"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
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...
Why do you assume I vote Republican? Actually, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in the last election, and Nader in years before, mostly as a protest vote.:-) I'm in a "safe state" so I knew the Democrats would win in those states anyway.
You're not engaging with the factual information I presented (as factual as stuff is from the US Government http://www.shadowstats.com/ ). Why? Is it perhaps just too unsettling to think about the implications? Those jobs and population figures are not much of calculations as a statement of facts as presented by the US government and a simple prediction of population growth the next decade based on the last decade.
It's true there are retirements coming up, but that is not going to fix the big trend. And in the short term (next decade) many people in the USA lost much of their retirement nest egg and are working longer, either postponing retirement or going back to work after the had retirement (incidentally, depressing wages).
So, again, where are thirty million net new jobs going to come from in the USA over the next decade?
Are you suggesting people stop trying to make sense of macroeconomic trends? Sure, doing volunteer stuff etc. is great, and I do, but you also just can't stick your head in the sand. Also, how can anyone start a business and hope for success in it if the fundamental dynamics of the economy are changing and they are not aware of it?
Look at the numbers again and you will see that those numbers are less that population growth. Population growth alone in the 2000s was about 26 million people. One can expect the same again for the 2010s. We're talking two decades worth of jobs that have to be created by 2020, so, about 30 million new jobs for 50 million new people.
You're reciting economic dogma but not looking at the points on limited demand and the successive replacement of agriculture, manufacturing, and now *services*.
Where are these 30 million net new jobs to come from, especially as robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks takes even more jobs? Not only do you need to replace all the newspaper jobs we're losing, but then you have to invent 30 million new jobs in addition to those. Sure, we may well see some few millions of green jobs for a time, but what else? And at what point do most people say enough is enough as far as too much stuff and too many supersized meals that are killing them?
Anyway, your (mainstream) prediction that the system will just correct itself when I can point to trends that are replacing vast numbers of humans just seems like wishful thinking to me.
In order for mainstream economists wishful thinking to be true (these are the same people who missed predicting the Great Recession, btw), three things need to hold true, all of which are false: * wealth from improved productivity needs to be widely distributed so it can be spent and not just stashed away or put in a "casino economy" of complex financial gambling (like with derivatives), but thirty years of US statistics says it has been getting more concentrated; http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/ * demand needs to rise as fast as productivity, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests people at some point turn to non-materialistic pursuits that are generally easy to satisfy; http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1519221/Researchers-Say-Happiness-Costs-75k * robots and computers need to never be able to be as smart and capable as most people, but we are already seeing that now in many limited domains (where the technology is smarter and more reliable than people at many complex tasks). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs
This is a phase change in our society. But, by so many people denying it and engaging in wishful thinking, reforms are being delayed, and suffering increased. Possible good solutions include a mix of a "basic income", democratic resource-based planning, a gift economy, and/or improved local subsistence in strong local communities.
What would it take to convince you (or most people) that wealth is concentrating, demand for stuff and paid services is limited, and/or robots and computers are getting better and better at replacing most human workers?
"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?
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."
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."
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?
From the article: "This work was funded by Grant No. N00014-08-1-0696 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR)."
How should your tax dollars be at work? Funding irony, or funding intrinsic mutual security by creating abundance for all?
That said, the robots sound cool ("the road to hell is paved with cool technology"?), and I liked that the article also said: "While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers. "We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," explained Arkin. "We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems.""
So consider my first link (and essay by me) as a suggestion towards that end...
I just finished reading (sadly) the last book the late James P. Hogan wrote (Migration) and central to the plot is the fact that a robot might be easily deceived and put to nefarious purposes because it did not understand the notion of deception. So, a complex issue. Still, I'd expect one can understand deception and illusion without engaging in it?
Also, again from the article: "A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception -- there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception."
I think you are still missing Gatto's main point here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm "Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."
And the same might be said about Chomsky.
If there are no "evil goals" behind the school system, then what about this? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm "The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done. The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different. In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.... The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among wor
"In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers."
Well, if we can move past your medical diagnosis of Gatto's mental state, you have just restated his main point.
He never says teachers are all evil. Most of them are, like you say, well-meaning. What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it and how it operates as a system (relative to our current needs -- he says it may have been a reasonable tradeoff when it was invented in Prussia in the 1800s).
To cite the most famous example of authoritarianism gone to extremes, was Nazi Germany filled with 100% evil Germans to make it work? No, most Germans were well-meaning people, and nice to their children and neighbors, very patriotic, and so on. It was the equivalent of some weird sort of social storm, and also a bit of a pyramid scheme. It was just the overall system that was insane from a human perspective (even granted it had some very nutty people at the top, but that's part of the problem too, how it got that way). "How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer" http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."
