I liked your point, and agree with it to the extent. Still, there are other social dynamics at work here moving in a post-scarcity direction towards a fundamental social change where "success" is redefined as it takes fewer people to produce enough for everyone. So, powerful tools can change how we can and should use them if we are to avoid irony (as suggested in my sig line).
And then, there is the issue of what sorts of internet tools groups of various sorts really need to be healthy groups. I'm not sure anyone fully understands that yet. And it may vary based on the group, even with some groups maybe being better off without any internet tools?
From something my wife just wrote:
"It takes all kinds, even on the internet" http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/10/it-takes-all-kinds-even-on-internet.html "Sadly, the thing Gladwell gets wrong (and lots of people have already pointed this out so I won't elaborate) is that weak and strong ties, and hierarchies and meshworks, are not polar opposites. They intermingle and interpenetrate, and they influence and sometimes become each other. I agree that social media support weak ties more than they support strong ties. But people interact in many ways. The whole thing is not as simple or strong as he makes it out -- and that in itself is telling, as I will explain.... I still think the internet doesn't work very well for small groups working together towards common goals, and I still want to help it get better at that. But this experience has given me new respect for what extraverted people can do with extraverted tools, and a new interest in supporting interactions among both introverts and extraverts. I'd say the most important thing I have learned in the past week is this. People who care about social activism on the internet need to be more aware of how our own personalities affect what we think everyone needs. And we need to build tools that work with, not just in spite of, our diverse ways of interacting. It's not good enough to say our tools work for some ways of interacting and connecting -- yours or mine. We need to make everyone part of the solution, if we don't want to build more problems."
Your point certainly applies to individuals and connects to "a bad crasftsman blames his tools".
But what if you are a tool maker, not just a tool user? What do you learn from all this discussion and experience about how to change the nature of our social tools to promote or sustain key values of democracy/accountability, joy, health, prosperity, community, and intrinsic/mutual security?
If we can grow the economy 40% without adding new workers last decade, why can we not do it again this decade? Or better, as robots are getting better? http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Great story. I agree: "better to be not so successful and live happily than to be a fully equipped pack mule for an ungrateful master".
Says the (mostly) stay-at-home Dad who does some free stuff on the side.:-) After a Princeton degree.:-)
See also my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?:-) "
What you describe sound like a very respectable life.:-) Still, no one (including me) can live in this world and not get involved in some bad aspects of it (like, in the case of helping broadcasting stations, the mainstream media was often not doing its job of investigative journalism). Related:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Anyway, I hope those first links might help with reversing Type-II diabetes.
BTW, two other boxes of democracy are moving box (to somewhere with better laws) and mail box (writing representatives).:-) So, there are at least six.:-)
As I said here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/msg/17cf35b6ca8aeb00 "The central issue many people are concerned about (reading comments elsewhere) is that security is not an "add on".... Ideally (though few manage this), security needs to be woven intrinsically and mutually throughout an entire endeavor at all levels of the social process, and from beginning to end, from recruitment to developer training to coding standards to code reviews (or whatever works) to archiving procedures to product announcements to bug fix procedures to communications with the public, as well as at all levels of the code itself, the tests, and so on. For many situations, security is often like a chain -- any weak link makes it fail. The less a project embodies this end-to-end security ethic, the more constant vigilance or constant exercise of power is required by everyone involved in it (extrinsic security and/or unilateral security)....
So, in that sense, security is cultural. If you try to bolt on security after the fact (like trying to use a big military to defend long oil supply lines instead of having local power sources like solar panels, or trying to be the one who has all the power and everyone is afraid of rather than being the one who has a lot of friends who all share power and look out for each other) you end up spending a lot of time, money, and lives on "security" and you possibly still end up insecure.:-(...
Unfortunately, intentional or not, the first Diaspora release has been taken by some people to be a statement about the culture of Diaspora development as regards end-to-end security, even if it was not an intentional statement or even it it perhaps may not be accurate assessment relative to intent or plans. So, it is going to take a bit of work to recover from that, but no doubt it can be done by showing steady progress to creating a developer culture that has a security mindset woven throughout it.
So how does one get security in practice, assuming you want to do it end-to-end? What engineering attitude may be best to cultivate within that mindset?
Often, the best security is just simplicity...."
"At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science."
In terms of continuing to try to reconcile our common interests to the greatest extent possible, consider, and connected with the previous item on Mark Frauenhoffer's comments on schools and the Maker/DIY movement, consider this by Seymour Papert: http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html "I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world...."
One more thing just in the news that relates to my point the the problem with measurement is precisely that you get what you measure:
"School for Hackers: The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing." by Mark Frauenfelder http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218 "When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things can't be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them. As our public educational institutions continue down this grim road, they'll lose value as places of learning. That may seem like a shame, but to the members of the growing DIY schooling movement, it's an irresistible opportunity to roll up their sleeves. "
"Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster..."
According to whose goal? What goal? And where are the parents? Where is the librarian? Where are the neighbors? Where are the other community members? All too busy to help? Well, then maybe we have a *community* problem and not a *library* problem?
"But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills."
Prove to whom? Why? When? How?
When they get their engineer's license? Sure...
