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Also related:
    "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
""" ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.
            Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
    I should know.
"""

See also the link betwen vitamin D deficiency (from an indoor lifestyle and no outdoor playtime) and mental problems...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a new DVD out called The War on Kids. The thesis is that schools are prisons and are about surveillance, metal detectors, and control. One of the best parts is where they are receiving a tour through a school, and they ask to see the library, which has a high-security metal door with metal grate over the glass. The principal can't find the key and asks, "did you really need to get in here?"

Learning is against school policy.