The DMCA anti-circumvention provision is a real threat to freedom. There must be some amendments made to the law that will expressly allow reverse engineering for educational purposes, at least. Microsoft is above the law when it comes to fair business practices. Why should they complain when someone else uses a few dirty tricks?
The murkiness of the criteria makes the line very blurry. People in the patent office trying to apply it to individual patent applications must be so perplexed that they are easily swayed by factors other than the law. They are swayed by the demands of "clients" because they have no clearer limit imposed upon them.
Yeah, the constitution was a cool document way back when but today we don't need to coddle "Science and the useful Arts" by giving people residual property rights in their creations. There's already a vast excess of intellectual property available, and we'd do just as well to simply spend some time reviewing what we already have.
Science and arts and business will be just fine on their own now, thank you. They're all grown up and can stand on their own two feet.
The argument that "Oooh -- it costs so much to do research -- you'd better guarantee us a return" is so lame it makes me sick. I've seen how these drug companies spend their research dollars. They buy FDA officials. They buy researchers. They buy clinical results. They throw money away and then whine that their expenses are so high that they can't live without a 20 year monopoly.
When social useful end results are desired, but too expensive to be profitable, one of two things usually happen. The government does something on behalf of its citizens or the citizens organize a collective effort to accomplish that goal. Even competitors in business cooperate when the development costs are high. They form consortia. If enough companies join a consortium, there would be no significant free riders. That's what happens with standards bodies. As long as enough players play by the rules, the job gets done.
What makes this approach impossible in today's world is everyone's total lack of civic-mindedness and cooperative spirit. "Government is our enemy!!" is the rallying cry of the libertarian. People say to themselves "My God, it's a mad rush to see who can eat the most at the banquet table. I'd better gorge myself but fast!". Take all you can get. Don't worry about the next guy. In fact, do everything you can to screw the next guy up. Make his life miserable so that you can be the happiest person on the block. No one seems to want to have public anything anymore. They dismiss proposals for joint effort as "art by committee" or "sure to be inefficient, just like the rest of the bureaucracy". People think that society is just a perpetual motion machine that requires no effort at all to maintain. They whine about taxes, they whine about welfare, they whine about lawlessness. Suspicion is the most important skill. Trust no one. "Why should I contribute if I get nothing in return?" people ask. The answer is you have been freely given the ability to ask the question. That is probably more than you deserve.
Mean-spiritedness fills the air. Television celebrates wretchedness with the likes of "Who wants to be a millionaire" or "The jerry springer show". If someone wants to contribute, they should do so by all means. But don't sit there with your hand out expecting us to put you on a pedestal and provide for you just because you are a "genius" or "auteur" or "artiste". Getting paid for your time is all that anyone needs. Time is the MOST limited resource of all, and therefore the most deserving of reward.
This ruling is not a legal precedent. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of limiting information flow. Forget it. It's like the War on Drugs (This is your War. This is your War on Drugs) The cost of locking down the system will always be higher than the benefit obtained by eliminating the "harm".
Maybe 500 years ago it made sense to try and protect citizens from information, but the Church eventually lost that battle. Now we're dredging the whole damn thing up again.
I would not, however, post a comment saying "IP law sucks. Get rid of it altogether." Others would. The difference here is that realists are posting more about the potential misuse of their own property than the idealists who like to post about something that has no significant impact upon them. I disagree. Realists argue that since ideas are not physical objects, they cannot be owned. Idealists and dreamers argue about the contrived legal niceties of posting comments to Slashdot.
The real disease is mergers and acquisitions. We protect copyrighted works against infringement in the hopes that the protection will "promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts." Why then do we honour patents and copyrights acquired through mergers and acquisitions? All the creative work has already been done and the extra protection afforded by the law offers no incentive to produce additional work. Intellectual property protection serves no public purpose when it protects acquired properties. Therefore we ought to return to the public domain all intellectual property obtained through mergers and acquisitions. That would make the cost of buying your way into a monopoly very high indeed. Maybe even high enough to make people think twice about doing it.
You are an acolyte of technology. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it is necessary. Technolust has become the mindless and all-consuming fetish of the developed world. Technolust is responsible for the vicious intellectual property rape being perpetrated against ordinary people. It gives the mass-media "buff boys" enough drool to make the capitalists hard thinking about the "New Economy" and the importance of the "money shot".