So, sure, every aspect of school that does not work to the child's obvious benefit is "regretted", as you outline examples of how it is regrettable that how children are taught has no relation to how kids learn or how they need to learn to be active participants in a democracy.
But the end result is to turn schools into a form of prison at this point. Granted, children are not physically gassed or worked to death like in Nazi concentration camps (even if some do die from the mental equivalent, as demonstrated by the high teen suicide rate or even now the obesity rate, probably partly from stress).
As Gatto suggests here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
So, really, you've just made Gatto's point. And perhaps you've reflexively done an ad hominem attack on him so you did not have to think about what he says in detail? S
is, beyond what you suggest, also, from: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also: "Sustainable Education" http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1 "Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate. There are now nearly two million people home educating. The first charter school was started in 1991. Now there are 2500 of them! And there are over 7500 additional alternatives in our database and many thousands more we have yet to discover. All of these fall in the general category of "learner-centered" approaches. We list many of them in our book, The Almanac of Education Choices. These people are steadfastly OPPOSED to the governmental thrust for more "standardization" and testing. "
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.
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...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm """ PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more) SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests. THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart—unless a culprit runs afoul of the media—an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This i
These are not the bold predictions they might have been thirty years ago, when you can point to working hardware and a history of falling prices...
As is written there: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery "With further overall employment reduction in 2009 not reflected in the chart above (changes since March 2009), there ultimately was zero net job creation in the 2000-2009 decade in the USA. This is even worse than it seems, given US population growth during that time with no new jobs created for them, creating a shortage of about 18 million jobs relative to previous decades by one estimate by Paul Krugman if this ground was to be made up in five years.[20] To understand such a calculation from another perspective, looking at the chart above, about 17 million net new jobs were created in the 1990-1999 decade relative to population growth. Assuming continuing population growth at about the same rate, for the USA to return to the level of employment of 2000 relative to population, starting from a lost decade, overall about 34 million net new jobs would need to be created by the end of the 2010-2019 decade (new jobs beyond replacements for jobs that are normally lost). Extending Paul Krugman's calculation would only require about 29 million jobs be created during that decade. By whatever calculation, this vast "jobs deficit", completely unpredicted by almost all mainstream economists, is causing "leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth."[21]"
Do you really believe our society can produce 30 million net new jobs over the next decade in any healthy way? Given that robotics and computing continue to progress? Who is making a more "bold, unsubstantiated prediction" here, you or I? You're asking everyone to discount all the obvious trends, including thirty years of stagnant real wages for most workers in the USA...
Business cycles do exist, but this overall trend goes far beyond them...
You're right, I see that it was someone else originally wrote: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33503164 "I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer."
And then I had misinterpred the first three words of this point you made, as I think a few other people who replied did as well: "From his comment, we wanted anyone with a EE degree, but would have been willing to pay an extra $20k if needed to hire someone with a PhD, rather then the normal rejecting of that candidate for being overqualified/too expensive."
So, that may explain all the replies you think did not read your comments, people interpreting when you wrote "we wanted" not in quotations to mean you were talking about your own company.
So, that first post, mixed with your later items, was what I was mostly responding to, not the internship point. Sorry for the confusion on my end.
Still, I sincerely tried to help as best as I could. And you reject that and call it a rant and a dump. Ask yourself, is that possibly in any way connected to even just internship hiring issues?:-)
Do you not care that I even agreed with the difficulty you raise about finding qualified interns and quoted a reputable person in CA you could easily go talk to if you wanted to do something big about the problem finding US citizens who know a lot about math and science? Someone who testified to Congress on this trend as far back as the 1990s?
Still, is declaring something an "internship" itself just another way to save money? Are you really, sincerely, setting up that "internship" just out of the goodness of your heart to help others and give back to the industry? Or is in just another way to get cheap labor? Or in other ways save money on hiring costs (like profiling candidates as to a work ethic or fitting into your company culture before you permanently hire them)?
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
Anyway, the ironic thing is an entire computer industry trying to automate jobs away to save money is caught up in a sort of either ignorance or denial of what it is doing... Why can not everyone just accept that, and say, as a business person, you want to get the most work for the least money? That's another part of the H1B problem, because it may force otherwise honest people to start skirting the truth in order to justify and then stand by the paperwork that there were no possible US candidates (even if they might cost a lot more or you would have to pay relocation to CA, so hundreds of thousands of dollars up front perhaps to buy someone an equivalent house to a Midwest one).
