bak 2 skool
Nothing is closer to the hearts of erstwhile liberals than public schools. Nothing comes closer to apostasy in the liberal mind that opposition to public schools, or “education.” Nothing constitutes a stronger political commitment than ours to compulsory public schooling. So I’m about to become the skunk at the party, and say that (1) compulsory public education is a process that is bad for children, (2) compulsory public education is designed to make “good citizens,” i.e., it is inherently nationalistic, (3) compulsory education creates “youth culture,” a pernicious phenomenon that has the blind leading the blind into a life of consumerism, (4) compulsory public education cripples learning, (5) even private education is public education, when the state dictates compulsory subjects and demands standardized testing for private or home schooling, and (6) compulsory public education is compulsory – that is, it is an instance where the state forces people to do something they don’t want to do with their own children, including teaching values that are alien to them.
Compulsory public education is bad for children
(1) Given the choice, no person between the ages of five and eighteen would voluntarily sit for hours on end, silent even in close proximity to others, and attempt to memorize decontextualized bits of information that hold no interest for them whatsoever. If they fail to perform they are punished with stigmatizing grades, hectoring teachers and administrators, freaked-out parents, and – if necessary –drugged to make them do what they cannot… sit still and quiet for hours, respond to bells like lab animals, obey authority without question, and eat crappy food. Now, kids even have to go through metal detectors.
Doing this for twelve years damages our children. They are damaged by the Hobbesian competition; they are damaged by the anxiety in the face of so much institutional authority; they are damaged by learning that learning is unpleasant and irrelevant; they are damaged – as are families – when parents and guardians are enlisted as the police on behalf of the school, against their own children; they are damaged by drugs, by Pavlovian conditioning, by shitty food and the junk food now for sale in schools, by making them pass through metal detectors, and by amphetamines used to “correct” their perfectly natural reaction to being told to sit still and quiet to listen to a non-intimate authority figure cajole them all day long.
We do this now out of necessity. The law says you have to give your kids the state’s prescribed education, or you can face charges, even if your children are perfectly happy not preparing for EOG tests and a life of regimentation.
Moreover, our lives have become structured around school schedules, and many households with two money-earners would not be able to spend the days with their children. This makes it difficult to extricate ourselves from the system, and the system is thereby impossible to end by decree because it is mixed into the very mortar of the built environment.
Like everything else in the late capitalist zeitgeist, the only way out now appears to be re-design, and this happens at a different scale and in a different social dimension than that occupied by the state. We almost need to design a way to spend time with the kids first, i.e., work alongside them as people did for most of our history, before we can address the political problems posed by compulsory public education.
(2) Compulsory public education is inherently nationalistic
(a) Why nationalism is a problem
I’ll cheat this one, and just lay out some quotes on nationalism that says what I want to better than I can.
Christianity has not conquered nationalism; the opposite has been the case nationalism has made Christianity its footstool.
-Arthur Keith
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
-Thorstein Veblen
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
-George Orwell
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult.
-Erich Fromm
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.
- W. R. Inge
Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.
-R. Aldington
I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that’s becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.
-bell hooks
(b) How schools are nationalistic
Let’s see. For starters, they are a state institution, flying a national flag, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, that are required to teach mythologized history and the fundamentals of good citizenship. I want to talk about citizenship.
What is a citizen?
The dictionary sez: “the state of being vested with the rights, privileges, and duties of a citizen.”
It is, in other words, a legal status. It exists only in the eyes of the law, and it is restricted. Moreover, it lists rights and privileges (privileges are something one has over others), but it also says “duties.” Those duties are to one entity and one entity alone, that is the state.
A “good citizen” is one who identifies first as a citizen against all other categories. This is critical in thinking about an education that is teaching mathematics and training obedient citizens. So if my status as a father conflicts with my duties as a citizen, and if I choose to privilege my status as a father over that of citizen, then I am no longer a good citizen. If my status as the member of a living community conflicts with the demands of citizenship, then I am expected to subordinate my status as community member to my citizenship. If I am a pacifist (which I am), I am expected nonetheless to pay taxes (a citizenship duty) to support wars and lethal injections in order to be a good citizen.
In other words, good citizenship can be boiled down to two basic expectations, obey the state and apologize for it to secure the general obedience of all. The power of the law to punish is adequate to gain the obedience. But to gain the belief in the goodness of this obedience, you need schools.
Compulsory schools have your children for twelve years, six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year (or whatever it is now). When they vote, they will vote based on the ideas of national superiority and fealty to the state that has been drummed into them during this 15,000 or so hours in class, the additional 5,000 hours spent doing “homework,” and reinforced in the television they watch when their homework is done.
And voting is what they can do, as citizens.
That’s it.
They can vote.
Mark the ballot, get your lapel sticker, that’s democracy, now get your ass back to work so you can eat and sleep indoors.
Citizenship. Worth fighting for? This is the meaning of freedom?
Compulsory education creates “youth culture,” a pernicious phenomenon that has the blind leading the blind into a life of consumerism
In societies that did not have schools, children stayed with their parents, small children predominantly with the mother, especially while cursing, and as children grew they would divide up by gender and spend the day with the same-sex parent. Children in this milieu begin imitating their parents early – pretending to wash clothes or pretending to harvest a crop or tagging along to fish or dig roots – and in very short order, sometimes as early as five or six, they begin actually working themselves, doing what they could within the limits of size and experience, with the parent as a kind of life-trainer for the apprentice child.
This is not to idealize the past, but to point out that most of the history of humans was without school, and without these arbitrary age-segregations. Consequently, if you could get in a time machine and travel back 1,000 years at wherever you sit right now, the nearest people you’d find – even if you spoke their language fluently – would find a description of what we call “adolescence” to be unintelligible. There simply was no such thing, because by the time we developed the notion, it was in the context of an age-segregated, schooled society, where peer-pressure at school represented a major break with and counter-force to kinship bonds.
As far back as we can tell, human beings have had initiation rites that marked critical passages in life; but the age segregation of schools is something altogether different. At an adulthood initiation or a marriage, the entire community participated in the passage, often with various forms of celebration to welcome their kin across this milestone, with no rupture in the constancy of contact with kin.
At schools, children are ripped away from their families and placed in an environment that was adopted directly from the military. They are placed alongside “peers,” with whom they are encouraged to compete, and they are punished if they fail in that competition. Not only punished, but stigmatized in that way that can only exist in a culture of inexperience (segregated youth is ripped loose from its experience base) built on the captivity and forced associations of school.
