With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
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....
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall": http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm
Judging by how my replies have been modded both up and down, and there are a couple of speculative Anonymous Coward personal attack replies, as well as some agreeing replies, obviously this issue has hit a nerve.:-)
You make some good points, but essentially what they seem to amount to, "This is they way the system works now, so best go with the flow." Sure, there is credentialism in science; so what? All this proves is academia is *good* at using labels to control and get bright young people to waste their youth jumping through hoops instead of making change or learning how to be free. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism Does that mean people without credentials are not qualified to do science, engineering, or education (including of their own children)? Should any programmer without a PhD be turned away from any Open Source or Free Software project?
Isn't "rankism" a bad thing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism But this is essentially what you are perhaps unknowingly arguing for: "Fuller has defined rankism as: "abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their lower rank in a particular hierarchy"" Gatto and John Holt argue it only takes fifty to one hundred hours to teach a kid enough about reading or math to bootstrap themselves up from there in those subjects as far as they want to go -- if the kid wants to learn. What are the other 12000 hours of schooling for if not to produce conformity? Are you saying you could not have learned all those other things on your own or in peer groups or from individuals in the community? On language, if you had lived in Japan at age six, or had a Japanese caretaker, you would have learned it effortlessly and fluently. Self learning in isolation or school learning of languages (except for immersion courses) almost never makes anyone fluent. Please note: mentoring and educating is completely different from compulsory schooling. Every child needs mentors and educators in their life; no child needs schooling or school personnel in their life. As Gatto suggest, most of what goes on in compulsory schools (public or private) has little to do with what kids need to learn to be free individuals in a 21st century post-industrial information age economy.
You are essentially arguing for the status quo based on convenience. Is there no point in talking about GNU/Linux or Open Office on Slashdot since Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products are still used by most businesses? Is there no point in discussing Python here since Visual Basic has so many users? Is "freedom" always (or ever) the easier road in the short term?
The point of that article on college and cowardice is that there are alternatives -- and many people who might benefit from them have been scared into conformity with the schooling enterprise -- especially the ones labeled "gifted" who otherwise might be troublemakers, just like a lot of people have been scared into conformity with Microsoft Office and Visual Basic. Sure people live in a somewhat capitalist society in the USA (ignoring huge government subsidies to major industries), but if Capitalism is driving the society off a cliff through short-sighted greed, is it smart to stay as a passenger in the car? Remember, the reason people in the USA now live in a militaristic capitalist scarcity-based society is that some greedy people used guns and biological warfare to wipe out the societies based on abundance and open-source style gift-giving which existed in North America beforehand. From: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm "When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough
It is part of propaganda (and perhaps many religions, of which schooling is a secular one), to hide the alternatives, label them evil, or make them into strawman shadows.
So, some class in a compulsory school program taught you something about C++. A technical skill. Is that all "education" (as distinct from "schooling")is supposed to be about? Skills?
Consider: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "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.... Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin- soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know. "
At what cost? Would you not perhaps rather have learned to love literature on your own, but instead have the $200K or so (principal of $10K per year plus compound interest over a dozen years) invested in your compulsory schooling upon reaching age 18 so you could live off the interest or buy a house with it to live rent free?
Consider the alternatives to labeling and dividing people and which have been hidden from your view. And then think about how people you trusted did this to you. They took money on your behalf. And left you with a lifetime of industrialized work ahead of you. Consider: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html "Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to hig
You've missed the point. All people are unique. There are also many types of intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_in telligences So this suggest you are correct to start making distinctions, like between IQ and EQ. One can go a lot further than that, according to Howard Gardner.
Even if some people are just smarter about everything (including ethics?), so what? How does that justify compulsory schooling of everyone? Perhaps "Gifted programs" skim off those who might be troublemakers and keep them occupied in relatively unimportant pursuits and direct their thinking away from social reform?
As I said, following on the point of the parent post I responded to, the "Gifted" label is used to control. Why not reflect on how those labels, even "high IQ", are being used to control you? Even if it implies it will get you the goodies academia has to offer?
Doesn't it bother you to be reduced from a unique individual to a label?
By the way, IQ was originally designed to detect and provide help for people below the norm in most areas, it's not clear it has any real meaning for people above the norm, since it is essentially ability divided by age. What happens when people get older?
Consider what Gatto writes here: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "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."
It may be a long journey before you are willing to admit you have been bamboozled by the very people who proclaimed to be your salvation. It was for me.:-)
As I said in the title, the Gifted label is used to control. If you are a standard product of school, even of a "gifted program", you have been controlled -- neutralized -- domesticated. You have been shaped to fit into a 19th century Brave New World industrial model of how society should be. OK, so you were tracked as an Alpha, so what? You were still controlled -- and limited -- against your wishes. Those very wishes were shaped to fit the perceived needs of that industrial order.
It does not matter if many or most teachers are caring individuals -- they remain the agents and prison wardens of this system; their range of behavior is limited by the system they are embedded in. That is one reason so many of the most caring ones burn out early.
I have no doubt that people vary in interests, experiences, or potential. Consider Howard Gardener's work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences: __ http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm "In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories or that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)"
There may well be people who excel at everything. You may be one of them. But so what? How does that justify "compulsory schooling" of anyone? Except to control them. To neutralize any potential benefit of that intelligence on social structure. Even if kids need to be in day prisons because their parents are forced to work to survive (even in this age of abundance): http://www.whywork.org/ why not "Free schools"? http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml
On conspiracy, if you read the rest of that online book, you will see that Gatto does not believe in "conspiracy" in a large sense. As he says here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud http://borntoexplore.org/unschool/gifted.htm "The truth is that "gifted and talented" programs are fast-track indoctrination courses, not real academics."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/15c.htm "I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of specific individuals--even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and talented." What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures before until you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you say. You survived, didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a crucial difference for good in your life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You paid your dues, I paid mine. But who collected those dues?"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologu e_print.html "In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling."