So, is the H1B program in part just to deal with crazy CA property values?:-) Or similar programs for importing guest workers? A truly free market would say, look if the people in CA can't raise salaries enough to deal with a crazy property market they helped cause, then tech investment dollars should flow to the Des Moines, or Pittsburgh, or Albany, or Raleigh (or abroad) rather than stay in CA where it is too expensive to buy a house... And some of them are... But the H1B system just papers over that fundamental problem. It says, well, we can get someone overall for less by importing an indentured servant for a few years, skimming the cream off of some other country's crop. Anyway, discussing the strengths an
Did you think about paying relocation for someone from, say, the midwest to come to CA? (Yes, I know with the price of CA homes that would have been really expensive, to pay the difference on an equivalent house in a walkable community.) Did you consider paying a lot more, like double? Did you consider just hiring someone with more experience (also for more money)? Did you consider investing in training someone? Did you consider relocating your company to a place with a lower cost of living. Apparently not, and probably why, because it costs more.
So, basically, you took the (perceived) cheaper route. Now, as a business person, than makes sense. Even globally it may make sense (to help other countries bootstrap themselves up in high technology). And sure, maybe all your perceived competitors are doing the same, so you feel compelled to follow suit, even if you did not want to. But, from the perspective of the near-term prosperity of the USA, what our legislators did to support you in doing that is extremely problematical (to use nice words.:-)
When a run down house in a town in CA costs US$400K, then US$80K a year is essentially poverty wages. Kids out of college are getting US$50K to start. Why is it that someone with a grad degree is then only give a bit more? Also, programmers can range 1000X in terms of productivity (some programmers are even negative in their contributions), so the entire notion of tying pay to performance is very broken in the field.
Or you can look at how SAS does things to be rated as the #1 place to work in corporate America (although they are not open source, which is the biggest perk for most good software developers over convenient concierge-type services).
Anyway, if local people don't want to work for your company, you might ask why? Has it gotten a bad reputation somehow (long hours, stressful arguments)? Or is it an outstanding place to work that has suffered from a lack of a good reputation getting spread around? Etc. Why is not word of mouth bringing you in more qualified people than you have slots for?
In any case, you'll get more out of your "resources" if you tell everyone to get their vitamin D levels checked (as vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of indoors work): http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And if you want to understand the social dynamics behind the truth of some of what you say (that indeed most kids coming out of US schools are effectively illiterate in math and science), go talk to Dr. David Goodstein at Caltech (previously the vice-Provost): http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It acc
I agree with you on the value of diversity. Still, one can also have diversity with a lot less work when code is shared and people are cooperating. I talk about that here: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery "Increasing competition in a society will greatly increase the amount of work to be done. As Alfie Kohn and others like Richard Stallman have pointed out, direct competition in a society is overall a reducer of abundance. While there is a lot of value in a diversity of services and products and friendly competition can help increase that, once people agree on the value of a service or product, cooperation by people in producing the good or service is almost always more efficient than directly competing with each other. Competition creates wasted duplicate efforts, incompatible standards, confusion among potential consumers, excessive advertising, and even direct sabotage; all of that dysfunction creates more work for everyone though. While it may make sense to have a variety of, say, cameras, whether the groups producing those cameras cooperate or compete in discussing new innovations is the issue. The free software movement, with groups working on different software products but sharing code and ideas under free licenses shows an alternative to commercial product groups working in secrecy and isolation and defending their finished proprietary products with patents and copyrights from those who would copy them or improve them independently. Law Professor James Boyle talks about aspects of this in his free book "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind"."
Would we really have so many redundant languages and redundant code libraries and redundant products if people were not competeting so much with each other and were sharing code? I think we might have more mass customization (like everyone may tweek their GNU/Linux system), but I think we would also have common systems people were working from. Even with the variety of GNU/Linux distros out there (but really, how many are big? Debian/Ubuntu? RedHat? Suse? etc.) they share a lot of common tools and also they are such a small number of mainlines compared to, say, the number of times cameras have been reinvented over the years...
Still, this is to say nothing against an individual who wants to learn re-inventing something. That can be a great way to learn, and a very enjoyable thing. But when we talk about how a productive community should be working, that is different.
Anyway, my key point is mostly that a focus on creating tech jobs misses the big picture of how our economy is changing due to the proliferation of all this advanced technology. Is not the point of all this fancy technology to reduce hiring in the Tech sector?:-) As well as every other sector? But then we act like unemployment is a bad thing. It would not be such a bad thing if we considered it a human right to have a "basic income" (social security for everyone) for everyone to be entitled to some of the fruits of the industrial commons, whether they "work" at a paying job or not. As was suggested in 1964: http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm "Chapter seven is perhaps the most powerful chapter of the book. It offers compelling evidence of dietary causes for most of the common health problems faced by Americans. Then Dr. Fuhrman explains how diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, chronic headaches, and autoimmune disease. He relates true stories of patients (who gave permission to be named) who have been able to stop their antihypertensive, antianginal, and antidiabetic drugs; patients who have experienced gradual elimination of their chest pain; patients who have been able to stop their use of toxic drugs for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. I was able to review the charts of Dr. Fuhrman's patients and verified that he is accurately presenting these results."