No industry has been able to capitalize on “youth culture,” a culture uprooted from experience and forged in captivity, than advertising. They have learned to market to the whole “demographic,” that demographic being between five and eighteen and in captivity, in ways that take advantage of this separation from community experience, in ways that take advantage of the inexperience and guilelessness of children, to train them into a deeper competition, of which school competition is but a feeble shadow. Uprooted, children in this form of captivity seek nothing more than to belong. Unable to identify with their captors – their parents rightly included in that sum – they seek to identify with one another, and the rebellious element of that identification then creates a wall between youth and what they really do need to hear from us. But the adults in this society have but a feeble grasp of how damaging this all is, how utterly unnatural, because we ourselves are products of schools and segregated youth culture. So we fail to explain away the contradictions in our own behavior – borne of the contradiction between kin and citizen; and youth fails to hear the critical voices in the adult world, because at their backs is the incessant demand-production apparatus of consumer capitalism.
Parents screw up doing trying to do the right thing. Families, by and large, care about one another, even if we are bumbling and confused about how to do it. The state wants obedience, and doesn’t care. Advertisers go the next step. They actively target this vulnerable population to convince them to get things that are bad for them, and the cynical motive is profit. Stupid, self-destructive fads rip through this part-time prison like wildfire, once key elements within the youth pecking order adopt them; and families bear the financial burden of this lunacy so their kids can fit in, so their kids don’t think they are less cared-for than other kids, so their kids will be able to read the hieroglyphic of the culture which families feel certain they are about to grow up in (and this last is, perversely, an exercise of good will).
The Youth Market is now a predators’ feast, and not just consumer goods, but pharmaceuticals, medical professionals, test-designers, tutors, crackpot educational products, that are not sold to the kids themselves, but to a collective parenthood that is kept in a constant state of anxiety about young people’s performance and potential.
Human beings are dependent, and that is why we are unavoidably social. At the stage where another primate is born, our heads are too big to get through the birth canal, so we are born partly unformed. We don’t get up and caper around like a new colt.
We have a long developmental period from infancy to puberty, and longer still to full-sized adulthood. Our reason outstripped out instincts in efficacy, and then our instincts atrophied, leaving us with this peculiar mental plasticity, or creativity, and the instinct has been stepped down to something akin to the urge to cooperate.
That cooperation, in conjunction with language and collective memory, gave rise to culture, which allows us to carry the lessons of the past along with us – and the errors, too, for a time – so we aren’t starting over every time someone is born. Every newborn inherits a past if that newborn is born into a culture.
Humans learn from the moment they are born. That is what we do. But the idea that a 10-year-old and a 30-year-old and a 60-year-old of the same gender, class, and culture are equally learned is preposterous on its face. There are capacities enlarged by repetitions over time and sustained observation that may not correspond to age in every instance, but they are not possible without age. Age is a necessary if not sufficient condition for the kind of wisdom we associate with age.
Youth Culture, which is inherently xenophobic, stands against this wisdom – in an entirely understandable reaction to the hypocrisy of older authority throughout their school sentences – and has that antagonism amplified by consumer society which sells their rebellions back to them as commodities – whether it’s a popular music label or shoes. So the antagonism between youth and age becomes an antagonism without a common language. We talk past each other, no matter how hard we try. And youth suffers for it. A lot.
Youth is leaderless, in a system of compulsory public education, and susceptible to the most horrific kinds of guidance by advertisers. Youth in a school-lockup are – like prisoners – extremely hierarchical, and the kids at the top unknowingly become the lieutenants of industry. Who do they talk to? A teacher, who is obliged to be their keeper? The authoritative family members have been subtly made the enemy – the veto along the road to consumer happiness. In many cases, we are seeing a second, maybe third generation of people disabled by the toxic combination of schooling and consumerism, so the parents themselves have become partisans of consumerism before their own children, and have actively trained them into it.
Compulsory public education cripples learning
Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh.
-John Taylor Gatto
The performance of homeschoolers on tests has proven that kids taught the state curriculum at home can do as well or better than kids trained in institutions. That’s not to make any particular point about relative merit that’s not apparent on its face; but an advantage homeschoolers have is that they are in the presence of someone who genuinely cares about them, even though surrounded by a society where individual self-realization – whatever that is – has become the watchword. At home, they belong. And at home, they are not exposed to the relentless intramural cruelties of captive youth culture.
The ultimate and inevitable result of liberal law and compulsory public schooling was the standardized test. It presumes the fake equality of liberalism, and it’s lawyer-proof – a key consideration in liberal society where lawyers have become dominant among the dominant. Equally inevitable is that the sole ability tested is the ability to recall and identify facts-as-stated when they are mixed with three or four distracter answers. Now, there is no doubt that there are people who have talent at this; nor any doubt that this is a valuable talent for themselves and others. Interestingly enough, this talent can be most usefully applied toward a law degree.
This narrow sliver of human creative capacity is raised up over the rest of life like the sword of Damocles. Every exit door is closed if you don’t possess this one skill. And society is vertically sorted – directly in many cases – by this one skill, a skill the rich can have their kids specially-trained for (ensuring their unhappiness).
Regardless of your ability or affinity for any of it, you will be willed and drilled in this series of tests, with all their intervening humiliations, and time being a constant your capacity in all areas of creativity will be squeezed out. You will sit five days a week in a fluorescent box, observed by the guards. You will say the right things, write the right things, study the right things, and regurgitate the right things on a test, then you will be free of anxiety for a while.
Women, in particular, have their agency ripped out of them in the student lockup. Studies show that girls have dramatic changes (“deteriorations”) in performance before and after the onset of puberty. The gender policing in youth culture is ten times as ruthless as it is in adult-culture, because there is a desperate need to belong and consumer culture has schooled them (pun intended) in the most glaringly offensive, misogynistic representations imaginable.
Learning is the ultimate creative process. Plastic as we are, we learn first by mimesis. From mimesis, we graduate to a point where we understand things schematically, which evolves into synthetic thinking, which evolves into creative engagement with what is understood. I know that’s armchair development theory, but whether I’ve named it accurately or not, I know that people learn faster when they are doing something that allows for the possibility of creativity. I would go so far as to say that this possibility of creativity is the secret to what we vaguely call enjoyment. Learning and joy are decoupled in an educational institution. Education is a product that we are all being forced to buy.
