So, these killer robots are already being used within the USA. It is claimed they are unarmed for now (ignoring that the military could fly them into things just like Joe Stack did).
These incremental small things are just more steps to Skynet or worse. Why object to a few unarmed test drone flights in US border states? Such a big fuss about nothing, and the borders need to be inspected to prevent terrorists from coming in and taking our freedoms and lives and property. And, then, well, if we're guarding the borders, it would be foolish to not have the things armed, in case the next Joe Stack tries to fly in from Canada or Mexico, or if they found other real trouble and there was no one else around. And because they are so useful and give us such a sense of security, of course we need more of them... And with so many in the air, if they were more automated, they would be more reliable and one soldier could run more at once, more like an air traffic controller than a pilot... And since people make mistakes, well, why not automate the traffic control part as the next logical step to securing our airspace? Every step makes sense. Every step has no alternative.
And, most importantly, every step makes profits for somebody somewhere.
"War is a Racket: by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler" http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.... A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."
Major General Butler has some suggestions, but they did not work apparently. So, we may need to make other changes to our overall economic system to remove the profit motive from national security work before it destroys us all. We can move towards a basic income so people don't feel they have to turn to the military just for a basic living (and so anyone who does go into it will be interested in true national security, not a paycheck). Or we can move towards a gift economy, better local subsistence production by 3D printing, or better resource-based planning, or other possibilities. All of these would take the same sorts of technology that goes into Predator drones (like networked communications, advanced materials, computers, image processing, robotics, teamwork, nanotech, and more) and use them for more human ends as well as real mutual intrinsic security, not "security theater".
As Albert Einstein said of nuclear weapons, and is as true or more of smart killer robots: http://www.heartquotes.net/Einstein.html "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watc
If we look at how humans used to live before formal "jobs", like Marshall Sahlins talks about here: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm- there are lots of things humans always want to do, like raise children, sing, dance, explore, commune with nature and the infinite, learn, create new things, comfort the dying, and just hang out with friends and family. So, there would be no shortage of things to do if we get machines to do more of the repetitive scut-work if no one wants to do it voluntarily. We would just be moving full-circle to an older way of life, but with a new technological twist (and longer life spans and bigger dreams).
A major issue is that our current economic system is set up on the assumption that if people don't work, they should not have access to food, shelter, or medical care. But automation and better design reduces the value of most human labor. And, the very dynamic of capitalism produces ever better designs and increased automation. This trend was pointed out in 1964, and, with some ups and downs, is accelerating as computers and robotics and networks and design are increasing in capacity exponentially: http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm """ The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. 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
The irony of military robots is that we are using them to enforce a global economic system that is based on forcing humans to do labor in exchange for the right to consume the fruits of industry. Why not just build robots to do the work directly instead? Why not use global networks to freely share information about how to make the world a better place that works for everyone? The same is true for nuclear missiles intended to fight over oil and land instead of using the same technologies to build nuclear power plants (or solar ones and wind ones) or to create self-replicating space habitats or seasteads for endless new land. We need to start thinking in 21st century terms now that we have 21st century technology. Otherwise, we will likely accidentally kill ourselves with the tools of abundance.
As Albert Einstein said: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Or further: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/nuclear1.htm """ "Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse." """
You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says 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, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.
Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm (A material security which is rapidly eroding for many: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )
I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved): http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm """ Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling? """
Noam Chomsky on defining terrorism
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"International Terrorism: Image and Reality" by Noam Chomsky, notable linguist and self-declared Libertarian Socialist http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm """ There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."... The answers are not difficult to find. We must simply abandon the literal approach and recognize that terrorist acts fall within the canon only when conducted by official enemies. When the US and its clients are the agents, they are acts of retaliation and self-defense in the service of democracy and human rights. Then all becomes clear.... """
Re:A sad irony, and maybe from vitamin D deficienc
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I decided to post the whole thing as a reply here since it is not easily accessible, even though there are a couple of replies there and additional comments by me.
Embedded software developer Joseph Stack allegedly intentionally flew a small plane into government offices in Austin, TX, in an act that has been labeled as domestic terrorism. He cited, among other things, IRS regulations about independent contractor status as well as other issues related to government corruption.
Could his behavior have been partially due to vitamin D deficiency syndrome from indoor work? Could vitamin D deficiency also have contributed to the violent behavior alleged of Hans Reiser or Amy Bishop? And is part of the problem also that Joe Stack was not talking to anyone about any of this to think through real solutions and find positive things to do that, as Mr. Rogers sang, would not hurt himself or anyone else?
Here are some useful resources for preventing more copycat violence to show how there are plenty of alternatives to violence despite Joe Stack's claim otherwise in his manifesto:
As another software developer who has done embedded work, here are some non-programming things I've worked on related to helping people see positive alternatives to violence:
The amazing thing to me is not that stuff like this happens. What is amazing is that it does not happen more often, which is a tribute to most of humanity's basic social nature. In a way, even Joe Stack chose a relatively limited approach; an embedded software developer such as he was could have done far more damage if trying to create general mayhem (he could have tampered with nuclear power plants or medical devices or airplane software). There is also irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology — a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel — and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future.
What do people think and feel about all this?
A sad irony, and maybe from vitamin D deficiency
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I suggested that vitamin D deficiency may be one factor, since inadequate vitamin D is slowly being recognized as an occupational hazard of indoor office work creating all sorts of health risks. Vitamin D deficiency can contribute to depression and schizophrenia, as well as cancer and heart disease, obesity, influenza, autism, and other things. Vitamin D deficiency is now common in the USA, since that many people as we all spend more time indoors at computer screens; here is how to treat it and prevent it: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
I listed other ways there that might help prevent additional such tragedies. There is a deep irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology -- a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel -- and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future. Very sad situation for everyone all around. We need to build a 21st century society socially and economically to go with the 21st century society we now have technically -- otherwise the divide-by-zero errors (from automated production costs falling to zero) and social absurdities and ironies will drag our society down eventually. We were lucky that Joe Stack, an embedded software developer, chose such a limited means (relatively) to express his anger, when you consider how much of our civilization depends on embedded software (from airplanes to nuclear power plants to medical equipment to electronic voting).
You wrote: "That is shifting the burden of proof. What evidence does Gatto have that Rockefeller denied a belief in a Creator or afterlife?"
That's a good point. And Gatto talks in general about a group of individuals with materialist values. You may be quite right to question how they are lumped together.
One thing on Rockefeller: http://www.reformation.org/john-d-rockefeller2.html """ Or is Mr. Rockefeller true to himself in both roles? Does he believe that money is a paramount duty, a sort of higher law justifying law-breaking, falsehood and extortion? Does he believe that the good his gentler self can do by charity, and his wise bequests to hospitals and to colleges with the money thus obtained more than balances the harm its accumulation works? That is, does the end justify the means, in Mr. Rockefeller's opinion, so that he can, unflinchingly face his own record and say, "I am right." Is it the inner consciousness of his own righteousness that keeps him silent before a sneering public?