I predict we'll see continually increasing unemployment (short of massive government intervention in make-work ways). To cope with massive unemployment, we need a new economic paradigm (some mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence in stronger face-to-face communities).
Frankly, as programmer who's been working with computers for 30 years or so, I can confidently say that the business world would have much software if there was a lot less paid business app developers (who seem mostly to make work for each other).:-)
How many basic accounting packages do we really need? You write a modular one in Lisp or Smalltalk, and you are good to go for the entire globe. Lisp plus some libraries under version control basically is your accounting package. If you need something fancy, you write a module to do it and load it in dynamically. And since the authors get abstraction, and also are just great developers, the system is designed to be easily expandable... There can be a 1000X difference in programmer productivity, not even including negative productivity... A handful of poor programmers pushes everyone towards dumbed down tools and just creates lots of work maintaining poorly thought out systems.
Note, that you may well want a domain specific language written in Lisp, or domain specific classes written and accessed in Smalltalk for non-programmers to use, but essentially, that is still just Lisp and Smalltalk. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069786 ""Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun"
Still, I think everyone should know something about programming, just to be an informed citizen, and programming is fun, and people should have choices, and sometimes new breakthrough stuff comes from diverse experiments, and there is a lot of very useful programming everyone can do in areas of educational simulation, scientific modeling, and such. I'm all for everyone coding. I'm all for a diversity of approaches.
But the fact is, I have not seen that much stuff that is better than Lisp and Smalltalk (OK, maybe with C or Forth translated from Lisp and Smalltalk for device drivers...:-) Really, whatever one can say about the wonders of almost any language, you can just write in Lisp and translate to those languages (and build tools to do debugging). And those are old, old languages. But they are great languages (and environments) that can make people far more productive, and they have been able to do that for decades. Now we have stuff like Eclipse, that lets people create boiler plate Java code even faster -- but why do you really want to pollute the universe with endless boilerplate code that someone has to comb through looking for gotchas? So, more makework...
Note, by Lisp I mean a whole family of related programming languages that have easily adopted new paradigms... And by Smalltalk, I mean, well Smalltalk.:-) And if 90% of programmers can't get Lisp syntax, well, back to my first point, the word would be better off without them doing business development. Note: you obviously want programmers who can both code and get the human and social side of things, so again, winnow programmer employment further and you are better off with less work being made for each other. Less code written is less code that needs to be maintained, tested, or debugged.
Instead, we have Java and C# as coding for those who can't get abstractions... But it becomes a standard everyone is stuck programming in, as a leveler. Just silly, really, but it bulks up employment numbers
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html "Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression."
Slashdot Mirror
"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: ... 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. ..."
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_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...
Why do you assume I vote Republican? Actually, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in the last election, and Nader in years before, mostly as a protest vote. :-) I'm in a "safe state" so I knew the Democrats would win in those states anyway.
Do you see how your assumptions could be part of the problem? Also, Democrats, like Republicans, are a big part of the problem... Democrats are not engaging with these bigger trends. Obama is a mostly a corporatist and upholder of a broken status-quo relative to what we could see. Look at who he put in charge of US economic policy (people from Wall Street). Look who he put in charge of "education" reform (people from big schools). He's also a militarist -- within three days, he used military killer robots (drones) in a way that lead to the (claimed) deaths of three children.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Obama-Finds-Predator-Drones-Hilarious-1171
Solutions to moving beyond that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
You're not engaging with the factual information I presented (as factual as stuff is from the US Government http://www.shadowstats.com/ ). Why? Is it perhaps just too unsettling to think about the implications? Those jobs and population figures are not much of calculations as a statement of facts as presented by the US government and a simple prediction of population growth the next decade based on the last decade.
It's true there are retirements coming up, but that is not going to fix the big trend. And in the short term (next decade) many people in the USA lost much of their retirement nest egg and are working longer, either postponing retirement or going back to work after the had retirement (incidentally, depressing wages).
So, again, where are thirty million net new jobs going to come from in the USA over the next decade?
Are you suggesting people stop trying to make sense of macroeconomic trends? Sure, doing volunteer stuff etc. is great, and I do, but you also just can't stick your head in the sand. Also, how can anyone start a business and hope for success in it if the fundamental dynamics of the economy are changing and they are not aware of it?