"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. Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
You can think of a triad a like a relationship for an object A with an attribute B and a value C.
One of the reasons I first decided to put it on SourceForge was in case someone later tried to patent the idea. Glad I did.
Essentially, and while there are variants of this, for speedy lookup of triads, I have data items which link via extra pointers. So, for example, for the triad A, B, C, there is the record structure:
Triad# A B C PreviousA PreviousB PreviousC LastA LastB LastC
To, if you have a triad number, you can fetch the last user of that triad, and then work back from there to find all the triads which contain that object in the A, B, or C slot. These links are all built or updated as new triads are added.
I have other variants of this as well -- quads where the first item represents a "space" of triads (though you can easily generalize this to arbitrary length tuples). And most recently where each object reference is two parts defining a Unicode name for a space and a binary string of data to be interpreted in the context of the standard for that space. This is a little like RDF and namespaces.
It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies.
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax
The deeper issue: http://www.whywork.org/
"We actively promote alternatives to the wage slavery mindset and what we call "The Cult of the Job" which automatically equates having a job with making a living."
And from an essay there by Bob Black: 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."
And further:
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.... And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? "
Re:why education technology has failed schools
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You may still unconsciously believe the school party line that school teaches people how to think or be creative, whereas as Gatto indicates its main role lies in training people how not to think or be creative. http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt Gatto's whole point is that schools were designed for a 19th century vision of industrial utopia -- sort of like a "Brave New World" on 1900s SteamPunk perhaps. But that is not the age we live in after the very success of industrialization and the rise of the internet. Also, you are throwing the word "efficient" around without asking "efficient to what end" -- a sure sign of excess schooling perhaps?:-) Are humans obsolete? Obsolete for whom? Certainly never to themselves. Perhaps you mean obsolete relative to a capitalist economy. If so, should we not be busy rethinking what sort of economy can sustain human life, instead of driving with capitalism off a cliff? Consider for example this essay by E.F. Schumacher: http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economic s/english.html "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
why education technology has failed schools
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"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"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.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin- soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it."
See, that's where you and many others go wrong. Historically, this is completely untrue. Corporations are "chartered" by the state to meet otherwise unmet social needs. If they fail to do so, the state has the right and responsibility to revoke their charters. It was understood that because corporations were large immortal beings without consciences or an ability to feel pain and without family or community ties that they needed to be kept on a very short leash. So, originally, corporations were only created for very narrow public purposes. The current state of related laws is an abomination of the original intent. While they are organizational demons made of people, the people do not control them any more than the cells in your body individually control you. And if you are in a role in a corporation and do not fulfill that role, you will be swapped out with as much emotion as you have when swapping out a burned out light bulb. The corporate demons created to serve humankind are now the masters. See for example:
"The History of the Corporation" http://www.astonisher.com/archives/corporation_int ro.html Or:
"TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation" http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoBeij.html From the second link: """ The American colonists did not revolt simply over a tax on tea. The laborers, small farmers, traders, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and landed gentry who sent King George III packing, feared corporations. As pamphleteer Thomas Earle was to write in 1823: "Chartered privileges are a burden, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery." While American volunteers were routing the king's armies, they vowed to put corporations under democratic command. After the revolution, people were determined to keep investment and production decisions local and democratic. They believed corporations were neither inevitable nor always appropriate. Many colonial citizens argued that under the Constitution, no business could be granted special privileges. Others worded that once incorporators amassed wealth, they would use their corporate shields to control jobs and production, buy off the press and dominate elections and the courts. Craft and industrial workers feared absentee corporate owners would turn them into "a commodity being as much an article of commerce as woolens, cotton, or yarn," according to historian Louis Hartz. Having thrown off British rule, the revolutionaries delegated their elected state legislators to issue corporate charters on the people's behalf. For 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, citizen vigilance and activism forced legislators to keep corporations on a short civic leash." """
See also:
"Toddlers' TV habits may 'rewire' brains" http://www.sptimes.com/2004/04/05/Worldandnation/T oddlers__TV_habits_m.shtml "Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.... The researchers didn't know what shows the children watched, but Christakis said content likely isn't the culprit. Instead, he said, fast-paced visual images typical of most TV programming may alter brain development."
Autism (or other similar seeming behavioral issues) it likely to be a multi-factorial disease, with many interacting causes -- genetics, diet, heavy metal exposure, viruses, TV, stress, and so on. Some of these factors may weigh more than others -- probably all are involved to some degree or another, and the amount may vary by individual based on how well their genetics can compensate for various problems whether they are too little good fats, too much heavy metals from whatever sources, or exposure to rapidly flickering changing scenes on TV. And it remains true that eating right, exercising, moderation in vices like TV, and trying to reduce stress are all good things to do in almost any situation (which is why I like that omega-3 suggestion, because it is probably not going to hurt, but generally may improve health). So too for not watching TV -- getting rid of your TV can't hurt much, and probably will improve health. Vaccination is admittedly a much more controversial topic. Here is one of the less sensationalized books on that:
"Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives" http://www.amazon.com/Vaccinations-Thoughtful-Sens ible-Decisions-Alternatives/dp/0892819316
Don't be so hard on yourself. Your's was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.
See:
"Underground History of American Education" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m "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."
This free school teaches all kids without coercion or drugs: http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml "Though we are by no means a special school for problem children, we frequently serve as a safety net for children who have been falling through the cracks of the conventional education system. At any given time, approximately half of our students are referrals from the public and parochial schools. Our reputation with students that are struggling academically and/or behaviorally, and whose needs the system has failed to meet, is such that an increasing number of kids are coming to us having previously been tagged with labels like ADHD and placed on Ritalin and other biopsychiatric medications. Their parents seek us out because they're concerned about the side effects of the drugs and because they've heard that we work effectively with these children without drugs of any kind. Our active, flexible, individually structured environment renders the drugs entirely unnecessary."
