An essay I wrote in 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingASt arTrekSociety.html An excerpt: "Now, let us move on to the question of where could more money for education and creativity come from -- such as to fund more creation of free copyrights and free patents? And where could budget cuts be made so US parents (and everyone else) could work less hours and devote more time to their families and charitable hobbies -- including informally educating their children? As we shall see, a hundred billion dollars here, a hundred billion dollars there, and soon we are talking real money.:-)
Let us consider ways to free up money for the non-profit sector (or reducing working hours) by cutting wasteful government and consumer spending in these areas with (annual estimate of easy savings):
* Healthcare ($800 billion),
* Military ($200 billion),
* Prisons ($125 billion),
* Agriculture ($40 billion),
* Transportation ($250+ billion),
* Housing ($350+ billion),
* Manufacturing (very variable),
* Media (very variable),
* Banking ($14000 billion up front, $320 billion annually), and
* Education (very variable). This is a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year. And this is even without considering any lifestyle changes such as from widespread adoption of Voluntary Simplicity: http://world.std.com/~habib/thegarden/simplicity/ which will ultimately result in the largest savings in the US and worldwide (but I discuss no further here). "
Note that the target audience of this particular help-file printing software might involve people who have no printed documentaiton because they are using an unpaid for copy of some software? So, that whole test may just tell you what unethical (as far as paying for licensed software) people do?
From the article: There's an evident problem, however, with technology being effectively the sole focus; many (arguably most) of the significant drivers of change in the world today have more to do with religion, or economics, or the environment than with technological toys. Looking only (or primarily) at new gadgets misses out on the big picture. The deeper problem is more subtle and, in my view, more important. A preponderance of focus on emerging technologies leads one to start thinking of technology as a neutral driver of change, rather than as a material manifestation of social values. More often than not, the emergence of new forms of technology is less a catalyst for social change than a result of it. As a result, technology is not neutral. It embodies -- and is biased by -- the underlying values of the cultures in which it is developed.
Sounds like he's just discovered what Langdon Winner has been saying since the 1970s, and others since before then. Slashdot frequently sees posts like "a razor blade can be used for good or evil" implying technology is value neutral -- but it isn't. Technology embodies our values, especially when looked at as a system including favorite economic stories at the time -- including a decision to invest in, say, designing nuclear weapons design or marketing larger SUVs instead of say, curing river blindness or designing electric cars -- decisions driven by values.
Contrast, say, Disney's investments in controlling media with DRM versus the RepRap project to make a free 3D printer. Winner goes further in his book _Autonomous Technology_ and suggests large bureaucracies "reverse adapt", changing their environment to perpetuate themselves, including the legal environment. So, if you can't make or share your own media or 3D models, then you are dependent on Disney or whoever. Consider the kind of technology to sustain the values described here: CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery and how it might differ from the politics and policies and technologies and infrastructure of today. Or from this essay The Abolition of Work: "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.... Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control."
I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics) "Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000"
US $149.00 The Cybiko system combines instant messaging, interactive gaming, email and personal information manager (PIM) capabilities in an all-in-one device.... Available in four translucent colors, Cybiko has a full QWERTY keyboard to compose messages, LCD display,.5 MB memory (expandable to 16MB), a high frequency transmitter and Vibration Alert feature. The unit measures 4.8 x 2.8-inches and weighs under four ounces making it light, thin and small enough to carry in a book bag, purse or shirt pocket.... With Cybiko, kids and teens can communicate instantly with others within a radius of 150 to 300 feet, depending on the environment, creating their very own virtual community.
Wow!
Imagine what we could have for $1000 by the end of this year by integrating technology that already exists:
Running Squeak (and maybe Linux) as an open source OS/Development environment: http://www.squeak.org/
Using Bootstrap OHS/DKR type ideas for the interface...
Powered by solar energy and/or Baygen radio windup technology and/or fuel cells.
And with a digital camera for fun and creation of educational how-to tutorials... (And on the spot news reporting...)
And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each.
As an alternative, this could be a set of HandSpring modules instead: [Springboard]
Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000 African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one shut down nuclear plant.)
Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...)
This is like a system I wanted to develop and deploy pre-Y2K just in case... But it still has much value in preparing for any potential (natural, political, economic, biological) disaster, as well as aiding the development of democracy.
It's somewhat like the wearable crystals described in The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix), although the one thing it lacks is easy self-repliaction...
Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball). But luckily, there is hope from toymakers!
====
Anyway, glad to see six years later this is going ahead at that $100 price point (and developed by other than toymakers). My hat goes off to the dedicated people making this happen.
No one will deny the value of learning how to get along with other as needed.
Still, consider any fault that may come from the institution of college itself -- putting together a bunch of poorly socialized kids who have endured twelve years of being in an authoritarian environment that cultivates hate and apathy among children and turns many of them into the monsters who saw sport in taking down your student rather than want to grok her for her unique being.
Second, even if true, one failure of a home schooler to get along with one college crowd does not make a case. There are lots of counter-cases of home schoolers getting a long with all sorts of people -- including college kids.
Third, consider the fault in your student and her parents (or guardians) -- perhaps they just made a mistake in thinking there was any value to college for a bright person? Perhaps dropping out was the best answer. Consider, even the Vice Provost of Caltech told Congress that the US educational system was a collapsing pyramid scheme: http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
Maybe your student's only problem was having too much faith in an institution that did not have her best interests at heart? Maybe, as is suggested in the essays here: http://www.unconventionalideas.com/educatn.html college is sometimes the cowardly route to life?
However, having said all that, yes, she may well have missed out on something in her earlier education. But that happens to kids all the time in K-12 -- as a college prof you only see the "successes" of the K-12 system. Just think about all the ex-High School kids who you don't see (and likely would not want in your classes).:-)
I think Gatto would encourage your skeptical frame of mind.:-)
By the way, even I said "dwell", not "avoid".:-)
A house defrays the cost of about $1K per month in living expenses, giving peopel many more possibilities. Plus, as an appreciable asset, if money is taken out of it, it might provide another $1K a month for twenty years or so. So, two decades of about a $2K a month income increse. That's a lot for the average high school student, a good fraction of whom may not get a diploma anyway (or at least, not directly from high school). Or are you making an argument for accepting "creeping credentialism" that has no relation to ability?
