I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; the reason we can not all live like that now is a combination of rising populations (meaning hunting and gathering is more difficult on less land per person, so people needed to do back breaking agriculture) and also the larger populations permitting the rise of militaristic bureaucracies that force people off the land by death or taxes (e.g. the British enclosure acts; colonial powers in Africa, the history of the USA).
The Arctic is one of the most difficult climates to survive in -- life is much easier in the tropics or near the sea because those areas produce a lot more food and require less shelter from cold (though one must also consider relative population presure on resources). And even then, ignoring the last half of the movie -- Nanook shows people who had a meaningful life and seemed masters of their environment, harsh as it was.
And, yes, easily satisfied with fairly little time. How much time do people in the Western world spend just preparing meals, shopping in stores, and even just going to the fridge for beers? Probably about the same amount of time as people 10000 years ago spent on finding food -- the rest was spent socializing or taking care of young kids. And the activities related to hunting and gathering were not at all "work" as in the present sense -- they were more like fun -- know anyone who loves to garden or likes to hunt? We will have such a life again someday, but via high-tech, see: http://www.whywork.org/
The NYTimes article, not the paper itself, makes this typical leading statement: "For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
That is false, at least as far as hunters and gatherers. See, for example: "The Original Affluent Society" -- by Marshall Sahlins http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
Very pretty Delphi code, especially compared to the spaghetti Fortran which was translated to Delphi for some of the underlying models. Notice how, say, all the simulation variables now have units appended to the end of the name, as in "rainfall_mm".
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm "Phage Therapy: where communism succeeded and capitalism failed. Western capitalism has another kind of correctness that can be at least as disabling; a correctness based on profit, and an unwillingness to check the growth of an industry that is too lucrative to too many people. The story of antibiotics is becoming one of those stories. An elementary application of Evolution 101 tells us that bacteria evolve. In an antibiotic-rich environment, selective pressure favours those bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics. It's virtually a tautology. The wonder is that we have got away with abusing antibiotic therapy for so long. The antibiotic-resistant superbugs have now arrived. The use of antibiotics as a cure-all is more stupid than anything that happened in the name of Lysenko. Antibiotic therapy used as anything other than a backup medicine defies the basic laws of evolution. As a general means of treating bacterial infections (and as food additives), the use of antibiotics only makes sense in terms of creationist biology. In creation science, all species are fixed. Antibiotic A will cure disease A for all of the time that God grants us.... It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?"
"Phage therapy is the therapeutic use of lytic bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Bacteriophages, or "phages" are viruses that invade only bacterial cells and, in the case of lytic phages, cause the bacterium to burst and die, thus releasing more phages. Phage therapy is one of the viable alternatives to antibiotics, being developed for clinical use in the 21st century by many research groups in Europe and the US. After having been extensively used and developed mainly in former Soviet Union countries for about 90 years, phage therapy is now becoming more available in other countries such as USA for a variety of bacterial and poly-microbial biofilm infections.[1] Phage therapy has many applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science and agriculture."
"Among those who saw the value to the State in controlling schools was Napoleon, who centralized all education bureaucracies in France and took complete control of education in the country.
'No one' it was decreed ' may open a school or teach publicly unless he is a member of the imperial university and a graduate of one of its faculties... No school may be set up outside the university and without the sanction of its head'...the whole system was modeled on the military regime of its founder. 'The university, in fact, was organized like a regiment. The discipline was severe, and the teachers were subject to it as well as the scholars. When a teacher infringed any regulation and incurred censure, he was put under arrest. There was a uniform for all members of the university: a black robe with blue palms. The college was a miniature reproduction of the army. Each establishment was divided into companies with sergeants and corporals. Everything was done to the sound of the drum. It was soldiers and not men that were to be made.'5
The nature of Napoleonic schooling is important, because when the French Emperor led a devastating defeat of Prussia, the effective schooling of the victors was widely noted. No more so than in Prussia, where after the country was severely reduced and limited following the Jena peace accord of 1806, was left with few national resources to control....
By 1819 the ideal of a national system of compulsory schooling was in place, and the Prussian economy and military was booming. Educational theorists from across the Western world came to Prussia to study its schools, and many left enthusiastic supporters. Among the most eager was Horace Mann, a young American aristocrat who was an education official in Massachusetts, which at that time, had a strong network of non-compulsory common schools."
