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Seriously, I'm beginning to question the value of completely free speech. I've spent my entire life so far in support of it, and the free marketplace, but I'm finding more and more, that both are a fiction and always have been!

The "free" marketplace isn't free, it's a highly unstable situation that's carefully protected by a government that's surprisingly willing to impose on the "freedome" of the marketplace. Until the 1980s, government stepped in many times, repeatedly, over the years, to limit the power of the monopolies in the United States. But after about 1981 or so, we simply stopped caring. And the result has decimated our marketplace! In becoming more "free", we've simply become more monopolistic, where Wal-Mart now delivers some 30% to 50% of the consumed goods in the USA.

This was unheard of before then, but only because the gubbmint stepped in repeatedly to limit the power of (among others) A&P, the mid-20th century equivalent of Wal-Mart. As a percentage of population, Wal-Mart is now at least 5x as big as A&P ever was at its height. Yet Wal-Mart is just one of many vertical monopolies now rearing, to the deafening roar of untrained people who rally and cry for speech and marketplaces free from the controls of the government that was otherwise busy serving their own interests. It's a sad, sad state of affairs.

In a similar vein, I'm finding that "free speech" never existed. For over a century, there were strict controls on news organizations and reporting agencies - strict policies on libel and a general expectation of truth. This was easily enforced, because there were so few news agencies with the ability to reach a significant percentage of the population. And the result was filtered news and information of generally high-quality.

But the Internet has changed all that. Even if strict news reporting standards were still in effect, the news organizations would have to compete with the deafening roar of blogs and other "almost news" sites (Slashdot being one of them!) and so the standards would lose all their teeth anyway.

What journalistic standards is my completely private post written from my armchair going to be held to?

But the end result is that any whining idiot with an opinion that sounds nice gets lots of play, and real information gets lost in the din of noise and misinformation. Without any expectation of accountability, idiots like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are free to spread their bile and intellectual filth to unwashed masses who haven't developed the means to filter them out, partly due to the falling standards and expectations from our public school system, which has gotten so bad that no schooling at all is often an improvement.

Free speech is just noise without a bullshit filter. Look in your spam box for 99.97% "free speech". If society is to save itself, it will need to learn the difference between speech and honest-to-god information.

Right now, it's not looking so good.

http://www.unschooling.com/

Lots of links on how and why schooling has failed:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html

More:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

An easy fix:
    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. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons"
   

It is part of propaganda (and perhaps many religions, of which schooling is a secular one), to hide the alternatives, label them evil, or make them into strawman shadows.

So, some class in a compulsory school program taught you something about C++. A technical skill. Is that all "education" (as distinct from "schooling")is supposed to be about? Skills?

Consider:
http://www.newciv.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. "

Granted it lead you to appreciate some things like some literature. And you are saying it was worth twelve to thirteen years of your early life to do this? Compared to what alternatives? Home schooling? Unschooling?
http://www.unschooling.com/
Free schooling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
Learning on your own in the library?
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/educatn.html
"Could college attendance be a form of cowardice?"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html

At what cost? Would you not perhaps rather have learned to love literature on your own, but instead have the $200K or so (principal of $10K per year plus compound interest over a dozen years) invested in your compulsory schooling upon reaching age 18 so you could live off the interest or buy a house with it to live rent free?

Consider the alternatives to labeling and dividing people and which have been hidden from your view. And then think about how people you trusted did this to you. They took money on your behalf. And left you with a lifetime of industrialized work ahead of you. Consider:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to hig

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

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

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

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

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

The dereanged idea that it has to have meaning, relevance, etc., or it is worthless is ruining schools.

alternative learning styles, etc., are ruining basic instruction.

(by the way, I have an MA in Ed. Technology)

moderated down straight away? That's the fraility of the Slashdot moderating system. Yes, people really do think this way, see here.
Schools have become so normalised that people can't imagine society being without them. So you immediately decide it to be an invalid opinion because you consider it unthinkable.

different people get different things, and different people have different abilities, but if you simply go by "normal" you're marginalizing a lot of very important people.

Understand, here, that I don't disallow my kids from *using* the 5+ computers in my house, it's just not part of their required education.

At least for us, home-schooling is a genuine misnomer. Perhaps a better name would be "community based education". My kids go to the local college, take classes, go on field trips, and take writing courses.

But what we're talking about is required "education" on computers at tender ages before 10 years of age!

Don't confuse the issue of "allowing the student to persue their interests and talents" (which I'm all in favor of) with "require the students to perform actions in subjects X, Y, and Z".

If you want to know more about our preferred homeschooling methods (often called "child-led" education or "un-schooling", you might want to start here or perhaps here. It's all about trust!