Anyway, he casts a broad net. You say sometimes he catches boots instead of fish. And sure, he does cherry pick sometimes. Well, OK, but even if you quibble over the details, I feel his main point stands: compulsory schooling was developed as a form of "indoctrination" to create compliant people willing to give up any right to be free (or if not 100% compliant, then just at best, a person who talks but does not act), not for "education" as a free person.
I'll agree his book has flaws, including the mathematical one you point out. But you miss the forest for the trees if you dwell on nitpicking some flaws. For example, even at just $200K for a kids education K-12, it's pretty clear kids would be better off with the house and not the schooling. And he is not the only one saying stuff. Look at John Holt's writings, or look up free schools and unschooling and so on.
Actually, if you read Gatto, he says the US and many other nations copied this form of education from Prussia, which instituted compulsory education after a military defeat, and then went on to have relatively superior armies for a time. The history is more complex than this as well, with roots in India, and so on.
See for example: http://members.iquest.net/~macihms/Education/pubni ght.html "The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders. So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: 1. Obedient soldiers to the army; 2. Obedient workers to the mines; 3. Well subordinated civil servants to government; 4. Well subordinated clerks to industry 5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues. Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia. Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own."
See John Taylor Gatto's writings for the larger story of how compulsaory schooling was created 150 years ago to turn independent minded US citizens into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m These are the real lessons any school teacher really teaches: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt From there: "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."
NYS "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto suggests the whole thing is a sham from K through 12 and beyond -- designed precisely to make people submissive factory workers, mindless consumers, and obedient soldiers: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
On the large topic, while I agree with you on someplace like Simon's Rock beinggn worthy of support given the educational system we have now, I think this "donation" shows the folly of a certain type of monetary philanthropy.
Spend your life essentially suppressing innovation in software (and when you can't suppress it, buy it) like Gates, or spend your life making corporate sharks smarter like Buffet, and then think you can make the world a better place by essentially propping up a failed idea like compulsory schooling or subsidizing big Pharma?
Just shows how out of touch the biggest players running much of the US economy are with the worlds needs. If you ask the people in Africa, they say they want sewage systems and working economies and political systems (other than the sham ones left over from European colonialism or US corporate-friendly interventions) more than Polio vaccinations. And yes, people have asked, there was a New Yorker article on this Polio vaccination issue a couple years back, specifically talking about Africans' comments how money would be more cost effective spent on getting raw sewage out of the streets rather than vaccination, but the money was earmarked by charities only for vaccination. Most of the improvements in public health in the developed world have resulted from better nutrition and better sanitation and cleaner water.
The deep problem is that that the things the world desperately needs -- truly innovative people, free-as-in-freedom software and content, sustainable decentralized economies, flexible distributed manufacturing of most goods and information, are the very things the people with the most wealth in the world have been fighting against their whole working lives (to make sure they get most of the profits of a centralized system). Why think they might suddenly wake up when they get old?
National security has similar problems -- hard to get a central govenment dominated by the interests of big centralized power structures to admit that any concentration of power and materials poses an inherent security risk which may outweight the profitability to a few of the centralization.
Sounds like a case of "group think" here to me. Sad to see Buffet get sucked into it, but just because you are good at one thing like earning money, does not mean you are good at another, like effectively giving it away or choosing those who can. Sad to hear his wife did not get her chance to play a role in that -- sounds like she might have done it really well.
Your information is way out of date (if it ever was true). PV is relatively clean and cost effective now, and per unit these advantages will only improve with increasing volume. We just don't need centralized nukes in the next few decades, propping up a nuclear industry with a history of lies, murder (Silkwood), and pollution, built on government subsidies for R&D and insurance, and initmately associated with WMD production.
On scalability, PV solar systems work well especially when integrated with a system that gets some of its energy during cloudy or nighttime from cogeneration, which could be fueled using hydrogen made elsewhere by solar panels, or by biodiesel fuelds derived from farms, or from synthetic carbon based fuels (like synthetic propane) created from power from solar panels deployed in equatorial areas or the ocean. To see such an solar and cogeneration system working cost effectively in a major northern city, consider: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/popup/hhtoronto/works.h tm "What is truly amazing is that CMHC's Healthy House in Toronto provides all the comforts of home - without using municipal services. It has been designed to rely on sun and precipitation as the basis of its heating, electrical, water and waste water management systems. And right from the start, the way it is built and the materials used in construction mean more comfort, less maintenance and lower operating costs. That goes for the landscaping, too. CMHC's Healthy House in Toronto is located near public transportation, and is designed to provide maximum usable space on a minimum amount of land, to limit air and water pollution, and to use locally available materials and durable renewable resources wherever possible. It is an affordable solution to housing now that will keep on working for many years to come."
On pollution: http://greennature.com/article641.html "These differences, however, may not be particularly meaningful, according to Vasilis Fthenakis, a senior chemical engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory who specializes in the potential environmental impacts of solar cells. "There are no significant environmental and safety hazards with any of [the types of solar cells] to the scale that they are manufactured today," he explains. And although there are some hazardous materials used, such as silane gas, cadmium, carbon tetrafluoride, and lead, he says, "if you look at the quantities in relation to their use in other industries, they are very, very small." But these risks will become more significant as the industry grows, he adds."
Still, the fact remains that either we clean up all manufacturing towards zero emissions, or we will be burried in waste and pollution no matter what our energy source. R&D into all forms of low pollution manufacuring in the future will benefit PV.
Overall they make sense right now compare to what we have: http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1119 "An average U.S. household uses 830 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. On average, producing 1000 kWh of electricity with solar power reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. During its projected 28 years of clean energy production, a rooftop system with 2-year payback and meeting half of a household's electricity use would avoid conventional electrical plant emissions of more than half a ton of sulfur dioxide, one-third a ton of nitrogen oxides, and 100 tons of carbon dioxide. PV is clearly a wise energy investment with great environmental benefits!"
Re:Before bad diet and state oppression
on
Stone Age Dentists
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· Score: 1
It is the challenge of modern times to have the benefits of the stone age lifestyle without the limitations and bad parts. Home 3D printing seems like a step in the right direction: http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2 When something like that could print stuff that works like an iPod (and not just pretty mockups) then even more of the rationale for work will disappear.