The original poster is also ignoring extra hardware costs to run Windows. Look at this slashdot reply: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/21/196252.shtml ?tid=146 Using the Linux terminals server projects, you can give lots of kids computer access on cheap (or otherwise obsolete) hardware: http://www.k12ltsp.org/ Not only do you save on proprietary software licensing costs, you also also save on all the latest hardware costs.
And what is the cost of an audit by companies who push proprietary stuff? Even failing to document properly the acquisition of a few licenses makes people felons these days. Can you *prove* you own every piece of proprietary software in your school? Really *prove* you own even *discounted* software? If a few certification documents are missing, it could mean jail time for someone these days. Personally, I think the laws which have been recently changed to make copyright violation criminal instead of civil are wrong, and will likely end up with as many people behind bars as for marijuana possession but that is the way it is, and an attitude like yours helps contribute to it -- in part by not considering the total cost of ownership when licensing compliance is considered.
Think it can't happen to you? Consider:
"Microsoft vs. Northwest Schools Part III" http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/21/196252.shtml ?tid=146 Or:
"Microsoft Screws Schools: The Redmond Giant applies "extortion marketing" to the 24 largest school districts in Washington and Oregon." http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M020422.html "Microsoft has given the school districts 60 days to inventory their huge number of computers and match them all to paperwork proving they have valid licenses for all Microsoft software. This would be impossible at the best of times, but Microsoft has pulled this stunt at the busiest time of year. Should a school district fail to complete the audit in time, Microsoft will "help" by sending in their own audit team, but if just one computer is found non-compliant, the schools have to pay for the audit - and it ain't gonna be cheap. Given the way schools acquire computers (many are donated), it is absolutely certain some will be declared noncompliant. But Microsoft has a solution! The district can just sign the Microsoft School Agreement. Just count all the computers and pay Microsoft $42 per computer every year. The Microsoft agreement says you count ALL computers that could conceivably ever run any Microsoft software. That includes Apple Macintoshes and apparently any computers running Linux, Unix and other non-Microsoft operating systems. Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes a big PR stink over donating software (which costs them about nothing, but gets written off for millions against taxes) to schools. Hypocrisy rules the day. Update: 04-30-02 - Microsoft has a Guide to Accepting Donated Comptuers which states that you cannot accept donations that do not include the original disks and certificates for Windows and all other software on them. The guidlines imply that you cannot accept computers without a Windows license even if you intend to reformat them and put Linux on them. The implication is absurd, but if you've been swindled into accepting the Microsoft School Agreement, you can't put Windows on them (because you don't have the original license), but you still have to include them in the total count and pay for Microsoft licensing on them anyway...."
What values are you teaching kids when you participate in such extortions?
"Imagine the IBOT, looking like a sleek wheelchair, not with two big and two small wheels, but two pair of midsize wheels on a swivel. Imagine joysticking an IBOT as it carries you quickly along a beach.
Imagine approaching a curb or, worse, stairs. The IBOT's wheels automatically swivel up the curb or swivel repeatedly up the stairs.
Imagine sitting in a supermarket, hitting the IBOT's "stand" button and swiveling up onto two wheels to reach the top shelf. What must it be like for people who have lost their legs to again face the world standing up?
The IBOT is now in clinical trials, prior to approval by our Federal Drug Administration, so Kamen can't talk much about it.
Johnson & Johnson has invested $50 million with Kamen in developing the Independence 3000 IBOT Transporter. Availability by prescription is projected for 2001, at less than $25,000.
I've seen NBC's John Hockenberry throw a 25-pound bag to Kamen, who is sitting in an IBOT, which is balancing on two wheels. The IBOT detected the bag's heavy arrival and instantly regained balance by spinning its wheels. Only a replay shows the wheels making their moves.
In shoving matches, Kamen says, IBOTs win. They keep their balance better than humans do by using gyroscopes and microprocessors. "
It makes using the text of, say, Wikipedia articles completely off-limits in a GPL'd program.
Why the FSF would promote licenses incompatible with the GPL is beyond me. And totally unnecessary IMHO.
Very shortsighted to promote artificial distinctions between code and data -- the kind of shortsightendess one would not expect from a Lisp hacker like RMS.
European cities tend to have sharper boundaries between city and country due to better zoning regulations, making the country more accessible as it starts right after a sharp edge to the city. US cities tend to have a huge blurry suburban boundary stretching on and on where there is little nature -- making for long trips out of the city before one can reach anything faintly natural. Also, European countries tend to have laws permitting the free passage (and even camping) across undeveloped and even farm lands, whereas the USA laws tend to restrict that as trespassing (or owners "post" their lands for liability reasons, resulting in the same thing).