I understand what you are saying, but how is it going to hurt to try cod liver oil capsules (or if capsules are rejected, then trying one of the other variations now available including it in flavored pastes, pudding, or orange juice, or adding it yourself to ice cream, and so on)? Check out:
"Q: Feeding Fish Oil to Toddler" http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=58 1169 Omega-3 supplements generally improve health. I've never heard of them doing harm (except for fish burps:-). If there is a remote chance they may slightly improve the worse aspects of autism for some people, then are they not worth trying for a few months?
This is not quite the same situation, but consider there is scientific evidence linking behavior issues to poor diet: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/crime-punishme nt-and-a-junk-food-diet/2006/11/15/1163266639865.h tml "The British prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences committed in the prison fell by 37 per cent. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, Britain's former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, says he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it". The clinician in charge of the US study on aggression, Joseph Hibbeln, hypothesises that modern industrialised diets may be changing the very architecture and functioning of the brain. We are suffering, he believes, from widespread diseases of deficiency. Just as vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, deficiency in the essential fats the brain needs and the nutrients needed to metabolise those fats is causing a host of mental problems, from depression to aggression. Not all experts agree, but if he is right, the consequences are serious. The pandemic of violence in Western societies may be related to what we eat or fail to eat. "
Before Bayh-Dole, there was a system where everything was patented with the patent assigned to the government and it sat on a shelf, as no one benefited by marketing the patent to potential customers. The *right* thing to do from a public point of view would have been that all inventions funded in whole or in part by US taxpayer dollars should have been put into the public domain as they had already been paid for. Instead, patent lawyers and universities got a free hand-out and the US public gets asked to pay twice (or more) for the same stuff. Conflict-of-interest and corruption plain and simple. Now universities keep professors from talking about their research until patents are filed and academic research is further skewed by pressure short term commercialization possibilities. The problem of money in academia has to do more with the pyramid scheme nature of PhD eduction (see below).
For more on how Bayh-Dole has ruined academia, see the article "The Kept University" for example: http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/20 00/the_kept_university http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/papers/k eptu.html
"One of the most basic tenets of science is that we share information in an open way," says Steven Rosenberg, of the National Cancer Institute, who is among the country's leading cancer researchers. "As biotech and pharmaceutical companies have become more involved in funding research, there's been a shift toward confidentiality that is severely inhibiting the interchange of information." A few years ago Rosenberg confronted this problem firsthand when he tried to obtain information on safe-dosage levels for a reagent he sought to use in a clinical trial involving an experimental cancer treatment. The company asked Rosenberg to sign a confidentiality agreement, and when he refused, they withheld the information. Rosenberg has become so alarmed about secrecy that he now urges all scientists and research institutions to reject confidentiality restrictions on principle. Few have heeded his call. A 1997 survey of 2,167 university scientists, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that nearly one in five had delayed publication for more than six months to protect proprietary information -- and this was the number that admitted to delay. "The ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well," Rosenberg says. "This is the real dark side of science."
For more on the deeper issue of the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme, as the exponential growth of academia has ended, see Dr. David Goodstein's testimony to Congress (he is the Vice Provost of CalTech): http://web.archive.org/web/20060509161315/http://w ww.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm "In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. There are some who have blamed these problems on a shortage of Federal funds for research. Many have argued that we should double our national investment in science, and that may well be true. But I do not thin
For more on your theme, see John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m "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."
But, lest you think this is a conspiracy: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m " A Conspiracy Against Ourselves: Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."
See also: http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/colum nists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml "I'll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than 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, film makers, 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. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there. "
Gatto suggests there is a lot more uniformity of soul-breaking methods (see his six or seven lesson schoolteacher essay, linked by a previous poster) http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt and he suggest that in the face of such conformity of methods any diversity of content is mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, those who have most bought into the system are busy shaping it for the next generation. What matters to many in control is to see their kid be broken the same way they were broken, so the kid will do well enough in school to move into a conformist slot in society. However, they do not see this as "breaking" a kid -- they see this as "making" them. There is a tension here between forcing a child to become part of a hierarchical and corrupt and bullying rank-oriented "society" versus helping them find their niche in a free expressive artistic "culture". One path seeks to make children all the same -- a standardized commodity; the other to amplify their differences to help them be the best they can be. Consider novel after novel where the aristocratic executive is trying to break their child to take on the family business which the child abhors. Granted, the schooling system tracks a few percent to be elite managers, but even they are often just as trapped in the system and the mythology that drives it as everyone else (the myth of scarcity and need for conformity to keep the industrial machinery running smoothly). This site: http://www.whywork.org/ is about the future -- and it is not the one compulsory schooling prepares people for.
It's more like complaining your chainsaw is incompatible with your store bought lumber.:-) Show me the 100% crystal clear boundary between a description of how to do something in a manual and a program (consider Lisp where code is data, or how often manuals contain code examples). Or explain with 100% clarity the difference between a description of what something is (as in Wikipedia) and a program (consider Prolog or a Functional Programing language, where describing a problem may actually be solving it). Explain to me where the line is in a program between documentation and implementation (consider, why are not all variable names just numbers like V001, V002, etc. and all function names F001, F002, etc? Why are there comments?) Where is the line between code and coumentation in various "literate programming" approaches which mix HTML and code snipped? Tell me why an image from Wikipedia should not be useful in a program's about box. The reality is that there are lots of shades of gray and overlap between programs and other creative works involving text. In the digital realm, give me one reason (other than dead tree publisher's financial benefit) why the GFDL makes any sense considering how the GPL is applicable to a work like Wikipedia. And, remember, if you actually use any of the special features of the GFDL, like invariant texts, then your contribution can not be in the "free" section of Debian -- so isn't the "Free" in GFDL a misnomer (granted FSF and Debian have slightly different agendas)?
This has happened before. A while back I tried without success to convince Richard Stallman that continuing to promote a license (the GNU Free Documentation License or GFDL) http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html which was incompatible with the GPL was a bad thing.:-) See for example some reasons at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentatio n_License http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html My particular interest was to use information from the GFDL-licensed Wikipedia in GPL programs. I'd go further and question the very reasons the GFDL was created in the first place -- just to make dead tree book publishers' lives easier? Where is the emphasis on freedom there?
I think it is easy for any technologist to underestimate community issues and then to see a license as a program for individual behavior instead of a constitution for a community. The GPL works. It has problems, sure, but it works well enough as a constitution for cooperation. More variants of licenses mainly just make more problems IMHO.
One big issue is we had to rearrange our house to have the heavy (~250lb) treadmills on the ground floor -- both to not carry them up the stairs and also for concerns about noise.
While we had a custom tray made for a treadmill by a generous neighbor a couple days ago, on reading your comment I do now realize it is a bit low and I am hunching to use the keyboard and mouse on it. So a few boxes to prop up the keyboard and mouse pad added just now and it feels better.
As the parent post to yours suggests, having multiple monitors also helps, and I have three in this setup, and it is nice to switch between them for moving around the neck and so on.
Anyway, the treadmill may be nice, but for the week or so that I was standing just with a drafting desk moved to standing height with three LCD monitors, I felt a big improvement. We also had tall chairs for variety, and also a floor rest for alternating resting feet while standing. The more you can keep moving in various ways and vary your body position while working for a long time, the better. The treadmill is mostly geared towards weight loss in my case.:-)
And I am typing this going half a mile an hour on the treadmill, having just walked about a mile during the two hours I have been web surfing (including reading this slashdot article and replying to this).
Well, except for hopping off the treadmill to give a treat to our two dogs.:-) We work at home, so dogs and workstation customizations are more possible here. Could ergonomics be a push for more home offices?
Another excerpt from the essay: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html "A common denominator in just about each of these areas is the domination by out-of-date ideologies based on scarcity perspectives and/or the capture of the government regulatory and funding bodies by narrow interests who are afraid of losing out by progressive post-scarcity change (which they fear will leave them impoverished). There is also the issue of some people desiring to continue to have lots of raw power over other people's lives (like that of a master over slaves); frankly I can't address that character flaw other than to point at religious and humanistic traditions of enlarging one's sense of self to include community and world responsibilities (including finding joy in helping the growth of others to be independent decision makers), so I restrict what follows to monetary aspects of the problem. Ultimately though, raw power lust has to be dealt with -- and dealing with that I freely admit will be tougher than the economic aspects of making the case for a post-scarcity worldview."
That is really where the core of the problem is. We can always argue about specifics in any one area -- but that is the big picture as we transition to a world where kids realize the schools they are forced to be in have little relation to an emerging post-scarcity reality made possible by automation and the internet: http://www.whywork.org/
Except the real solution is to get rid of compulsory schooling entirely and get people doing "unschooling", http://www.unschooling.com/ and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).
All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.
Slashdot Mirror
From this essay I wrote:h nologyHasFailedSchools.html
m l
...
W all.htm
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTec
With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.ht
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
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.
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative
work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and
creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based
ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as
opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making
things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much
sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if
you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a
challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a
way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by
automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the
drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything
you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn
something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50
contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap
themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so
of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-
Judging by how my replies have been modded both up and down, and there are a couple of speculative Anonymous Coward personal attack replies, as well as some agreeing replies, obviously this issue has hit a nerve. :-)
You make some good points, but essentially what they seem to amount to, "This is they way the system works now, so best go with the flow." Sure, there is credentialism in science; so what? All this proves is academia is *good* at using labels to control and get bright young people to waste their youth jumping through hoops instead of making change or learning how to be free.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism
Does that mean people without credentials are not qualified to do science, engineering, or education (including of their own children)? Should any programmer without a PhD be turned away from any Open Source or Free Software project?
Isn't "rankism" a bad thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism
But this is essentially what you are perhaps unknowingly arguing for: "Fuller has defined rankism as: "abusive, discriminatory, or exploitative behavior towards people who have less power because of their lower rank in a particular hierarchy""
Gatto and John Holt argue it only takes fifty to one hundred hours to teach a kid enough about reading or math to bootstrap themselves up from there in those subjects as far as they want to go -- if the kid wants to learn. What are the other 12000 hours of schooling for if not to produce conformity? Are you saying you could not have learned all those other things on your own or in peer groups or from individuals in the community? On language, if you had lived in Japan at age six, or had a Japanese caretaker, you would have learned it effortlessly and fluently. Self learning in isolation or school learning of languages (except for immersion courses) almost never makes anyone fluent. Please note: mentoring and educating is completely different from compulsory schooling. Every child needs mentors and educators in their life; no child needs schooling or school personnel in their life. As Gatto suggest, most of what goes on in compulsory schools (public or private) has little to do with what kids need to learn to be free individuals in a 21st century post-industrial information age economy.
You are essentially arguing for the status quo based on convenience. Is there no point in talking about GNU/Linux or Open Office on Slashdot since Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products are still used by most businesses? Is there no point in discussing Python here since Visual Basic has so many users? Is "freedom" always (or ever) the easier road in the short term?
The point of that article on college and cowardice is that there are alternatives -- and many people who might benefit from them have been scared into conformity with the schooling enterprise -- especially the ones labeled "gifted" who otherwise might be troublemakers, just like a lot of people have been scared into conformity with Microsoft Office and Visual Basic. Sure people live in a somewhat capitalist society in the USA (ignoring huge government subsidies to major industries), but if Capitalism is driving the society off a cliff through short-sighted greed, is it smart to stay as a passenger in the car? Remember, the reason people in the USA now live in a militaristic capitalist scarcity-based society is that some greedy people used guns and biological warfare to wipe out the societies based on abundance and open-source style gift-giving which existed in North America beforehand.
From:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
"When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough
It is part of propaganda (and perhaps many religions, of which schooling is a secular one), to hide the alternatives, label them evil, or make them into strawman shadows.
... Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
So, some class in a compulsory school program taught you something about C++. A technical skill. Is that all "education" (as distinct from "schooling")is supposed to be about? Skills?
Consider:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"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.
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know. "
Granted it lead you to appreciate some things like some literature. And you are saying it was worth twelve to thirteen years of your early life to do this? Compared to what alternatives? Home schooling? Unschooling?
http://www.unschooling.com/
Free schooling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
Learning on your own in the library?
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/educatn.html
"Could college attendance be a form of cowardice?"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/wizard.html
At what cost? Would you not perhaps rather have learned to love literature on your own, but instead have the $200K or so (principal of $10K per year plus compound interest over a dozen years) invested in your compulsory schooling upon reaching age 18 so you could live off the interest or buy a house with it to live rent free?
Consider the alternatives to labeling and dividing people and which have been hidden from your view. And then think about how people you trusted did this to you. They took money on your behalf. And left you with a lifetime of industrialized work ahead of you. Consider:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to hig
You've missed the point. All people are unique. There are also many types of intelligence:n telligences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_i
So this suggest you are correct to start making distinctions, like between IQ and EQ. One can go a lot further than that, according to Howard Gardner.
Even if some people are just smarter about everything (including ethics?), so what? How does that justify compulsory schooling of everyone? Perhaps "Gifted programs" skim off those who might be troublemakers and keep them occupied in relatively unimportant pursuits and direct their thinking away from social reform?
As I said, following on the point of the parent post I responded to, the "Gifted" label is used to control. Why not reflect on how those labels, even "high IQ", are being used to control you? Even if it implies it will get you the goodies academia has to offer?
Doesn't it bother you to be reduced from a unique individual to a label?
By the way, IQ was originally designed to detect and provide help for people below the norm in most areas, it's not clear it has any real meaning for people above the norm, since it is essentially ability divided by age. What happens when people get older?
Consider what Gatto writes here:
:-)
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"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."
It may be a long journey before you are willing to admit you have been bamboozled by the very people who proclaimed to be your salvation. It was for me.
As I said in the title, the Gifted label is used to control. If you are a standard product of school, even of a "gifted program", you have been controlled -- neutralized -- domesticated. You have been shaped to fit into a 19th century Brave New World industrial model of how society should be. OK, so you were tracked as an Alpha, so what? You were still controlled -- and limited -- against your wishes. Those very wishes were shaped to fit the perceived needs of that industrial order.
It does not matter if many or most teachers are caring individuals -- they remain the agents and prison wardens of this system; their range of behavior is limited by the system they are embedded in. That is one reason so many of the most caring ones burn out early.
I have no doubt that people vary in interests, experiences, or potential. Consider Howard Gardener's work Frames of Mind. The theory of multiple intelligences: __
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
"In the heyday of the psychometric and behaviorist eras, it was generally believed that intelligence was a single entity that was inherited; and that human beings - initially a blank slate - could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way. Nowadays an increasing number of researchers believe precisely the opposite; that there exists a multitude of intelligences, quite independent of each other; that each intelligence has its own strengths and constraints; that the mind is far from unencumbered at birth; and that it is unexpectedly difficult to teach things that go against early 'naive' theories or that challenge the natural lines of force within an intelligence and its matching domains. (Gardner 1993: xxiii)"
There may well be people who excel at everything. You may be one of them. But so what? How does that justify "compulsory schooling" of anyone? Except to control them. To neutralize any potential benefit of that intelligence on social structure. Even if kids need to be in day prisons because their parents are forced to work to survive (even in this age of abundance):
http://www.whywork.org/
why not "Free schools"?
http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml
On conspiracy, if you read the rest of that online book, you will see that Gatto does not believe in "conspiracy" in a large sense. As he says here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/
'Gifted Child Industry' Preys on Parents' Insecuritiesw &cID=259124&pID=259049
u e_print.html
http://www.alternet.org/story/42644/?comments=vie
The "Gifted and Talented" Fraud
http://borntoexplore.org/unschool/gifted.htm
"The truth is that "gifted and talented" programs are fast-track indoctrination courses, not real academics."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/15c.htm
"I could regale you with mountains of statistics to illustrate the damage schools cause. I could bring before your attention a line of case studies to illustrate the mutilation of specific individuals--even those who have been apparently privileged as its "gifted and talented." What would that prove? You've heard those stories, read these figures before until you went numb from the assault on common sense. School can't be that bad, you say. You survived, didn't you? Or did you? Review what you learned there. Has it made a crucial difference for good in your life? Don't answer. I know it hasn't. You surrendered twelve years of your life because you had no choice. You paid your dues, I paid mine. But who collected those dues?"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prolog
"In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling."
"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. Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly: Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
See my linked lists of triads:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/pointrel/
http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
SourceForge downloads going back to at least 2001:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
My own work on it goes back about thirty years.
You can think of a triad a like a relationship for an object A with an attribute B and a value C.
One of the reasons I first decided to put it on SourceForge was in case someone later tried to patent the idea. Glad I did.
Essentially, and while there are variants of this, for speedy lookup of triads, I have data items which link via extra pointers. So, for example, for the triad A, B, C, there is the record structure:
Triad# A B C PreviousA PreviousB PreviousC LastA LastB LastC
To, if you have a triad number, you can fetch the last user of that triad, and then work back from there to find all the triads which contain that object in the A, B, or C slot. These links are all built or updated as new triads are added.
I have other variants of this as well -- quads where the first item represents a "space" of triads (though you can easily generalize this to arbitrary length tuples). And most recently where each object reference is two parts defining a Unicode name for a space and a binary string of data to be interpreted in the context of the standard for that space. This is a little like RDF and namespaces.
See my comment here:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/arc hive/000431.html
It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies.
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax
The deeper issue:
o n.html
... And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? "
http://www.whywork.org/
"We actively promote alternatives to the wage slavery mindset and what we call "The Cult of the Job" which automatically equates having a job with making a living."
And from an essay there by Bob Black:
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."
And further:
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
You may still unconsciously believe the school party line that school teaches people how to think or be creative, whereas as Gatto indicates its main role lies in training people how not to think or be creative. :-) Are humans obsolete? Obsolete for whom? Certainly never to themselves. Perhaps you mean obsolete relative to a capitalist economy. If so, should we not be busy rethinking what sort of economy can sustain human life, instead of driving with capitalism off a cliff? Consider for example this essay by E.F. Schumacher:c s/english.html
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Gatto's whole point is that schools were designed for a 19th century vision of industrial utopia -- sort of like a "Brave New World" on 1900s SteamPunk perhaps. But that is not the age we live in after the very success of industrialization and the rise of the internet. Also, you are throwing the word "efficient" around without asking "efficient to what end" -- a sure sign of excess schooling perhaps?
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economi
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
See:o n-technology-has-failed.htmlh nologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-educati
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTec
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
From:
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"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.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it."
Homework only makes the problem worse!
"A corporation exists to make money."
t ro.html
t m
See, that's where you and many others go wrong. Historically, this is completely untrue. Corporations are "chartered" by the state to meet otherwise unmet social needs. If they fail to do so, the state has the right and responsibility to revoke their charters. It was understood that because corporations were large immortal beings without consciences or an ability to feel pain and without family or community ties that they needed to be kept on a very short leash. So, originally, corporations were only created for very narrow public purposes. The current state of related laws is an abomination of the original intent. While they are organizational demons made of people, the people do not control them any more than the cells in your body individually control you. And if you are in a role in a corporation and do not fulfill that role, you will be swapped out with as much emotion as you have when swapping out a burned out light bulb. The corporate demons created to serve humankind are now the masters.
See for example:
"The History of the Corporation"
http://www.astonisher.com/archives/corporation_in
Or:
"TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation"
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoBeij.html
From the second link: """ The American colonists did not revolt simply over a tax on tea. The laborers, small farmers, traders, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and landed gentry who sent King George III packing, feared corporations. As pamphleteer Thomas Earle was to write in 1823: "Chartered privileges are a burden, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery." While American volunteers were routing the king's armies, they vowed to put corporations under democratic command. After the revolution, people were determined to keep investment and production decisions local and democratic. They believed corporations were neither inevitable nor always appropriate. Many colonial citizens argued that under the Constitution, no business could be granted special privileges. Others worded that once incorporators amassed wealth, they would use their corporate shields to control jobs and production, buy off the press and dominate elections and the courts. Craft and industrial workers feared absentee corporate owners would turn them into "a commodity being as much an article of commerce as woolens, cotton, or yarn," according to historian Louis Hartz. Having thrown off British rule, the revolutionaries delegated their elected state legislators to issue corporate charters on the people's behalf. For 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, citizen vigilance and activism forced legislators to keep corporations on a short civic leash." """
And of course your education was designed by corporation owners to keep you from thinking about this:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
This has been an interesting dialogue to read.
1 7/04352504 8682,00.html
T oddlers__TV_habits_m.shtml ... The researchers didn't know what shows the children watched, but Christakis said content likely isn't the culprit. Instead, he said, fast-paced visual images typical of most TV programming may alter brain development."
s ible-Decisions-Alternatives/dp/0892819316
Just to throw in another possibility previously discussed on slashdot, perhaps "TV" helps cause autism in those susceptible to it. See:
"TV Really Might Cause Autism"
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/
Though others disagree:
"Does Watching TV Cause Autism?"
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,15
(even suggesting indoor air quality might be part of the problem).
See also:
"Toddlers' TV habits may 'rewire' brains"
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/04/05/Worldandnation/
"Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.
Autism (or other similar seeming behavioral issues) it likely to be a multi-factorial disease, with many interacting causes -- genetics, diet, heavy metal exposure, viruses, TV, stress, and so on. Some of these factors may weigh more than others -- probably all are involved to some degree or another, and the amount may vary by individual based on how well their genetics can compensate for various problems whether they are too little good fats, too much heavy metals from whatever sources, or exposure to rapidly flickering changing scenes on TV. And it remains true that eating right, exercising, moderation in vices like TV, and trying to reduce stress are all good things to do in almost any situation (which is why I like that omega-3 suggestion, because it is probably not going to hurt, but generally may improve health). So too for not watching TV -- getting rid of your TV can't hurt much, and probably will improve health. Vaccination is admittedly a much more controversial topic. Here is one of the less sensationalized books on that:
"Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives"
http://www.amazon.com/Vaccinations-Thoughtful-Sen
Don't be so hard on yourself. Your's was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.
t m
See:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
"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."
Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
This free school teaches all kids without coercion or drugs:
http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/overview.shtml
"Though we are by no means a special school for problem children, we frequently serve as a safety net for children who have been falling through the cracks of the conventional education system. At any given time, approximately half of our students are referrals from the public and parochial schools. Our reputation with students that are struggling academically and/or behaviorally, and whose needs the system has failed to meet, is such that an increasing number of kids are coming to us having previously been tagged with labels like ADHD and placed on Ritalin and other biopsychiatric medications. Their parents seek us out because they're concerned about the side effects of the drugs and because they've heard that we work effectively with these children without drugs of any kind. Our active, flexible, individually structured environment renders the drugs entirely unnecessary."
I understand what you are saying, but how is it going to hurt to try cod liver oil capsules (or if capsules are rejected, then trying one of the other variations now available including it in flavored pastes, pudding, or orange juice, or adding it yourself to ice cream, and so on)? Check out:8 1169 :-). If there is a remote chance they may slightly improve the worse aspects of autism for some people, then are they not worth trying for a few months?
e nt-and-a-junk-food-diet/2006/11/15/1163266639865.h tml
"Q: Feeding Fish Oil to Toddler"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=5
Omega-3 supplements generally improve health. I've never heard of them doing harm (except for fish burps
This is not quite the same situation, but consider there is scientific evidence linking behavior issues to poor diet:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/crime-punishm
"The British prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences committed in the prison fell by 37 per cent. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, Britain's former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, says he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it". The clinician in charge of the US study on aggression, Joseph Hibbeln, hypothesises that modern industrialised diets may be changing the very architecture and functioning of the brain. We are suffering, he believes, from widespread diseases of deficiency. Just as vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, deficiency in the essential fats the brain needs and the nutrients needed to metabolise those fats is causing a host of mental problems, from depression to aggression. Not all experts agree, but if he is right, the consequences are serious. The pandemic of violence in Western societies may be related to what we eat or fail to eat. "
Before Bayh-Dole, there was a system where everything was patented with the patent assigned to the government and it sat on a shelf, as no one benefited by marketing the patent to potential customers. The *right* thing to do from a public point of view would have been that all inventions funded in whole or in part by US taxpayer dollars should have been put into the public domain as they had already been paid for. Instead, patent lawyers and universities got a free hand-out and the US public gets asked to pay twice (or more) for the same stuff. Conflict-of-interest and corruption plain and simple. Now universities keep professors from talking about their research until patents are filed and academic research is further skewed by pressure short term commercialization possibilities. The problem of money in academia has to do more with the pyramid scheme nature of PhD eduction (see below).
For more on how Bayh-Dole has ruined academia, see the article "The Kept University" for example:
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/20 00/the_kept_university
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/papers/k eptu.html
"One of the most basic tenets of science is that we share information in an open way," says Steven Rosenberg, of the National Cancer Institute, who is among the country's leading cancer researchers. "As biotech and pharmaceutical companies have become more involved in funding research, there's been a shift toward confidentiality that is severely inhibiting the interchange of information." A few years ago Rosenberg confronted this problem firsthand when he tried to obtain information on safe-dosage levels for a reagent he sought to use in a clinical trial involving an experimental cancer treatment. The company asked Rosenberg to sign a confidentiality agreement, and when he refused, they withheld the information. Rosenberg has become so alarmed about secrecy that he now urges all scientists and research institutions to reject confidentiality restrictions on principle. Few have heeded his call. A 1997 survey of 2,167 university scientists, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that nearly one in five had delayed publication for more than six months to protect proprietary information -- and this was the number that admitted to delay. "The ethics of business and the ethics of science do not mix well," Rosenberg says. "This is the real dark side of science."
For more on the deeper issue of the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme, as the exponential growth of academia has ended, see Dr. David Goodstein's testimony to Congress (he is the Vice Provost of CalTech):
http://web.archive.org/web/20060509161315/http://w ww.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
"In the course of a career, a professor in a research university turns out, on the average, about 15 Ph.D.'s. Many of these would like, themselves, to become in turn professors in research universities and turn out 15 more Ph.D.'s. After all, these were the gems that were selected at each stage of the mining and sorting operation. Becoming a professor seems to many of them the natural culmination of their successful educations. That is obviously one of the principal engines of the exponential growth that lasted for a hundred years in America. Those students are bitterly disappointed when they find out the jobs they want aren't there, and their disappointment seeps down through the ranks, turning younger students away from science. There are some who have blamed these problems on a shortage of Federal funds for research. Many have argued that we should double our national investment in science, and that may well be true. But I do not thin
For more on your theme, see John Taylor Gatto:t m
t m
m nists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
"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."
But, lest you think this is a conspiracy:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.h
" A Conspiracy Against Ourselves: Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."
See also:
http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/colu
"I'll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than 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, film makers, 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. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there. "
Gatto suggests there is a lot more uniformity of soul-breaking methods (see his six or seven lesson schoolteacher essay, linked by a previous poster) http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt and he suggest that in the face of such conformity of methods any diversity of content is mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, those who have most bought into the system are busy shaping it for the next generation. What matters to many in control is to see their kid be broken the same way they were broken, so the kid will do well enough in school to move into a conformist slot in society. However, they do not see this as "breaking" a kid -- they see this as "making" them. There is a tension here between forcing a child to become part of a hierarchical and corrupt and bullying rank-oriented "society" versus helping them find their niche in a free expressive artistic "culture". One path seeks to make children all the same -- a standardized commodity; the other to amplify their differences to help them be the best they can be. Consider novel after novel where the aristocratic executive is trying to break their child to take on the family business which the child abhors. Granted, the schooling system tracks a few percent to be elite managers, but even they are often just as trapped in the system and the mythology that drives it as everyone else (the myth of scarcity and need for conformity to keep the industrial machinery running smoothly). This site: http://www.whywork.org/ is about the future -- and it is not the one compulsory schooling prepares people for.
It's more like complaining your chainsaw is incompatible with your store bought lumber. :-) Show me the 100% crystal clear boundary between a description of how to do something in a manual and a program (consider Lisp where code is data, or how often manuals contain code examples). Or explain with 100% clarity the difference between a description of what something is (as in Wikipedia) and a program (consider Prolog or a Functional Programing language, where describing a problem may actually be solving it). Explain to me where the line is in a program between documentation and implementation (consider, why are not all variable names just numbers like V001, V002, etc. and all function names F001, F002, etc? Why are there comments?) Where is the line between code and coumentation in various "literate programming" approaches which mix HTML and code snipped? Tell me why an image from Wikipedia should not be useful in a program's about box. The reality is that there are lots of shades of gray and overlap between programs and other creative works involving text. In the digital realm, give me one reason (other than dead tree publisher's financial benefit) why the GFDL makes any sense considering how the GPL is applicable to a work like Wikipedia. And, remember, if you actually use any of the special features of the GFDL, like invariant texts, then your contribution can not be in the "free" section of Debian -- so isn't the "Free" in GFDL a misnomer (granted FSF and Debian have slightly different agendas)?
This has happened before. A while back I tried without success to convince Richard Stallman that continuing to promote a license (the GNU Free Documentation License or GFDL) :-)o n_License
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
which was incompatible with the GPL was a bad thing.
See for example some reasons at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentati
http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
My particular interest was to use information from the GFDL-licensed Wikipedia in GPL programs. I'd go further and question the very reasons the GFDL was created in the first place -- just to make dead tree book publishers' lives easier? Where is the emphasis on freedom there?
I think it is easy for any technologist to underestimate community issues and then to see a license as a program for individual behavior instead of a constitution for a community. The GPL works. It has problems, sure, but it works well enough as a constitution for cooperation. More variants of licenses mainly just make more problems IMHO.
We have set up two workstations with treadmills, inspired by Dr. James A. Levine's work at the Mayo clinic:6 08.html_ lab/c e-fit_x.htm?csp=34
http://www.mayoclinic.org/endocrinology-rst/11206
http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/levine
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-07-offi
Each has three LCD monitors on a shelf on the wall in front of the treadmill.
One big issue is we had to rearrange our house to have the heavy (~250lb) treadmills on the ground floor -- both to not carry them up the stairs and also for concerns about noise.
Your comment and the parent were interesting to me.
6 08.html_ lab/c e-fit_x.htm?csp=34
:-)
:-) We work at home, so dogs and workstation customizations are more possible here. Could ergonomics be a push for more home offices?
We are setting up workstations with treadmills, inspired by Dr. James A. Levine's work at the Mayo clinic:
http://www.mayoclinic.org/endocrinology-rst/11206
http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/levine
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-07-offi
While we had a custom tray made for a treadmill by a generous neighbor a couple days ago, on reading your comment I do now realize it is a bit low and I am hunching to use the keyboard and mouse on it. So a few boxes to prop up the keyboard and mouse pad added just now and it feels better.
As the parent post to yours suggests, having multiple monitors also helps, and I have three in this setup, and it is nice to switch between them for moving around the neck and so on.
Anyway, the treadmill may be nice, but for the week or so that I was standing just with a drafting desk moved to standing height with three LCD monitors, I felt a big improvement. We also had tall chairs for variety, and also a floor rest for alternating resting feet while standing. The more you can keep moving in various ways and vary your body position while working for a long time, the better. The treadmill is mostly geared towards weight loss in my case.
And I am typing this going half a mile an hour on the treadmill, having just walked about a mile during the two hours I have been web surfing (including reading this slashdot article and replying to this).
Well, except for hopping off the treadmill to give a treat to our two dogs.
I appreciate the reply.
i zzoz.htmle t.htm :-)
t arTrekSociety.html
We can quibble over specifics, especially the issue of who pays the costs versus who gets the benefits, e.g.:
Banking: The gold standard (gold dinar and islamic banking vs. fiat dollars and usury):
http://www.moneyfiles.org/goldwar.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_gold_dinar
http://www.prosperityuk.com/prosperity/articles/w
Health: "Has Canada Got The Cure?"
http://www.alternet.org/story/40951/
Empire: "War is a Racket"
http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisarack
but thanks for the comment about being a good start -- we sure need to start somewhere.
Another excerpt from the essay:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAS
"A common denominator in just about each of these areas is the domination
by out-of-date ideologies based on scarcity perspectives and/or the
capture of the government regulatory and funding bodies by narrow
interests who are afraid of losing out by progressive post-scarcity
change (which they fear will leave them impoverished). There is also the
issue of some people desiring to continue to have lots of raw power over
other people's lives (like that of a master over slaves); frankly I
can't address that character flaw other than to point at religious and
humanistic traditions of enlarging one's sense of self to include
community and world responsibilities (including finding joy in helping
the growth of others to be independent decision makers), so I restrict
what follows to monetary aspects of the problem. Ultimately though, raw
power lust has to be dealt with -- and dealing with that I freely admit
will be tougher than the economic aspects of making the case for a
post-scarcity worldview."
That is really where the core of the problem is. We can always argue about specifics in any one area -- but that is the big picture as we transition to a world where kids realize the schools they are forced to be in have little relation to an emerging post-scarcity reality made possible by automation and the internet:
http://www.whywork.org/
Except the real solution is to get rid of compulsory schooling entirely and get people doing "unschooling",
0 031028151034651
http://www.unschooling.com/
and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).
See for example John Holt's writings:
http://www.holtgws.com/index.html
or John Taylor Gatto's:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
or any of many other radical school reformers.
All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.
The future is not to still idealize Prussia and even earlier empire building aspirations back to Plato
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=2
which developed these techniques of "education" but instead to look into the future, where people start asking questions like "why work?"
http://www.whywork.org/
and how to structure an economy when "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
(Sorry to read about your loss, and it sounds like you were doing a lot of great things together, just needed more time to go even further.)