It may be so. Or it may be that Mr. Rockefeller is one of those double natures that puzzle the psychologist. A man whose soul is built like a ship in air-tight compartments - to use the familiar figure - one devoted to business, one to religion and charity, one to simple living and one to nobody knows what. But between these compartments there are no doors. The life that goes on in compartment one has no relation to compartment two, has no influence upon it. Each is a solitary unit. It is an uncanny explanation; but it may be the true one. """
I think that is why Gatto is probably correct to say that someone like Rockefeller believes in materialist values -- because of the majority of his deeds, not his words. But it is hard to make a simple conclusion, because, according to the religion of capitalism, if we let Social Darwinism work its magic, everyone will be better off materially, and so have more time for spiritual pursuits, and any intervention in the market will bring disaster for all.
The question of ultimate ends is, ultimately, a religious one, as Einstein suggests. People can most likely legitimately disagree on all aspects of that. In a democratic society, we try to come to some consensus about the aspects of those that affect our daily life in positive ways to take communal action in various ways. It's a very messy thing.:-)
Yes, I feel it fair to call schooling a secular religion, along with a "scientism" that is often connected with it. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_religion "Secular religion is a term used to describe ideas, theories or philosophies which involve no spiritual component, yet possess qualities similar to those of a religion. Such qualities include such things as dogma, a system of indoctrination, the prescription of an absolute code of conduct, and unquestioning devotion to a higher authority. The secular religion operates in a secular society by filling a role which would be satisfied by the Church, or another religious authority. Social philosopher Raymond Aron notably uses the term to refer to Communism. Likewise, philosopher of science Michael Ruse has made use of the term in discussing evolution theory. Similarly Thomas Frank suggests that the free market has become a secular religion in the United States."
So, in that sense, Rockefeller had another God he worshiped:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm """ A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice
I know how you can feel as you probably do. I used to think and feel the same things. It has taken years of unlearning the explicit and implicit lesson of schooling and other aspects of our society to see beyond those reactions. It will be a long path -- years. One post or a handful is not going to move you beyond that.
Yes, historically, modern schooling did come out of Prussia, and, for that matter, has a lot to do with two world wars coming out of that area too. We need both good facts and good reasoning tools to reach good conclusions. The history of education is a complex thing interwoven with politics and economics.
And next you then say most parents have no regard for the welfare of their own children, and if they had money to use to take care of their children, they would not. Have you thought that maybe many parents have a tough time taking care of their children because they are poor? And, if everyone around them also got US$20K per child per year, maybe their neighbors could also lend a hand for the few parents who were really dysfunctional. Besides, if we had a decent universal health care system in the US, parents who were that dysfunctional would be getting the other help they need. If you look at a recent article on unemployment, you can see that much of the social dysfunction we see in the USA is connected to employment and wealth issues: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future
Do you have any evidence to back up all your suggestion that most parents would give their children a crappy education? Are they really getting a non-crappy education if they live in a poor area? Do you have any first hand knowledge of homeschooling? Have you even researched any of that? Are you holding yourself up as an ideal product of schooling if you have not researched those things but are making such strong comments on them?
A starting point, based on research studies, consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling """ Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting. Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously mos
Wow, I had never heard of "Special Agent Oso" that I remember. Creepy. Still, we will do better in a democracy by creating alternatives than by censoring. We need to make it easier for parents to find better media alternatives, and better non-media alternatives to having their kids immersed in such things.
You're right about early indoctrination. Although, it's also true that all education is a form of indoctrination in some sense. The issue is mainly, what values and habits and assumptions are we passing on? And that's something every person in our society should reflect on (and no one is perfect, of course). I grew up on 1970s stuff like Sealab 2020, Mr. Rogers, The Magic Garden, New Zoo Review, Star Trek, Electric Company, the old Sesame Street, Yogi and his Friends, and so on, and they (hopefully) shaped my values in positive ways, along with many other influences from books, individuals, and organizations (including some positive aspects of schools and teachers).
Here are two books co-written by the same educator (Diane E Levin) which talk about the problems resulting from an unhealthy alliance between toy makers and media makers in the 1980s that displaced a lot of 1970s children's media (especially since media regulation in the USA under the "family values" era of Roland Reagan), one about the problems mostly boys face (locked into violent play) and one about the problems mostly girls face (locked into sexualized roles): http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
But what you link to moves in yet another direction, acquiescence to continual intimate surveillance, like in Orwell's 1984. Some of this may not be intentional by the authors as just a reflection of changing cultural norms powered by other things. A related slashdot article from just now: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/075223/The-Surreal-World-of-Chatroulette
One can sometimes read malice where there was just ignorance or difference or change. Still, often media is both a message and has other messages embedded in it reflecting the norms of the people who pay a lot of money to produce it.
Here is a related item on thinking about media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck "How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is a political analysis book, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, published in Chile in 1971. It is seen as a pioneering work on cultural imperialism. Written in the form of essay (or as a decolonization manual, as described by the authors[1]), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It's considered a key work of its genre, mainly because it is one of the first social studies of two broad subjects: entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the problem of children's literature, meaning by this the analysis of cultural products which have children as main targets.[2]"
Another example is how Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory celebrates capitalism, secrecy, discarding workers to replace them with automation and half-humans, copyright, patents, not sharing, competition, and a bunch of other negative stuff -- which actually is all good for the conventional (wealthy) movie maker's bottom line.
A lot of people become homeschoolers because they tried for decades to change the system from within.
From Wikipedia:
"John Taylor Gatto (born December 15, 1935) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years and 8 months and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions."
More from there: """
What does the school do with the children? Gatto takes this in "Dumbing Us Down", the following propositions:
1. Makes the the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize, to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, fills almost the whole, "free" time of the children. One sees and hears something, to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence, which require constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
6. It makes it clear to them that they can not hide, because they are always supervised.
"""
Another such person was John Holt, who also tried to improve things for years inside the system. In turn, the have inspired others, like Grace Llewelyn. There are many more. Both boredom and burnout (common in children as well as teachers) can be deadly.
So, this spying with webcams is just a continuation of a general trend for one hundred and fifty years.
Here is a good discussion of the current dynamics of what is going on in the educational world, from an interview with Jerry Mintz on Sustainable Education: "
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."
What does showing up in a church say about someone's core beliefs or actions? Lots of people show up in Church for social networking reasons. Still, it is true that many people consider economic social Darwinism to be justified by the Bible, just like many people used the Bible to justify slavery. http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_slav1.htm
Still, there remains often a divide between science/technology and religion. Albert Einstein had a lot of good things to say about reconciling the two, and I like to interpret Gatto's comments about religion and values in that context (maybe incorrectly, I don't know): http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm """ For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. """
That is a deeper reason about the conflict between many conservatives and public education, as regards to values. Of course, where to draw the line between labelling some things positive values and other things harmful dogma is part of the gradually enlightened human condition. But Einstein has some comments on that at the link above, too.
