knowledge validation and school accreditation (was exi party

Jeff Davis (jdavis@socketscience.com)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 19:31:26 -0700

On 15 Oct 1999 22:37:29 +0200,
Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:

>I think knowledge validation is the important part, and this is where
>independent review boards can get relevant.

                        <snip>

>There is probably a need for some standard review boards that might be
>government run, but it also makes a lot of sense to have independent
>boards. 

                         <snip>

Of course, the Kansas Board of Creationist
>Science might exist, but that is no real problem since it will not be
>a very credible board - what really makes this system interesting is
>if the boards can be reviewed and rated well.

Children are helpless in their earliest years, which are their most intense learning years, wherein they are not only at their most impressionable, but most helplessly and uncritically so. Various groups take an active interest in them at this time: family, local community(local political forces), and nation(larger political forces). Each of these is politicized, each has their own self-interest at heart, so the training program for young 'uns is subject to distortions according to the bias of each group.

Ander's suggestion seems an excellent approach to creating educational resources that are *graded* for either a minimum bias or a most broadly approved bias.

The tough part for me is that children are in the captivity of their parents, and their intellectual development subject, virtually without oversight, to whatever flakiness the parents think of as proper upbringing and proper belief, particularly in the earliest, most intense learning years when the schools aren't even in the picture yet. (Not to make this seem worse than it is, most parents are just fine, with broad, largely benign, and somewhat malleable cultural biases. Only a few fundamentalist and other wackos do serious damage. IMNSHO.) Also, what with the view of "parental rights", and the intangible nature of intellectual development, *damage* in that area is not easily seen, or seen as such. What ends up happening is that a certain group becomes identified as being *that way*, as if it were an inherent part of their nature. The *lower* classes.

Best, Jeff Davis 

	   "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
					Ray Charles