Also, if you look at the basic demographics of what is going on in the world (see Hans Rosling), you will see that "foreigners" are rapidly increasing in their ability to produce their own stuff. The USA has very little relative advantage anymore, the way it did when it was the only major intact economy after WWII.
http://www.gapminder.org/
http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
And, you'd also see that even China is automating to cut labor costs...
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
Anyway, you might want to think about how you are filtering, spinning, and assuming information here.
The good news is, this all helps me get a better sense of how to present things, so thanks.
Look at the numbers again and you will see that those numbers are less that population growth. Population growth alone in the 2000s was about 26 million people. One can expect the same again for the 2010s. We're talking two decades worth of jobs that have to be created by 2020, so, about 30 million new jobs for 50 million new people.
It's true that people are still employed in construction, even with the recent bust:
"Construction Employment Trends Short and Long Term"
http://www.tauc.org/toolsResources/industry/index.cfm?fa=article&id=1411
But for how much longer will we need all these people in the construction trades given new designs that are easier to assemble or involve automation? For example, people are working on huge robots that essentially print houses:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=57
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=900
You're reciting economic dogma but not looking at the points on limited demand and the successive replacement of agriculture, manufacturing, and now *services*.
Where are these 30 million net new jobs to come from, especially as robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks takes even more jobs? Not only do you need to replace all the newspaper jobs we're losing, but then you have to invent 30 million new jobs in addition to those. Sure, we may well see some few millions of green jobs for a time, but what else? And at what point do most people say enough is enough as far as too much stuff and too many supersized meals that are killing them?
Anyway, your (mainstream) prediction that the system will just correct itself when I can point to trends that are replacing vast numbers of humans just seems like wishful thinking to me.
In order for mainstream economists wishful thinking to be true (these are the same people who missed predicting the Great Recession, btw), three things need to hold true, all of which are false:
* wealth from improved productivity needs to be widely distributed so it can be spent and not just stashed away or put in a "casino economy" of complex financial gambling (like with derivatives), but thirty years of US statistics says it has been getting more concentrated;
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
* demand needs to rise as fast as productivity, but Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests people at some point turn to non-materialistic pursuits that are generally easy to satisfy;
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1519221/Researchers-Say-Happiness-Costs-75k
* robots and computers need to never be able to be as smart and capable as most people, but we are already seeing that now in many limited domains (where the technology is smarter and more reliable than people at many complex tasks).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs
This is a phase change in our society. But, by so many people denying it and engaging in wishful thinking, reforms are being delayed, and suffering increased. Possible good solutions include a mix of a "basic income", democratic resource-based planning, a gift economy, and/or improved local subsistence in strong local communities.
What would it take to convince you (or most people) that wealth is concentrating, demand for stuff and paid services is limited, and/or robots and computers are getting better and better at replacing most human workers?
"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?
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"
From the article: "This work was funded by Grant No. N00014-08-1-0696 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR)."
How should your tax dollars be at work? Funding irony, or funding intrinsic mutual security by creating abundance for all?
That said, the robots sound cool ("the road to hell is paved with cool technology"?), and I liked that the article also said: "While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers. "We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," explained Arkin. "We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems.""
So consider my first link (and essay by me) as a suggestion towards that end...
I just finished reading (sadly) the last book the late James P. Hogan wrote (Migration) and central to the plot is the fact that a robot might be easily deceived and put to nefarious purposes because it did not understand the notion of deception. So, a complex issue. Still, I'd expect one can understand deception and illusion without engaging in it?
Also, again from the article: "A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception -- there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception."
They have left out a key third possibility -- there has to be no other way to resolve the conflict than competition, which is rarely (or perhaps even never?) the case. See also:
"No contest: the case against competition" by Alfie Kohn
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
I think you are still missing Gatto's main point here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."
And the same might be said about Chomsky.
If there are no "evil goals" behind the school system, then what about this? ... The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among wor
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done. The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different. In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
"In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers."
Well, if we can move past your medical diagnosis of Gatto's mental state, you have just restated his main point.
He never says teachers are all evil. Most of them are, like you say, well-meaning. What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it and how it operates as a system (relative to our current needs -- he says it may have been a reasonable tradeoff when it was invented in Prussia in the 1800s).
To cite the most famous example of authoritarianism gone to extremes, was Nazi Germany filled with 100% evil Germans to make it work? No, most Germans were well-meaning people, and nice to their children and neighbors, very patriotic, and so on. It was the equivalent of some weird sort of social storm, and also a bit of a pyramid scheme. It was just the overall system that was insane from a human perspective (even granted it had some very nutty people at the top, but that's part of the problem too, how it got that way).
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."
So, sure, every aspect of school that does not work to the child's obvious benefit is "regretted", as you outline examples of how it is regrettable that how children are taught has no relation to how kids learn or how they need to learn to be active participants in a democracy.