The condition that will allow young people to grow in their learning/creativity – no longer divided – is through strong local culture. If we are to reintegrate across the state-mandated age boundaries, then we first have to render more convivial the environment into which these kids will be released. They need to be able to travel around in the day, to be with many ages of people to see how they speak with each other, how they get things done… and allowed to participate to the limits of their own capacities. If that environment is sterile, releasing them from school is not going to be a solution, but a bigger problem. (It ain’t kid-friendly out there right now.)
The community has to have places where these same young people are welcome, and public multi-aged gatherings for the common good are where the learning curve and the creativity are the highest, imho.
Making our communities habitable for our kids, habitable as in we feel like we really belong there, is a precondition for springing young people from the mess we are in with education. Then they can start learning creatively again; and so can we.
Even private education is public education, when the state dictates compulsory subjects and demands standardized testing for private or home schooling
This is pretty self-explanatory.
Compulsory public education is compulsory
This is pretty self-explanatory, too. But it’s obviously not an argument for a lot of people who support compulsory public education. Many are socialists even, who otherwise seem to have little in common with liberals. Their explicit premise is that compulsory universal education is the domain of the state and will remain so under socialist administration. It is seen as a marker of progress, and many who assume this stance call themselves “progressives.” I am not a progressive.
I don’t believe people should force their visions of progress on others. Some might call me libertarian about that, and I suppose it’s true. I share nothing with “libertarians” (the noun) with regard to their individualism and their arbitrary definitions of property… or much else for that matter. But on this, they are right.
Good faith and good will between people does not admit of forcing our will on others. Democracy that is the outcome of a vote where 51 beats 49, and the 49 are very unhappy, is not a stable solution to anything. And before we defend the idea of these schools, we need to take a long hard look at what they actually are and what they actually do.
Here is Ivan Illich’s classic Deschooling for those who want to read a long-ago critique of education that still seems to apply.
Guy Montag:
You’ll get no disagreement from me. I heard John Taylor Gatto speak at the 2nd Luddite Congress in Ohio in 1996 (seems like an eternity now). I’ve believed that schooling is a waste of time and money past the sixth grade (I should now after getting a Master’s in Engineering before coming to my senses and becoming a firefighter). If you’re smart and motivated, 90% of jobs can be learned with a minimum of formal schooling (eg. when I worked for Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, they English majors mostly self-taught themselves computer programming … in six weeks they were doing it for real).
Do I have the courage of my convictions? Well, both my children (six and nine) are in school, albeit private Christian (“yes dear” to my wife). However, they seem to be doing well, and their soujurn in Montissori school had a good impact with its emphasis on self-directed study. And, my children don’t watch TV or play video games (get a 1/2 hour DVD time each day apiece). That alone seems to make a big difference.
28 November 2010, 6:20 pmlatte lenya:
Wonderful topic, thoughtfully treated.
28 November 2010, 7:42 pmAs a school teacher myself (in a private school, and so with no education degree), I have experienced incredible tension between the progressive myth of school and my daily reality.
Boredom is another huge enemy, HUGE, both to teachers and to students. I have come to believe that the experience of boredom as a normal state is one of the key missions of school, both public and private.
Critics of school often target teachers as being uncaring, which as a parent of a child in the public school, I’ve been humbled by how much they do care. Many of them are so brainwashed, in exactly the same way you describe above, parents with the best of intentions working hard to collude in the oppression of their children.
It’s a cruel system to all.
The best I can figure out so far in the classroom is small moments of choice. Letting (even that verb is so telling) students choose topics, set deadlines, choose books, self-grade…and keeping it below the radar screen keeps us safe. We feed the machine what it wants, which is grades, and that buys us some freedom.
Teachers police each other just as students do. We often play to each other and act harsher than we really are to prove ourselves.
Often teachers say the hardest part of any break-out creative idea they might have is how the ‘chaos’ that results from any creative moment will look to the other teachers. And indeed as a substitute teacher I often had teachers poke their heads in if things got too fun: “Is everything ok in here?” until the noise subsided.
In general, the less I teach, the more they learn. But it’s an art form in and of itself, a delicate process.
Everyone is so inured to the system, that changing the rules (far less removing them) results in terrible anxiety. The students know that whatever you do, you will grade them in the end, so it looks like a trick to them.
So I’ve learned to subvert rather than to challenge.
And it’s important to distinguish between knowledge and intelligence: I have more knowledge than my students, but no more intelligence.
Thank you for raising this issue.
M. D.:
Stan, I’m so, so glad you have this topic here. Education in the United States is one of the greatest heartbreaks of all. Good you say the blind leading the blind.
Three comments I’d add:
1.) Our schools are used for military recruiting. We teach little children in kindergarten, “No hitting, use your words.” But then, entering high school, they arrive some mornings to face the sharks and barracudas circling the lobbies. All with parent, teacher consent. Some “safe” zone. With those incongruities, discordances, it’s small wonder kids are on drugs.
2.) Speaking of drugs, we know that anyone who can’t handle “the system” is medicated…
3.) THIS IS IMPORTANT: I’m pretty sure there’s a movement underway to “privatize” our schools. This means Halliburton- and KBR- type contractors handling the maintenance, school cafeterias – outsourced services, just like the military. Teachers on “professional development” programs (more programming). Children tested and shunted in this direction or that based on scores. And PROFIT. We get profit by lowering cost. So-called efficiencies and scaling will further alienate and marginalize, as do all institutions: The prison model comes to mind as probably, ultimately, the model for schools.
I say this because I recall that Jeb and Marvin Bush had already started the ball rolling (lots of money to be made, children as a commodity?) and my own (former) state representative was heavily involved. Politicians and school boards will be easily coerced, inch by inch.
Back to the prison model, it seems to me you could already draw a direct comparison, one for one, between the characteristics of our schools and those of prisons.
28 November 2010, 10:02 pmJohn:
Great article.
Here is the paradox: My ability to comprehend/enjoy your article (including the references to Veblen, Orwell, et al) stems in no small part from the excellent public+private education that I received from K-12 (which prepared me to get into a decent college, which, in turn, allowed me to take classes with great professors and small student/faculty ratios, as well as good/diverse student organizations with enough of a budge to invite folks like yourself (as well as those diametrically opposed to your point of view) to come speak to us.
Standardized tests, exams, textbooks/curriculum and all the rest of it was such a small part of my K-12 school years. Looking back, the most important as well as enjoyable aspects of school were: spending time with kids my age and growing up with them, listening and learning from their questions/challenges to our teachers during class (math, physics, scripture, english,…), sports and other team activities, outdoor activities/school trips, building friendships, learning about life, and so on…
BTW: I’ve ordered “Hideous Dream” twice from Amazon, and it has not been delivered (though my credit card has been charged). What gives?