But since no one in the USA seems to want to be an engineer anymore (sadly, see a recent New Yorker article on Dyson where this is lamented by someone at NSF), why focus on them? Or maybe we need to change other aspects of the culture first, so people want to be engineers again, maybe with having more freedom somehow to design new and useful things? (I've seen a lot of engineering nonsense in many years of work around corporations, including IBM Research...)
By the way, discussion on Gatto: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Taylor_Gatto "At the time this criticism was added, the scholar in question (Wade A. Carpenter) had already changed his views on Gatto: "I saw the book as basically factual, but one-sided and angry. I believed then that Gatto was correct but wrong: that there was far more good going on in our schools than harm. Over the past year or so,my opinion has changed.I’ve encountered the most despicable miseducation I’ve seen or even heard of in thirty-three years of teaching—so bad, in fact, that I’m no longer willing to be tactful.""
Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the value of some structure. I'm just asking, what kind of structure? And when? And for who?
And why should "compulsory public schools" have anything to do with whatever the solution is, as opposed to the public library or a public internet (and sites like Khan Academy)?
Even if kids at some time need to "prove" something (like pass a drivers test) why do we need compulsory public schools for that, at great expense, and with all sorts of demonstrated pathologies?
Still, as I wrote there, there would be downsides to letting the parents decide how to spend the dollars now going to schools::-) "So, ironically, if schools were to give in gracefully to this idea, they might even get bigger as they got more voluntary and broadened their missions to include people of all ages learning anything.:-) So, the current school superintendents would become more like college campus presidents, and thus get more prestige, bigger offices with larger staffs, and of course, bigger salaries to go with that all.:-) Naturally, as schools expanded, this might cause various urban planning problems, and parking issues, and demands for more local public transit to get to them, and so on, but presumably we have a lot of good urban planners in NYS who could help with that, even as they might quickly feel pressured. Likewise, a rapid increase in construction and renovations around schools might cause various local shortages of construction workers and other tradespeople and so on. Likewise, all the families with young children moving to the state would strain the capacity of real estate agents, and overload the malls, and create traffic jams near supermarkets and toy stores. The new bus
Just as a caveat, and to clarify my own beliefs, I believe in the importance of both meshworks and hierarchies as Manuel DeLanda talks about:
"MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm we need to be careful not to turn the oppression of people against each other into the oppression of the group against the individual. So, it is a dynamic and creative balancing act...
An example of the other side of this that people rightly reject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Mind "This episode deals with conformity, methods of enforcing it, and the consequences of its rejection.[2] In particular, it has been said that the episode addresses both McCarthyism (in which "unmutual" is equivalent to "communist") and the show trials of Stalinist Russia (which often featured coerced confessions), as well as the ethical issues of lobotomy.[3] At one point, some of the other prisoners are shown going through "self-criticism", which was common in China at the time."
So, to the extent social institutions can help people find that balance, they can be good things. But, that does not mean schools-as-we-know-them are good at that, or ever would be.
From 1991: "Educating for a Peaceful World" http://www.forums.alliance21.org/d_read/pax/articles/Deutsch.htm "This article outlines a program of what schools can do to encourage the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world. It describes four key components of such programs: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in schools....
Families and schools are the two most important institutions that influence developing children's predispositions to hate and to love. Although the influence of the family comes earlier and is often more profound, there is good reason to believe that children's subsequent experiences in schools can modify or strengthen their earlier acquired dispositions. In this article, I outline a program that schools can follow to encourage the development of the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world....
Many schools do not provide much constructive social experience for students. Too often, schools are structured in ways that pit students against one another. They compete for teachers' attention, for grades, for status, and for admission to prestigious schools. Being put down and putting down others are pervasive occurrences. Many of us can recall classroom experiences of hoping that another student, who was called on by the teacher instead of us, would give the wrong answer so that we could get called on and give the right answer.
In recent years, it has been increasingly recognized that schools have to change in basic ways if we are to educate children so that they are for rather than against one another, so that they develop the ability to resolve their conflicts constructively rather than destructively and are prepared to live in a peaceful world. This recognition has been expressed in a number of interrelated movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution, and education for peace. In my view, there are four key components in these overlapping movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in the schools. I discuss each briefly, with more emphasis on cooperative learning and conflict resolution because I have worked more extensively in these two areas and because they provide a valuable base for education in constructive controversy and mediation."
Twenty years later, how much of that do schools embody? Why keep giving schools second, third, and fifty-third chances? Why should we continue to hope, after decades of failures of attempts at reform, that a social system called compulsory public schooling that was very carefully designed to produce compliant soldiers for 1800s-era Prussian Monarchy could ever be reformed to fit the educational needs of healthily-engaged citizens of 21st century democracies? As opposed to, say, just providing the same amount of money to the public library system or even directly to parents?
Instead, almost all public schools still emphasize "grading", which Alfie Kohn explains to be destructive to human relationships: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm "You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way
When I was learning to fly gliders at the Princeton University airport (sadly now given up to development), as I was circling to land and had right of way some helicopter flew across my path at a very fast rate and landed there. It was some executive from Time I guess (and they had copies of the magazine you could see through the bubble canopy). Anyway, when Time says non-mainstream stuff, it is interesting to me. When they echo a mainstream line, I can wonder.
Is this the article?