Perhaps one of the factors for your family was a change in work situation (given how demanding most farmwork can be) making available more free time to spend together as a family in nature?
For my research, I tried to cross every barrier I could think of -- for instance, I did interviews in more rural areas and suburban areas, like the one I grew up in outside Kansas City, which still has a lot of nature. I went in there thinking, Well, certainly if you have woods next to you, kids will be out in them. But that simply wasn't true. The parents and the kids there were saying the same things as kids in more urban areas. In fact, the amount of nature you have in New York City is actually better than some of the newer suburbs; imagine, today, a city building a Central Park.
A major study came out a few months ago that said that the rate of obesity in children is growing faster in rural areas than it is in cities and suburbs. Again, it seems counterintuitive. But it's not so counterintuitive when you think about the fact that the family farm is fairly nonexistent now. Kids in rural areas are playing the same video games, watching the same television, and they're on longer car rides."
So indeed, kids in rural areas can suffer from NDD too!
A new book argues that children desperately need to be able to play in the woods -- and that our culture's sterile rejection of nature is harming them in body and soul.
"In the not-so-distant past, kids ruled the country's woods and valleys -- running in packs, building secret forts and treehouses, hunting frogs and fish, playing hide-and-seek behind tall grasses. But in the last 30 years, says journalist Richard Louv, children of the digital age have become increasingly alienated from the natural world, with disastrous implications, not only for their physical fitness, but also for their long-term mental and spiritual heath.
In his new book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder," Louv argues that sensationalist media coverage and paranoid parents have literally "scared children straight out of the woods and fields," while promoting a litigious culture of fear that favors "safe" regimented sports over imaginative play. Well-meaning elementary school curricula may teach students everything there is to know about the Amazon rain forest's endangered species, but do little to encourage kids' personal relationship with the world outside their own doors. And advances in technology, while opening up a wealth of "virtual" experiences to the young, have made it easier and easier for children to spend less time outside.
Louv spent 10 years traveling around the country reporting and speaking to parents and children, in both rural and urban areas, about their experiences in nature. In "Last Child in the Woods," he pairs their anecdotes with a growing body of scientific research that suggests children who are given early and ongoing positive exposure to nature thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their "shut-in" peers do not. By reducing stress, sharpening concentration, and promoting creative problem solving, "nature-play" is also emerging as a promising therapy for attention-deficit disorder and other childhood maladies. Indeed Louv, in both the book's title and content, suggests that while increased exposure to nature may prove a salve for many of the childhood disorders that now run rampant, the very ubiquity of those disorders is evidence that two generations of alienation from nature may have already resulted in considerable harm to our kids."
You make an insightful point that the overall problems is not just schools -- it is a whole system of interlinked institutions and related assumptions of which school is just a part. One of the reason many parents can't do a great job raising kids is simply that they work really long hours in the USA -- more than just about any other industrialized country and have very little vacation time. That is one of the reasons for this recent UN report suggesting "US and UK worst places in developed world to be a child": http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/unic-f16 .shtml
The best way forward may well be to rethink the whole notion of work, perhaps by transcending it altogether:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985 http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
I feel Mark Shuttleworth's heart is in the right place, and much good will come out of various initiatives he is involved in, but I'm thinking specifically of this project of his:
"The SchoolTool Project" http://www.schooltool.org/ From there: "SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license. SchoolTool encompasses three sub-projects:
* SchoolTool Calendar and SchoolBell are calendar and resource management tools for schools available as part of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.
* A SchoolTool student information system is being developed and tested in collaboration with schools in Lithuania and Belgium during the 2006 - 2007 school year
* CanDo is a SchoolTool-based skills tracking program developed by Virginia students and teachers to track which skills students are acquiring in their classes and at what level of competency."
So that software is definitely intended to be applicable in the USA.
I think the "Hole in the Wall" approach pioneered by Sugata Mitra has a lot to recommend itself as an approach to help kids in poor areas. From: http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm "Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."... To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.... What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him."
Also of great potential for learning is the "Fab Lab" idea: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/ From there: "Fab Labs are the educational outreach component for the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.... By making accessible engineering in space (down to microns, through precision machining) and time (down to microseconds, through RISC microcontrollers), these facilities have been uncovering what can be thought of as instrumentation and fabrication divides, and suggesting that they can be addressed by bringing IT development rather than just IT to the masses.... CBA Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute."