29 November 2010, 3:03 amStan:
Can’t speak for Amazon. )-:
Generally speaking, I need to say that the Republican attack on pubic schools has more to do with the desire to make money from them (as stated above) and their hatred of teachers’ UNIONS.
They have no plans for making the environment more hospitable for kids, in fact, they would have it more punitive and inhospitable.
I learned things in school, too; but I could have learned most of those things without school (I was taught to read at home), and much of it had to be unlearned (history eg). More to the point, however, why should we expect all people to learn the same things? Not everyone enjoys reading. Not everyone enjoys math. And while a lot of kids – the popular and the performers (nothing wrong with either) – enjoy aspects of school, for those who are subjected to ridicule and abuse – there are plenty – it is a daily forced march into psychic hell and back.
By the time I’d reached the 7th grade, I had completely shut down. Barely passing and miserable, expelled from one school by my junior year, and graduating by the skin of my teeth. So I definitely have a personal axe to grind with school…
Schools produce pecking orders, for the same reason prisons do. Captive hierarchies emerge from milieus of captivity…
The school was modeled on the factory, and the factory was modeled on the military.
29 November 2010, 7:34 amHenry:
Stan, your link to “Deschooling” leads to this: http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2007/10/17/“our-strategy-is-hinged-to-our-ability-to-organize-gi-resistance”/
You can get a pdf of it here:
http://gyanpedia.in/tft/Resources/books/DESCHOOLING.pdf
29 November 2010, 2:09 pmM. D.:
I sent bak 2 skool to my son, in his fourth year of college. His email feedback: “wow. spell it out and #$%& down my throat! I hated that. Why did I go to public school again? oh so many bad memories. yuck.” He’s having a ball in college, loves his profs, and one is a prominent professional in his field, guiding my son in a self-tailored independent study program. On the other hand, this is a state institution with “Enterprise Status” (profit center) so we scrape our pennies and he goes without groceries to attend.
When he was little, I took him to a Waldorf school. I couldn’t send a tender little child to the institution while I was at work all day. To make my decision on this, I kept seeing, on the left: cold war architecture, stealth bombers/Nintendo, Pepsi and Coke machines in the halls to raise money, report cards, the essentials of the MIPC; on the right: the humble manger in an inn (I’m not a conventional Christian). But after fifth grade, we couldn’t afford it (note his comment: Why did I go to a public school again?)
I attended high school in Europe and we had fantastic, bohemian, subversive teachers who helped us scramble all over Europe, filled us with enthusiasm for our opportunities and for learning, and told us things not allowed! Attended college in the 70s while our profs still had some residual freedom from the 60s. HOWEVER, that same institution is now the one where they crucified Ward Churchill for speaking the truth about what went on in the towers.
And I’d take this opportunity to say that not a one prominent “liberal,” “progressive” took up for Ward, and everyone’s forgotten what he said, even while the evils of the towers make headlines in the current financial/economic implosion bearing forth the truth.
29 November 2010, 6:54 pmCurt:
I came up with what I think is a good question for a standardized test today.
30 November 2010, 11:48 amThe question is as follows;
The number of ways to do things more or less wrong is:
A. one half the number of ways to do things more or less right
B. equal to the number of ways to do things more or less right
C. twice the number of ways to do things more or less right
D. Five times the number of ways to do things more or less right.
E. None of the above.
F. It depends on what religion that you are.
G. This is an unfair question becasue more than four choices are given.
H. This is an unfair question becasue more than one answer may be correct.
Charles:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/diane-ravitch/ravitch-answers-gates.html
Ravitch answers Gates
30 November 2010, 4:55 pmBy Valerie Strauss
Andy:
This piece says just about everything one would suspect is wrong with public education down to the bone. The complaints of quality (usually from the grassroots Right) are marginal when viewed in the broader scope here. Regardless, that lack of quality and lack of “kinship” prompted many parents to jump ship and DIY.
It seems reasonable enough to teach your child how to survive (I don’t mean Jeremiah Johnson, but simply how to sustain oneself in the community in which they live). Beyond that is imbuing that child with wisdom – an oral tradition of parent-to-child that no book or 6-figure income can substitute. That having been said, and me being childless, I have no idea how one goes about accomplishing this. I suppose parenting is its own textbook (as well as obstacle course). I don’t know. Stan, may I ask what and how you and your wife teach your children, or anyone else here for that matter? What is the alternative?
1 December 2010, 1:14 amStan:
I made all the mistakes. That’s kinda how I got to where I am now with regard to this school thing. We woulda home schooled… but we were both working our asses off to stay afloat. Like most people in the US who couldn’t take time off if kids were home and still pay bills.
Seems to me that schools are not going away by decree, nor should they, because there has been zero preparation for that kind of cultural disruption. There really would be terrible consequences in just dropping school altogether at once… but that won’t happen, so it’s a hypothetical worry.
Transforming schools where possible is a good thing, if those incremental changes actually make school a less horrific place for a lot of kids. Key to that, imho, are direct struggles – not unrelated. One, get the corporate shit, especially Channel One and Frankenfood, out of the schools. Two, develop opt-in/opt-out alternatives to competitive grading.
(I know the left hates charter schools, etc, but that’s because they see this as part of a right-wing effort to get rid of public schools. That may be, but that’s not what motivates a lot of charter school teachers and administrators who are authentically concerned about the experience and impact of school on kids, and who are humanizing the schools as much as they can.)
The real key to resolving school is to redesign the community environment so young folks can flourish outside an institutional framework, where they have a world to learn from that values them not as students but as persons, and where young people’s natural curiosity and urge to creativity are matched with many mentors.
One of the promises of relocalization is the de-credentilization of communities. Deep change is going to require us to break down our current intellectual division of labor.
That may not square well with many liberals who are committed to regulatory and credentialing authorities out of the belief that they protect the public from bad actors. This fundamental failure to grasp the nature of the state, and its complete fusion with haute-capital, leads us to hang onto the idea that we can use to law to address discrete problems. But we are now, again imo, in a place where resilience advocates are aligned with certain species of libertarians, because we have seen how many serious unintended consequences have accrued from these regulatory regimes.
I agree with marxists that the state is not going away any time soon. I disagree with them that our goal ought to be to take state power. I disagree with the anarchists who say the state has to be toppled. The state is not going to be toppled, so why tilt at a windmill? Nor is the state going to be reformed under socialists, because many of the problems of the state are traceable to sheer scale and its attendant compulsion to control.
