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https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."

And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."

And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""

Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org

The Radioactive Boy Scout

Article by national award winning teacher... the more you know... http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm http://digg.com/programming/How_Public_Education_C ripples_Our_Kids,_And_Why

For a considered, detailed and (pardon me) chilling examination of the evidence for global warming, you couldn't do better than Elizabeth Kolbert's series in The New Yorker. I believe it is no longer on The New Yorker's Web site, but you can find it at http://www.wesjones.com/climate1.htm. It's in three parts (all linked on that page), and worth more than one read. She has written a book based on the series.

I'm not going to defend Apple, but how much more are you willing to pay for an iPod to see that workers are treated the way you think they should be? Whose product will you buy because they treat their workers better than Apple does? Or will you refuse to buy it at all, for the sake of the working conditions in China or wherever? And how much will that help?

Of the stories I have read on the Bush administration's war against science, this New Yorker article http://www.wesjones.com/specter2.htm is the best, all the more devastating because it is scrupulously fair.

Great article about a young experimenter who creates a nuclear reactor at home.

By getting people used to idea of being tracked when they are young and powerless, you have a better chance of not making them question the tracking when they are adults.

Many kids would have otherwise first encountered the term "Big Brother" in its original, very negative context when reading George Orwell's 1984 in school.

What he got in Laos was not the Internet. It was a Potemkin internet (small "i"), where the government controls the access to controversial people. The Internet is not the threat to tyranny, people are, when using the Internet. The people of Laos are uniquely tyrannized, after their 1970s holocaust which killed millions of people, on the basis of their education and independence. And Laos is just now getting any kind of internet at all, or even foreigners. In a few years, after the inevitable noise in their tyranny signal buzzes the people with any alternatives to the official truth, confirming the crazy ideas of the bearded backpackers scrambling through their mountains, their government will have a lot more trouble monopolizing the minds of their people, leading to the dissolution of their _1984_ style dystopia. From which they will likely move to our own _Brave New World_ style dystopia.