"What Makes A School Great" http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20100920,00.html http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2016978,00.html "But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. Today, several decades into America's long fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year -- and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Second, legions of public schools -- some charters, some not -- are succeeding while others flounder. These schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions.... It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. We may be on the cusp of running schools -- brace yourself -- according to what actually works."
As I said, you get what you measure. Are people measuring how happy kids are during school or during their lifetime? Saying schools are good because some kid does well on a test is like saying some drug like Vioxx is good because it works in the short term (and we don't care what it does to anyone ten years down the road).
So, if you want to measure, you should measure a lot of things.:-) But how do you measure someone's soul? So there are limits to measurement too. As Einstein said, our goals need to come from some process outside of what we are measuring in some way.
Which just gets back to the goals of education. If a goal is to get people participating in our democracy in a healthy way, then common sense suggests making them spend thirteen years of their life in a day-prison is probably not the best way to do it, whatever the numbers say. We know how most kids learn, and learning by doing is very important.
Again though, this is not to dispute the value of learning communities, good role models, tutoring, mentoring, well-equipped labs, and so on.
Anyway, I guess another aspect of this is to separate the term "schooling" from "education". The two are just not the same, even if there is sometimes some overlap. And you may never fix the social problem that the people who have become and stayed schoolteachers are those willing to jump through hoops on demand and make other staff as well as students do the same. Because you are a self-starter, that may not be so obvious to you, because you, like I, have probably enjoyed jumping through those hoops because we were good at it and did get something out of it. But that is not true for most people, and even for us, it may not have been very healthy in the long term.
Really, what is the justification for schools at all, as opposed to better libraries and a network of other learning opportunities (with families having enough to afford tutors through a basic income)? Locking children away for their entire youth is just a dim vie
See also: "Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI" http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/ "Ernest C. Withers had been the photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement through the 50s and 60s. His photos of the gruesome racial murder of teenager Emmitt Till still resonate to this day; he was there when nine students integrated Little Rock Central High School; and his camera shutters snapped just moments after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And all the while, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was betraying everything he knew about the civil rights movement to the FBI."
Which connects to my previous post on the open manufacturing list: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en "My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them:-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too.:-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA,:-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA.:-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge.:-) "
And:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Of course, to understand part of why that was not done, it is important to note that Iraq was *supposed* to be a quagmire, because, according to, Smedly Butler, a USMC Major General "War is a Racket": http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes...."
... used to enforce artificial boundaries. If we have the technology to make iris scanners, made with very delicate nanoscale components, doing immense amounts of pattern matching, hooked to a huge networked database, then we have enough technology to make a world of abundance for everyone, and essentially, there is no reason to restrict immigration anywhere in the world, and no need for wars over resources, etc. Something I wrote related to that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
I've enjoyed this discussion including your most recent comment here; thanks.
At this point, we may continue to disagree about whether the ends justify the means, and whether the ends should be a person with a lot of skills or a person with a lot of self-direction. No doubt, the truth will be somewhere in the middle (some ends justify some means, and people need both skills and some degree of self-direction to have a happy life). I'm indeed glad that you paint a better picture of people in schools very seriously trying to consider substantial reforms (even if I may still think the entire paradigm remains broken).
Although I would add that schools might improve a lot when we accept that not only should adults try to shape kids into civilized creatures, but also adults should let them be shaped back into joyful creatures by (re)learning many things from children.:-) Something I learned from a comedian (Michael Pritchard), from his video "Making the World a Better Place: Commit Random Acts of Comedy and Create Inverse Paranoids": http://www.humorproject.com/bookstore/2010.php as he was quoting Kahlil Gibran: http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html """
On Children
by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable. """
Just something to think about. That video is really great. I got it at a "humor conference" I went to a couple years ago.
A couple factoids, for you to make what you will of:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.speregen/physical_education_and_school_performance "Despite the wealth of knowledge concerning the benefits of physical education and physical activity, only 8% of elementary schools, 6.4% of middle schools, and 5.8% of high schools provide daily physical education to all of its students (SHPPS, 2000)."
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml "Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all th
Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.
Numbers can help, but they can also mislead. If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to? We lived for a time in a "top ten" school district (Chappaqua, thankfully before we had a kid, and at first before the Clinton's moved in and it went downhill faster), and the Realtor said, I don't know why he did unless it was to be nice, that we could tell the school district was in the top ten because the teen suicide rate was so high... It's a more general issue now, perhaps.
"Teen Suicide Rate: Highest Increase In 15 Years" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070907221530.htm And for every kid who does complete a suicide, you can be sure there are many, many others who are in deep distress. So, if you want an important quantitative statistic on modern schooling (and the system it is embedded in), that is one that is easily accessible (even if, like any statistic, it may have its issues, since sometimes things are covered up etc.).
Also: http://www.edutopia.org/loss-prevention "Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century, and suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 10-24."
There they question whether schools should get involved in labelling at risk kids or offering prevention programs, but they don't ask whether school contributes to the problem, or whether a better wholistic education process would give kids deeper roots to help keep them from toppling over in life's storms.