I think we have to see the state as part of the political scenery, as one out of many variables that have to be dealt with when they create problems. Once we make the state the object of a strategy, however, then everything the state does – over which we have very little control – shifts our priorities and forces us to regroup. Given the power gradient between state and small bands of activists, that means that we will never, ever, ever gain the initiative.
We are in a period where we will see the contradictory and simultaneous expansion and contraction of state power. Expansion into the field of security as economic instability increases, and contraction in the field of social management and services. Hurricane Katrina gave us a kind of magnified preview of how states react to crises that outstrip the government’s capacity to deal with them. There is an almost Maslow-ian hierarchy of needs for states, too.
So (sub-premise to first premise) if I’m right that making control of the state the central object of a political strategy will guarantee us that we will never again have the initiative, and (first premise) that what we do is then a waste of resources that encourages the state to keep us engaged in fixed games and futile campaigns, and (second premise) that the state is about to contract and relinquish its influence over certain key aspects of our lives, then (conclusion):
(1) our directed efforts for change in all those arenas where the state contracts will meet little resistance, and fill real needs (thereby creating real, personal bonds between those involved),
(2) our efforts will meet with many more material successes than political setbacks, and will give us something tangible to defend when we do encounter political obstacles.
1 December 2010, 7:43 amGuy Montag:
Stan, you sound a lot like the Wendell Berry essays I read 15 years ago. Stuff, like “economic secession” or “consumer disobedience” where efforts are directed at the local economy and local relationships. (Ref. the “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” poem I pointed out to you a year or two ago).
1 December 2010, 12:27 pmStan:
“Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias.”
— Mike Davis
1 December 2010, 3:14 pmBruce F:
I’m always looking for encouraging examples of adapting in place. One Straw, located in Southern Wisconsin, has been blogging for a few years about his work on composting, soil building, food security and energy independence in the suburbs.
His latest post came to mind after reading Mike Davis’ quote about using “materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand…”.
http://onestraw.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/evolving-suburbia/
1 December 2010, 6:44 pmAndy:
It sounds like your conclusions echo what you have spoken on regarding an asymmetrical resistance (if I recall correctly), not by militancy and strategy, but a way of living that is truly asymmetrical. Some of the means of a happy survival is by seeking out and adapting to opportunities for change and empowerment that slip through the cracks of the state fist. I’m trying to be careful with my language here, as you have observed the inherent flaws and pitfalls of militancy and strategy, at least as practiced and preached by the Left. And I injected “happy” here because “survival” as it has been sold to us is a commodity that eschews sentiment. Joy comes through discomfort, or as the USMC recruiting ads would put it – “pain is weakness leaving the body.” Therefore you should love pain.
The very word survival is almost owned by the extreme libertarian / objectivist mindset. Would you agree with that? “Survival” conjures up fantasies that accumulate into an image a poor man’s ubermensch – the Noble Savage. Being one who has been taken by the “SF mystique,” it was an eye-opener to come across your judgments on all of it. Does survival really have to be Jeremiah Johnson, Simon Kenton, Rambo, et al – privileged, white, strong men, who leave comfort to seek communion with nature… by overcoming it? Contrast that with John Muir, raised a stoic Christian, who then found the Divine in simple creation, even in his own travails. His journey was to see God in His mountains, not stick a pick axe into them.
Forgive me if I’m meandering here. You can tell I’m coming from a different place. I’ll just say that the more extreme one gets in a political ideology, the more he may come to have in common with those on the opposite side. I’m just (re)working thorugh some notions here. To tie it back, survival in its harshness doesn’t have to be Ted Nugent necessarily. As you noted in one of your books, Haitian women are just tough because they carry a good part of America on their backs. Survival in the Third World is not the “survival” of white warriors. What’s this got to do with reclaiming education of the young? Talk about going on a tangent. Dang it’s getting late!
I live in comfort like anyone else now, but just beginning to grasp the reality of a way of life that cannot be sustained for much longer, even through war. The Right wing method (or fantasy) of “survival” is to head for the woods, stock up, and stockpile. The approaches being explored here seem more towards creating kinships, and again, seeking areas of life where the state loses its grip to return to ordinary people. I don’t know, I just got lots of learnin’ to do!
2 December 2010, 12:02 amStan:
Survival is a collective, not individual effort. It’s based on cooperation. I think that differentiates it from many more survival-IST fantasies, which only include cooperation in the fantasy of leading one’s own armed force.
There are a lot of ways to secure one’s survival. I’m suggesting that existing communities can step-by-step identify and replace common practice – which consists of knowing where to go to exchange money for goods and services. The abiding purpose of these small steps is to reduce dependency on that practice, and the standard for practice is that it reduce distant inputs and replace them with local ones, as well as reduce consumption generally and aggressively re-use.
This is going to happen anyway, when it becomes necessary; but people under duress who have no prior commitment to one another, tend to squabble and snatch instead of cooperate.
There’s definitely a tactical element to this, and a strategic one.
Tactical: like a well-executed reconnaissance patrol, one’s actions avoid “contact” with the opposition. Not to avoid compromise, but to keep the system from slowing us down by tangling us up in their own game.
Strategic: measures taken are guided by a common strategic imperative – relocalize. A strategy involves imposition of hierarchy, a general staff, and management of the individual sites by a center. Then when you cut off the head, the thing dies. A strategic imperative can be grasped and engaged creatively and far far far more appropriately and effectively.
@ Bruce – great link, thanks.
2 December 2010, 7:01 amellen:
Interesting post.
I think you are by and large correct, although I wouldn’t go QUITE as far as you.
I don’t so much think that ALL formal, mandatory school is bad, but rather that there is TOO DAMN MUCH of it, and it’s TOO DAMN COMPETITIVE.