But the end result is to turn schools into a form of prison at this point. Granted, children are not physically gassed or worked to death like in Nazi concentration camps (even if some do die from the mental equivalent, as demonstrated by the high teen suicide rate or even now the obesity rate, probably partly from stress).
As Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
So, really, you've just made Gatto's point. And perhaps you've reflexively done an ad hominem attack on him so you did not have to think about what he says in detail? S
is, beyond what you suggest, also, from: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
See also:
"Sustainable Education"
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
"Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate. There are now nearly two million people home educating. The first charter school was started in 1991. Now there are 2500 of them! And there are over 7500 additional alternatives in our database and many thousands more we have yet to discover. All of these fall in the general category of "learner-centered" approaches. We list many of them in our book, The Almanac of Education Choices. These people are steadfastly OPPOSED to the governmental thrust for more "standardization" and testing. "
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...
Considering how much this one guy has done on a shoestring: http://www.khanacademy.org/
The whole paradigm is broken, see my collection of links starting here:
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.html
And also:
"Academic Bankruptcy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15taylor.html?_r=1
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart—unless a culprit runs afoul of the media—an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This i
which is dumbing us down: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Give them more money, and as NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, they will only do that job better... We need to change the whole paradigm...
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.holtgws.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGgeGHU1Bs
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://books.google.com/books?id=CX8huSU0n8AC
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
http://www.diseaseproof.com/
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
And this site has some great videos to improve your knife skills for using wicked sharp knives to cut up your veggies:
http://www.kitchenonfire.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhfAE6McrM
And don't forget your vitamin D, which you almost certainly won't get enough of from food:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Tell, you what, if you come over to my house in twenty years, I'll have my robot fetch you a beer if robots can't fetch people beers. :-) That's a safe bet for me, because they already can: :-) :-)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/07/2230255/Willow-Garage-Robot-Fetches-Beer-Engineers-Rejoice
(I know, that really makes no sense, and it isn't a real offer, but I hoped it was funny anyway.
See also a list of what robot can do currently:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
These are not the bold predictions they might have been thirty years ago, when you can point to working hardware and a history of falling prices...
As is written there:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"With further overall employment reduction in 2009 not reflected in the chart above (changes since March 2009), there ultimately was zero net job creation in the 2000-2009 decade in the USA. This is even worse than it seems, given US population growth during that time with no new jobs created for them, creating a shortage of about 18 million jobs relative to previous decades by one estimate by Paul Krugman if this ground was to be made up in five years.[20] To understand such a calculation from another perspective, looking at the chart above, about 17 million net new jobs were created in the 1990-1999 decade relative to population growth. Assuming continuing population growth at about the same rate, for the USA to return to the level of employment of 2000 relative to population, starting from a lost decade, overall about 34 million net new jobs would need to be created by the end of the 2010-2019 decade (new jobs beyond replacements for jobs that are normally lost). Extending Paul Krugman's calculation would only require about 29 million jobs be created during that decade. By whatever calculation, this vast "jobs deficit", completely unpredicted by almost all mainstream economists, is causing "leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth."[21]"
Do you really believe our society can produce 30 million net new jobs over the next decade in any healthy way? Given that robotics and computing continue to progress? Who is making a more "bold, unsubstantiated prediction" here, you or I? You're asking everyone to discount all the obvious trends, including thirty years of stagnant real wages for most workers in the USA...
Business cycles do exist, but this overall trend goes far beyond them...
You're right, I see that it was someone else originally wrote:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1779942&cid=33503164
"I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer."
And then I had misinterpred the first three words of this point you made, as I think a few other people who replied did as well: "From his comment, we wanted anyone with a EE degree, but would have been willing to pay an extra $20k if needed to hire someone with a PhD, rather then the normal rejecting of that candidate for being overqualified/too expensive."
So, that may explain all the replies you think did not read your comments, people interpreting when you wrote "we wanted" not in quotations to mean you were talking about your own company.
So, that first post, mixed with your later items, was what I was mostly responding to, not the internship point. Sorry for the confusion on my end.
Still, I sincerely tried to help as best as I could. And you reject that and call it a rant and a dump. Ask yourself, is that possibly in any way connected to even just internship hiring issues? :-)
Do you not care about vitamin D deficiency, caused in part by too much indoors work, making your workers sicker and less productive?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
Do you not care that I even agreed with the difficulty you raise about finding qualified interns and quoted a reputable person in CA you could easily go talk to if you wanted to do something big about the problem finding US citizens who know a lot about math and science? Someone who testified to Congress on this trend as far back as the 1990s?