When books disappear, we'll be one brownout away from the Dark Ages. Computers make us dependent on systems we don't understand. We're trapped in the hardware upgrade treadmill that is totally beyond our control. Would you want to wake up one day and find that your copy of "Crime and Punishment" had expired and it would cost you 10.00 to get it back? Or if you dropped your lithium ion battery into your Corn Flakes? You're just an addict. Library sharing at least allows you to share with other people in an orderly way.
I think the librarian fears that if people CAN access any book from a home computer, then they will be EXPECTED to do so -- witness what is happening in schools. A computer is not a formal requirement, but tremendous pressure is exerted on students who don't have access to computers. Once civic governments realize this trend, they can gradually whittle down the funding for libraries thus dividing and conquering the library constituency. Read E.Con for an insightful, if paraniod, look at the hidden agenda of the "wired library" advocates.
One day all the libraries will be closed and we'll be as dependent on the LOC Corp. and it's industry "partners" as we are on Ma Bell (or her spawn).
But by then the LOC will have been privatized or it's entire collection sold to Microsoft.
You will require the latest version of Microsoft Internet Exfoliator in order to view an online copy of the Gettysburg Address. Please press the "I Submit" button
I think we should have hasbro buy the library of congress and then sue the estate of Mark Twain for copyright infringement.
Or maybe Michael Jackson could buy the LOC and re-release all the titles in his name.
I personally hate reading online because half the people are jerks and the other half can't spell. Online text is so impermanent that people really don't give a shit what they write. It all goes away eventually. It evaporates. You don't have to burn anything, you just have to unplug it. Cheers.
Forward time travel? You're soaking in it!!
on
Democratizing Space
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· Score: 1
I'm sitting in my technologically advanced EASY CHAIR with a cup of genetically engineered "coffee" in front of a special time-travel enabled COMPUTER MONITOR. I set my THRUSTERS to blast me ONE SECOND into the future and VOILA! One second later, I'm there!
I'll accept my nobel prize after I finish my breakfast.
Commonly accepted criteria for differentiating science from pseudo-science:
Originality: Research should add something to what is already known
Detachment: Scientist should ignore personal and social prejudices and bias in their research.
Universality: Results should apply equally everywhere and should be repeatable.
Skepticism: All scientific literature should be carefully scrutinized and not taken for granted.
Public accessibility: Scientific knowledge should be freely accesible to anyone. Thus, the results of research are not the private property of the scientist, but are public goods that should be transmitted immediately to the community of science.
Does astrology meet these criteria? I'm not asking as a rhetorical question, I think that defining what constitutes good science is next to impossible.
These points were from Paradigms Lost by John L. Costi who borrowed them from Robert K. Merton's Sociology of Science (1976).
I think the Free Software Foundation is right to oppose software patents as harmful to free software, but the arguments apply equally to other types of patents: devices, materials, biotechnology, and any other specialty in which the USPTO lacks expertise. Why should we make this arbitrarily limited (and thus contrived sounding) case against software patents, when really we are making a case against patents en masse?
The problem of Free Software seems to me not at all related to figuring out how to make a buck by selling services as some other poster suggested. Instead it should seek to limit the reach and duration of all intellectual property claims.
The real question ought to be how can we rationally draw a line between intellectual property and tangible property rights so that attacks against the former don't also fall against the latter.
RMS is the Patron Saint of Free Software Keep up the outstanding work, Mr. Stallman!
CmdrTaco Rules!! Slashdot is the best, in spite of it's shortcomings.
Facts are good, but they're not everything. You need to be able to hypothesize, recognize patterns, classify observations, understand subtext, etc. Education should ideally give students the ability to create or discover new facts about the world rather than just force-feeding them some pre-cooked factoid meatloaf.
Re:Why laptops? Answer: To eliminate bricks&mortar
on
Laptops In Education
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· Score: 1
I think the real reason for introducing portable computing devices is to do away with costly anachronisms like school buildings.
Think about how much more cost-effectively public schooling would be if school boards just demolished schools and let kids study at home or at the mall or in unsupervised study cubicles.
It's all about withdrawing resources from the commons so that they can be enjoyed privately by the people who really deserve them -- the rich. Having a government just takes money away from wealth creators.
I'm sure someone as bright and thoughtful as you could come up with some way of improving the system. There is no "system" anyway, just a bunch of people trying to make the best of their limitations.
How about suggesting an alternative?
My Ideal primary or secondary school environment
on
Laptops In Education
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· Score: 1
Ideal World:
School system is overfunded to the same degree that the high-tech equity market is today.