First, I think that part of the problem is that there is TOO MUCH school. Requiring kids to show up and learn the basics – namely, how to read, write, and do basic math – is one thing. Why? Because that’s the one part that everyone, from the crunchy left to the fundie right, can pretty much agree on as necessary skills. Furthermore, “reading writing and ‘rithmetic” are the skills that most kids actually SEE adults using, and that everyone who wants to have ANY kind of success in life – whether as am accomplished brain surgeon or a talented car mechanic – needs to learn. The rest of the stuff gets memorized and forgotten in no small part because hardly anyone every needs to use it. (You might CHOOSE to use your other knowledge, but let’s face it – unless you decide to pursue a career in one of a handful of upper-middle-class professions, how often do you NEED to know stuff like history, languages, chemistry, or any school subject other than reading, writing, and basic math? Even if you “need” some other subject, chances are, you only need one of them – as a doctor, you’ll need biology – but not physics or history or advanced math; as a constitutional lawyer, you might need some of that history, but none of the science – so on and so forth.) The fact is, FORCING people to learn things that don’t interest them and which – most importantly – they CAN SEE THEY DON’T ACTUALLY NEED IN THE REAL WORLD just doesn’t work. So let’s limit ourselves to “forcing” kids to learn only the stuff that everyone uses – in other words, the basics – like they did 100+ years ago, when most kids went to school for just a few years, and left when they’d mastered basic math and literacy skills.
Second, let’s give up the farce that school can be both 1) about learning and 2) competitive. It’s one or the other. Either it exists to teach kids, or it exists to rank them. I think we both know what the current school system does.
A simple solution would be to eliminate grading, and make everything a “do it until you prove you know it” system. In other words, once you can read/write/do math at a sufficient level to pass certain standards, you get a “pass”, and you’re done! If you try to take a test and prove you know it and fail – well, you just keep at it until you can do it! If you can get through the mandatory basic achievement levels in just two years, great – you’re done! Go home! If it takes you six years, then it takes six – just keep plugging until to get it. But I strongly suspect that NOTHING would motivate kids more than knowing that once they’d achieved a certain level of mastery, they were DONE – as opposed to our current idiotic system, which “rewards” precocious learning by piling “more challenging” work on smart kids (aka, “more tests to rank the best kids in more detail”), and which keeps everyone, no matter their level of achievement, trapped in prison until they turn 18 or have a nervous breakdown, whichever comes first.
In fact, “keep at it until you pass the test then you’re done” is a system that we already use for a lot of things, from learning to drive to passing the medical boards. Why not make basic education the same? Focus on the RESULT – “Everyone needs basic literacy and math skills – so you stay here until you have them, and not a day longer.” But sadly, there isn’t much money to be made that way.
11 December 2010, 9:19 amCurt:
“Liberty can not be maintained with out GENERAL knowledge among the people”
15 December 2010, 6:17 pmYes I know that it is as boring as hell studying the history of the Incas when you are 12 years old and you think that you want to become a marine biologist but someone thinks that there is a good reason to teach things to children that will not directly help them earn a living. Of course there is the huge problem of deciding what exactly GENERAL knowledge is. From my point of view it would include what Generals REALLY do for a living not want our government wants us to think that they do for a living.
Curt:
I can understand how grades can stigmatize you children. That is surely a point for doing away with them. Yet when people want to hire a person for a position with their company they usually have a large number of applicants for the job. Grades help narrow the field. It may narrow the field unfairly but it is a simple low cost way to do it.
15 December 2010, 6:32 pmOf course if we had a parecon economy it would not be neccessary for companies to compete for the best students since they will not be in the business of driving each other out of business. The best candidate for the job will be the one who lives closest to the place of business. Then grades will be less important. But even then I still think that we (any society) would want to train those who have demonstrated high grades over a period of years to become scientists. Grading seems to be something that a modern society can not live with or without. If a society is going to try to live with it the society needs to get a handle on it. Grade inflation can make grades worthless. That is my 3 cents worth.
Ellen:
“Yes I know that it is as boring as hell studying the history of the Incas when you are 12 years old and you think that you want to become a marine biologist but..”
But what? Who the hell remembers anything about the Incas? Answer: the smidgen of people who were actually interested in the Incas and CHOSE to learn about them (either formally or infomally) at some point.
The fact is forcing people to learn about the Incas when they don’t want to learn about the Incas DOES NOT WORK – because nobody actually LEARNS anything. They just memorize what they need to regurgitate for the test, and forget it the day after the test. If you don’t beleive me, just poll some people – find out how many people actually remember a single damn thing about the Incas, or any of the other stuff they were forced to memorize-and-spit-back that they didn’t care about. The answer will be “not a damn thing.”
Forcing people to “learn” – that is, memoize for the test – a bunch of stuff that is not directly use-able (i.e., reading and basic math) is useless not because the knowledge itself is worthless, but because IT DOESN’T STICK. Unwilling forced learning is not “learning” – it’s just memorizing and forgetting. I don’t care how “important” you think the Incas, or the soalr system, or Shakespeare, or calculus, or the US Consittution are are – if people aren’t actually interested in learning the stuff, they DO NOT LEARN IT. That’s why almost nobody actually knows anything about any of those things – despite having been “taught” it in school.
Which is why I stand by my argument: Give people the tools to learn, in the form of literacy. The relatively small number of people actually interested in learning will then either teach themselves, or seek ways to learn from others (and subsidizing good learning opportunties for the actual willling participants would help too). Everyone else will wind up no less ignorant then they are now for not having spent 12 years memorizing and forgetting – with a lot less time and effort wasted.
1 January 2011, 10:41 amCurt:
Ellen,
1 January 2011, 12:01 pmWhat you write all seems very reasonable except perhaps for one thing. That is…..ahh……ahh… I forgot but when I remember I will get back with you.
Curt:
Ah yes it suddenly came to me like a bolt of lightning. If children only learn what they want to learn about how could they possibly know what they are missing? They may think that they have absolutely no interest in learning about something until they are actually exposed to learning about it.
2 January 2011, 4:21 pmDo teachers not recieve any training what so ever in learning to overcome some initial reluctance by children to learn about a subject to which the child had no previous exposure?
I may not remember much about what I was taught in school about the Incas but I do remember that there was such a thing as an Inca Empire (and an Aztec Empire). Knowing just this one thing connects to Marx and his idea of inevitable stages of economic developement. Is it possible that he based his idea from the knowledge that Empires had bee growing a collapsing in the new world just like the old world?
More importantly I have to wonder why was the history of the conquest of the Incas by De La Salle and his Con Quist a Doors important enough to be taught in the schools but the Hatian struggle for independance not considered important enough to be taught in the schools?
Larry Cebula:
From Mirriam-Webster:
Definition of ERSTWHILE: former, previous
Synonyms: former, late, old, once, onetime, other, past, quondam, sometime, whilom
2 January 2011, 6:56 pmMark folk:
Some of the finest writers of the English language in the 20th century– Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken, Doris Lessing, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Hunter Thompson, and George Orwell– all had one thing in common. They were uneducated. None went to college and some did not complete high school.