Before bad diet and state oppression
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Stone Age Dentists
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· Score: 2, Interesting
For more on your point, see:
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times." and:
"CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery" http://www.whywork.org/
"If you start asking yourself "why work?" you may see a connection between wage slavery, misunderstandings of leisure, lifestyles based on consumption, corporate welfare, education that often amounts to little more than conditioning, and the global social, environmental, and economic crises we are now facing. We hope that the materials we feature here will encourage critical thinking about such things. This site is primarily about ideas and encouragement, so our focus is more philosophical than practical. However, ideas and action go hand-in-hand, so we're currently expanding the "practicality" sections." and:
"THE ABOLITION OF WORK" by Bob Black http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
"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." or:
_The End of Work_ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778247/002-64 49219-7760050?v=glance&n=283155
"Global unemployment is now at its highest levels since the Great Depression. Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, LJ 5/15/91) argues that the Information Age is the third great Industrial Revolution. A consequence of these technological advances is the rapid decline in employment and purchasing power that could lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Rifkin foresees two possible outcomes: a near workerless world in which people are free, for the first time in history, to pursue a utopian life of leisure; or a world in which unemployment leads to an even further polarization of the economic classes and a decline in living conditions for millions of people."
James P. Hogan has several sci-fi novels envisioning an alternative positive future (e.g. _Voyage from Yesteryear_)
Manuel De Landa puts it in another context: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Our (free) Garden Simulator is also intended as an an open ended toy. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/gwi.htm Doesn't suceed at that as much as we hoped, in part as we tossed too many of the fun aspects (neighbors, food preservation, survival aspects, etc.) in the interests of finishing version 1.0.
Our PlantStudio software which tries to do less ends up succeeding more at that (where just designing your own plants can be a lot of fun). http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Seymour Papert called these things "Microworlds" and was a big inspiration for us, http://www.papert.org/ "People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation...."
For young kids though (under five to seven?), just playing with physical toys and doing physical activities and being in a physical neighborhood seems like a better idea than spending too much time at the screen. I think it has a lot to do with how children are wired to learn best. See for example: http://www.alternative-doctor.com/home_page_articl es/vid-kids.html "In addition to the physical perils of too much screen, educators and other experts believe the TV and computer games take children away from the time that otherwise would be spent on developing their imaginations and social skills through peer play, socialization and hands-on creativity."
I still think computer microworlds be useful and positive; it's more a question of moderation and how they fit into a child's overall entire experience (especially later in life, after age five or so). We also found out that people learn more creating their own simulations than using someone else's.
See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.h tm http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m For example: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2e.htm "I have little doubt the fantastic wealth of American big business is psychologically and procedurally grounded in our form of schooling. The training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about."
The biggest problem with compulsary "public" education is that unlike "public" libraries, you can't (easily) escape by just walking out the door. (Well, you could for a day or two and then the police machinery related to truancy will start grinding on you, unless it is appeased in other ways.) Most "private" education is little better in the compulsary aspects or preventing bullying.
While this may seem paradoxical, as you continue your quest for spritiual growth, consider the idea that the bullies you faced are in some sense just as much victims of those systems as you were.
A good resource: http://www.bullyonline.org/ http://www.bullyonline.org/schoolbully/index.htm http://www.bullyonline.org/schoolbully/myths.htm Example from the myths page: "Children have it drummed into them from the moment they are born that they must not hit, punch, kick, bite, scratch, pull, push, poke or use any form of physical violence. Children are often punished - sometimes brutally and humiliatingly - for exhibiting any form of violent behaviour. Some adults then criticise children for not using violence when faced with a thug. Child targets of bullying also know (better than adults) that if they retaliate physically, the bully will feign victimhood (often with a convincing flood of tears) and the responsible adults will be fooled into believing that the target is the bully and the bully is the target. The (real) target is then punished by the adults whilst the bully looks on, enjoying every moment. Once the adults turn their backs, the bully starts on their target again. Targets are also people with high moral integrity, a well-developed sense of moral values, and a clear understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue. This is how we teach children to behave and how society demands that children behave. We should therefore not be surprised when targets of bullying display their maturity by going to great lengths to resolve the violent acts committed towards them with dialogue rather than with fists or feet. Trying to resolving conflict with dialogue is a hallmark of integrity and strength of character. Bullying is a hallmark of lack of integrity and weakness of character."
For the rest of the sordid story behind almost-all public (and also most private) education see the book:
_The Underground History of American Education_ -- by John Taylor Gatto available on-line here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.h tm From the prologue: "Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her. Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine. Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.... You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened? If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean? One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don't have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen? Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child's mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn't any. The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated.... You wouldn't build a home without some idea what it would
In an individualist way, Paul Graham is ignoring the bigger picture, and just advising individuals on how to have a better life in a failing society. There is nothing wrong with that kind of good advice by itself, and it is good advice, but it lacks social context, lacks long term planning, and lacks a way to make things permanently better for people without a lot of social advantages needed to follow that advice (let alone have time to read it).
From: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm 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."
Bob Black then goes on to say most work is unneeded, most of the rest can be made into fun, and the small remaining amount no one wants to do can be automated.
We have the system of "work" we do as a holdover from an agricultural feudal mindset coupled with a scarcity driven ideology (where dollars are really "ration units"). Compare this with, for example the better parts of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, see: "The Original Affluent Society -- by Marshall Sahlins" http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html for a description of life in a world where there is abundance for all with only a limited need for other-directed "work", where the productivity of the surrounding (living) system far exceeds that of collective human needs.
I don't see we have much of a good alternative to a post-work "utopia" for all;
"Utopia or Oblivian -- by Buckminster Fuller" http://www.bfi.org/node/17 we either build the world Bob Black envisions (or something like it, whether Bucky Fuller's ideas, or see James P. Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_ novel for a related perspective, http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml ) with abundance for all people, or, alternatively, by following the status quo off the cliffs of either pollution or warfare, humanity (though probably neither life nor intelligence nor humans) will perish in a world driven to destruction by putting abstractions like profits or nationalism ahead of basic human needs (including the basic human need not to be bored or demeaned eight hours a day). Does it all have to change in one day? No. You can build a better world bit by bit -- and that's one thi
This is the basis for the argument for CATs (Cheap Access to Space) and http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/CatsPrize/ various legislative pushes and at least a couple of billionaires (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com) putting a lot of money into this (perhaps as businesses, but essentially still billionaire hobbies). While I wish them well, I think this approach towards space settlement is misguided. Let's work the numbers.