And probably most schools approaches miss key points about improving health (vitamin D and whole foods), as well as the real psychological and spiritual side of all that: "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC "Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy" by Bruce Levine http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
The first book is mostly about adults, but the second was written by a psychologist who has treated a lot of adolescent patients and has a lot to say about schooling in that context. http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C&q=school
Beyond those sorts of statistics, which you may rightfully question as to whether they are school's fault, the evidence Gatto cites includes that the USA had (ignoring the genocide against the natives, black slavery, women not voting, etc.) a very vibrant and literate democracy one hundred and fifty years ago, one that inspired the world, back before schooling, back in the time when private family business (usually farm) ownership was widespread and people had a lot more sense of control over many aspects of their lives (ignoring small town privacy problems, racism, sexism, lack of physical mobility, disease, famine, and bad weather, which granted, we have improved on in dealing with in many ways). Again though, correlation does not prove causality. But it can be suggestive...
Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas ex
Except as I also said: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all...."
So, while what you wrote is more or less true (ignoring it is also a recipe for a destabilizing arms race, since like with nukes, the side with less robots is going to make plagues or crash airlines into buildings or whatever), it is still ironic to put all those resources into competition using robots instead of making the world work for everyone through robotics.
Wars are pretty hard to "win". As I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the cold war -- it is just taking the USA longer to topple...
"Again, you misunderstand. Having technology that makes your military more effective *does* make you safer, after a fashion. Look back at the interaction between the Spanish conquistadors and the Incas. The conquistadors had metal armor and guns. The Incas had wooden/hide armor, spears and arrows. A single conquistador was a more effective military weapon than a single Incan soldier."
Well, it was guns, *germs*, and steel (see the book with that title). And it was other things as well, like the Inca seeing the invaders as gods, and also being highly centralized and vulnerable to a centralized attack, otherwise millions of Inca would have wiped out a few hundred men with musketts, even on horseback. It's sort of like by the fourth airplane on 9/11 the strategy of the terrorists wasn't working anymore as the people began to fight back (and so that plane crashed in a field). Eventually, the Inca did fight back more, but by then the (mostly unintended) germs were wiping them out. There was also a civil war at the time the Spanish took advantage of, and other factors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_Empire "The situation went quickly downhill. As things began to fall apart, many parts of the Inca Empire revolted, some of them joining with the Spanish against their own rulers. Many kingdoms and tribes had been conquered or persuaded to join the Inca empire. They thought that by joining the Spaniards, they could gain their own freedom. But these native people never foresaw the massive waves of Spaniard immigrants coming to their land and the tragedy that they would bring upon their people."
So the Inca empire itself was unstable... If the Inca empire has been more stable, and had (unintentional) disease not been a major factor, I'd suggest the Inca would have easily kicked out the Conquistadors, despite guns and steel.
Columbus' destruction of the Arawaks on Haiti might be a better example of what you say... And a very sad one... They offered him gifts and friendship amd a better way of life, and he repaid them in death, justified in part by religion as well as his business obligations... http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html But is that what you want to hold up as an ideal? Columbus only lived to age 54; might he have lived to age 100 if he and his men had just settled in Haiti and never gone back to Europe? All that violence must have been stressful for him, and what did that genocide for profit against the Arawaks get him? Beyond being remembered for it (plus being the last person to discover America)?
If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinisic unilateral security (not intrinsic mututal security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabestes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passerbys, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard.
"It's not really very hard to take a space launch system and turn it into an ICBM system"
Rockets are big and obvious. As with the slashdot articles about someone building a cruise missile in their garage, the bigger security problem is how easy it is to make things like UAVs guided by a GPS with enough payload to cause trouble. And making designer plagues in a garage is going to get easier and easier, too. And that is not going to be solved by banning model aircraft or GPSs or biotech or garages, it is going to be solved by making the world a more joyful place with abundance for all, and rethinking security in terms of being intrinsic and mutual (as mentioned in another reply).
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "
The key idea is to rethink security in terms of "intrinsic" security and "mutual" security (as opposed to "extrinsic" and "unilateral" security), as you imply and as I spell out some more at the link above.
And we're not just a laughingstock because we cripple ourselves as you point out, we're also a laughingstock in the ironic sense as above. Of course, we may still be a laughingstock that is dangerous to ourselves and others... We need to move beyond that to a better paradigm of security, starting with the diplomatic approach as you suggest...
Slashdot Mirror
I liked your point, and agree with it to the extent. Still, there are other social dynamics at work here moving in a post-scarcity direction towards a fundamental social change where "success" is redefined as it takes fewer people to produce enough for everyone. So, powerful tools can change how we can and should use them if we are to avoid irony (as suggested in my sig line).
And then, there is the issue of what sorts of internet tools groups of various sorts really need to be healthy groups. I'm not sure anyone fully understands that yet. And it may vary based on the group, even with some groups maybe being better off without any internet tools?
From something my wife just wrote: ... I still think the internet doesn't work very well for small groups working together towards common goals, and I still want to help it get better at that. But this experience has given me new respect for what extraverted people can do with extraverted tools, and a new interest in supporting interactions among both introverts and extraverts. I'd say the most important thing I have learned in the past week is this. People who care about social activism on the internet need to be more aware of how our own personalities affect what we think everyone needs. And we need to build tools that work with, not just in spite of, our diverse ways of interacting. It's not good enough to say our tools work for some ways of interacting and connecting -- yours or mine. We need to make everyone part of the solution, if we don't want to build more problems."