It is quite true that Hunter Thompson had a doctorate, but he got it quite hoenstly, by sending in his ten bucks to the Church of Heavenly Truth, allowing him to gain his theological discount at selected shops and emporiums.
12 January 2011, 12:05 amm.c.:
I agree they didn’t have formal higher education. Twain, Hemingway, Mencken, Thompson(in the air force),Jack London, I think Orwell too,(he did go to Eton) started out as newspaper reporters/journalists. This was way before graduate J schools. Usually young working class. Of course the owners, publishers, and top editors were not. Who, What, When, Where, Why, How.(did I miss one?)
In this way higher education has stratified Journalism & Sanitized it along with Imbedded War-Reporting.
13 January 2011, 1:27 pmMark folk:
Yeah, I forgot Jack London and Hemmingway. But it isn’t journalism that has been the major victim of acadidacts, but the schools, univerisities and other learned bureaucracies. The function of specialized Education is to prevent the young from thinking in a holistic way about people and power. The historical functon of Education and Information is to restict and narrow the legitimate range of intellectual thought, preventing the Educated from critiqing effectively power from a people’s perspective.
13 January 2011, 3:49 pmm.c.:
London dropped out of Berkeley. He did write for his high school newspaper. Most of these writers lived in the age before TV. Some of their writings maybe were read over the radio, and a few were made into black-and-white films.
14 January 2011, 1:05 pmCurt:
OK fellow feralscholars. I have about 15 minutes to wait until my breakfast brownies are finished. During this time I would like to review what I think are some important concepts that have been previouisly discussed but should not be forgotten. (This would have not been neccessary if Stan would have agreed to to allow me to choose quotes to go at the top of the page.)
18 January 2011, 4:49 amThe first point is very very simple but it seems that it rarely gets followed in America. It was said by someone here at FS, Marcilla I think. The point is, it is much more important not to be poor than it is to be rich. An observation made by someone else was that the richest 10% strive to like like the richest 1% and the richest 1% strives to like like the richest 1/10 of 1 percent.
The second point is somethng that we hear no and then but about 1/10 of 1 percent as much as we hear something else. What we hear frequently is that there is always room for improvement. That is really probalby a national motto. I think that I have heard this little ditto more than any other. Even more than do un to others…….
But what we hear only when we take an economics course is that improvment reaches a point in which a 1/10 of one percent improvement reguires 10 percent more resources or effort and then another 1/10 of 1 percent requires 25% more resources or effort the next 1/10 of a percent improvement requires 100% more resources or effort.
Does this sitution apply to the military instutions of the USA today? Is it possible that for the US military to serve America better they need to become a much much worse military? Would it make sense for the military to adopt a new unofficail motto of success through failure. That may sound self defeating but if the militry’s standard of success is how well we support the desires of the “American” voters and not how well we support the needs of the “American” voters then to me then the military needs to change its standard of success and the new motto would make sense.
Now here is an extra point review question.
The Most important port in the USA today is:
A. New York
B. Pittsburg
C.Chicago
D.Green Bay
E. Supirior-Duluth
No cheating
Curt:
OK fellow Feralscholars I have about 20 minutes to wait until my Apfelstrudel is finished.
18 January 2011, 9:22 amI was just reminiscing on an earlier age. An age in which I heard the the sound bite, I am not a national resource, for the first time. This little sound bite still resonates with me. But my understanding of it is different now.
Once upon a time I saw this little sound bite as a justification for a society in which the state was only allowed to prevent me from harming someone but had no business making me help someone that I had no interest in helping.
Now I have a more flexible interpretation of it.
Now I would use this sound bite as a principle that would protect citizens from abuse by the political leadership. Of course defining what abuse is and knowing that this definition would apply in a given situation could be very disputed.
One example that I like that I think illistrates this is the invasion of Europe in 1944. I maintain that is obvious that if the US and UK had invaded Europe along the German and or Danish North Sea coast the war would have been over by the Christmas of 44.
I maintain that the reasons the US did not want to end the war that quickly is that they wanted to give the Germans more time to weaken the the Soviets and they wanted more US troops the chance to gain combat expierience.
Even though I think that was an abuse of power the commanders from that day besides of taking the defense that my charges are not true could also have countered, OK if you keep your mouth shut we will admitt that you have seen through us. But we do not see the strategy we have chosen as abuse but as simply making a short term sacrifice for a longer term gain. This strategy may save lives over the long term if we end up in war with the Soviets.
That would be a good potential defence. The only way that I could counter it is by pointing out the lives that will certainly be lost by prolonging the war have to be measured against only possible gains since war with the Soviets is only a possible future. But then it is also possible that in 1944 the Generals had other plans based on being the sole nuclear power on the planet.
m.c.:
Before Twain, Ben Franklin was perhaps the first American self-made from a working class background International Celebrity & man of letters. He invented the bifocals, Franklin stove, public lending library, modern firehouse, lightning rod, other stuff, was maybe the most influential actor in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Without his powers of pursuasion the French government would not have bankrolled the revolution in my opinion.
My vote for Greatest American(U.S) of All-Time.
To let the Right control the working class persons of ideas arena, ie. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, etc. is probably the U.S. Left’s greatest loss. Franklin Roosevelt knew how to connect with the Ben Franklins out there.
18 January 2011, 1:00 pmm.c.:
I forgot. He wrote a letter of recommendation for Thomas Paine when he came to the colonies.
18 January 2011, 1:04 pmCurt:
More review: The world used 6 million barrels of oil a day when it was fighting World War Two. Since then the worlds population has tripled. If the world uses 80 million barrels of oil a day now which I think is the correct figure per person world consumption has gone up more than 400% since then. There are probably a million reasons (or 300 million?) that the US uses around 20 million barrels a day. How many of these reason are good reasons? The bad reasons obviuosly need to be corrected. That will not make people happy campers. If these bad reasons can be corrected using a screw driver and a plyers great. If a hammer is the only tool for the job do not use a mallet.
19 January 2011, 10:12 amThe Potomac Great Falls life style is an evolutionary dead end. Even the people of southern Prince Georges County will not be happy to hear that.
The super rich know that they have been getting away with murder for years. The end for them might even come as a relief. The mere prosperous however think that they have just been working hard following the rules and keeping their noses clean.