Schools have no commercial influences whatsoever. They are free from consumerist messages.
Students learn for the sake of learning.
The guiding principle of curriculum design is student curiosity.
Under these circumstances, laptops would be out of the question as an educational desiderratum. Laptops are tools, but they are tools that determine the curriculum to a large extent. This is not the case with pencils and paper. Laptops would determine the curriculum because students must learn to use the "school approved" operating system. The students would have to be taught how to use the "official" productivity packages. Also, corporate influence would play a large part in determining what content was available online. The students' attention would be directed toward a narrow set of pre-defined options.
Real World:
Schools have been gradually starved of cash in as a result of fiscal austerity programs.
Students need to learn in order to get jobs, not just for the sake of learning.
Teachers are struggling to keep up with a steadily growing workload.
The guiding principle of curriculum design is ease (efficiency) of delivery.
Given the real world picture, it is probably unavoidable that commercial interest will direct the educational agenda. How else will schools be funded? And once the decision has been made to allow corporate "sponsorships" the school boards are relieved of their responsibility to find unencumbered financial support for their schools. That will make the corporate penetration of the school system even easier and more complete.
But if that is the situation we've gotten ourselves into, then we may as well make the best of it. If IBM wants to give students a good deal on laptops then I suppose we have no choice but to accept.
Parents who allow strangers to raise their children is the real problem facing children in America today.
The real problem is that America is in decline. It happens eventually to every great power. Panic-striken Americans are casting about for scapegoats but there just aren't any.
That said, you really have to ask yourself whether you feel better having a child at home where mom or dad feels they are just a pain in the neck. In theory parents are better than "professionals" but in reality they often turn out much worse.
Another thought that came to mind when I read your post was of the children on Kibbutzim in Israel who are raised collectively, in a kind of day care. The kids seemed quite well-adjusted and not needy or enraged. I think kids will do well as long as they are treated fairly and shown some affection.
Also, think of the benefits of having someone offer you guidance who has no vested interest or ulterior motive in advising you. Pushy stage parents, or "hockey dads" (I'm a Canuck) are probably much more detrimental to the child's well being than a disinterested adult. Think about all the crazy parents who want their kids to succeed where they failed, even if the child has no interest in whatever it was that the parent failed at.
What about the teachers and day care workers who recognize battered children and give them a safe haven that they would never have at home? That has to have some value to society, does it not?
I'd say the jury's still out on whether third-party parenting is worse than "natural" parenting. There is still a case to be made for a mix of both.
P.S., it's interesting that you say we even need the government to build roads and do the military and police...there are libertarians / anarchists who say private industry could do those as well.
Even more outrageous than that, libertarians believe there ought not to be criminal law!! All "disputes" should be settled in civil court by Tort. (I heard the leader of a libertarian party say that at a speech he gave at the University of Manitoba)
Please, libertarians out there, restore my faith in humanity and say it ain't so!!
The so-called "education" system of the US is a State-run propaganda organ mated to a state-subsidized day-care program. It has nothing to do with "thinking for yourself". Schools exist to promulgate conformity as practice and as virtue.
Yes I agree with most of what you say except that "promulgating conformity as practice and as virtue" is not bad given the alternatives. First, kids need to know what the "received opinion" is before they can even begin to be skeptical about it. If suspicion is the highest virtue in your universe, then I don't really want to live there.
I think many children are happy to conform because it gives them a starting point -- a backdrop if you will -- against which they can begin to question the status quo.
Secondly, no western liberal democracy could function without mass-produced, brainwashed (to a certain extent) automatons. Who else is going to keep the trains running on time? People who aren't desensitized to repetitive, mechanistic bureaucracy would balk at most of what bourgeois life throws at them. If you'd rather have a society structured differently than the one we live in now, go ahead and change things.
I think that the crushing banality of bourgeois life is simply the price we have to pay for a society based on equality. We eliminated the noble and the divine when we beheaded the monarch. All men are created equal. Underneath this explicitly held precept, there is an implicit relativism which destroys the ability to question because it denies the individual a platform from which to view the status quo.
The relativist claim that "There is no such thing as absolute truth" has come to mean "anything goes". Rather than responding to this moral abyss with fear and trembling, Americans (and really all western democracies) simply busy themselves with material pursuits in order to drown out thought altogether. They can't become passionate about issues because that would threaten the comfort of consumption and, more importantly, it would exemplify the heresy that some things are more valuable than others. Students are not learning how to learn or think for themselves because that is not the objective of public school. They're learning how to consume. They are being fed knowledge so that they won't have enough hunger to cause much of a stir. They are being given a mass of facts in order to pre-empt valuating and weighing things. Weighing alternative points of view leads to the dangerous and undemocratic belief that some facts were more important than other facts. It would mean that the universe no longer reflects the equality of man. We can no longer say "The firmament sheweth His handiwork and the heavens declare His glory".