The USA has about two million millionaires. There are many more elsewhere. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/07/07 11_030711_money.html "In total, there are an estimated 7.3 million people in the world whose assets--excluding their home--amount to U.S. $1 million or more. Behind Europe, North America has the second highest concentration of millionaires at 2.2 million. The Asia Pacific region accounts for 1.8 million. Latin America and the Middle East account for 300,000 each, and Africa accounts for 100,000."
At current launch costs of $10000 per pound, to put a 150 pound adult (me on a starvation diet for a couple months!) would be about $1,500,000, or $6,000,000 for a family of four. Now that amount of money being paid is well within the reach of hundreds of thousands of people if they liquidate all their assets -- homes, stocks, retirement accounts, and so forth. Now if you could guarantee that they and their children would have a better life living in cities in space, then some percentage of them might well do that. The problem as I see it is, we can't guarantee that right now. The other problem is of course, there is no place to live right now for hundreds of thousands of people showing up in their underwear and starving with no shelter or clothes or food or air or water or other goods for them.
One solution is to pursue the 1980s NASA vision http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5A.html#5a of first putting automated factories on the moon (or at asteroids) and using robotics (and teleoperation) make space settlements complete with food, water, clothes, etc. for when these people show up. It would in theory only take one Apollo-type launch to the Moon or an asteroid with the seed of an automated factory instead of a LEM to start the process rolling, and that would have an up front cost of a few billion dollars or so -- far less than the total launch costs for all the people. The factory could also carry out putting up mass drivers etc. to realize Gerry O'Neill's or J.D. Bernal's vision of building near earth habitats from lunar or asteroidal resources.
So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science http://www.bfi.org/node/387 that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in s
In the 1960s, imprisoning a half million people for smoking pot in the USA would have seemed laughable. Forty years later, that is roughly the number of people in prison for non-violent drug offenses, many of them for marijuana. http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/409/toohigh.sh tml
Many other prisoners are also there for things like theft related to a drug habit (despite that addiction is often more a medical problem, or sometimes also from an economic problem leading to depression which our society refuses to deal with).
So, will it be any surprise if copyright laws go the same way -- towards Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" cautionary tale? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html Will there be a half million kids in prison for using file sharing software in a couple of decades? Or just even using GNU/Linux?:-)
From: http://www.windside.com/ "Windside works, when others don't, with gentle summer breeze and in a violent winter storm. It works, when others are in deep frost. Windside produces electricity at least 50 % more in a year than traditional propeller models. All the year round. Many things make it extraordinary. And therefore it gives the best value for the money."
Not sure what the differences might be. Winside apparently has been producing these vertical axis windmills for extreme environments for, they say, about twenty years. But they do seem costly. They use a helix type design for the blades, see: http://www.windside.com/products.html
Is there really any unbiased "undogmatic" information -- no matter whether it is called, "science" or not?
More or less biased maybe, more or less dogmatic, perhaps, but unbiased, or undogmatic at all, probably not.
At the very best, science is a process that admits to uncertainty, as in being more or less certain about things to the best of our knowledge right now, but we may still be very wrong. And any scientist, doing science as a human enterprise taking place often in a bureaucratic context must admit to all the human pressures any one calling themselves a scientist must face -- in particular, keeping the ration units (money) flowing in at the rate needed to explore interestign questions -- and how those pressures can cause conflicts-of-interest.
Similarly, any conventionally rational person (including any scientist) must admit logically that it is possible the fossil record is there as a test of dogmatic faith, but where even dogmatic people go wrong is then not asking the next questions of what would that mean about a duplicitous god, and is it really productive to think that way, plus a whole host of other follow on questions?
Likewise, any conventionally rational person must admit it is possible the universe is a simulation that has only been running for 6000 Earth years and started from some hand tooled initial conditions (made by a God-like programmer or team). Again, the questions is, does that really get you anywhere on a day-to-day basis? You're still stuck in the simulation as it is.
It is in the spirit of questioning that the spirit of science is most alive -- not in the spirit of saying science has the absolute truth right now. What we must accept above all else, if we are rational, is the great mystery of it all, where we come from, where we go to, what it all means, and whether any of that is ever answerable. Generally, when someone says otherwise, they are trying to sell you something, whether a timeshare or an opportunity to annually tithe and hang out in a church. Still, timeshares and hangout joints aren't necessarily all bad.:-)
Still, when you really explore these issues, you discover that even "rationality" is based on a host of assumptions, including assumptions about what are valid reasoning tools, what are valid experiences, what constitutes valid evidence or valid communications, and so on. People, including conventionally religious ones, may legitimately disagree about those. So, you really can't escape from making assumptions or having some sort of values coming from outside of rationality, at least at the start.
People used to learn the basics from their parents. Gatto and others like Holt argue it doesn't take more than a hundred hours or so of instruction for almost all kids to learn the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, and then bootstrap from there on their own, once a kid actually decides they want to learn those things. The notion that it takes years of study is just self-justifying propaganda put out by the school system.
Gatto writes: "Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?"
Slashdot Mirror
An essay I wrote in 2004:t arTrekSociety.html :-)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAS
An excerpt:
"Now, let us move on to the question of where could more money for
education and creativity come from -- such as to fund more creation of
free copyrights and free patents? And where could budget cuts be made so
US parents (and everyone else) could work less hours and devote more
time to their families and charitable hobbies -- including informally
educating their children? As we shall see, a hundred billion dollars
here, a hundred billion dollars there, and soon we are talking real
money.
Let us consider ways to free up money for the non-profit sector (or
reducing working hours) by cutting wasteful government and consumer
spending in these areas with (annual estimate of easy savings):
* Healthcare ($800 billion),
* Military ($200 billion),
* Prisons ($125 billion),
* Agriculture ($40 billion),
* Transportation ($250+ billion),
* Housing ($350+ billion),
* Manufacturing (very variable),
* Media (very variable),
* Banking ($14000 billion up front, $320 billion annually), and
* Education (very variable).