Of course, compulsory schooling trending towards a police state has now become a secular religion in the USA, as evidenced by these cameras (if true). Even if these allegations on how the cameras are use are false, an environment where children are taught for more than a dozen years that they have no right to privacy at school, they have no right to have private school lockers (requiring a
If John Taylor Gatto is a paranoid lunatic, how was he New York State Teacher of the Year, and how did he teach in NYC public schools for about thirty years? And what does that say about schools? More by him on how the real curriculum of school has nothing to do with the informational content dispensed: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """ Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes. """
Neither he, nor I, would dispute that there are many, many amazing, caring, wonderful human beings who are teachers at all levels, who try their very hardest to help students grow. But the system is set up against that. See:
"Power ÷ 22" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm """ PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more) SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Ed
Another great reason to homeschool: "State Controlled Consciousness" http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html """ Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
But the people who gave us schooling, weren't these wealthy people, they were Utopian thinkers who believed the family and tradition were the greatest obstacles to making a perfect society, a utopia. Every utopia that survived, invents schooling, long before we had universal forced schooling for all these little neighborhood schools. They all invented universal schooling of a homogenous variety in order to reach Utopia.
Now let's shift to the basis of your question which is Rockefeller and Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. These people saw a different kind of utopia. Through solving the problem of production with highspeed machinery they saw material abundance could be created and that want - first of all, of course, they thought they could become supremely wealthy which they did - but secondarily, they weren't beasts, they thought that this material abundance, since they had abandoned a belief in a Creator or an Afterlife, this material abund
I went there for a combination of reasons including boredom, but the biggest single one was one bully who was difficult to deal with. I dealt reasonably successfully with bullies closer to my size, but this one was tougher, captain of the wrestling team, outweighed me by fifty pounds and was two years older, socially connected, showing off to a girlfriend, and so on. It's hard to remember how much in fear for my life I was then (not sure how justified that fear was.) Sometimes walking away towards something better is the best thing you can do when those around you don't or can't help. http://homeschooling.families.com/blog/bullying-may-be-a-good-reason-to-homeschool http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/ My Taekwondo instructor showed me how to kill the bully if he ever assaulted me again, but that did not seem like a good idea for multiple reasons, even assuming what the instructor taught was accurate. And I have since studied Aikido which has better ways to handle violence, including redirecting negative energy in more positive ways. Had the bully been the only thing about high school that was a problem, I might have tried harder to get the school to do something else to deal with the situation rather than my leaving, but in general the coursework was not that challenging. I guess that was also before the time of thinking about filing police reports for assaults in schools. Still, looking back from my forties, I can see many ways that I was more of an ass then (e.g. more of a praise-addicted show off and socially oblivious, if generally well meaning) -- not enough to justify bullying and violence if anything does, but certainly enough not to have enough great social connections to prevent bullying on that scale (others were probably afraid of this guy too, and the usual sad story, his father beat him, etc.). Had the teachers in the two classes we shared -- physics and gym -- not been, respectively, burned-out (taking many breaks outside the classroom) and the head of a wrestling team maybe with a chance at some regional competition that year, things might have been different. And while I was smart enough not to try to kill the bully (what a weight to carry), I was not smart enough to make him into a friend. http://www.wikihow.com/Turn-Enemies-Into-Friends
Still, I had always wanted to go to MIT, and that then did not work out as I had not taken my SATs; Caltech accepted me probably based on my robotics work (including winning a Navy Science Award) and PSATs, but it seemed so far away and expensive and smoggy and earthquakey, so I did not go. So, leaving early essentially cost me a chance to go to MIT, where I had always wanted to go and do robotics. I had never really associated Caltech with robotics (even though I know now they are a great place for that through JPL work).
All the admissions person wanted then at SUNY Stony Brook (leaving in the middle of 11th grade) was proof that you had a B or better GPA. I was disappointed they did not want to see my science fair awards and so on. So, if kids can get into major state universities still, why shunt kids off to community college if they are academically minded? If anything, I think that I would have had an easier time of college starting it even earlier, when I would have been more focused on academics and less on social things and hormones. Maybe academically interested kids should skip high school altogether? Then, by the time hormones kick in, they're off to grad school for their PhD and can date undergrads their age?:-)
With that said, I had a sister who was a residence hall director at SUNY SB, which made it more acceptable (thanks, sis). I also had friends from the chess club and AD&D role playing who had started there the year before. I can see t
The essential part is extracted here by Bill Kerr: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-education-technology-has-failed.html """ Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. """
The good news is, in two to three years, people will be discarding today's fancy Google Android Smartphones, and they will make amazing educational platforms once they are free as hand-me-downs (instead of or in addition to OLPC-like endeavors): http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html No doubt most compulsory schools will try to suppress them. At least they will be usable outside of school.
More on this general idea of wearable computers changing the nature of education (and society) from Theodore Sturgeon written as a sci-fi short story "The Skills of Xanadu" in 1956, and which inspired Ted Nelson and other technology pioneers: http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51
Re:Fixing a problem for a person or a community?
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If kids are animals in that sense, why are so many homeschoolers at the same age so well behaved? No group is perfect, of course, just an alternative thing to consider that the environment may be causing a lot of behavior problems.
From the last: "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."
Bullying will always be with us, but we can reduce it by having a better society with happier and more fulfilled individuals. Wi-Fi on school buses empowering children to do self-directed learning using networked computers is a big step forward in many ways, even if there are downsides as well (vitamin D deficiency from not walking outdoors, obesity from sedentary behavior, some media content is candy or even toxic, and it displaces other good things like face-to-face interaction, relationships with nature, hands-on hobbies, helping others physically, and so on).
Re:Fixing a problem for a person or a community?
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You have a point in protecting others from additional bullying as the next victim. Still, what do you do if the bully is two years older than you, outweighs you by fifty pounds, is trained in some combat skill (martial arts, wrestling, etc.), might be packing a weapon, and is popular with his/her cohort?
Also, many social situations have an element of ambiguity; what if things then become a cycle of feuds and violence, perhaps escalating in various ways?
Some bullies are also often excellent at playing a role in a social hierarchy and making themselves look like the victim, so the consequences of trying to go one-on-one may actually just make you more the victim in some situtaions. Also, you are assuming physical violence, what about verbal assault, especially the kind of stuff that goes on with the toxic girl culture?
Still, another aspect of the bullying problem is that the normal behavior for people being bullied might be to avoid the bully; but compulsory schooling makes that impossible, and bullies take advantage of that, whether in a classroom, in a school yard, or on a bus. And as I said, compulsory schooling is bullying at its core as well (derived from Prussia), http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html and almost every teacher standing up in front of a class is essentially setting an example of how to use authority to bully. Bullying is essentially another negative externality of compulsory schooling. John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the year, goes so far as to say in his writings that the schools become co-dependent on bullies and other violent students to keep the status quo going by keeping children living in fear in various ways. http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle513-20090405-03.html """ School order came to depend upon maintaining good relations with the toughest bullies, covertly affirming their right to prey upon whiners and cry-babies (though never cry-babies from politically potent families). The intellectual dimension was removed from almost all classrooms as a matter of unwritten policy, and since test scores are independent of intellect, those teachers who tried to hold onto mental development as a goal, rather than rote memorization, actually penalized their students and themselves where test scores were the standard of accomplishment. """
Notice how the character of the bus changed when it became a place with more learner-directed learning-and-playing-on-demand instead of just an extension of day prison. (This is not to advocate violent games for behavior control, of course.) But, as with all such reports, there is no acknowledgment of the bigger issues, or apologies for past trauma and pain caused by aspects of schooling and ignored. What about all those years of bus problems? Those are just ignored, even as they are admitted now that there is a possible solution. What about the implications about children having more control over what they do versus behavior problems including aggression? Again, ignored. Also, what are the political implications of schools controlling network access to children and logging everything they do? Also, ignored. What are the implications of some kids having computers and others not? Again, ignored. Granted, it's a short article, my question is not so much about the reporting as the schooling culture it might reflect.
There are negative issues for media like being indoors away from sunlight and vitamin D, issues of being sedentary (even on a bus), issues of problematical content, and issues of other displaced healthy activities. But those need to be weighed against benefits of media for education, creativity, connectedness, and empowerment. And that media landscape continues to change with new technologies or new understanding about health issues.
How about just give the tax money to the parents?
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"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works "
Fixing a problem for a person or a community?
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While good advice for the individual, it doesn't fix the bigger problem of the bully moving on to bully someone else, as well as the bully often being an unhappy person for various reasons (like bullied in their past). There is a lot to be said for well functioning communities too. Example of advice for the community: http://www.beyondbullying.com/whatyoucando.html """ You can help to stop bullying in your school. Check your own behaviour. Refuse to be involved in any bullying situation.
Do not allow someone to be deliberately left out of a group.
Encourage a bullied pupil to join in with your activities or groups. How To Challenge Bullying Behaviour If You See Someone Being Bullied: Do not smile or laugh. Tell a member of staff what is happening. If you can, tell the bully to stop what they are doing. If you can, show the bully that you disapprove of his or her actions. If you do nothing when you see bullying, you may be allowing it to happen, or even encouraging it """
This biggest problem with school bullying is that compulsory schools themselves are usually bullies and demonstrate that all the time by the authoritarian environment. So, you get a lot of what the school intentionally or not teaches. http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
The big media companies are still thinking in 20th century terms of creating scarcity and profiting from standing between people and what they think they want. The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as you gave an example of. The irony goes for media publishers, who want to be compensated every time someone enjoys themselves and prevent others from being happy, rather than everyone just help each other be happy through gifts. But it also goes for things like military robots, used ironically to enforce wage slavery and other related hierarchical social processes instead of building robots to do the work. Or it goes for nuclear missiles, ironically to fight over land with oil on it, instead of building habitats in space for more land, or building power systems on earth from renewables or nuclear energy.
So, this is all part of a widely unrealized irony now that we are in the 21st century of potential abundance, not the 20th of real scarcity anymore. Now that we have so much technology, so many networks, and so much knowledge about better design, we need an economics of abundance for the 21st century. An economy of abundance might involve things like a gift economy (especially for things that are easy to copy), improved local communities with local production (like 3D printing), a basic income for all (like in Alaska, from the shared bounty of collectively owned natural resources), and better accounting, planning, and regulation for resource use given externalities like pollution or social problems caused by various economic strategies.
The alternative is just more artificial scarcity and make-work, which overall seems immoral to me if we understand the alternatives. Of course, given that only some people see this, how do we survive as individuals with one foot in 20th century economics and one foot in 21st century economics (Wikipedia, Debian GNU/Linux, RepRap, etc.)? Coming up with a good transition path to a society built around the assumption of material abundance is the short-term problem we all face.
Humor on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World ""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage."
Seriousness on this, from the (sadly) late Howard Ziss: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html """ However, the unexpected victories - even temporary ones - of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. """
Related: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece "A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues."
My senior thesis in college about 25 years ago was about intelligence and survival, and argued, as you suggest, that there may be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence.
Still, with that said, the problem today is not so much about intelligence as values (or emotions, like my point on Descartes' Error, or Einstein said a similar thing here). http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Here are some letters I wrote to Ray Kurzweil (and someone else put on their site) about why his vision of the singularity reflects his own (capitalist, competitive) values more than any necessity of how it has to be: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
And there may also be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence. But, not before smart machines drive the cost of most human labor to near zero, ending mainstream economics as we know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Drones are already being used in the USA for border patrol (including in my own state):
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=1727873
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/us/08drone.html
So, these killer robots are already being used within the USA. It is claimed they are unarmed for now (ignoring that the military could fly them into things just like Joe Stack did).
These incremental small things are just more steps to Skynet or worse. Why object to a few unarmed test drone flights in US border states? Such a big fuss about nothing, and the borders need to be inspected to prevent terrorists from coming in and taking our freedoms and lives and property. And, then, well, if we're guarding the borders, it would be foolish to not have the things armed, in case the next Joe Stack tries to fly in from Canada or Mexico, or if they found other real trouble and there was no one else around. And because they are so useful and give us such a sense of security, of course we need more of them... And with so many in the air, if they were more automated, they would be more reliable and one soldier could run more at once, more like an air traffic controller than a pilot... And since people make mistakes, well, why not automate the traffic control part as the next logical step to securing our airspace? Every step makes sense. Every step has no alternative.
And, most importantly, every step makes profits for somebody somewhere. ... A few profit - and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war."
"War is a Racket: by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler"
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Major General Butler has some suggestions, but they did not work apparently. So, we may need to make other changes to our overall economic system to remove the profit motive from national security work before it destroys us all. We can move towards a basic income so people don't feel they have to turn to the military just for a basic living (and so anyone who does go into it will be interested in true national security, not a paycheck). Or we can move towards a gift economy, better local subsistence production by 3D printing, or better resource-based planning, or other possibilities. All of these would take the same sorts of technology that goes into Predator drones (like networked communications, advanced materials, computers, image processing, robotics, teamwork, nanotech, and more) and use them for more human ends as well as real mutual intrinsic security, not "security theater".
As Albert Einstein said of nuclear weapons, and is as true or more of smart killer robots:
http://www.heartquotes.net/Einstein.html
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watc
If we look at how humans used to live before formal "jobs", like Marshall Sahlins talks about here:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm-
there are lots of things humans always want to do, like raise children, sing, dance, explore, commune with nature and the infinite, learn, create new things, comfort the dying, and just hang out with friends and family. So, there would be no shortage of things to do if we get machines to do more of the repetitive scut-work if no one wants to do it voluntarily. We would just be moving full-circle to an older way of life, but with a new technological twist (and longer life spans and bigger dreams).
A major issue is that our current economic system is set up on the assumption that if people don't work, they should not have access to food, shelter, or medical care. But automation and better design reduces the value of most human labor. And, the very dynamic of capitalism produces ever better designs and increased automation. This trend was pointed out in 1964, and, with some ups and downs, is accelerating as computers and robotics and networks and design are increasing in capacity exponentially:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. 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
The irony of military robots is that we are using them to enforce a global economic system that is based on forcing humans to do labor in exchange for the right to consume the fruits of industry. Why not just build robots to do the work directly instead? Why not use global networks to freely share information about how to make the world a better place that works for everyone? The same is true for nuclear missiles intended to fight over oil and land instead of using the same technologies to build nuclear power plants (or solar ones and wind ones) or to create self-replicating space habitats or seasteads for endless new land. We need to start thinking in 21st century terms now that we have 21st century technology. Otherwise, we will likely accidentally kill ourselves with the tools of abundance.
As Albert Einstein said:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
Or further:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/nuclear1.htm
"""
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big, unsolved problems of how to organize human work and the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a blessing to mankind, and not a curse."
"""
Or more on how Einstein was more than the disconnected absent minded professor he is made out to be:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/eins-s03.shtml
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
It is not the nukes and drones that may kill us all eventually, it is the unrecognized irony.
You're right, it is somewhat different, but that is how I see part of the link to this camera issue. I am conjecturing that the school staff did not think they were doing anything wrong based on their religious beliefs. Perhaps to their credit, if this was not something prurient, they thought they were upholding the better part of a perceived obligation to be a child's parent and do a difficult thing that needed to be done. This is only creepy and gross and insane if you don't agree with a schoolish religious world view. As Gatto says 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, that is what is perhaps happening here. The school is just trying to do what schools do, only even better, using technology. They are adapting technology others hoped would be liberating and using it to further imprison children. In general, the internet has become a race between transitioning to a better society through abundance, understanding, and community versus being weighed down by chains of technology that allow a police state to easily profile all its citizen based on previous communications. Freedom -- use it or lose it.
Compulsory schooling has gotten worse in that respect over the last few decades, with pressures on it from all directions, whether political correctness, zero-tolerance, liability fears, and reflecting a general climate of fear that has been growing in this country (despite the real evidence showing, say, crime went down in most areas). But it seem quite likely that students learning to leave their rights at the door of the school (or worse, as alleged) has contributed to growing police state aspects in the USA. And, essentially, it is a main part of Gatto's thesis that, as a society, the USA has traded a high degree of liberty, self-reliance, and solid education for some form of dumbed-down apparent material security for many.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(A material security which is rapidly eroding for many:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future )
I especially like Gatto's example here of the hypocrisy of it all (hypocrisy being all too common sometimes when religion is involved):
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"""
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
"""
"International Terrorism: Image and Reality" by Noam Chomsky, notable linguist and self-declared Libertarian Socialist ... The answers are not difficult to find. We must simply abandon the literal approach and recognize that terrorist acts fall within the canon only when conducted by official enemies. When the US and its clients are the agents, they are acts of retaliation and self-defense in the service of democracy and human rights. Then all becomes clear. ...
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
"""
There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
"""
There are many related comments by Chomsky on this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=chomsky+terrorism
Even a book:
"excerpts from the book: The Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky"
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Culture%20of%20Terrorism.html
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Terrorism-Noam-Chomsky/dp/0896083349
More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky's_political_views
And, not by him, but here is an essay by Prof. G. William Domhoff on why non-violence is the only moral and rational approach to social change in the USA:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
I decided to post the whole thing as a reply here since it is not easily accessible, even though there are a couple of replies there and additional comments by me.
Embedded software developer Joseph Stack allegedly intentionally flew a small plane into government offices in Austin, TX, in an act that has been labeled as domestic terrorism. He cited, among other things, IRS regulations about independent contractor status as well as other issues related to government corruption.
Could his behavior have been partially due to vitamin D deficiency syndrome from indoor work? Could vitamin D deficiency also have contributed to the violent behavior alleged of Hans Reiser or Amy Bishop? And is part of the problem also that Joe Stack was not talking to anyone about any of this to think through real solutions and find positive things to do that, as Mr. Rogers sang, would not hurt himself or anyone else?
Here are some useful resources for preventing more copycat violence to show how there are plenty of alternatives to violence despite Joe Stack's claim otherwise in his manifesto:
Treating Disease With Vitamin D
Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy
Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals
Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science
A wombat talks about a global mindshift
TED | Peter Eigen on moving beyond corruption
The Optimism of Uncertainty
Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence
As another software developer who has done embedded work, here are some non-programming things I've worked on related to helping people see positive alternatives to violence:
Possible cures for a jobless recovery
Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease
Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future
The amazing thing to me is not that stuff like this happens. What is amazing is that it does not happen more often, which is a tribute to most of humanity's basic social nature. In a way, even Joe Stack chose a relatively limited approach; an embedded software developer such as he was could have done far more damage if trying to create general mayhem (he could have tampered with nuclear power plants or medical devices or airplane software). There is also irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology — a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel — and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future.
What do people think and feel about all this?
Here is my story submission on it (I think you have to be logged in to see it):
http://slashdot.org/submission/1176330/Programmer-plane-crash-targeted-feds
I suggested that vitamin D deficiency may be one factor, since inadequate vitamin D is slowly being recognized as an occupational hazard of indoor office work creating all sorts of health risks. Vitamin D deficiency can contribute to depression and schizophrenia, as well as cancer and heart disease, obesity, influenza, autism, and other things. Vitamin D deficiency is now common in the USA, since that many people as we all spend more time indoors at computer screens; here is how to treat it and prevent it:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
I listed other ways there that might help prevent additional such tragedies. There is a deep irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology -- a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel -- and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future. Very sad situation for everyone all around. We need to build a 21st century society socially and economically to go with the 21st century society we now have technically -- otherwise the divide-by-zero errors (from automated production costs falling to zero) and social absurdities and ironies will drag our society down eventually. We were lucky that Joe Stack, an embedded software developer, chose such a limited means (relatively) to express his anger, when you consider how much of our civilization depends on embedded software (from airplanes to nuclear power plants to medical equipment to electronic voting).
You wrote: "That is shifting the burden of proof. What evidence does Gatto have that Rockefeller denied a belief in a Creator or afterlife?"
That's a good point. And Gatto talks in general about a group of individuals with materialist values. You may be quite right to question how they are lumped together.
One thing on Rockefeller:
http://www.reformation.org/john-d-rockefeller2.html
"""
Or is Mr. Rockefeller true to himself in both roles? Does he believe that money is a paramount duty, a sort of higher law justifying law-breaking, falsehood and extortion? Does he believe that the good his gentler self can do by charity, and his wise bequests to hospitals and to colleges with the money thus obtained more than balances the harm its accumulation works? That is, does the end justify the means, in Mr. Rockefeller's opinion, so that he can, unflinchingly face his own record and say, "I am right." Is it the inner consciousness of his own righteousness that keeps him silent before a sneering public?
It may be so. Or it may be that Mr. Rockefeller is one of those double natures that puzzle the psychologist. A man whose soul is built like a ship in air-tight compartments - to use the familiar figure - one devoted to business, one to religion and charity, one to simple living and one to nobody knows what. But between these compartments there are no doors. The life that goes on in compartment one has no relation to compartment two, has no influence upon it. Each is a solitary unit. It is an uncanny explanation; but it may be the true one.
"""
I think that is why Gatto is probably correct to say that someone like Rockefeller believes in materialist values -- because of the majority of his deeds, not his words. But it is hard to make a simple conclusion, because, according to the religion of capitalism, if we let Social Darwinism work its magic, everyone will be better off materially, and so have more time for spiritual pursuits, and any intervention in the market will bring disaster for all.
The question of ultimate ends is, ultimately, a religious one, as Einstein suggests. People can most likely legitimately disagree on all aspects of that. In a democratic society, we try to come to some consensus about the aspects of those that affect our daily life in positive ways to take communal action in various ways. It's a very messy thing. :-)
Yes, I feel it fair to call schooling a secular religion, along with a "scientism" that is often connected with it. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_religion
"Secular religion is a term used to describe ideas, theories or philosophies which involve no spiritual component, yet possess qualities similar to those of a religion. Such qualities include such things as dogma, a system of indoctrination, the prescription of an absolute code of conduct, and unquestioning devotion to a higher authority. The secular religion operates in a secular society by filling a role which would be satisfied by the Church, or another religious authority. Social philosopher Raymond Aron notably uses the term to refer to Communism. Likewise, philosopher of science Michael Ruse has made use of the term in discussing evolution theory. Similarly Thomas Frank suggests that the free market has become a secular religion in the United States."
So, in that sense, Rockefeller had another God he worshiped:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"""
A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice
You said: "there's no shortage of crappy or crazy teachers in the school system."
OK. And so why should parents want to have such people adopt their children for much of their waking time?
As for the history of schooling, as another source, here is as short summary:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
I know how you can feel as you probably do. I used to think and feel the same things. It has taken years of unlearning the explicit and implicit lesson of schooling and other aspects of our society to see beyond those reactions. It will be a long path -- years. One post or a handful is not going to move you beyond that.
Yes, historically, modern schooling did come out of Prussia, and, for that matter, has a lot to do with two world wars coming out of that area too. We need both good facts and good reasoning tools to reach good conclusions. The history of education is a complex thing interwoven with politics and economics.
And next you then say most parents have no regard for the welfare of their own children, and if they had money to use to take care of their children, they would not. Have you thought that maybe many parents have a tough time taking care of their children because they are poor? And, if everyone around them also got US$20K per child per year, maybe their neighbors could also lend a hand for the few parents who were really dysfunctional. Besides, if we had a decent universal health care system in the US, parents who were that dysfunctional would be getting the other help they need. If you look at a recent article on unemployment, you can see that much of the social dysfunction we see in the USA is connected to employment and wealth issues:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/jobless-america-future
Do you have any evidence to back up all your suggestion that most parents would give their children a crappy education? Are they really getting a non-crappy education if they live in a poor area? Do you have any first hand knowledge of homeschooling? Have you even researched any of that? Are you holding yourself up as an ideal product of schooling if you have not researched those things but are making such strong comments on them?
Have you at least glanced at books like these by academic historians?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States
(Granted, schooling and the presentation of history is improving some since those were written, in part in reaction to those books.)
A starting point, based on research studies, consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting. Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously mos
Wow, I had never heard of "Special Agent Oso" that I remember. Creepy. Still, we will do better in a democracy by creating alternatives than by censoring. We need to make it easier for parents to find better media alternatives, and better non-media alternatives to having their kids immersed in such things.
You're right about early indoctrination. Although, it's also true that all education is a form of indoctrination in some sense. The issue is mainly, what values and habits and assumptions are we passing on? And that's something every person in our society should reflect on (and no one is perfect, of course). I grew up on 1970s stuff like Sealab 2020, Mr. Rogers, The Magic Garden, New Zoo Review, Star Trek, Electric Company, the old Sesame Street, Yogi and his Friends, and so on, and they (hopefully) shaped my values in positive ways, along with many other influences from books, individuals, and organizations (including some positive aspects of schools and teachers).
Here are two books co-written by the same educator (Diane E Levin) which talk about the problems resulting from an unhealthy alliance between toy makers and media makers in the 1980s that displaced a lot of 1970s children's media (especially since media regulation in the USA under the "family values" era of Roland Reagan), one about the problems mostly boys face (locked into violent play) and one about the problems mostly girls face (locked into sexualized roles):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
But what you link to moves in yet another direction, acquiescence to continual intimate surveillance, like in Orwell's 1984. Some of this may not be intentional by the authors as just a reflection of changing cultural norms powered by other things. A related slashdot article from just now:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/075223/The-Surreal-World-of-Chatroulette
One can sometimes read malice where there was just ignorance or difference or change. Still, often media is both a message and has other messages embedded in it reflecting the norms of the people who pay a lot of money to produce it.
Here is a related item on thinking about media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
"How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is a political analysis book, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, published in Chile in 1971. It is seen as a pioneering work on cultural imperialism. Written in the form of essay (or as a decolonization manual, as described by the authors[1]), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It's considered a key work of its genre, mainly because it is one of the first social studies of two broad subjects: entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the problem of children's literature, meaning by this the analysis of cultural products which have children as main targets.[2]"
Another example is how Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory celebrates capitalism, secrecy, discarding workers to replace them with automation and half-humans, copyright, patents, not sharing, competition, and a bunch of other negative stuff -- which actually is all good for the conventional (wealthy) movie maker's bottom line.
Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer or Good Will Hunting also has some weird message in them, when you think about it. A comment by me here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.
Would that be happening all the time now, except other organisms eat the simple results before they get very advanced?
A lot of people become homeschoolers because they tried for decades to change the system from within. From Wikipedia: "John Taylor Gatto (born December 15, 1935) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years and 8 months and author of several books on education. He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions."
More from there:
"""
What does the school do with the children? Gatto takes this in "Dumbing Us Down", the following propositions:
1. Makes the the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize, to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, fills almost the whole, "free" time of the children. One sees and hears something, to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence, which require constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
6. It makes it clear to them that they can not hide, because they are always supervised.
"""
Another such person was John Holt, who also tried to improve things for years inside the system. In turn, the have inspired others, like Grace Llewelyn. There are many more. Both boredom and burnout (common in children as well as teachers) can be deadly.
So, this spying with webcams is just a continuation of a general trend for one hundred and fifty years.
Here is a good discussion of the current dynamics of what is going on in the educational world, from an interview with Jerry Mintz on Sustainable Education: " 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."
If you are burned out as a schoolteacher (and, in some ways, teachers are the worst victims of all this), here are some resources:
Treating Disease With Vitamin D
Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy
Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals
Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science
A wombat talks about a global mindshift
What does showing up in a church say about someone's core beliefs or actions? Lots of people show up in Church for social networking reasons. Still, it is true that many people consider economic social Darwinism to be justified by the Bible, just like many people used the Bible to justify slavery.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_slav1.htm
Still, there remains often a divide between science/technology and religion. Albert Einstein had a lot of good things to say about reconciling the two, and I like to interpret Gatto's comments about religion and values in that context (maybe incorrectly, I don't know):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"""
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
"""
That is a deeper reason about the conflict between many conservatives and public education, as regards to values. Of course, where to draw the line between labelling some things positive values and other things harmful dogma is part of the gradually enlightened human condition. But Einstein has some comments on that at the link above, too.
Of course, compulsory schooling trending towards a police state has now become a secular religion in the USA, as evidenced by these cameras (if true). Even if these allegations on how the cameras are use are false, an environment where children are taught for more than a dozen years that they have no right to privacy at school, they have no right to have private school lockers (requiring a
If John Taylor Gatto is a paranoid lunatic, how was he New York State Teacher of the Year, and how did he teach in NYC public schools for about thirty years? And what does that say about schools? More by him on how the real curriculum of school has nothing to do with the informational content dispensed:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
Neither he, nor I, would dispute that there are many, many amazing, caring, wonderful human beings who are teachers at all levels, who try their very hardest to help students grow. But the system is set up against that. See:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Ed
Another great reason to homeschool: "State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"""
Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
But the people who gave us schooling, weren't these wealthy people, they were Utopian thinkers who believed the family and tradition were the greatest obstacles to making a perfect society, a utopia. Every utopia that survived, invents schooling, long before we had universal forced schooling for all these little neighborhood schools. They all invented universal schooling of a homogenous variety in order to reach Utopia.
Now let's shift to the basis of your question which is Rockefeller and Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. These people saw a different kind of utopia. Through solving the problem of production with highspeed machinery they saw material abundance could be created and that want - first of all, of course, they thought they could become supremely wealthy which they did - but secondarily, they weren't beasts, they thought that this material abundance, since they had abandoned a belief in a Creator or an Afterlife, this material abund
I went there for a combination of reasons including boredom, but the biggest single one was one bully who was difficult to deal with. I dealt reasonably successfully with bullies closer to my size, but this one was tougher, captain of the wrestling team, outweighed me by fifty pounds and was two years older, socially connected, showing off to a girlfriend, and so on. It's hard to remember how much in fear for my life I was then (not sure how justified that fear was.) Sometimes walking away towards something better is the best thing you can do when those around you don't or can't help.
http://homeschooling.families.com/blog/bullying-may-be-a-good-reason-to-homeschool
http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/
My Taekwondo instructor showed me how to kill the bully if he ever assaulted me again, but that did not seem like a good idea for multiple reasons, even assuming what the instructor taught was accurate. And I have since studied Aikido which has better ways to handle violence, including redirecting negative energy in more positive ways. Had the bully been the only thing about high school that was a problem, I might have tried harder to get the school to do something else to deal with the situation rather than my leaving, but in general the coursework was not that challenging. I guess that was also before the time of thinking about filing police reports for assaults in schools. Still, looking back from my forties, I can see many ways that I was more of an ass then (e.g. more of a praise-addicted show off and socially oblivious, if generally well meaning) -- not enough to justify bullying and violence if anything does, but certainly enough not to have enough great social connections to prevent bullying on that scale (others were probably afraid of this guy too, and the usual sad story, his father beat him, etc.). Had the teachers in the two classes we shared -- physics and gym -- not been, respectively, burned-out (taking many breaks outside the classroom) and the head of a wrestling team maybe with a chance at some regional competition that year, things might have been different. And while I was smart enough not to try to kill the bully (what a weight to carry), I was not smart enough to make him into a friend.
http://www.wikihow.com/Turn-Enemies-Into-Friends
Still, I had always wanted to go to MIT, and that then did not work out as I had not taken my SATs; Caltech accepted me probably based on my robotics work (including winning a Navy Science Award) and PSATs, but it seemed so far away and expensive and smoggy and earthquakey, so I did not go. So, leaving early essentially cost me a chance to go to MIT, where I had always wanted to go and do robotics. I had never really associated Caltech with robotics (even though I know now they are a great place for that through JPL work).
All the admissions person wanted then at SUNY Stony Brook (leaving in the middle of 11th grade) was proof that you had a B or better GPA. I was disappointed they did not want to see my science fair awards and so on. So, if kids can get into major state universities still, why shunt kids off to community college if they are academically minded? If anything, I think that I would have had an easier time of college starting it even earlier, when I would have been more focused on academics and less on social things and hormones. Maybe academically interested kids should skip high school altogether? Then, by the time hormones kick in, they're off to grad school for their PhD and can date undergrads their age? :-)
With that said, I had a sister who was a residence hall director at SUNY SB, which made it more acceptable (thanks, sis). I also had friends from the chess club and AD&D role playing who had started there the year before. I can see t
An essay I wrote connected to a free software project on educational technology: :-)
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
(The title has a double meaning.
The essential part is extracted here by Bill Kerr:
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-education-technology-has-failed.html
"""
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
"""
More recent stuff by me on education and socio-technological change:
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
The good news is, in two to three years, people will be discarding today's fancy Google Android Smartphones, and they will make amazing educational platforms once they are free as hand-me-downs (instead of or in addition to OLPC-like endeavors):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
No doubt most compulsory schools will try to suppress them. At least they will be usable outside of school.
More on this general idea of wearable computers changing the nature of education (and society) from Theodore Sturgeon written as a sci-fi short story "The Skills of Xanadu" in 1956, and which inspired Ted Nelson and other technology pioneers:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51
If kids are animals in that sense, why are so many homeschoolers at the same age so well behaved? No group is perfect, of course, just an alternative thing to consider that the environment may be causing a lot of behavior problems.
Other aspects of the solution, as a care package of healing-related links. :-)
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D" (anyone like a school child spending most of their time indoors is at risk)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and
Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science"
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"A wombat talks about a global mindshift"
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
"The Orchid Child"
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
From the last: "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."
Bullying will always be with us, but we can reduce it by having a better society with happier and more fulfilled individuals. Wi-Fi on school buses empowering children to do self-directed learning using networked computers is a big step forward in many ways, even if there are downsides as well (vitamin D deficiency from not walking outdoors, obesity from sedentary behavior, some media content is candy or even toxic, and it displaces other good things like face-to-face interaction, relationships with nature, hands-on hobbies, helping others physically, and so on).
You have a point in protecting others from additional bullying as the next victim. Still, what do you do if the bully is two years older than you, outweighs you by fifty pounds, is trained in some combat skill (martial arts, wrestling, etc.), might be packing a weapon, and is popular with his/her cohort?
Also, many social situations have an element of ambiguity; what if things then become a cycle of feuds and violence, perhaps escalating in various ways?
Some bullies are also often excellent at playing a role in a social hierarchy and making themselves look like the victim, so the consequences of trying to go one-on-one may actually just make you more the victim in some situtaions. Also, you are assuming physical violence, what about verbal assault, especially the kind of stuff that goes on with the toxic girl culture?
Community is more of an answer that works in more situations. There are other solutions to conflicts than either violence or threats of it. See, for example, ideas about mutual security:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
Lots more ideas:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solutions+to+bullying
Still, another aspect of the bullying problem is that the normal behavior for people being bullied might be to avoid the bully; but compulsory schooling makes that impossible, and bullies take advantage of that, whether in a classroom, in a school yard, or on a bus. And as I said, compulsory schooling is bullying at its core as well (derived from Prussia),
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
and almost every teacher standing up in front of a class is essentially setting an example of how to use authority to bully. Bullying is essentially another negative externality of compulsory schooling. John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the year, goes so far as to say in his writings that the schools become co-dependent on bullies and other violent students to keep the status quo going by keeping children living in fear in various ways.
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle513-20090405-03.html
"""
School order came to depend upon maintaining good relations with the toughest bullies, covertly affirming their right to prey upon whiners and cry-babies (though never cry-babies from politically potent families). The intellectual dimension was removed from almost all classrooms as a matter of unwritten policy, and since test scores are independent of intellect, those teachers who tried to hold onto mental development as a goal, rather than rote memorization, actually penalized their students and themselves where test scores were the standard of accomplishment.
"""
Bullying may happen in other compulsory settings tool, like the typical workplace, but here are some ideas about that too: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Notice how the character of the bus changed when it became a place with more learner-directed learning-and-playing-on-demand instead of just an extension of day prison. (This is not to advocate violent games for behavior control, of course.) But, as with all such reports, there is no acknowledgment of the bigger issues, or apologies for past trauma and pain caused by aspects of schooling and ignored. What about all those years of bus problems? Those are just ignored, even as they are admitted now that there is a possible solution. What about the implications about children having more control over what they do versus behavior problems including aggression? Again, ignored. Also, what are the political implications of schools controlling network access to children and logging everything they do? Also, ignored. What are the implications of some kids having computers and others not? Again, ignored. Granted, it's a short article, my question is not so much about the reporting as the schooling culture it might reflect.
There are negative issues for media like being indoors away from sunlight and vitamin D, issues of being sedentary (even on a bus), issues of problematical content, and issues of other displaced healthy activities. But those need to be weighed against benefits of media for education, creativity, connectedness, and empowerment. And that media landscape continues to change with new technologies or new understanding about health issues.
Some more thoughts on the general topic; rather than wi-fi on the bus, why not just give the school taxes directly to the parents to spend on their family in the free market based on their own unique needs?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)" :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
While good advice for the individual, it doesn't fix the bigger problem of the bully moving on to bully someone else, as well as the bully often being an unhappy person for various reasons (like bullied in their past). There is a lot to be said for well functioning communities too. Example of advice for the community:
http://www.beyondbullying.com/whatyoucando.html
"""
You can help to stop bullying in your school. Check your own behaviour. Refuse to be involved in any bullying situation.
Do not allow someone to be deliberately left out of a group.
Encourage a bullied pupil to join in with your activities or groups.
How To Challenge Bullying Behaviour
If You See Someone Being Bullied:
Do not smile or laugh.
Tell a member of staff what is happening.
If you can, tell the bully to stop what they are doing.
If you can, show the bully that you disapprove of his or her actions.
If you do nothing when you see bullying, you may be allowing it to happen, or even encouraging it
"""
This biggest problem with school bullying is that compulsory schools themselves are usually bullies and demonstrate that all the time by the authoritarian environment. So, you get a lot of what the school intentionally or not teaches.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
The big media companies are still thinking in 20th century terms of creating scarcity and profiting from standing between people and what they think they want. The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as you gave an example of. The irony goes for media publishers, who want to be compensated every time someone enjoys themselves and prevent others from being happy, rather than everyone just help each other be happy through gifts. But it also goes for things like military robots, used ironically to enforce wage slavery and other related hierarchical social processes instead of building robots to do the work. Or it goes for nuclear missiles, ironically to fight over land with oil on it, instead of building habitats in space for more land, or building power systems on earth from renewables or nuclear energy.
So, this is all part of a widely unrealized irony now that we are in the 21st century of potential abundance, not the 20th of real scarcity anymore. Now that we have so much technology, so many networks, and so much knowledge about better design, we need an economics of abundance for the 21st century. An economy of abundance might involve things like a gift economy (especially for things that are easy to copy), improved local communities with local production (like 3D printing), a basic income for all (like in Alaska, from the shared bounty of collectively owned natural resources), and better accounting, planning, and regulation for resource use given externalities like pollution or social problems caused by various economic strategies.
The alternative is just more artificial scarcity and make-work, which overall seems immoral to me if we understand the alternatives. Of course, given that only some people see this, how do we survive as individuals with one foot in 20th century economics and one foot in 21st century economics (Wikipedia, Debian GNU/Linux, RepRap, etc.)? Coming up with a good transition path to a society built around the assumption of material abundance is the short-term problem we all face.
Humor on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage."
Seriousness on this, from the (sadly) late Howard Ziss:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"""
However, the unexpected victories - even temporary ones - of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people - the employed, the somewhat privileged - are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us.
"""
All great points.
Related:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
"A study commissioned by the Government that suggests robots could one day have rights was attacked by leading scientists yesterday as a red herring that has diverted attention from more pressing ethical issues."
Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery (organized mostly by me)
My senior thesis in college about 25 years ago was about intelligence and survival, and argued, as you suggest, that there may be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence.
Still, with that said, the problem today is not so much about intelligence as values (or emotions, like my point on Descartes' Error, or Einstein said a similar thing here).
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Here are some letters I wrote to Ray Kurzweil (and someone else put on their site) about why his vision of the singularity reflects his own (capitalist, competitive) values more than any necessity of how it has to be:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
And how many milliseconds would it take to simulate intellectual growth of twenty years in a simulated environment?
And then there is the issue that networked systems can all pool their learning and may never forget.
See also "The Two Faces of Tommorrow":
http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671878484/0671878484.htm
On sensory deprivation, yes, maybe:
"The Schumann Computer"
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=146
And deeper issues:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
And there may also be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence. But, not before smart machines drive the cost of most human labor to near zero, ending mainstream economics as we know it.