"It takes all kinds, even on the internet"
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/10/it-takes-all-kinds-even-on-internet.html
"Sadly, the thing Gladwell gets wrong (and lots of people have already pointed this out so I won't elaborate) is that weak and strong ties, and hierarchies and meshworks, are not polar opposites. They intermingle and interpenetrate, and they influence and sometimes become each other. I agree that social media support weak ties more than they support strong ties. But people interact in many ways. The whole thing is not as simple or strong as he makes it out -- and that in itself is telling, as I will explain.
So, tools can make a big difference to *groups*, in terms of affecting group dynamics. Clay Shirky talks a little about this in "A group is its own worst enemy".
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Or Doug Englebart's point on the need for a goupr and its tools to co-evolve.
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
Your point certainly applies to individuals and connects to "a bad crasftsman blames his tools".
But what if you are a tool maker, not just a tool user? What do you learn from all this discussion and experience about how to change the nature of our social tools to promote or sustain key values of democracy/accountability, joy, health, prosperity, community, and intrinsic/mutual security?
Consider also: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/the-average-worker-and-the-average-machine
If we can grow the economy 40% without adding new workers last decade, why can we not do it again this decade? Or better, as robots are getting better?
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Stuff on college and school: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
And also:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Great story. I agree: "better to be not so successful and live happily than to be a fully equipped pack mule for an ungrateful master".
Says the (mostly) stay-at-home Dad who does some free stuff on the side. :-) After a Princeton degree. :-)
See also my online book: :-) "
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?
And a list of four big ways forward I put together (a basic income, a gift economy, improved local subsistence in stronger communities, and democratic resource-based planning):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzXBn5koFbY
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
http://www.diseaseproof.com/
Check your vitamin D levels too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
What you describe sound like a very respectable life. :-) Still, no one (including me) can live in this world and not get involved in some bad aspects of it (like, in the case of helping broadcasting stations, the mainstream media was often not doing its job of investigative journalism). Related:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream"
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Anyway, I hope those first links might help with reversing Type-II diabetes.
BTW, two other boxes of democracy are moving box (to somewhere with better laws) and mail box (writing representatives). :-) So, there are at least six. :-)
Why the ammo box is problematical:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
Anyway, the things they don't teach in school...
"Educating for a Peaceful World"
http://www.forums.alliance21.org/d_read/pax/articles/Deutsch.htm
Maybe you were better off to get out sooner?
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
As I said here: http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/msg/17cf35b6ca8aeb00 ... Ideally (though few manage this), security needs to be woven intrinsically and mutually throughout an entire endeavor at all levels of the social process, and from beginning to end, from recruitment to developer training to coding standards to code reviews (or whatever works) to archiving procedures to product announcements to bug fix procedures to communications with the public, as well as at all levels of the code itself, the tests, and so on. For many situations, security is often like a chain -- any weak link makes it fail. The less a project embodies this end-to-end security ethic, the more constant vigilance or constant exercise of power is required by everyone involved in it (extrinsic security and/or unilateral security). ... :-( ... ..."
"The central issue many people are concerned about (reading comments elsewhere) is that security is not an "add on".
So, in that sense, security is cultural. If you try to bolt on security after the fact (like trying to use a big military to defend long oil supply lines instead of having local power sources like solar panels, or trying to be the one who has all the power and everyone is afraid of rather than being the one who has a lot of friends who all share power and look out for each other) you end up spending a lot of time, money, and lives on "security" and you possibly still end up insecure.
Unfortunately, intentional or not, the first Diaspora release has been taken by some people to be a statement about the culture of Diaspora development as regards end-to-end security, even if it was not an intentional statement or even it it perhaps may not be accurate assessment relative to intent or plans. So, it is going to take a bit of work to recover from that, but no doubt it can be done by showing steady progress to creating a developer culture that has a security mindset woven throughout it.
So how does one get security in practice, assuming you want to do it end-to-end? What engineering attitude may be best to cultivate within that mindset?
Often, the best security is just simplicity.
http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev/browse_thread/thread/4cd369bdf16a346f
(My comments, starting with: "Here are some general thoughts about how Diaspora might relate to the
Semantic Web and a Social Semantic Desktop, and how that might make it even
more awesome to encourage everyone to migrate to it.")
"At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science."
In terms of continuing to try to reconcile our common interests to the greatest extent possible, consider, and connected with the previous item on Mark Frauenhoffer's comments on schools and the Maker/DIY movement, consider this by Seymour Papert: ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education. ..."
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
"I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
Which also relates to this story (from the 1950s but presaged the web):
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
And this essay by from 1985 that presaged the ongoing DIY/Maker/Open trends:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
And also this other item I just posted related to the DIY/Maker/OpenManufacturing scene:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/70fec0838320517b
One more thing just in the news that relates to my point the the problem with measurement is precisely that you get what you measure:
"School for Hackers: The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing."
by Mark Frauenfelder
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218
"When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things can't be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them. As our public educational institutions continue down this grim road, they'll lose value as places of learning. That may seem like a shame, but to the members of the growing DIY schooling movement, it's an irresistible opportunity to roll up their sleeves. "
Also, with a five minute video about Mark Frauenfelder's journey into making more of his own stuff, including how when you make things yourself they have stories, and linking this to a change in our culture after WWII and losing an important part of human existence as tool makers and tool users:
"Boing Boing Co-Founder Mark Frauenfelder on Maker Education"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/boing-boing-co-founder-mark-frauenfelder-on-maker-education/63017/
"Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster..."