This is a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085
billion per year. And this is even without considering any lifestyle
changes such as from widespread adoption of Voluntary Simplicity:
http://world.std.com/~habib/thegarden/simplicity/
which will ultimately result in the largest savings in the US and
worldwide (but I discuss no further here). "
Note that the target audience of this particular help-file printing software might involve people who have no printed documentaiton because they are using an unpaid for copy of some software? So, that whole test may just tell you what unethical (as far as paying for licensed software) people do?
Sounds like he's just discovered what Langdon Winner has been saying since the 1970s, and others since before then. Slashdot frequently sees posts like "a razor blade can be used for good or evil" implying technology is value neutral -- but it isn't. Technology embodies our values, especially when looked at as a system including favorite economic stories at the time -- including a decision to invest in, say, designing nuclear weapons design or marketing larger SUVs instead of say, curing river blindness or designing electric cars -- decisions driven by values.
Contrast, say, Disney's investments in controlling media with DRM versus the RepRap project to make a free 3D printer. Winner goes further in his book _Autonomous Technology_ and suggests large bureaucracies "reverse adapt", changing their environment to perpetuate themselves, including the legal environment. So, if you can't make or share your own media or 3D models, then you are dependent on Disney or whoever. Consider the kind of technology to sustain the values described here: CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery and how it might differ from the politics and policies and technologies and infrastructure of today. Or from this essay The Abolition of Work: "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. ... Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control."
See my comment in 2000 to Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap List at:
... Available in four translucent colors, Cybiko has a full QWERTY keyboard to compose messages, LCD display, .5 MB memory (expandable to 16MB), a high frequency transmitter and Vibration Alert feature. The unit measures 4.8 x 2.8-inches and weighs under four ounces making it light, thin and small enough to carry in a book bag, purse or shirt pocket. ... With Cybiko, kids and teens can communicate instantly with others within a radius of 150 to 300 feet, depending on the environment, creating their very own virtual community.
m 050399.htm
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html
From there [with some outdated links removed]:
I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics) "Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000"
US $149.00 The Cybiko system combines instant messaging, interactive gaming, email and personal information manager (PIM) capabilities in an all-in-one device.
Wow!
Imagine what we could have for $1000 by the end of this year by integrating technology that already exists:
Develop a beefed up version supporting a distributed file system like Freenet...
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Using technology like this 6GB in 14 ounces $500 portable audio player/recorder: [nomad Jukebox]:
And a two mile radio range: [Motorola walky talky]
Maybe with a next generation StrongARM 600Mhz processor:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/e
Like a faster version of: [BossaNova mobile processor]
Running Squeak (and maybe Linux) as an open source OS/Development environment:
http://www.squeak.org/
Using Bootstrap OHS/DKR type ideas for the interface...
Powered by solar energy and/or Baygen radio windup technology and/or fuel cells.
And with a digital camera for fun and creation of educational how-to tutorials... (And on the spot news reporting...)
And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each.
As an alternative, this could be a set of HandSpring modules instead: [Springboard]
Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000 African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one shut down nuclear plant.)
Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...)
This is like a system I wanted to develop and deploy pre-Y2K just in case... But it still has much value in preparing for any potential (natural, political, economic, biological) disaster, as well as aiding the development of democracy.
It's somewhat like the wearable crystals described in The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix), although the one thing it lacks is easy self-repliaction...
Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball). But luckily, there is hope from toymakers!
====
Anyway, glad to see six years later this is going ahead at that $100 price point (and developed by other than toymakers). My hat goes off to the dedicated people making this happen.
No one will deny the value of learning how to get along with other as needed.
:-)
Still, consider any fault that may come from the institution of college itself -- putting together a bunch of poorly socialized kids who have endured twelve years of being in an authoritarian environment that cultivates hate and apathy among children and turns many of them into the monsters who saw sport in taking down your student rather than want to grok her for her unique being.
Second, even if true, one failure of a home schooler to get along with one college crowd does not make a case. There are lots of counter-cases of home schoolers getting a long with all sorts of people -- including college kids.
Third, consider the fault in your student and her parents (or guardians) -- perhaps they just made a mistake in thinking there was any value to college for a bright person? Perhaps dropping out was the best answer. Consider, even the Vice Provost of Caltech told Congress that the US educational system was a collapsing pyramid scheme:
http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
Maybe your student's only problem was having too much faith in an institution that did not have her best interests at heart? Maybe, as is suggested in the essays here:
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/educatn.html
college is sometimes the cowardly route to life?
However, having said all that, yes, she may well have missed out on something in her earlier education. But that happens to kids all the time in K-12 -- as a college prof you only see the "successes" of the K-12 system. Just think about all the ex-High School kids who you don't see (and likely would not want in your classes).
I think Gatto would encourage your skeptical frame of mind. :-)
:-)
c hooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
By the way, even I said "dwell", not "avoid".
A house defrays the cost of about $1K per month in living expenses, giving peopel many more possibilities. Plus, as an appreciable asset, if money is taken out of it, it might provide another $1K a month for twenty years or so. So, two decades of about a $2K a month income increse. That's a lot for the average high school student, a good fraction of whom may not get a diploma anyway (or at least, not directly from high school). Or are you making an argument for accepting "creeping credentialism" that has no relation to ability?
Anyway, he casts a broad net. You say sometimes he catches boots instead of fish. And sure, he does cherry pick sometimes. Well, OK, but even if you quibble over the details, I feel his main point stands: compulsory schooling was developed as a form of "indoctrination" to create compliant people willing to give up any right to be free (or if not 100% compliant, then just at best, a person who talks but does not act), not for "education" as a free person.
Again, as I posted elsewhere in this thread, for a broader historical view see:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-S
I'll agree his book has flaws, including the mathematical one you point out.
But you miss the forest for the trees if you dwell on nitpicking some flaws.
For example, even at just $200K for a kids education K-12, it's pretty clear kids
would be better off with the house and not the schooling.
And he is not the only one saying stuff. Look at John Holt's writings,
or look up free schools and unschooling and so on.