If you want the real story of why math and science teaching in the USA is so bad, see this about the collapse of the exponentially growing PhD pyramid scheme starting in the 1970s:
"The Big Crunch" http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html and also more by the same author (Dr. David Goodstein) here:
"Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates" http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives.132.html From that second link: "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
What good does it do to make teachers happy with their salaries if the system they work in is fundamentally broken for todays' needs? You can even have both happy teachers and happy students -- but does that mean kids are learning and growing in good ways? An example of this is when teachers become entertainers, essentially feeding students the intellectual equivalent of candy all day, but everyone is happy (at least as long as the party lasts). Now, this is very different from the "hard fun" http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html John Holt, Seymour Papert, and others talk about (e.g. learning to play the piano well, or to build a complex robot like encouraged by Dean Kamen's FIRST programs http://www.usfirst.org/ ) and which children generally must choose for themselves to pursue if they are to get much out of it beyond misery.
Also, consider this Libertarian-oriented article on schooling:
"Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System" http://www.mises.org/story/2216 "All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the fr
Again from the DOE: http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index .html "Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation. By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02."
Those figures don't quite agree with the ones you list -- the DOE claims 24% increase adjusted for inflation and enrollment in public schools over that time period. I'm not sure where the difference is (perhaps more money spent in private schools?)
And a related essay by someone else also commenting on Shuttleworth Foundation's SchoolTool project:
"School system needs revolution, not evolution" http://ninjamonkeys.co.za/index.php/2005/03/07/sch ool_system_needs_revolution_not_evolu From that essay: "The Shuttleworth Foundation has been investing a lot of money in school administration and computer labs. Both of these projects are worthwhile efforts. The former allowing teachers to spend less time administrating and more time teaching, and the latter allowing kids to get involved in computers which are a critical aspect of nearly every high paying job today. But more money needs to be invested in creating engaging learning materials and in creating an environment to help students learn real life skills."
A related essay by me on this topic:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools" http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html From there: "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."
According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?
As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.
The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.
That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/ to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.
Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
"The Alternative Education Resource Organization" http://www.educationrevolution.org/ And a related article by the leader of that organization:
"Sustainable Education " http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195 He writes: "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."
Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu, http://www.edubuntu.org/ and so on).
See:
"The Underground History of American Education" -- John Taylor Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m "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.""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:...
The first lesson I teach is confusion. The second lesson I teach is your class position. The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide....
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Here is a conference paper we presented on this topic in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web here: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to The Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems" http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout 2001_web.html "The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems.... We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."
What's the next step? It really is a choice ultimatly between police state enforced copyrights or a gift economy where you can compose as much as you want and that (among other things perhaps) is the gift you give to the world, while other things you need to feed and clothe and house yourself and your family are otherwise free to you (being gifts from others). It helps if people diminish their desires somewhat too -- and pursue a life of voluntary simplicity. Neolithic hunter/gatherers had lots of time for music, apparently:
"The Original Affluent Society" -by Marshall Sahlins http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Using modern technology, see Bob Black's essay here on "The Abolition of Work": http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html "I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.... I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies.... What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Slashdot Mirror
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; the reason we can not all live like that now is a combination of rising populations (meaning hunting and gathering is more difficult on less land per person, so people needed to do back breaking agriculture) and also the larger populations permitting the rise of militaristic bureaucracies that force people off the land by death or taxes (e.g. the British enclosure acts; colonial powers in Africa, the history of the USA).
The Arctic is one of the most difficult climates to survive in -- life is much easier in the tropics or near the sea because those areas produce a lot more food and require less shelter from cold (though one must also consider relative population presure on resources). And even then, ignoring the last half of the movie -- Nanook shows people who had a meaningful life and seemed masters of their environment, harsh as it was.
And, yes, easily satisfied with fairly little time. How much time do people in the Western world spend just preparing meals, shopping in stores, and even just going to the fridge for beers? Probably about the same amount of time as people 10000 years ago spent on finding food -- the rest was spent socializing or taking care of young kids. And the activities related to hunting and gathering were not at all "work" as in the present sense -- they were more like fun -- know anyone who loves to garden or likes to hunt? We will have such a life again someday, but via high-tech, see: http://www.whywork.org/
The NYTimes article, not the paper itself, makes this typical leading statement: "For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
...