I agree that in a lot of ways this is insidious, but would you prefer a return to the ancien regime? Would you prefer dictatorship or anarchy? If you do prefer those things, then I suppose we can agree to disagree.
Of course people are no longer as willing to lie down as they once were. The growing gap between rich and poor means that fewer and fewer students have anything to gain by conforming. Hence the movement to home schooling, no schooling, behaviour problems, etc, etc.
Anyone that believes that a lower literacy rate is the product of public education, is really quite foolish. Our population is many times larger, with immigrants from places where the literacy rate is abysmal. Public education, if anything, is responsible for the U.S. keep a high literacy rate.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I meant to disagree with the claim that we have "historically unprecedented levels of literacy". The literacy rates are lower today than they were in the 1780's. I didn't mean to imply that public education hurts the cause of literacy. On the contrary, it can only help. I was just being nit-picky about a tiny historical fact. Sorry to be unclear.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA anti-circumvention provision is a real threat to freedom. There must be some amendments made to the law that will expressly allow reverse engineering for educational purposes, at least. Microsoft is above the law when it comes to fair business practices. Why should they complain when someone else uses a few dirty tricks?
Shouldn't that be Monday OR Friday?
I keep trying, but so far I can't convince anyone that I'm not a machine.
The murkiness of the criteria makes the line very blurry. People in the patent office trying to apply it to individual patent applications must be so perplexed that they are easily swayed by factors other than the law. They are swayed by the demands of "clients" because they have no clearer limit imposed upon them.
Science and arts and business will be just fine on their own now, thank you. They're all grown up and can stand on their own two feet.
The argument that "Oooh -- it costs so much to do research -- you'd better guarantee us a return" is so lame it makes me sick. I've seen how these drug companies spend their research dollars. They buy FDA officials. They buy researchers. They buy clinical results. They throw money away and then whine that their expenses are so high that they can't live without a 20 year monopoly.
When social useful end results are desired, but too expensive to be profitable, one of two things usually happen. The government does something on behalf of its citizens or the citizens organize a collective effort to accomplish that goal. Even competitors in business cooperate when the development costs are high. They form consortia. If enough companies join a consortium, there would be no significant free riders. That's what happens with standards bodies. As long as enough players play by the rules, the job gets done.
What makes this approach impossible in today's world is everyone's total lack of civic-mindedness and cooperative spirit. "Government is our enemy!!" is the rallying cry of the libertarian. People say to themselves "My God, it's a mad rush to see who can eat the most at the banquet table. I'd better gorge myself but fast!". Take all you can get. Don't worry about the next guy. In fact, do everything you can to screw the next guy up. Make his life miserable so that you can be the happiest person on the block. No one seems to want to have public anything anymore. They dismiss proposals for joint effort as "art by committee" or "sure to be inefficient, just like the rest of the bureaucracy". People think that society is just a perpetual motion machine that requires no effort at all to maintain. They whine about taxes, they whine about welfare, they whine about lawlessness. Suspicion is the most important skill. Trust no one. "Why should I contribute if I get nothing in return?" people ask. The answer is you have been freely given the ability to ask the question. That is probably more than you deserve.
Mean-spiritedness fills the air. Television celebrates wretchedness with the likes of "Who wants to be a millionaire" or "The jerry springer show". If someone wants to contribute, they should do so by all means. But don't sit there with your hand out expecting us to put you on a pedestal and provide for you just because you are a "genius" or "auteur" or "artiste". Getting paid for your time is all that anyone needs. Time is the MOST limited resource of all, and therefore the most deserving of reward.
Yeah. Patents are the wrong question.
Maybe 500 years ago it made sense to try and protect citizens from information, but the Church eventually lost that battle. Now we're dredging the whole damn thing up again.
I would not, however, post a comment saying "IP law sucks. Get rid of it altogether." Others would. The difference here is that realists are posting more about the potential misuse of their own property than the idealists who like to post about something that has no significant impact upon them. I disagree. Realists argue that since ideas are not physical objects, they cannot be owned. Idealists and dreamers argue about the contrived legal niceties of posting comments to Slashdot.