An even better source of the history of the compulsory school idea from Plato onwards:c hooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-S
Actually, if you read Gatto, he says the US and many other nations copied this form of education from Prussia, which instituted compulsory education after a military defeat, and then went on to have relatively superior armies for a time. The history is more complex than this as well, with roots in India, and so on.
i ght.html
See for example:
http://members.iquest.net/~macihms/Education/pubn
"The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.
So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:
1. Obedient soldiers to the army; 2. Obedient workers to the mines; 3. Well subordinated civil servants to government; 4. Well subordinated clerks to industry 5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.
Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.
Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty-six years after this form of schooling began, the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, as the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own."
See John Taylor Gatto's writings for the larger story of how compulsaory schooling was created 150 years ago to turn independent minded US citizens into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers:t m ...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
These are the real lessons any school teacher really teaches:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
From there:
"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."
Ah, but humans have spent the last 100,000+ years of their lives living in "affluence" in terms of lots of free time and an abundance of food. It is only the last few thousands years of agricultural empires and industrialism that have been the anomaly. See:c ietyI D=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_so
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
So, I see no reason humans can not adapt to a post-scarcity society brought on by stuff like:
http://reprap.org/
or:
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?
NYS "Teacher of the Year" John Taylor Gatto suggests the whole thing is a sham from K through 12 and beyond -- designed precisely to make people submissive factory workers, mindless consumers, and obedient soldiers:t m
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
On the large topic, while I agree with you on someplace like Simon's Rock beinggn worthy of support given the educational system we have now, I think this "donation" shows the folly of a certain type of monetary philanthropy.
Spend your life essentially suppressing innovation in software (and when you can't suppress it, buy it) like Gates, or spend your life making corporate sharks smarter like Buffet, and then think you can make the world a better place by essentially propping up a failed idea like compulsory schooling or subsidizing big Pharma?
Just shows how out of touch the biggest players running much of the US economy are with the worlds needs. If you ask the people in Africa, they say they want sewage systems and working economies and political systems (other than the sham ones left over from European colonialism or US corporate-friendly interventions) more than Polio vaccinations. And yes, people have asked, there was a New Yorker article on this Polio vaccination issue a couple years back, specifically talking about Africans' comments how money would be more cost effective spent on getting raw sewage out of the streets rather than vaccination, but the money was earmarked by charities only for vaccination. Most of the improvements in public health in the developed world have resulted from better nutrition and better sanitation and cleaner water.
The deep problem is that that the things the world desperately needs -- truly innovative people, free-as-in-freedom software and content, sustainable decentralized economies, flexible distributed manufacturing of most goods and information, are the very things the people with the most wealth in the world have been fighting against their whole working lives (to make sure they get most of the profits of a centralized system). Why think they might suddenly wake up when they get old?
National security has similar problems -- hard to get a central govenment dominated by the interests of big centralized power structures to admit that any concentration of power and materials poses an inherent security risk which may outweight the profitability to a few of the centralization.
Sounds like a case of "group think" here to me. Sad to see Buffet get sucked into it, but just because you are good at one thing like earning money, does not mean you are good at another, like effectively giving it away or choosing those who can. Sad to hear his wife did not get her chance to play a role in that -- sounds like she might have done it really well.
Your information is way out of date (if it ever was true). PV is relatively clean and cost effective now, and per unit these advantages will only improve with increasing volume. We just don't need centralized nukes in the next few decades, propping up a nuclear industry with a history of lies, murder (Silkwood), and pollution, built on government subsidies for R&D and insurance, and initmately associated with WMD production.
On scalability, PV solar systems work well especially when integrated with a system that gets some of its energy during cloudy or nighttime from cogeneration, which could be fueled using hydrogen made elsewhere by solar panels, or by biodiesel fuelds derived from farms, or from synthetic carbon based fuels (like synthetic propane) created from power from solar panels deployed in equatorial areas or the ocean. To see such an solar and cogeneration system working cost effectively in a major northern city, consider:
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/popup/hhtoronto/works.h tm
"What is truly amazing is that CMHC's Healthy House in Toronto provides all the comforts of home - without using municipal services. It has been designed to rely on sun and precipitation as the basis of its heating, electrical, water and waste water management systems. And right from the start, the way it is built and the materials used in construction mean more comfort, less maintenance and lower operating costs. That goes for the landscaping, too. CMHC's Healthy House in Toronto is located near public transportation, and is designed to provide maximum usable space on a minimum amount of land, to limit air and water pollution, and to use locally available materials and durable renewable resources wherever possible. It is an affordable solution to housing now that will keep on working for many years to come."
On pollution:
http://greennature.com/article641.html
"These differences, however, may not be particularly meaningful, according to Vasilis Fthenakis, a senior chemical engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory who specializes in the potential environmental impacts of solar cells. "There are no significant environmental and safety hazards with any of [the types of solar cells] to the scale that they are manufactured today," he explains. And although there are some hazardous materials used, such as silane gas, cadmium, carbon tetrafluoride, and lead, he says, "if you look at the quantities in relation to their use in other industries, they are very, very small." But these risks will become more significant as the industry grows, he adds."
Still, the fact remains that either we clean up all manufacturing towards zero emissions, or we will be burried in waste and pollution no matter what our energy source. R&D into all forms of low pollution manufacuring in the future will benefit PV.
Overall they make sense right now compare to what we have:
http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1119
"An average U.S. household uses 830 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. On average, producing 1000 kWh of electricity with solar power reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide. During its projected 28 years of clean energy production, a rooftop system with 2-year payback and meeting half of a household's electricity use would avoid conventional electrical plant emissions of more than half a ton of sulfur dioxide, one-third a ton of nitrogen oxides, and 100 tons of carbon dioxide. PV is clearly a wise energy investment with great environmental benefits!"
And consider innovative approaches towards lifetime recycling of PV products:
http://www.renewableenergyacc
It is the challenge of modern times to have the benefits of the stone age lifestyle without the limitations and bad parts. Home 3D printing seems like a step in the right direction:I D=2
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?
When something like that could print stuff that works like an iPod (and not just pretty mockups) then even more of the rationale for work will disappear.