That is false, at least as far as hunters and gatherers. See, for example:
"The Original Affluent Society" -- by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/progman.htm
Very pretty Delphi code, especially compared to the spaghetti Fortran which was translated to Delphi for some of the underlying models. Notice how, say, all the simulation variables now have units appended to the end of the name, as in "rainfall_mm".
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm ... It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?"
"Phage Therapy: where communism succeeded and capitalism failed. Western capitalism has another kind of correctness that can be at least as disabling; a correctness based on profit, and an unwillingness to check the growth of an industry that is too lucrative to too many people. The story of antibiotics is becoming one of those stories. An elementary application of Evolution 101 tells us that bacteria evolve. In an antibiotic-rich environment, selective pressure favours those bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics. It's virtually a tautology. The wonder is that we have got away with abusing antibiotic therapy for so long. The antibiotic-resistant superbugs have now arrived. The use of antibiotics as a cure-all is more stupid than anything that happened in the name of Lysenko. Antibiotic therapy used as anything other than a backup medicine defies the basic laws of evolution. As a general means of treating bacterial infections (and as food additives), the use of antibiotics only makes sense in terms of creationist biology. In creation science, all species are fixed. Antibiotic A will cure disease A for all of the time that God grants us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
"Phage therapy is the therapeutic use of lytic bacteriophages to treat pathogenic bacterial infections. Bacteriophages, or "phages" are viruses that invade only bacterial cells and, in the case of lytic phages, cause the bacterium to burst and die, thus releasing more phages. Phage therapy is one of the viable alternatives to antibiotics, being developed for clinical use in the 21st century by many research groups in Europe and the US. After having been extensively used and developed mainly in former Soviet Union countries for about 90 years, phage therapy is now becoming more available in other countries such as USA for a variety of bacterial and poly-microbial biofilm infections.[1] Phage therapy has many applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science and agriculture."
You were *both* victims of a school system set up to teach people how to be hierarchical violent "rankist" bullies or their victims. See:0 031028151034651
... No school may be set up outside the university and without the sanction of its head'...the whole system was modeled on the military regime of its founder. 'The university, in fact, was organized like a regiment. The discipline was severe, and the teachers were subject to it as well as the scholars. When a teacher infringed any regulation and incurred censure, he was put under arrest. There was a uniform for all members of the university: a black robe with blue palms. The college was a miniature reproduction of the army. Each establishment was divided into companies with sergeants and corporals. Everything was done to the sound of the drum. It was soldiers and not men that were to be made.'5
...
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=2
"Among those who saw the value to the State in controlling schools was Napoleon, who centralized all education bureaucracies in France and took complete control of education in the country.
'No one' it was decreed ' may open a school or teach publicly unless he is a member of the imperial university and a graduate of one of its faculties
The nature of Napoleonic schooling is important, because when the French Emperor led a devastating defeat of Prussia, the effective schooling of the victors was widely noted. No more so than in Prussia, where after the country was severely reduced and limited following the Jena peace accord of 1806, was left with few national resources to control.
By 1819 the ideal of a national system of compulsory schooling was in place, and the Prussian economy and military was booming. Educational theorists from across the Western world came to Prussia to study its schools, and many left enthusiastic supporters. Among the most eager was Horace Mann, a young American aristocrat who was an education official in Massachusetts, which at that time, had a strong network of non-compulsory common schools."
The original poster is also ignoring extra hardware costs to run Windows. Look at this slashdot reply:l ?tid=146
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/21/196252.shtm
Using the Linux terminals server projects, you can give lots of kids computer access on cheap (or otherwise obsolete) hardware:
http://www.k12ltsp.org/
Not only do you save on proprietary software licensing costs, you also also save on all the latest hardware costs.
And what is the cost of an audit by companies who push proprietary stuff? Even failing to document properly the acquisition of a few licenses makes people felons these days. Can you *prove* you own every piece of proprietary software in your school? Really *prove* you own even *discounted* software? If a few certification documents are missing, it could mean jail time for someone these days. Personally, I think the laws which have been recently changed to make copyright violation criminal instead of civil are wrong, and will likely end up with as many people behind bars as for marijuana possession but that is the way it is, and an attitude like yours helps contribute to it -- in part by not considering the total cost of ownership when licensing compliance is considered.
l ?tid=146 ..."