According to whose goal? What goal? And where are the parents? Where is the librarian? Where are the neighbors? Where are the other community members? All too busy to help? Well, then maybe we have a *community* problem and not a *library* problem?
"But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills."
Prove to whom? Why? When? How?
When they get their engineer's license? Sure...
But since no one in the USA seems to want to be an engineer anymore (sadly, see a recent New Yorker article on Dyson where this is lamented by someone at NSF), why focus on them? Or maybe we need to change other aspects of the culture first, so people want to be engineers again, maybe with having more freedom somehow to design new and useful things? (I've seen a lot of engineering nonsense in many years of work around corporations, including IBM Research...)
By the way, discussion on Gatto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Taylor_Gatto
"At the time this criticism was added, the scholar in question (Wade A. Carpenter) had already changed his views on Gatto: "I saw the book as basically factual, but one-sided and angry. I believed then that Gatto was correct but wrong: that there was far more good going on in our schools than harm. Over the past year or so,my opinion has changed.I’ve encountered the most despicable miseducation I’ve seen or even heard of in thirty-three years of teaching—so bad, in fact, that I’m no longer willing to be tactful.""
The link on Wikipedia is broken, but Googling around I found this:
http://www.newfoundations.com/Carpenter/NCLB.html
Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the value of some structure. I'm just asking, what kind of structure? And when? And for who?
And why should "compulsory public schools" have anything to do with whatever the solution is, as opposed to the public library or a public internet (and sites like Khan Academy)?
Even if kids at some time need to "prove" something (like pass a drivers test) why do we need compulsory public schools for that, at great expense, and with all sorts of demonstrated pathologies?
I have no doubt the school buildings could be repurposed to good use as bigger libraries, craft centers, meeting places for tutoring sessions, get together places for learning communities, and so on. As I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
Still, as I wrote there, there would be downsides to letting the parents decide how to spend the dollars now going to schools: :-) :-) So, the current school superintendents would become more like college campus presidents, and thus get more prestige, bigger offices with larger staffs, and of course, bigger salaries to go with that all. :-) Naturally, as schools expanded, this might cause various urban planning problems, and parking issues, and demands for more local public transit to get to them, and so on, but presumably we have a lot of good urban planners in NYS who could help with that, even as they might quickly feel pressured. Likewise, a rapid increase in construction and renovations around schools might cause various local shortages of construction workers and other tradespeople and so on. Likewise, all the families with young children moving to the state would strain the capacity of real estate agents, and overload the malls, and create traffic jams near supermarkets and toy stores. The new bus
"So, ironically, if schools were to give in gracefully to this idea, they might even get bigger as they got more voluntary and broadened their missions to include people of all ages learning anything.
Just as a caveat, and to clarify my own beliefs, I believe in the importance of both meshworks and hierarchies as Manuel DeLanda talks about:
"MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
we need to be careful not to turn the oppression of people against each other into the oppression of the group against the individual. So, it is a dynamic and creative balancing act...
An example of the other side of this that people rightly reject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Mind
"This episode deals with conformity, methods of enforcing it, and the consequences of its rejection.[2] In particular, it has been said that the episode addresses both McCarthyism (in which "unmutual" is equivalent to "communist") and the show trials of Stalinist Russia (which often featured coerced confessions), as well as the ethical issues of lobotomy.[3] At one point, some of the other prisoners are shown going through "self-criticism", which was common in China at the time."
So, to the extent social institutions can help people find that balance, they can be good things. But, that does not mean schools-as-we-know-them are good at that, or ever would be.
From 1991: "Educating for a Peaceful World" http://www.forums.alliance21.org/d_read/pax/articles/Deutsch.htm ... ...
"This article outlines a program of what schools can do to encourage the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world. It describes four key components of such programs: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in schools.
Families and schools are the two most important institutions that influence developing children's predispositions to hate and to love. Although the influence of the family comes earlier and is often more profound, there is good reason to believe that children's subsequent experiences in schools can modify or strengthen their earlier acquired dispositions. In this article, I outline a program that schools can follow to encourage the development of the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world.
Many schools do not provide much constructive social experience for students. Too often, schools are structured in ways that pit students against one another. They compete for teachers' attention, for grades, for status, and for admission to prestigious schools. Being put down and putting down others are pervasive occurrences. Many of us can recall classroom experiences of hoping that another student, who was called on by the teacher instead of us, would give the wrong answer so that we could get called on and give the right answer.
In recent years, it has been increasingly recognized that schools have to change in basic ways if we are to educate children so that they are for rather than against one another, so that they develop the ability to resolve their conflicts constructively rather than destructively and are prepared to live in a peaceful world. This recognition has been expressed in a number of interrelated movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution, and education for peace. In my view, there are four key components in these overlapping movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in the schools. I discuss each briefly, with more emphasis on cooperative learning and conflict resolution because I have worked more extensively in these two areas and because they provide a valuable base for education in constructive controversy and mediation."
Twenty years later, how much of that do schools embody? Why keep giving schools second, third, and fifty-third chances? Why should we continue to hope, after decades of failures of attempts at reform, that a social system called compulsory public schooling that was very carefully designed to produce compliant soldiers for 1800s-era Prussian Monarchy could ever be reformed to fit the educational needs of healthily-engaged citizens of 21st century democracies? As opposed to, say, just providing the same amount of money to the public library system or even directly to parents?