The real disease is mergers and acquisitions. We protect copyrighted works against infringement in the hopes that the protection will "promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts." Why then do we honour patents and copyrights acquired through mergers and acquisitions? All the creative work has already been done and the extra protection afforded by the law offers no incentive to produce additional work. Intellectual property protection serves no public purpose when it protects acquired properties. Therefore we ought to return to the public domain all intellectual property obtained through mergers and acquisitions. That would make the cost of buying your way into a monopoly very high indeed. Maybe even high enough to make people think twice about doing it.
You are an acolyte of technology. Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it is necessary. Technolust has become the mindless and all-consuming fetish of the developed world. Technolust is responsible for the vicious intellectual property rape being perpetrated against ordinary people. It gives the mass-media "buff boys" enough drool to make the capitalists hard thinking about the "New Economy" and the importance of the "money shot".
When books disappear, we'll be one brownout away from the Dark Ages. Computers make us dependent on systems we don't understand. We're trapped in the hardware upgrade treadmill that is totally beyond our control. Would you want to wake up one day and find that your copy of "Crime and Punishment" had expired and it would cost you 10.00 to get it back? Or if you dropped your lithium ion battery into your Corn Flakes? You're just an addict. Library sharing at least allows you to share with other people in an orderly way.
I think the librarian fears that if people CAN access any book from a home computer, then they will be EXPECTED to do so -- witness what is happening in schools. A computer is not a formal requirement, but tremendous pressure is exerted on students who don't have access to computers. Once civic governments realize this trend, they can gradually whittle down the funding for libraries thus dividing and conquering the library constituency. Read E.Con for an insightful, if paraniod, look at the hidden agenda of the "wired library" advocates.
One day all the libraries will be closed and we'll be as dependent on the LOC Corp. and it's industry "partners" as we are on Ma Bell (or her spawn).
But by then the LOC will have been privatized or it's entire collection sold to Microsoft.
You will require the latest version of Microsoft Internet Exfoliator in order to view an online copy of the Gettysburg Address. Please press the "I Submit" button
I think we should have hasbro buy the library of congress and then sue the estate of Mark Twain for copyright infringement.
Or maybe Michael Jackson could buy the LOC and re-release all the titles in his name.
I personally hate reading online because half the people are jerks and the other half can't spell. Online text is so impermanent that people really don't give a shit what they write. It all goes away eventually. It evaporates. You don't have to burn anything, you just have to unplug it. Cheers.
I'll accept my nobel prize after I finish my breakfast.
Does astrology meet these criteria? I'm not asking as a rhetorical question, I think that defining what constitutes good science is next to impossible.
These points were from Paradigms Lost by John L. Costi who borrowed them from Robert K. Merton's Sociology of Science (1976).
If MS has a TerraServer, Sun should have a SolariServer -- showing sunspots, prominences, etc.
The problem of Free Software seems to me not at all related to figuring out how to make a buck by selling services as some other poster suggested. Instead it should seek to limit the reach and duration of all intellectual property claims.
The real question ought to be how can we rationally draw a line between intellectual property and tangible property rights so that attacks against the former don't also fall against the latter.
RMS is the Patron Saint of Free Software Keep up the outstanding work, Mr. Stallman!
CmdrTaco Rules!! Slashdot is the best, in spite of it's shortcomings.
Facts are good, but they're not everything. You need to be able to hypothesize, recognize patterns, classify observations, understand subtext, etc. Education should ideally give students the ability to create or discover new facts about the world rather than just force-feeding them some pre-cooked factoid meatloaf.
Think about how much more cost-effectively public schooling would be if school boards just demolished schools and let kids study at home or at the mall or in unsupervised study cubicles.
It's all about withdrawing resources from the commons so that they can be enjoyed privately by the people who really deserve them -- the rich. Having a government just takes money away from wealth creators.
I'm sure someone as bright and thoughtful as you could come up with some way of improving the system. There is no "system" anyway, just a bunch of people trying to make the best of their limitations.
How about suggesting an alternative?
Ideal World:
Under these circumstances, laptops would be out of the question as an educational desiderratum. Laptops are tools, but they are tools that determine the curriculum to a large extent. This is not the case with pencils and paper. Laptops would determine the curriculum because students must learn to use the "school approved" operating system. The students would have to be taught how to use the "official" productivity packages. Also, corporate influence would play a large part in determining what content was available online. The students' attention would be directed toward a narrow set of pre-defined options.
Real World:
Given the real world picture, it is probably unavoidable that commercial interest will direct the educational agenda. How else will schools be funded? And once the decision has been made to allow corporate "sponsorships" the school boards are relieved of their responsibility to find unencumbered financial support for their schools. That will make the corporate penetration of the school system even easier and more complete.
But if that is the situation we've gotten ourselves into, then we may as well make the best of it. If IBM wants to give students a good deal on laptops then I suppose we have no choice but to accept.
The real problem is that America is in decline. It happens eventually to every great power. Panic-striken Americans are casting about for scapegoats but there just aren't any.
That said, you really have to ask yourself whether you feel better having a child at home where mom or dad feels they are just a pain in the neck. In theory parents are better than "professionals" but in reality they often turn out much worse.
Another thought that came to mind when I read your post was of the children on Kibbutzim in Israel who are raised collectively, in a kind of day care. The kids seemed quite well-adjusted and not needy or enraged. I think kids will do well as long as they are treated fairly and shown some affection.
Also, think of the benefits of having someone offer you guidance who has no vested interest or ulterior motive in advising you. Pushy stage parents, or "hockey dads" (I'm a Canuck) are probably much more detrimental to the child's well being than a disinterested adult. Think about all the crazy parents who want their kids to succeed where they failed, even if the child has no interest in whatever it was that the parent failed at.
What about the teachers and day care workers who recognize battered children and give them a safe haven that they would never have at home? That has to have some value to society, does it not?
I'd say the jury's still out on whether third-party parenting is worse than "natural" parenting. There is still a case to be made for a mix of both.
Even more outrageous than that, libertarians believe there ought not to be criminal law!! All "disputes" should be settled in civil court by Tort. (I heard the leader of a libertarian party say that at a speech he gave at the University of Manitoba)
Please, libertarians out there, restore my faith in humanity and say it ain't so!!
Yes I agree with most of what you say except that "promulgating conformity as practice and as virtue" is not bad given the alternatives. First, kids need to know what the "received opinion" is before they can even begin to be skeptical about it. If suspicion is the highest virtue in your universe, then I don't really want to live there.
I think many children are happy to conform because it gives them a starting point -- a backdrop if you will -- against which they can begin to question the status quo.
Secondly, no western liberal democracy could function without mass-produced, brainwashed (to a certain extent) automatons. Who else is going to keep the trains running on time? People who aren't desensitized to repetitive, mechanistic bureaucracy would balk at most of what bourgeois life throws at them. If you'd rather have a society structured differently than the one we live in now, go ahead and change things.
I think that the crushing banality of bourgeois life is simply the price we have to pay for a society based on equality. We eliminated the noble and the divine when we beheaded the monarch. All men are created equal. Underneath this explicitly held precept, there is an implicit relativism which destroys the ability to question because it denies the individual a platform from which to view the status quo.
The relativist claim that "There is no such thing as absolute truth" has come to mean "anything goes". Rather than responding to this moral abyss with fear and trembling, Americans (and really all western democracies) simply busy themselves with material pursuits in order to drown out thought altogether. They can't become passionate about issues because that would threaten the comfort of consumption and, more importantly, it would exemplify the heresy that some things are more valuable than others. Students are not learning how to learn or think for themselves because that is not the objective of public school. They're learning how to consume. They are being fed knowledge so that they won't have enough hunger to cause much of a stir. They are being given a mass of facts in order to pre-empt valuating and weighing things. Weighing alternative points of view leads to the dangerous and undemocratic belief that some facts were more important than other facts. It would mean that the universe no longer reflects the equality of man. We can no longer say "The firmament sheweth His handiwork and the heavens declare His glory".
I agree that in a lot of ways this is insidious, but would you prefer a return to the ancien regime? Would you prefer dictatorship or anarchy? If you do prefer those things, then I suppose we can agree to disagree.
Of course people are no longer as willing to lie down as they once were. The growing gap between rich and poor means that fewer and fewer students have anything to gain by conforming. Hence the movement to home schooling, no schooling, behaviour problems, etc, etc.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I meant to disagree with the claim that we have "historically unprecedented levels of literacy". The literacy rates are lower today than they were in the 1780's. I didn't mean to imply that public education hurts the cause of literacy. On the contrary, it can only help. I was just being nit-picky about a tiny historical fact. Sorry to be unclear.
That's not entirely true. New England Puritans had achieved almost 100% literacy by the 1780's.[1]
[1] Daniels, Bruce Puritans at Play p28, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.