I wonder how long it will take them to accept the fact that their campers have to stay parked. That when they go to the shore it will be to paddle a canoe and not to speed around in a power boat. That if the Indy 500 is held on Memorial Day it will be either with Smart cars or with motorcycles. That home airconditioners can only be used when tempritures go above 95 Farenhiet except for old people. When you think about that it will be a good reason for children and grandchildren to spend some time with their elders. What the people of Potomac and Great Falls and the areas like them in every US city are going to have to learn to consider being a good time again is playing cards with neighbors, riding bike, hiking from their home, having nieghborhood theaters, reading books by the Author Dan whats his name,…..Ja, Braun, thats right. Even having pot luck suppers with neighbors where people can discuss what they read in the latest book by Dan Braun. Of course TV and the internet are not going to go away. The content of video games might change some. Of course since parents will have more time at home children will be able to play outside more because there will be more parents who will be able to do neighborhood watch to ensure the children’s safety.
I would expect that this would result in some neighborhood disputes as parents argue over whether or not it is appropriate for 8 year old Billy and Selly to be showing off thier private parts to each other in a fort built in the woods somewhere. Arguements will develope over whether or not it is appropriate for 16 year olds to have some beer in the woods. That is my attempt at preeminence.
This last prediction about alchohol leads me in to a whole new subject that I am going to start throwing out at some of the different sites that I visit. Should consumption of alchohol be forbidden at professional sporting events? I decided to start thinking about this when someone, I think that it was Stan, pointed out that alchohol is THE gateway drug. I have not yet made up my mind about my own question. But I will be thinking about that now.
m.c.:
John Steinbeck & Upton Sinclair are two more middle/highbrow working class writers. They did receive college educations though.
20 January 2011, 1:47 pmMark folk:
What about Paine himself, m.c. He may not have been born here but he died here. Good point about Ben Franklin though. Also, he was quite witty, and I remember a short essay about his marriage that may have been daring for his time. France influenced him.
20 January 2011, 10:01 pmm.c.:
One of my general points here is that most of these writers were bestsellers as well as Nobel and/or Pulitzer winners. Hard to do. Franklin, Twain, London, Hemingway, Thompson realized that in the anti-intellectual U.S., unlike some of Europe you need to be a big personality or celebrity to get widespread attention(Twain in his white suits) But they were good writers to boot….
21 January 2011, 1:20 pmCurt:
I had previously asked this question in 2010 but no one chose to answer it. Well it is time to quite fooling around and get to work. I do not remember where I posted it exactly so I post it here because it seems like a question that would be one for HS seniors to ponder. Since this question might be to difficult for economists to answer I am also going to put it up to Western Buddhish Philosophers and see what they come up with.
11 February 2011, 8:05 amThe question is, if an economy could be CREATED, not evolve as a result of luck, manipulation, coercion, and an occasional well thought out decision, should the value of money saved over time; grow, shrink, or remain the same.(In real terms)
Of course any answer to this question could address all the potential variables such as changes in productivity due to new inventions, or resource constraints.
Sometimes people think that they are experts of a given subject. At the other extreme there are people who are such novices that they know that they are not even smart enough to know what questions to ask to ask an expert. That is why I hate really hate doing any carpentery, electrical, or plumbing work around the house myself.
Now you know why I am asking this question. I would be glad to be part of a committee that would brainstorm and try to imagine all of the different factors that could influence how a person would answer this question but I do not think that a person working alone, even someone one with a PHD in economics would be able to keep in mind all of the potential implications of their answer all by themselves.
Curt:
I should perhaps clarify that I am asking about someones personal savings, not about the aggregate personal savings of an entire nation. Of course aggregate personal savings of an entire nation might be a very important factor in answering the question of whether or not the value of money that an individual has saved should over time grow remain the same or shrink.
11 February 2011, 8:22 amJosiah:
Sorry to be random, but I was reading Deschooling Society and felt the need to quote Illich’s definition of school.
It is “an advertising agency which makes you believe that you need society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline smaller consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satifaction in making do with what they have. The ethos of nonsaity is thus at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.” (113)
23 December 2011, 10:01 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/18/anti-intellectualism-us-book-banning
18 May 2012, 9:21 amStan:
incredible
19 May 2012, 5:27 amJosiah:
On that note, I highly recommend this article by Deborah Meier on the mindlessness of our current testing regime:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/05/dear_diane_sixty_year_ago.html
Here is an excerpt:
“The “State” has never listened closely to the words of children as they struggle, for example, to decide the one right answer to a multiple-choice test question. I spent hours and hours trying to make sense of wrong answers that puzzled me, checked by children who I knew could read. It started with my own son. Then I interviewed dozens of children in a variety of contexts. I gave them a test passage to read and asked them singly and in groups to decide on the best answers. I tried reading the passage and questions aloud—to see how much that would help. I was staggered to discover how often they gave perfectly logical explanations for arriving at the wrong answer, and less sensible answers to the right ones. Reading was not their problem. They were often so convincing that I had to check it out to see if I were right. I was.”
19 May 2012, 7:39 pmMichael Anderson:
We’ve talked about the “system” approach to schooling….have things turned around so that we are in a mad, Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass version of what we’ve been railing against? Or, is this just another example of “systems” run amok, in this case end-game Fascist systems?
22 May 2012, 1:34 pmMichael Anderson:
http://feralscholar.com/
Feral scholar, meet Feral scholar…
29 November 2012, 10:45 amMichael Anderson:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13367-the-corporate-war-against-teachers-as-public-intellectuals-in-dark-times
This article has some flaws, but some gems, too; like this one:
“…Neoliberalism, or unbridled free-market fundamentalism, employs modes of governance, discipline and regulation that are totalizing in their insistence that all aspects of social life be determined, shaped and weighted through market-driven measures.[2] Neoliberalism is not merely an economic doctrine that prioritizes buying and selling, makes the supermarket and mall the temples of public life and defines the obligations of citizenship in strictly consumerist terms. It is also a mode of pedagogy and set of social arrangements that uses education to win consent, produce consumer-based notions of agency and militarize reason in the service of war, profits, power and violence while simultaneously instrumentalizing all forms of knowledge…”
Got me thinking about what exactly is a “classical” education…realized I didn’t know.
http://www.welltrainedmind.com/classical-education/
“…Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium…”
17 December 2012, 10:08 pmMichael Anderson:
Smoke screens:
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/03/04/the-education-games-endure/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/18/my-hero-george-orwell-atwood
http://educationnext.org/an-appeal-to-authority/
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15123-the-poor-are-too-free-unlocking-the-middle-class-code
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/26/the-handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood
17 March 2013, 4:57 pm