For more on your point, see:4 49219-7760050?v=glance&n=283155
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
and:
"CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery"
http://www.whywork.org/
"If you start asking yourself "why work?" you may see a connection between wage slavery, misunderstandings of leisure, lifestyles based on consumption, corporate welfare, education that often amounts to little more than conditioning, and the global social, environmental, and economic crises we are now facing. We hope that the materials we feature here will encourage critical thinking about such things. This site is primarily about ideas and encouragement, so our focus is more philosophical than practical. However, ideas and action go hand-in-hand, so we're currently expanding the "practicality" sections."
and:
"THE ABOLITION OF WORK" by Bob Black
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
"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."
or:
_The End of Work_
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874778247/002-6
"Global unemployment is now at its highest levels since the Great Depression. Rifkin (Biosphere Politics, LJ 5/15/91) argues that the Information Age is the third great Industrial Revolution. A consequence of these technological advances is the rapid decline in employment and purchasing power that could lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Rifkin foresees two possible outcomes: a near workerless world in which people are free, for the first time in history, to pursue a utopian life of leisure; or a world in which unemployment leads to an even further polarization of the economic classes and a decline in living conditions for millions of people."
James P. Hogan has several sci-fi novels envisioning an alternative positive future (e.g. _Voyage from Yesteryear_)
Manuel De Landa puts it in another context:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding
meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only
because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but
because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties
of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete
experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs
or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn
out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the
appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the
services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other
hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a
better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory
occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten
years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an
increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities.
But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity
articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution.
After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we
do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of
property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions.
Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the
solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental
attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what
the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze
and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Our (free) Garden Simulator is also intended as an an open ended toy.
..."
l es/vid-kids.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/gwi.htm
Doesn't suceed at that as much as we hoped, in part as we tossed too many of the fun aspects (neighbors, food preservation, survival aspects, etc.) in the interests of finishing version 1.0.
Our PlantStudio software which tries to do less ends up succeeding more at that (where just designing your own plants can be a lot of fun).
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
Seymour Papert called these things "Microworlds" and was a big inspiration for us,
http://www.papert.org/
"People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation.
For young kids though (under five to seven?), just playing with physical toys and doing physical activities and being in a physical neighborhood seems like a better idea than spending too much time at the screen. I think it has a lot to do with how children are wired to learn best. See for example:
http://www.alternative-doctor.com/home_page_artic
"In addition to the physical perils of too much screen, educators and other experts believe the TV and computer games take children away from the time that otherwise would be spent on developing their imaginations and social skills through peer play, socialization and hands-on creativity."
I still think computer microworlds be useful and positive; it's more a question of moderation and how they fit into a child's overall entire experience (especially later in life, after age five or so). We also found out that people learn more creating their own simulations than using someone else's.
See John Taylor Gatto:h tmt m
"The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation
Into The Problem Of Modern Schooling"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
For example:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2e.htm
"I have little doubt the fantastic wealth of American big business is psychologically and procedurally grounded in our form of schooling. The training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about."
The biggest problem with compulsary "public" education is that unlike "public" libraries, you can't (easily) escape by just walking out the door. (Well, you could for a day or two and then the police machinery related to truancy will start grinding on you, unless it is appeased in other ways.) Most "private" education is little better in the compulsary aspects or preventing bullying.
While this may seem paradoxical, as you continue your quest for spritiual growth, consider the idea that the bullies you faced are in some sense just as much victims of those systems as you were.
A good resource:
http://www.bullyonline.org/
http://www.bullyonline.org/schoolbully/index.htm
http://www.bullyonline.org/schoolbully/myths.htm
Example from the myths page: "Children have it drummed into them from the moment they are born that they must not hit, punch, kick, bite, scratch, pull, push, poke or use any form of physical violence. Children are often punished - sometimes brutally and humiliatingly - for exhibiting any form of violent behaviour. Some adults then criticise children for not using violence when faced with a thug. Child targets of bullying also know (better than adults) that if they retaliate physically, the bully will feign victimhood (often with a convincing flood of tears) and the responsible adults will be fooled into believing that the target is the bully and the bully is the target. The (real) target is then punished by the adults whilst the bully looks on, enjoying every moment. Once the adults turn their backs, the bully starts on their target again. Targets are also people with high moral integrity, a well-developed sense of moral values, and a clear understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue. This is how we teach children to behave and how society demands that children behave. We should therefore not be surprised when targets of bullying display their maturity by going to great lengths to resolve the violent acts committed towards them with dialogue rather than with fists or feet. Trying to resolving conflict with dialogue is a hallmark of integrity and strength of character. Bullying is a hallmark of lack of integrity and weakness of character."
For the rest of the sordid story behind almost-all public (and also most private) education see the book: ... You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened? If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher? I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean? One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don't have opportunity to know those things. How did this happen? Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child's mind and character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can? There isn't any. The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. ... You wouldn't build a home without some idea what it would
_The Underground History of American Education_ -- by John Taylor Gatto
available on-line here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.h tm
From the prologue: "Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her. Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine. Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
In an individualist way, Paul Graham is ignoring the bigger picture, and just advising individuals on how to have a better life in a failing society. There is nothing wrong with that kind of good advice by itself, and it is good advice, but it lacks social context, lacks long term planning, and lacks a way to make things permanently better for people without a lot of social advantages needed to follow that advice (let alone have time to read it).
From:
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
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."
Bob Black then goes on to say most work is unneeded, most of the rest can be made into fun, and the small remaining amount no one wants to do can be automated.
We have the system of "work" we do as a holdover from an agricultural feudal mindset coupled with a scarcity driven ideology (where dollars are really "ration units"). Compare this with, for example the better parts of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, see: "The Original Affluent Society -- by Marshall Sahlins"
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
for a description of life in a world where there is abundance for all with only a limited need for other-directed "work", where the productivity of the surrounding (living) system far exceeds that of collective human needs.