Instead, almost all public schools still emphasize "grading", which Alfie Kohn explains to be destructive to human relationships:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way
When I was learning to fly gliders at the Princeton University airport (sadly now given up to development), as I was circling to land and had right of way some helicopter flew across my path at a very fast rate and landed there. It was some executive from Time I guess (and they had copies of the magazine you could see through the bubble canopy). Anyway, when Time says non-mainstream stuff, it is interesting to me. When they echo a mainstream line, I can wonder.
Is this the article? ... It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. We may be on the cusp of running schools -- brace yourself -- according to what actually works."
"What Makes A School Great"
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20100920,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2016978,00.html
"But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. Today, several decades into America's long fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year -- and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Second, legions of public schools -- some charters, some not -- are succeeding while others flounder. These schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions.
As I said, you get what you measure. Are people measuring how happy kids are during school or during their lifetime? Saying schools are good because some kid does well on a test is like saying some drug like Vioxx is good because it works in the short term (and we don't care what it does to anyone ten years down the road).
So, if you want to measure, you should measure a lot of things. :-) But how do you measure someone's soul? So there are limits to measurement too. As Einstein said, our goals need to come from some process outside of what we are measuring in some way.
Which just gets back to the goals of education. If a goal is to get people participating in our democracy in a healthy way, then common sense suggests making them spend thirteen years of their life in a day-prison is probably not the best way to do it, whatever the numbers say. We know how most kids learn, and learning by doing is very important.
Again though, this is not to dispute the value of learning communities, good role models, tutoring, mentoring, well-equipped labs, and so on.
Anyway, I guess another aspect of this is to separate the term "schooling" from "education". The two are just not the same, even if there is sometimes some overlap. And you may never fix the social problem that the people who have become and stayed schoolteachers are those willing to jump through hoops on demand and make other staff as well as students do the same. Because you are a self-starter, that may not be so obvious to you, because you, like I, have probably enjoyed jumping through those hoops because we were good at it and did get something out of it. But that is not true for most people, and even for us, it may not have been very healthy in the long term.
Really, what is the justification for schools at all, as opposed to better libraries and a network of other learning opportunities (with families having enough to afford tutors through a basic income)? Locking children away for their entire youth is just a dim vie
Of course, ironically, we can just use renewable energy and not have so much controversy... But fossil fuels are heavily subsidized in terms of both government incentives and ignored externalities...
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
See also:
"Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/
"Ernest C. Withers had been the photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement through the 50s and 60s. His photos of the gruesome racial murder of teenager Emmitt Till still resonate to this day; he was there when nine students integrated Little Rock Central High School; and his camera shutters snapped just moments after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And all the while, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was betraying everything he knew about the civil rights movement to the FBI."
Which connects to my previous post on the open manufacturing list: :-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them
And:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
By the way, someone (mrbrod) in the com
Thanks for that link you posted; really important stuff:
"Thom Hartmann: Are Corporations People?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHmGEkzhhfQ
I could believe it...
Of course, to understand part of why that was not done, it is important to note that Iraq was *supposed* to be a quagmire, because, according to, Smedly Butler, a USMC Major General "War is a Racket": ..."
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
... used to enforce artificial boundaries. If we have the technology to make iris scanners, made with very delicate nanoscale components, doing immense amounts of pattern matching, hooked to a huge networked database, then we have enough technology to make a world of abundance for everyone, and essentially, there is no reason to restrict immigration anywhere in the world, and no need for wars over resources, etc. Something I wrote related to that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
I've enjoyed this discussion including your most recent comment here; thanks.
At this point, we may continue to disagree about whether the ends justify the means, and whether the ends should be a person with a lot of skills or a person with a lot of self-direction. No doubt, the truth will be somewhere in the middle (some ends justify some means, and people need both skills and some degree of self-direction to have a happy life). I'm indeed glad that you paint a better picture of people in schools very seriously trying to consider substantial reforms (even if I may still think the entire paradigm remains broken).
Although I would add that schools might improve a lot when we accept that not only should adults try to shape kids into civilized creatures, but also adults should let them be shaped back into joyful creatures by (re)learning many things from children. :-) Something I learned from a comedian (Michael Pritchard), from his video "Making the World a Better Place: Commit Random Acts of Comedy and Create Inverse Paranoids":
http://www.humorproject.com/bookstore/2010.php
as he was quoting Kahlil Gibran:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html
"""
On Children
by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
"""
Just something to think about. That video is really great. I got it at a "humor conference" I went to a couple years ago.
A couple factoids, for you to make what you will of:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.speregen/physical_education_and_school_performance
"Despite the wealth of knowledge concerning the benefits of physical education and physical activity, only 8% of elementary schools, 6.4% of middle schools, and 5.8% of high schools provide daily physical education to all of its students (SHPPS, 2000)."
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
"Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all th
Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.
Numbers can help, but they can also mislead. If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to? We lived for a time in a "top ten" school district (Chappaqua, thankfully before we had a kid, and at first before the Clinton's moved in and it went downhill faster), and the Realtor said, I don't know why he did unless it was to be nice, that we could tell the school district was in the top ten because the teen suicide rate was so high... It's a more general issue now, perhaps.