Still, is declaring something an "internship" itself just another way to save money? Are you really, sincerely, setting up that "internship" just out of the goodness of your heart to help others and give back to the industry? Or is in just another way to get cheap labor? Or in other ways save money on hiring costs (like profiling candidates as to a work ethic or fitting into your company culture before you permanently hire them)?
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
Anyway, the ironic thing is an entire computer industry trying to automate jobs away to save money is caught up in a sort of either ignorance or denial of what it is doing... Why can not everyone just accept that, and say, as a business person, you want to get the most work for the least money? That's another part of the H1B problem, because it may force otherwise honest people to start skirting the truth in order to justify and then stand by the paperwork that there were no possible US candidates (even if they might cost a lot more or you would have to pay relocation to CA, so hundreds of thousands of dollars up front perhaps to buy someone an equivalent house to a Midwest one).
So, is the H1B program in part just to deal with crazy CA property values? :-) Or similar programs for importing guest workers? A truly free market would say, look if the people in CA can't raise salaries enough to deal with a crazy property market they helped cause, then tech investment dollars should flow to the Des Moines, or Pittsburgh, or Albany, or Raleigh (or abroad) rather than stay in CA where it is too expensive to buy a house... And some of them are... But the H1B system just papers over that fundamental problem. It says, well, we can get someone overall for less by importing an indentured servant for a few years, skimming the cream off of some other country's crop. Anyway, discussing the strengths an
Did you think about paying relocation for someone from, say, the midwest to come to CA? (Yes, I know with the price of CA homes that would have been really expensive, to pay the difference on an equivalent house in a walkable community.) Did you consider paying a lot more, like double? Did you consider just hiring someone with more experience (also for more money)? Did you consider investing in training someone? Did you consider relocating your company to a place with a lower cost of living. Apparently not, and probably why, because it costs more.
So, basically, you took the (perceived) cheaper route. Now, as a business person, than makes sense. Even globally it may make sense (to help other countries bootstrap themselves up in high technology). And sure, maybe all your perceived competitors are doing the same, so you feel compelled to follow suit, even if you did not want to. But, from the perspective of the near-term prosperity of the USA, what our legislators did to support you in doing that is extremely problematical (to use nice words. :-)
When a run down house in a town in CA costs US$400K, then US$80K a year is essentially poverty wages. Kids out of college are getting US$50K to start. Why is it that someone with a grad degree is then only give a bit more? Also, programmers can range 1000X in terms of productivity (some programmers are even negative in their contributions), so the entire notion of tying pay to performance is very broken in the field.
Anyway, with your focus on money and "resources", for another perspective, you might want to consider rethinking how you motivate people in your company. Some pointers to get you started:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/fa4459793c6b7ed3
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/04fbdf60ad463dbb
Or you can look at how SAS does things to be rated as the #1 place to work in corporate America (although they are not open source, which is the biggest perk for most good software developers over convenient concierge-type services).
Anyway, if local people don't want to work for your company, you might ask why? Has it gotten a bad reputation somehow (long hours, stressful arguments)? Or is it an outstanding place to work that has suffered from a lack of a good reputation getting spread around? Etc. Why is not word of mouth bringing you in more qualified people than you have slots for?
In any case, you'll get more out of your "resources" if you tell everyone to get their vitamin D levels checked (as vitamin D deficiency is an occupational hazard of indoors work):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And if you want to understand the social dynamics behind the truth of some of what you say (that indeed most kids coming out of US schools are effectively illiterate in math and science), go talk to Dr. David Goodstein at Caltech (previously the vice-Provost):
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It acc
I agree with you on the value of diversity. Still, one can also have diversity with a lot less work when code is shared and people are cooperating. I talk about that here:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"Increasing competition in a society will greatly increase the amount of work to be done. As Alfie Kohn and others like Richard Stallman have pointed out, direct competition in a society is overall a reducer of abundance. While there is a lot of value in a diversity of services and products and friendly competition can help increase that, once people agree on the value of a service or product, cooperation by people in producing the good or service is almost always more efficient than directly competing with each other. Competition creates wasted duplicate efforts, incompatible standards, confusion among potential consumers, excessive advertising, and even direct sabotage; all of that dysfunction creates more work for everyone though. While it may make sense to have a variety of, say, cameras, whether the groups producing those cameras cooperate or compete in discussing new innovations is the issue. The free software movement, with groups working on different software products but sharing code and ideas under free licenses shows an alternative to commercial product groups working in secrecy and isolation and defending their finished proprietary products with patents and copyrights from those who would copy them or improve them independently. Law Professor James Boyle talks about aspects of this in his free book "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind"."
Would we really have so many redundant languages and redundant code libraries and redundant products if people were not competeting so much with each other and were sharing code? I think we might have more mass customization (like everyone may tweek their GNU/Linux system), but I think we would also have common systems people were working from. Even with the variety of GNU/Linux distros out there (but really, how many are big? Debian/Ubuntu? RedHat? Suse? etc.) they share a lot of common tools and also they are such a small number of mainlines compared to, say, the number of times cameras have been reinvented over the years...