I don't see we have much of a good alternative to a post-work "utopia" for all;
"Utopia or Oblivian -- by Buckminster Fuller"
http://www.bfi.org/node/17
we either build the world Bob Black envisions (or something like it, whether Bucky Fuller's ideas, or see James P. Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_ novel for a related perspective,
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/tit lepage.shtml )
with abundance for all people, or, alternatively, by following the status quo off the cliffs of either pollution or warfare, humanity (though probably neither life nor intelligence nor humans) will perish in a world driven to destruction by putting abstractions like profits or nationalism ahead of basic human needs (including the basic human need not to be bored or demeaned eight hours a day). Does it all have to change in one day? No. You can build a better world bit by bit -- and that's one thi
This is the basis for the argument for CATs (Cheap Access to Space) and
http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/CatsPrize/
various legislative pushes and at least a couple of billionaires (including Jeff Bezos of
Amazon.com) putting a lot of money into this (perhaps as businesses, but
essentially still billionaire hobbies). While I wish them well, I think
this approach towards space settlement is misguided. Let's work the
numbers.
The USA has about two million millionaires. There are many more elsewhere.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/07/07 11_030711_money.html
"In total, there are an estimated 7.3 million people in the world whose
assets--excluding their home--amount to U.S. $1 million or more. Behind
Europe, North America has the second highest concentration of
millionaires at 2.2 million. The Asia Pacific region accounts for 1.8
million. Latin America and the Middle East account for 300,000 each, and
Africa accounts for 100,000."
At current launch costs of $10000 per pound, to put a 150 pound adult
(me on a starvation diet for a couple months!) would be about
$1,500,000, or $6,000,000 for a family of four. Now that amount of money
being paid is well within the reach of hundreds of thousands of people
if they liquidate all their assets -- homes, stocks, retirement
accounts, and so forth. Now if you could guarantee that they and their
children would have a better life living in cities in space, then some
percentage of them might well do that. The problem as I see it is, we
can't guarantee that right now. The other problem is of course, there is
no place to live right now for hundreds of thousands of people showing
up in their underwear and starving with no shelter or clothes or food or
air or water or other goods for them.
One solution is to pursue the 1980s NASA vision
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5A.html#5a
of first putting
automated factories on the moon (or at asteroids) and using robotics
(and teleoperation) make space settlements complete with food, water,
clothes, etc. for when these people show up. It would in theory only
take one Apollo-type launch to the Moon or an asteroid
with the seed of an automated
factory instead of a LEM to start the process rolling, and that would
have an up front cost of a few billion dollars or so -- far less than
the total launch costs for all the people. The factory could also carry
out putting up mass drivers etc. to realize Gerry O'Neill's or
J.D. Bernal's vision of building
near earth habitats from lunar or asteroidal resources.
So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck.
So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space.
And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be
built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from
materials found in space.
So, what is a bottleneck
is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory,
or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or
on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology)
a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science
http://www.bfi.org/node/387
that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge
which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice,
despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible)
in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure
for sustaining human life in style in s
In the 1960s, imprisoning a half million people for smoking pot in the USA would have seemed laughable. Forty years later, that is roughly the number of people in prison for non-violent drug offenses, many of them for marijuana.h tml
/ whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html
:-)
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/409/toohigh.s
Many other prisoners are also there for things like theft related to a drug habit (despite that addiction is often more a medical problem, or sometimes also from an economic problem leading to depression which our society refuses to deal with).
One major reason pot was pushed to be illegal is because hemp is such a versatile product and threatened timber and paper monopolies (although there were other factors as well).
http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22
http://www.cannabis.com/faqs/hemp2.shtml
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/002065.php
So, will it be any surprise if copyright laws go the same way -- towards Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" cautionary tale?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Will there be a half million kids in prison for using file sharing software in a couple of decades? Or just even using GNU/Linux?
From: http://www.windside.com/
"Windside works, when others don't, with gentle summer breeze and in a violent winter storm. It works, when others are in deep frost. Windside produces electricity at least 50 % more in a year than traditional propeller models. All the year round. Many things make it extraordinary. And therefore it gives the best value for the money."
Not sure what the differences might be. Winside apparently has been producing these vertical axis windmills for extreme environments for, they say, about twenty years. But they do seem costly. They use a helix type design for the blades, see: http://www.windside.com/products.html
Is there really any unbiased "undogmatic" information -- no matter whether it is called, "science" or not?
:-)
More or less biased maybe, more or less dogmatic, perhaps, but unbiased, or undogmatic at all, probably not.
At the very best, science is a process that admits to uncertainty, as in being more or less certain about things to the best of our knowledge right now, but we may still be very wrong. And any scientist, doing science as a human enterprise taking place often in a bureaucratic context must admit to all the human pressures any one calling themselves a scientist must face -- in particular, keeping the ration units (money) flowing in at the rate needed to explore interestign questions -- and how those pressures can cause conflicts-of-interest.
Similarly, any conventionally rational person (including any scientist) must admit logically that it is possible the fossil record is there as a test of dogmatic faith, but where even dogmatic people go wrong is then not asking the next questions of what would that mean about a duplicitous god, and is it really productive to think that way, plus a whole host of other follow on questions?
Likewise, any conventionally rational person must admit it is possible the universe is a simulation that has only been running for 6000 Earth years and started from some hand tooled initial conditions (made by a God-like programmer or team). Again, the questions is, does that really get you anywhere on a day-to-day basis? You're still stuck in the simulation as it is.
It is in the spirit of questioning that the spirit of science is most alive -- not in the spirit of saying science has the absolute truth right now. What we must accept above all else, if we are rational, is the great mystery of it all, where we come from, where we go to, what it all means, and whether any of that is ever answerable. Generally, when someone says otherwise, they are trying to sell you something, whether a timeshare or an opportunity to annually tithe and hang out in a church. Still, timeshares and hangout joints aren't necessarily all bad.
Still, when you really explore these issues, you discover that even "rationality" is based on a host of assumptions, including assumptions about what are valid reasoning tools, what are valid experiences, what constitutes valid evidence or valid communications, and so on. People, including conventionally religious ones, may legitimately disagree about those. So, you really can't escape from making assumptions or having some sort of values coming from outside of rationality, at least at the start.
Try Gatto's writings:
o -on-literacy/
Cited:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/07/25/gatt
Gatto says:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm
(And so on).
He cites military test results in particular.
People used to learn the basics from their parents. Gatto and others like Holt argue it doesn't take more than a hundred hours or so of instruction for almost all kids to learn the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, and then bootstrap from there on their own, once a kid actually decides they want to learn those things. The notion that it takes years of study is just self-justifying propaganda put out by the school system.
Gatto writes: "Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?"