[p2p-research] On unschooling

[marc fawzi]

Just sharing a story along the same lines:

I refused to believe that the formal concept/definition of the 'limit' in
calculus was making any sense as far as why someone would have even thought
of it. So I went and researched the history of calculus and found out that
Newton had come to it through an intuitive feat not through formal
construction but his peers couldn't assimilate it into the rational story
that is mathematics so he went on to explain it (after the fact) as a formal
concept, i.e. invented the rational story for it after he had used it
intuitively.

In the same effort to understand the history of rational story constructed
mathematics, with all its bits and pieces, I found out about a completely
different version of calculus called 'non-standard analysis'' where the
concept of the limit is defined differently. At that point I realized that
even at a top engineering school, even in a mathematics class, the teacher
is more harm than benefit. So I went on teaching myself everything I wanted
to learn (something that started when I was 10) and dropping out of my
classes (to work on some hardware/software idea) and did not finish my
degree until I was 28... and that caused a lot of havoc upfront that freed
me from the false safety of the traditional path and caused me to be really
angry about the educational system (and the stupid system we have built
around it) ... an anger which I wouldn't trade for anything except the
complete dissolution (or constructive evolution) of the system... Obviously,
I couldn't stand teachers who were technically brilliant but philosophically
crippled... and the more I pushed the more frequently I got on their shit
list.

:)



On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> I tried to comment on Dave Pollar's recent excellent blog post on
> unschooling, and got a 403 error message.
> http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/04/25.html
>
> Here's the comment:
>
> Andrew:  You're right that some people can't guide their own
> education, but it could be that "guiding" them against their will
> won't result in any real learning anyway.  On the other hand, if some
> kind of learning is needed the experienced lack may be what eventually
> drives people into self-directed learning.  Robert Pirsig's comments
> (as "Phaedrus") on the "Church of Reason" might be relevant here:
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/02/phaedrus-on-church-of-reason.html
>
> I can relate, from personal experience, to the scenario "Phaedrus"
> describes.  When I was in high school, I was signed up for
> Pre-Calculus Algebra against my wishes, with my complaints brushed off
> dismissively:  "Well, you need math to get any kind of a good job
> these days."  At the time I was interested in history and political
> philosophy, and read extensively in those subjects on my own time.
> When my own reading interests competed with the hated Pre-Cal for my
> time, I wound up dropping out of Pre-Cal with a failing grade, and
> hated math for years afterward.
>
> Then a few years ago I wrote a book defending the classical political
> economists' labor theory of value against marginalism.  My review of
> marginalist literature focused mainly on the Austrians because of
> their relative freedom from higher math apparatus, and largely
> neglected neoclassical econ after Marshall.  I sorely felt the lack in
> the first edition of the book, and decided it needed to incorporate
> the neoclassical version of marginal analysis.  So now, after more
> than twenty years, I'm reteaching myself algebra and trig so I can
> pick up enough calculus to read 20th century econ.  It didn't become
> interesting to me until I perceived its relevants to my own,
> self-determined needs.
>
> Another anecdote:  A couple years ago, I saw a sign at a local
> bookstore announcing it carried Watership Down and the rest of the
> public schools' summer reading list.  Thank God, I said to myself,
> that we didn't have mandatory summer reading lists when I was in
> school.  I first read the book when I was about 40 or so, and loved
> it.  But if I'd been forced to read it against my will, via an act
> that I regarded as school bureaucrats stealing summer time that was
> rightfully my own, I'd have hated the book and cursed it to my dying
> day.
>
> I can't count the number of instances when I was confronted with
> something before I was ready to assimilate it, and then turned around
> years later and eagerly absorbed it when it became relevant to my
> interests.
>
> The problem is that coerced learning based on someone else's agenda
> can be pretty efficient at instilling a hatred of "learning," as much
> so as if that was the actual goal.  But then I've almost always been
> the sort of person who instinctively hates anything assigned to me by
> some authority figure sitting behind a desk (genuine work is to jobs
> as genuine learning is to schools).
>
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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>



-- 

Marc Fawzi
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/Marc-Fawzi/605919256
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcfawzi
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