"Teen Suicide Rate: Highest Increase In 15 Years"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070907221530.htm
And for every kid who does complete a suicide, you can be sure there are many, many others who are in deep distress. So, if you want an important quantitative statistic on modern schooling (and the system it is embedded in), that is one that is easily accessible (even if, like any statistic, it may have its issues, since sometimes things are covered up etc.).
Also:
http://www.edutopia.org/loss-prevention
"Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century, and suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 10-24."
There they question whether schools should get involved in labelling at risk kids or offering prevention programs, but they don't ask whether school contributes to the problem, or whether a better wholistic education process would give kids deeper roots to help keep them from toppling over in life's storms.
And probably most schools approaches miss key points about improving health (vitamin D and whole foods), as well as the real psychological and spiritual side of all that:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy" by Bruce Levine
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
The first book is mostly about adults, but the second was written by a psychologist who has treated a lot of adolescent patients and has a lot to say about schooling in that context.
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C&q=school
Beyond those sorts of statistics, which you may rightfully question as to whether they are school's fault, the evidence Gatto cites includes that the USA had (ignoring the genocide against the natives, black slavery, women not voting, etc.) a very vibrant and literate democracy one hundred and fifty years ago, one that inspired the world, back before schooling, back in the time when private family business (usually farm) ownership was widespread and people had a lot more sense of control over many aspects of their lives (ignoring small town privacy problems, racism, sexism, lack of physical mobility, disease, famine, and bad weather, which granted, we have improved on in dealing with in many ways). Again though, correlation does not prove causality. But it can be suggestive...
Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas ex
Except as I also said: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
So, while what you wrote is more or less true (ignoring it is also a recipe for a destabilizing arms race, since like with nukes, the side with less robots is going to make plagues or crash airlines into buildings or whatever), it is still ironic to put all those resources into competition using robots instead of making the world work for everyone through robotics.
Wars are pretty hard to "win". As I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the cold war -- it is just taking the USA longer to topple...
We've discussed such issues here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
Examples: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=fernhout+itar+open
and also here: http://www.openvirgle.net/
"Again, you misunderstand. Having technology that makes your military more effective *does* make you safer, after a fashion. Look back at the interaction between the Spanish conquistadors and the Incas. The conquistadors had metal armor and guns. The Incas had wooden/hide armor, spears and arrows. A single conquistador was a more effective military weapon than a single Incan soldier."
Well, it was guns, *germs*, and steel (see the book with that title). And it was other things as well, like the Inca seeing the invaders as gods, and also being highly centralized and vulnerable to a centralized attack, otherwise millions of Inca would have wiped out a few hundred men with musketts, even on horseback. It's sort of like by the fourth airplane on 9/11 the strategy of the terrorists wasn't working anymore as the people began to fight back (and so that plane crashed in a field). Eventually, the Inca did fight back more, but by then the (mostly unintended) germs were wiping them out. There was also a civil war at the time the Spanish took advantage of, and other factors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_Empire
"The situation went quickly downhill. As things began to fall apart, many parts of the Inca Empire revolted, some of them joining with the Spanish against their own rulers. Many kingdoms and tribes had been conquered or persuaded to join the Inca empire. They thought that by joining the Spaniards, they could gain their own freedom. But these native people never foresaw the massive waves of Spaniard immigrants coming to their land and the tragedy that they would bring upon their people."
So the Inca empire itself was unstable... If the Inca empire has been more stable, and had (unintentional) disease not been a major factor, I'd suggest the Inca would have easily kicked out the Conquistadors, despite guns and steel.
Columbus' destruction of the Arawaks on Haiti might be a better example of what you say... And a very sad one... They offered him gifts and friendship amd a better way of life, and he repaid them in death, justified in part by religion as well as his business obligations...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
But is that what you want to hold up as an ideal? Columbus only lived to age 54; might he have lived to age 100 if he and his men had just settled in Haiti and never gone back to Europe? All that violence must have been stressful for him, and what did that genocide for profit against the Arawaks get him? Beyond being remembered for it (plus being the last person to discover America)?
If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinisic unilateral security (not intrinsic mututal security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabestes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passerbys, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard.
And that's basically the previous poster's point.
"It's not really very hard to take a space launch system and turn it into an ICBM system"
Rockets are big and obvious. As with the slashdot articles about someone building a cruise missile in their garage, the bigger security problem is how easy it is to make things like UAVs guided by a GPS with enough payload to cause trouble. And making designer plagues in a garage is going to get easier and easier, too. And that is not going to be solved by banning model aircraft or GPSs or biotech or garages, it is going to be solved by making the world a more joyful place with abundance for all, and rethinking security in terms of being intrinsic and mutual (as mentioned in another reply).
Some ways to do that I helped put together, related to a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and stronger local subsistence communities:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "
The key idea is to rethink security in terms of "intrinsic" security and "mutual" security (as opposed to "extrinsic" and "unilateral" security), as you imply and as I spell out some more at the link above.
And we're not just a laughingstock because we cripple ourselves as you point out, we're also a laughingstock in the ironic sense as above. Of course, we may still be a laughingstock that is dangerous to ourselves and others... We need to move beyond that to a better paradigm of security, starting with the diplomatic approach as you suggest...