Think it can't happen to you? Consider:
"Microsoft vs. Northwest Schools Part III"
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/05/21/196252.shtm
Or:
"Microsoft Screws Schools: The Redmond Giant applies "extortion marketing" to the 24 largest school districts in Washington and Oregon."
http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M020422.html
"Microsoft has given the school districts 60 days to inventory their huge number of computers and match them all to paperwork proving they have valid licenses for all Microsoft software. This would be impossible at the best of times, but Microsoft has pulled this stunt at the busiest time of year. Should a school district fail to complete the audit in time, Microsoft will "help" by sending in their own audit team, but if just one computer is found non-compliant, the schools have to pay for the audit - and it ain't gonna be cheap. Given the way schools acquire computers (many are donated), it is absolutely certain some will be declared noncompliant. But Microsoft has a solution! The district can just sign the Microsoft School Agreement. Just count all the computers and pay Microsoft $42 per computer every year. The Microsoft agreement says you count ALL computers that could conceivably ever run any Microsoft software. That includes Apple Macintoshes and apparently any computers running Linux, Unix and other non-Microsoft operating systems. Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes a big PR stink over donating software (which costs them about nothing, but gets written off for millions against taxes) to schools. Hypocrisy rules the day. Update: 04-30-02 - Microsoft has a Guide to Accepting Donated Comptuers which states that you cannot accept donations that do not include the original disks and certificates for Windows and all other software on them. The guidlines imply that you cannot accept computers without a Windows license even if you intend to reformat them and put Linux on them. The implication is absurd, but if you've been swindled into accepting the Microsoft School Agreement, you can't put Windows on them (because you don't have the original license), but you still have to include them in the total count and pay for Microsoft licensing on them anyway.
What values are you teaching kids when you participate in such extortions?
Too bad this got eclipsed by his Segway. The IBOT was a much better idea IMHO.
g /
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9911/26/ibot.id
"Imagine the IBOT, looking like a sleek wheelchair, not with two big and two small wheels, but two pair of midsize wheels on a swivel. Imagine joysticking an IBOT as it carries you quickly along a beach.
Imagine approaching a curb or, worse, stairs. The IBOT's wheels automatically swivel up the curb or swivel repeatedly up the stairs.
Imagine sitting in a supermarket, hitting the IBOT's "stand" button and swiveling up onto two wheels to reach the top shelf. What must it be like for people who have lost their legs to again face the world standing up?
The IBOT is now in clinical trials, prior to approval by our Federal Drug Administration, so Kamen can't talk much about it.
Johnson & Johnson has invested $50 million with Kamen in developing the Independence 3000 IBOT Transporter. Availability by prescription is projected for 2001, at less than $25,000.
I've seen NBC's John Hockenberry throw a 25-pound bag to Kamen, who is sitting in an IBOT, which is balancing on two wheels. The IBOT detected the bag's heavy arrival and instantly regained balance by spinning its wheels. Only a replay shows the wheels making their moves.
In shoving matches, Kamen says, IBOTs win. They keep their balance better than humans do by using gyroscopes and microprocessors. "
The compatibility matrix does not include the GFDL.
o n_License
http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq
So is the GPLv3 still incompatible with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentati
It makes using the text of, say, Wikipedia articles completely off-limits in a GPL'd program.
Why the FSF would promote licenses incompatible with the GPL is beyond me. And totally unnecessary IMHO.
Very shortsighted to promote artificial distinctions between code and data -- the kind of shortsightendess one would not expect from a Lisp hacker like RMS.
European cities tend to have sharper boundaries between city and country due to better zoning regulations, making the country more accessible as it starts right after a sharp edge to the city. US cities tend to have a huge blurry suburban boundary stretching on and on where there is little nature -- making for long trips out of the city before one can reach anything faintly natural. Also, European countries tend to have laws permitting the free passage (and even camping) across undeveloped and even farm lands, whereas the USA laws tend to restrict that as trespassing (or owners "post" their lands for liability reasons, resulting in the same thing).
/ Louv/index.html
Perhaps one of the factors for your family was a change in work situation (given how demanding most farmwork can be) making available more free time to spend together as a family in nature?
One more part of that interview on Nature Deficit Disorder:
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02
"Is this just an urban problem, or does it affect children in suburban and rural areas as well?
For my research, I tried to cross every barrier I could think of -- for instance, I did interviews in more rural areas and suburban areas, like the one I grew up in outside Kansas City, which still has a lot of nature. I went in there thinking, Well, certainly if you have woods next to you, kids will be out in them. But that simply wasn't true. The parents and the kids there were saying the same things as kids in more urban areas. In fact, the amount of nature you have in New York City is actually better than some of the newer suburbs; imagine, today, a city building a Central Park.
A major study came out a few months ago that said that the rate of obesity in children is growing faster in rural areas than it is in cities and suburbs. Again, it seems counterintuitive. But it's not so counterintuitive when you think about the fact that the family farm is fairly nonexistent now. Kids in rural areas are playing the same video games, watching the same television, and they're on longer car rides."
So indeed, kids in rural areas can suffer from NDD too!
Check out:i t+disorder/ Louv/index.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nature+defic
From:
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02
"Do today's kids have "nature-deficit disorder"?
A new book argues that children desperately need to be able to play in the woods -- and that our culture's sterile rejection of nature is harming them in body and soul.
"In the not-so-distant past, kids ruled the country's woods and valleys -- running in packs, building secret forts and treehouses, hunting frogs and fish, playing hide-and-seek behind tall grasses. But in the last 30 years, says journalist Richard Louv, children of the digital age have become increasingly alienated from the natural world, with disastrous implications, not only for their physical fitness, but also for their long-term mental and spiritual heath.
In his new book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder," Louv argues that sensationalist media coverage and paranoid parents have literally "scared children straight out of the woods and fields," while promoting a litigious culture of fear that favors "safe" regimented sports over imaginative play. Well-meaning elementary school curricula may teach students everything there is to know about the Amazon rain forest's endangered species, but do little to encourage kids' personal relationship with the world outside their own doors. And advances in technology, while opening up a wealth of "virtual" experiences to the young, have made it easier and easier for children to spend less time outside.
Louv spent 10 years traveling around the country reporting and speaking to parents and children, in both rural and urban areas, about their experiences in nature. In "Last Child in the Woods," he pairs their anecdotes with a growing body of scientific research that suggests children who are given early and ongoing positive exposure to nature thrive in intellectual, spiritual and physical ways that their "shut-in" peers do not. By reducing stress, sharpening concentration, and promoting creative problem solving, "nature-play" is also emerging as a promising therapy for attention-deficit disorder and other childhood maladies. Indeed Louv, in both the book's title and content, suggests that while increased exposure to nature may prove a salve for many of the childhood disorders that now run rampant, the very ubiquity of those disorders is evidence that two generations of alienation from nature may have already resulted in considerable harm to our kids."
You make an insightful point that the overall problems is not just schools -- it is a whole system of interlinked institutions and related assumptions of which school is just a part. One of the reason many parents can't do a great job raising kids is simply that they work really long hours in the USA -- more than just about any other industrialized country and have very little vacation time. That is one of the reasons for this recent UN report suggesting "US and UK worst places in developed world to be a child":6 .shtml
o n.html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/unic-f1
The best way forward may well be to rethink the whole notion of work, perhaps by transcending it altogether:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/aboliti
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
I feel Mark Shuttleworth's heart is in the right place, and much good will come out of various initiatives he is involved in, but I'm thinking specifically of this project of his:
W all.htm ... ...
... By making accessible engineering in space (down to microns, through precision machining) and time (down to microseconds, through RISC microcontrollers), these facilities have been uncovering what can be thought of as instrumentation and fabrication divides, and suggesting that they can be addressed by bringing IT development rather than just IT to the masses. ... CBA Fab Labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston and Costa Rica. Fab Lab outreach projects are being explored with a growing group of institutional partners and countries including Panama, Trinidad, South Africa, the National Academies, the Indian Department of Science and Technology, and the Africa-America Institute."
"The SchoolTool Project"
http://www.schooltool.org/
From there: "SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license. SchoolTool encompasses three sub-projects:
* SchoolTool Calendar and SchoolBell are calendar and resource management tools for schools available as part of the Edubuntu Linux distribution.
* A SchoolTool student information system is being developed and tested in collaboration with schools in Lithuania and Belgium during the 2006 - 2007 school year
* CanDo is a SchoolTool-based skills tracking program developed by Virginia students and teachers to track which skills students are acquiring in their classes and at what level of competency."
So that software is definitely intended to be applicable in the USA.
I think the "Hole in the Wall" approach pioneered by Sugata Mitra has a lot to recommend itself as an approach to help kids in poor areas. From:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-
"Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."
To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him."
Also of great potential for learning is the "Fab Lab" idea:
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/
From there: "Fab Labs are the educational outreach component for the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
If you want the real story of why math and science teaching in the USA is so bad, see this about the collapse of the exponentially growing PhD pyramid scheme starting in the 1970s: .132.html
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
and also more by the same author (Dr. David Goodstein) here:
"Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates"
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives
From that second link: "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
What good does it do to make teachers happy with their salaries if the system they work in is fundamentally broken for todays' needs? You can even have both happy teachers and happy students -- but does that mean kids are learning and growing in good ways? An example of this is when teachers become entertainers, essentially feeding students the intellectual equivalent of candy all day, but everyone is happy (at least as long as the party lasts). Now, this is very different from the "hard fun"
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
John Holt, Seymour Papert, and others talk about (e.g. learning to play the piano well, or to build a complex robot like encouraged by Dean Kamen's FIRST programs http://www.usfirst.org/ ) and which children generally must choose for themselves to pursue if they are to get much out of it beyond misery.
Also, consider this Libertarian-oriented article on schooling:
"Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System"
http://www.mises.org/story/2216
"All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the fr
According to the figures in the report mentioned here:m l
x .html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.ht
with an executive summary here:
http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm
here in 2002 dollars is the cost per student in the USA:
Year Cost Fourth Grade Reading Scores
1984 $5400 211
1988 $6100 212
1992 $6800 211
1996 $6950 213
1999 $7300 212
2002 $8977 217
Again from the DOE:
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/inde
"Total education funding has increased substantially in recent years at all levels of government, even when accounting for enrollment increases and inflation. By the end of the 2004-05 school year, national K-12 education spending will have increased an estimated 105 percent since 1991-92; 58 percent since 1996-97; and 40 percent since 1998-99. On a per-pupil basis and adjusted for inflation, public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02."
Those figures don't quite agree with the ones you list -- the DOE claims 24% increase adjusted for inflation and enrollment in public schools over that time period. I'm not sure where the difference is (perhaps more money spent in private schools?)
Link for the above mentioned US DOE statistics on total K-12 spending:x .htmlt e-chart.html#2
h ool_system_needs_revolution_not_evolu
h nologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/inde
The specific chart:
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edli
And a related essay by someone else also commenting on Shuttleworth Foundation's SchoolTool project:
"School system needs revolution, not evolution"
http://ninjamonkeys.co.za/index.php/2005/03/07/sc
From that essay: "The Shuttleworth Foundation has been investing a lot of money in school administration and computer labs. Both of these projects are worthwhile efforts. The former allowing teachers to spend less time administrating and more time teaching, and the latter allowing kids to get involved in computers which are a critical aspect of nearly every high paying job today. But more money needs to be invested in creating engaging learning materials and in creating an environment to help students learn real life skills."
The direct link to SchoolTool itself:
http://www.schooltool.org/
A related essay by me on this topic:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTec
From there: "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."
According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?
m l
l etterid=21&articleid=195
As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.ht
for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.
The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.
That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.
Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
"The Alternative Education Resource Organization"
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And a related article by the leader of that organization:
"Sustainable Education "
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?news
He writes: "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."
Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu,
http://www.edubuntu.org/
and so on).
See:t m
"The Underground History of American Education" -- John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
"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.""
From:
...
...
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven
lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They
constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you
can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty,
of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when
I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I
teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you
will:
The first lesson I teach is confusion.
The second lesson I teach is your class position.
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference.
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.
The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem.
The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide.
After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.
Here is a conference paper we presented on this topic in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web here:t 2001_web.html ... We believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level - but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such details."
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to The Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhou
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems.
This is a big reason the USA is losing its competitive edge.
But why should the two economies (the material one and the status one) use the same currency?
You're probably right as far as you go.
o n.html ... I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. ... What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
What's the next step? It really is a choice ultimatly between police state enforced copyrights or a gift economy where you can compose as much as you want and that (among other things perhaps) is the gift you give to the world, while other things you need to feed and clothe and house yourself and your family are otherwise free to you (being gifts from others). It helps if people diminish their desires somewhat too -- and pursue a life of voluntary simplicity. Neolithic hunter/gatherers had lots of time for music, apparently:
"The Original Affluent Society" -by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Using modern technology, see Bob Black's essay here on "The Abolition of Work":
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/aboliti
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.
That's the bigger picture IMHO.
Well said!