Still, this is to say nothing against an individual who wants to learn re-inventing something. That can be a great way to learn, and a very enjoyable thing. But when we talk about how a productive community should be working, that is different.
Anyway, my key point is mostly that a focus on creating tech jobs misses the big picture of how our economy is changing due to the proliferation of all this advanced technology. Is not the point of all this fancy technology to reduce hiring in the Tech sector? :-) As well as every other sector? But then we act like unemployment is a bad thing. It would not be such a bad thing if we considered it a human right to have a "basic income" (social security for everyone) for everyone to be entitled to some of the fruits of the industrial commons, whether they "work" at a paying job or not. As was suggested in 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
That's the big widely unrecognized issue here...
"would have much software" -> "would have much better software"
Better than sick care is true wellness: http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm
"Chapter seven is perhaps the most powerful chapter of the book. It offers compelling evidence of dietary causes for most of the common health problems faced by Americans. Then Dr. Fuhrman explains how diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, chronic headaches, and autoimmune disease. He relates true stories of patients (who gave permission to be named) who have been able to stop their antihypertensive, antianginal, and antidiabetic drugs; patients who have experienced gradual elimination of their chest pain; patients who have been able to stop their use of toxic drugs for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. I was able to review the charts of Dr. Fuhrman's patients and verified that he is accurately presenting these results."
His diet is killing him.
Something I put together: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
I predict we'll see continually increasing unemployment (short of massive government intervention in make-work ways). To cope with massive unemployment, we need a new economic paradigm (some mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence in stronger face-to-face communities).
Frankly, as programmer who's been working with computers for 30 years or so, I can confidently say that the business world would have much software if there was a lot less paid business app developers (who seem mostly to make work for each other). :-)
How many basic accounting packages do we really need? You write a modular one in Lisp or Smalltalk, and you are good to go for the entire globe. Lisp plus some libraries under version control basically is your accounting package. If you need something fancy, you write a module to do it and load it in dynamically. And since the authors get abstraction, and also are just great developers, the system is designed to be easily expandable... There can be a 1000X difference in programmer productivity, not even including negative productivity... A handful of poor programmers pushes everyone towards dumbed down tools and just creates lots of work maintaining poorly thought out systems.
Note, that you may well want a domain specific language written in Lisp, or domain specific classes written and accessed in Smalltalk for non-programmers to use, but essentially, that is still just Lisp and Smalltalk. See:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069786
""Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun"
Still, I think everyone should know something about programming, just to be an informed citizen, and programming is fun, and people should have choices, and sometimes new breakthrough stuff comes from diverse experiments, and there is a lot of very useful programming everyone can do in areas of educational simulation, scientific modeling, and such. I'm all for everyone coding. I'm all for a diversity of approaches.
But the fact is, I have not seen that much stuff that is better than Lisp and Smalltalk (OK, maybe with C or Forth translated from Lisp and Smalltalk for device drivers... :-) Really, whatever one can say about the wonders of almost any language, you can just write in Lisp and translate to those languages (and build tools to do debugging). And those are old, old languages. But they are great languages (and environments) that can make people far more productive, and they have been able to do that for decades. Now we have stuff like Eclipse, that lets people create boiler plate Java code even faster -- but why do you really want to pollute the universe with endless boilerplate code that someone has to comb through looking for gotchas? So, more makework...
Note, by Lisp I mean a whole family of related programming languages that have easily adopted new paradigms... And by Smalltalk, I mean, well Smalltalk. :-) And if 90% of programmers can't get Lisp syntax, well, back to my first point, the word would be better off without them doing business development. Note: you obviously want programmers who can both code and get the human and social side of things, so again, winnow programmer employment further and you are better off with less work being made for each other. Less code written is less code that needs to be maintained, tested, or debugged.
Instead, we have Java and C# as coding for those who can't get abstractions... But it becomes a standard everyone is stuck programming in, as a leveler. Just silly, really, but it bulks up employment numbers
At least everyone in Cuba have access to medical care.
http://www.hr676.org/
On your points:
"Go to work,"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"send your kids to school."
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/
"Follow fashion,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-consumerism
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
"act normal."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Walk on the pavements,"
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about (shows how unusual that is)
"watch T.V."
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
http://www.tvturnoff.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Save for your old age,"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
"obey the law."
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
"Repeat after me: I am free."
http://www.amctv.com/videos/the-prisoner-1960s-video/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Any more? :-)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/researchObesity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Though food plays a big part, too:
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
"Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression."
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml