One is being put in place in Brazil: http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=974 """ A senator from Brazil, Suplicy was the sponsor of the "Citizen's Basic Income" legislation that was signed into law last year. The law is grounded in the concept that an unconditional and guaranteed minimum income is the simplest and most effective step toward the eradication of poverty. It will be implemented gradually in Brazil beginning this year."
He said today: "All people -- regardless of their ethnicity, gender, whatever -- should be able to share in the wealth of the nation. This should be done in a way that is just and provides for dignity and real freedom. Ensuring a guaranteed unconditional income does several things: It ends bureaucracy of reporting and checking on people. It eliminates the stigma attached to getting resources from the government. It does not penalize someone for earning money from a job. And it removes uncertainty." """
Ursula K. Le Guin writes about balance in life; everything is great: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin She writes a lot of things that might appeal to a less techy audience, but still have deep meanings.
The Earthsea Trilogy is more fantasy than sci-fi, but is great as it covers one person through growing up and retirement. (There are more books as well.)
Especially "Voyage From Yesteryear": http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
Regarding: "what reason would the guy have to make the music in the first place? Sure, there's the love of music, but some people... have to put food on the table."
High math and analytical GRE scores, a degree in psychology, previous work in the speech group at IBM Research, lots of programming and simulation knowledge...:-)
The Pointrel system, using contexts to associate triadal data, is a project I first put on SourceForge in 2001, but has roots going back much longer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/ http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/ "The Pointrel Data Repository System includes a triadal data storage system. A triad is an object with three links defined in a context. These links can point to arbitrary strings. When strings (especially uniquely generated ones) are treated as nodes, triads can build arbitrarily complex structures, as well as add to these structures at any time. Using triads, one can build arbitrary complex networks of relationships. These dynamic relationships can define the equivalent of records or objects in a database."
Lots of jobs don't require much literacy, which is one reason schools are getting worse and worse at teaching basic literacy, even as they still stamp out initiative and creativity in many cases.:-( From John Taylor Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. """
This robot is not very literate, but it will probably eventually take many jobs away: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation "A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"
We need to rethink many things about our society and economy -- and compulsory schooling is interwoven with the notion of a command economy based on rationing and a scarcity-mindset. We need post-scarcity education to go with a post-scarcity economy. A related sci-fi story by Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
It's ironic your tagline says "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging". Compulsory education was created precisely to have an underclass to in your words "grind into the machinery of the economy"; see John Taylor Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt So, unschooling is really about stopping the digging. But it sounds unbelievable at first because of "cognitive dissonance":
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
I go one step further here::-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html """ New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. """
What does "schooling" have to do with "education"?:-) http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html """ 1 don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, though it does not "educate;" that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing. """
For what schools really teach, see:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" 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. """
Deal with which structures? The structures in daily life? Or prison structures, like are found in most schools? What crime have children committed (besides being young) that they deserve to have to learn how to live inside a prison instead of learn to live inside a healthy family and healthy neighborhood?
From: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh """ Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison." They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."
Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free. """
I would agree that *some* unschoolers (especially "radical" ones with young children) tend too far to permissive parenting. But, that does not invalidate the general concept of "unschooling" as defined by John Holt decades ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling """ Unschooling refers to a range of educational philosophies and practices centering around allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a conventional school. Exploration of activities is often led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child. """
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling """ During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studi
But a healthy child who is part of a healthy community wants to learn to become part of it -- whatever it takes.
There are two problems there though. Kids today are often unhealthy (media violence, junk food, consumerism) and communities are often unhealthy for the similiar reasons (an economics that values stuff other than community). So, the biggest challenges for unschooling come from living in a dysfunctional society (created in large part by compulsory schooling).
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. " "Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh." "The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."" "Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading proficiency." And so on...
http://sandradodd.com/socialization/ """ But I try to explain that unschooling works because all kids, regardless of their so-called intelligence quotients, thrive when they get to pursue what matters to them. I know a lot of unschoolers, and they are all bright and amazing. Most of the time, I have no idea--literally NONE--where those kids would rank in a classroom setting or how they would score on a standardized test. Who cares?
WHO CARES?
What matters is that they are bright, happy, interesting, accomplished, engaged and engaging. Unschooling doesn't only work for kids of "above-average intelligence," or kids whose parents are teachers, or kids who can recite the alphabet while twirling a baton, or any other limiting factor.
Unschooling works because the unschooled individual has the time and support to follow the interesting byways that lead to real learning. """
Why subject children to more than a decade of imprisonment when they are guilty of no crime except youth?
"When the child says "well none of that seems fun!" the school then beats the child emotionally, mentally and/or physically, to get rid of their curiosity, because it is a distraction from the work to be done."
Well, some of the kids are cultivated to have "assignable curiosity": http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/radical-teacher.htm """ A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts of things. Along the road to becoming a professional, they learn how to orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others.
Consider, for example, a typical essay in a university class. The teacher sets the topic and the students write on it. To do really well, students need to figure out what will please the teacher. If the teacher had assigned a completely different topic, the conscientious student would have directed effort to that topic. Well-trained students do not even think about writing about topics that are not assigned. They wait to be told where to direct their curiosity.
Schmidt has a teaching credential and has taught junior high school math in Pasadena, California and in El Salvador. However, it is his experiences pursuing a PhD in physics that come through most strongly in Disciplined Minds. "Assignable curiosity" has a special significance for researchers. Military funding of science, for example, works well to direct research into military-relevant directions because scientists are willing to take up whatever project is offering. When scientists put in research proposals to military funders, they anticipate what will be most useful and attractive for military purposes, while maintaining the illusion that they are directing the research. """
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm """ Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes....
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil....
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajo
As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm """ What to do?
Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications.... """
So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests. ""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... " http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
"The War Play Dilemma" http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.
Slashdot Mirror
Most US people are Vitamin D deficient. See the Vitamin D Council web site for how to test and supplement:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/vitamin-d-and-h1n1-swine-flu.shtml
Or a "basic income", which is related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Louis Kelso's idea of a basic income removes the need for many job protections. A basic income almost passed under Richard Nixon, promoted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.basicincome.com/
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan
One is being put in place in Brazil:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=974
"""
A senator from Brazil, Suplicy was the sponsor of the "Citizen's Basic Income" legislation that was signed into law last year. The law is grounded in the concept that an unconditional and guaranteed minimum income is the simplest and most effective step toward the eradication of poverty. It will be implemented gradually in Brazil beginning this year."
He said today: "All people -- regardless of their ethnicity, gender, whatever -- should be able to share in the wealth of the nation. This should be done in a way that is just and provides for dignity and real freedom. Ensuring a guaranteed unconditional income does several things: It ends bureaucracy of reporting and checking on people. It eliminates the stigma attached to getting resources from the government. It does not penalize someone for earning money from a job. And it removes uncertainty."
"""
Ursula K. Le Guin writes about balance in life; everything is great:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin
She writes a lot of things that might appeal to a less techy audience, but still have deep meanings.
The Earthsea Trilogy is more fantasy than sci-fi, but is great as it covers one person through growing up and retirement. (There are more books as well.)
"Four ways to forgiveness" is more sci-fi-ish as an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Ways_to_Forgiveness
Especially "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?"
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
The last is my own start towards one, building on years of other work in an RDF-like direction, but maybe there is no point in competing with Google?
How about "Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes": :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0395710901
Or:
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition"
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
Well, we also have robots on Planet Earth:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
What does that robot mean about the future of most jobs requiring hand-eye coordination?
See also:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
A basic income almost passed under Nixon. :-)
And what about Debian GNU/Linux? Or the FOSS movement? And so on. Take a look at this video and tell me anything about mainstream economics is going to make sense soon:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Or just rethink "work" in general:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Also:
"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Regarding: "what reason would the guy have to make the music in the first place? Sure, there's the love of music, but some people ... have to put food on the table."
Incremental cognitive dissonance and social pressure can cause this too:
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/1400064112
High math and analytical GRE scores, a degree in psychology, previous work in the speech group at IBM Research, lots of programming and simulation knowledge... :-)
Might as well make a little money out of the market before post-scarcity issues obsolete it. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
The Pointrel system, using contexts to associate triadal data, is a project I first put on SourceForge in 2001, but has roots going back much longer:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
"The Pointrel Data Repository System includes a triadal data storage system. A triad is an object with three links defined in a context. These links can point to arbitrary strings. When strings (especially uniquely generated ones) are treated as nodes, triads can build arbitrarily complex structures, as well as add to these structures at any time. Using triads, one can build arbitrary complex networks of relationships. These dynamic relationships can define the equivalent of records or objects in a database."
Lots of jobs don't require much literacy, which is one reason schools are getting worse and worse at teaching basic literacy, even as they still stamp out initiative and creativity in many cases. :-( From John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""
This robot is not very literate, but it will probably eventually take many jobs away:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
"A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"
We need to rethink many things about our society and economy -- and compulsory schooling is interwoven with the notion of a command economy based on rationing and a scarcity-mindset. We need post-scarcity education to go with a post-scarcity economy. A related sci-fi story by Marshall Brain:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
It's ironic your tagline says "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging". Compulsory education was created precisely to have an underclass to in your words "grind into the machinery of the economy"; see John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
So, unschooling is really about stopping the digging. But it sounds unbelievable at first because of "cognitive dissonance":
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
I go one step further here: :-) :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not.
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
"""
What does "schooling" have to do with "education"? :-)
http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html
"""
1 don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, though it does not "educate;" that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.
"""
For what schools really teach, see:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
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.
"""
Deal with which structures? The structures in daily life? Or prison structures, like are found in most schools? What crime have children committed (besides being young) that they deserve to have to learn how to live inside a prison instead of learn to live inside a healthy family and healthy neighborhood?
From:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
"""
Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison." They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."
Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free.
"""
How parents can best interact with their children is a complex topic, depending in part on the parent's temperment and the child's temperment. One resource:
http://www.motherstyles.com/
Another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
I would agree that *some* unschoolers (especially "radical" ones with young children) tend too far to permissive parenting. But, that does not invalidate the general concept of "unschooling" as defined by John Holt decades ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
"""
Unschooling refers to a range of educational philosophies and practices centering around allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a conventional school. Exploration of activities is often led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
"""
Just look at this one essay on how harmful grading is:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
Or this on how pointless homework is:
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
Or this on how people are punished by "rewards" in school:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
Or this on how the secret to a happy life is in part how we think about time in a balanced way (schools are unbalanced in that sense):
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studi
As John Holt would say, you need to learn to trust children.
http://www.educationreformbooks.net/how_learn.htm
Schools traffic in "just in case" learning; unschooling is more about "just in time" and "on demand" learning.
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
So, you could see unschooling as like "eXtreme Programming" compared to a schoolish "waterfall model" of child development. :-)
But, sure, "strewing" stuff around the home to interest kids is something many unschoolers do:
http://sandradodd.com/strew/sandra
But a healthy child who is part of a healthy community wants to learn to become part of it -- whatever it takes.
There are two problems there though. Kids today are often unhealthy (media violence, junk food, consumerism) and communities are often unhealthy for the similiar reasons (an economics that values stuff other than community). So, the biggest challenges for unschooling come from living in a dysfunctional society (created in large part by compulsory schooling).
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. "
"Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh."
"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior.""
"Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading proficiency."
And so on...
http://sandradodd.com/socialization/
"""
But I try to explain that unschooling works because all kids, regardless of their so-called intelligence quotients, thrive when they get to pursue what matters to them. I know a lot of unschoolers, and they are all bright and amazing. Most of the time, I have no idea--literally NONE--where those kids would rank in a classroom setting or how they would score on a standardized test. Who cares?
WHO CARES?
What matters is that they are bright, happy, interesting, accomplished, engaged and engaging. Unschooling doesn't only work for kids of "above-average intelligence," or kids whose parents are teachers, or kids who can recite the alphabet while twirling a baton, or any other limiting factor.
Unschooling works because the unschooled individual has the time and support to follow the interesting byways that lead to real learning.
"""
Why subject children to more than a decade of imprisonment when they are guilty of no crime except youth?
"When the child says "well none of that seems fun!" the school then beats the child emotionally, mentally and/or physically, to get rid of their curiosity, because it is a distraction from the work to be done."
Well, some of the kids are cultivated to have "assignable curiosity":
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/radical-teacher.htm
"""
A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts of things. Along the road to becoming a professional, they learn how to orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others.
Consider, for example, a typical essay in a university class. The teacher sets the topic and the students write on it. To do really well, students need to figure out what will please the teacher. If the teacher had assigned a completely different topic, the conscientious student would have directed effort to that topic. Well-trained students do not even think about writing about topics that are not assigned. They wait to be told where to direct their curiosity.
Schmidt has a teaching credential and has taught junior high school math in Pasadena, California and in El Salvador. However, it is his experiences pursuing a PhD in physics that come through most strongly in Disciplined Minds. "Assignable curiosity" has a special significance for researchers. Military funding of science, for example, works well to direct research into military-relevant directions because scientists are willing to take up whatever project is offering. When scientists put in research proposals to military funders, they anticipate what will be most useful and attractive for military purposes, while maintaining the illusion that they are directing the research.
"""
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm ... ...
"""
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajo
As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid. ...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
"""
What to do?
Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications.
"""
So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests.
""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... "
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
"The War Play Dilemma"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.
Sandra Dodd http://sandradodd.com/ is on the "radical" side (where the philosophy extends to all aspects of parenting). There are others who are less extreme. One can contrast her points with, say, "Christian Unschooling" for another perspective:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=christian+unschooling