[p2p-research] On unschooling

Tue Apr 28 15:45:26 CEST 2009

I see Michel's point about left right, but I really see it more as
order/disorder (though perhaps that is similar if not the same as
left/right).

Order was necessary for bureaucratic control and nation state stability.
Now that we are moving to a post nation state world slowly, the order
demanded by those frameworks is melting.

As structure melts, there are local collapses, noticeable concentrations and
a great deal of tension at the fringes.  Kevin's points in other posts about
the rise of hollow states really reaches a chord with me.  I see the
hollowing occurring.  It happens with inconsistent budget funding, arbitrary
policy shifts by highly politicized bureaucracies and the advent of new
technologies and social changes that cannot be rationalized into large
structures rapidly.

My own view is that p2p theory is right on the money in terms of trying to
theorize a post structural world based on trust and service systems.  The
economic ideas of an energy transaction economy, etc. are so far over the
horizon in my view, that the theorizing is much more speculative and more
likely to be of lower value.

The trick is going to be watching the melt occur and anticipating its
variable rates of change, local collapses and intermediate responses to
structural decay.  We might be moving away from punctuated equlibria to
continous transformation--sort of a fractal world.  If that is so, means of
coping with the lack of stucture and chaos are going to have a great deal of
local variation.  One wonders whether any form of centralized theorizing can
be effective in such times.

Ryan Lanham

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> added this as a comment at
> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/an-unschooling-manifesto/2009/04/27
>
>
> I have to agree with Edward's feelings on this. Though I hated school
> myself, I experienced that one of my children did not fit well in an
> alternative and relatively unstructured school environment, and she wanted
> to join a more disciplined learning environment, where she thrived, and she
> was happy in public school all the way to graduation.
>
> Less personal: public school, despite all its flaws, was instrumental of
> social advance and equality of opportunity, and it worked rather well in
> this until the advent of neoliberalism started to starve public education of
> funds. What's wrong in my opinion, is not 'places' of learning, but rather
> their centralized management, which discourages and demoralizes local school
> establishments.
>
> I think the debate echoes the old left/right divide, the left assumes that
> people are naturally 'good', full of potential; the right that people are
> naturally enclined to evil, unless strong institutions guide them. Why not
> accept both truths, but above all create a system with broad freedom of
> school, so that unschoolers can unschool, alternative education methods can
> thrive, and those that prefer a disciplined method also have choices, with
> the partner state authorities imposing only a minimal skillset requirement,
> to insure equality of opportunity for all.
>
> Like Edward, I would not trust that every human being would want to
> naturally do the effort of learning, and also that especially those living
> in less privileged social situations, would get larger doses of assistance.
>
> Michel
>
>   On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Kevin, there is much merit in your insights here, I think.
>>
>> John Taylor Gatto explains the history of forced schooling, and the
>> attitudes that extend into Universities, in *The Underground History of
>> American Education* [1] where he argues that education in the US is
>> largely meant to create a caste system, and has largely succeeded in doing
>> this.
>>
>> 2 page sumarry from Digital Youth Research by Mizuko Ito et al [2] also
>> outlines the problems with coercive education, based on research about how
>> kids actually go about learning.
>>
>> Some of this education is already shifting to smaller networks of mutual
>> mentors, open research and development enthusiasts, and others. I am
>> directly involved in forming mutual mentoring for people interested in
>> creating commons-based and networked business systems. We are also engaging
>> youth by creating a mentoring network where youth realize their
>> possibilities beyond "jobs and careers", and realize how to employ open
>> knowledge networks, open license design, and open source software to create
>> new form of youth self-employment, rapid decision making, collaborative
>> intelligence and civic engagement. Adults mentor, but projects and energies
>> are directed by youth.
>>
>> While traveling around and taking to students and teachers in schools, we
>> discovered that youths often have little awareness of their possibilities.
>> And, we discovered that teachers and administrators are focused on antiquted
>> problems, like "declining enrollment", and the assumed need to close
>> schools, cut back on "costs" etc. Our proposal to schools is to do exactly
>> the opposite of what they are currently doing:
>>
>>
>>    - Instead of closing and demolishing unused schools, use the spaces
>>    for indoor hydronic and aquaculture food production, and flexible
>>    fabrication. Students can use the spaces to found businesses.
>>    - Switch focus from training students for careers with corporations,
>>    and compliance, to giving students liberty to learn from each other, and
>>    from innovators in their community.
>>    - Destroy the misconception that the only way to make money is to
>>    charge people for abundant goods that can instead be released under an open
>>    license, and exponentially innovated upon. Instead, help students to learn
>>    how to innovate, to find and serve ever-emerging niches within their local
>>    systems (whatever local means to them).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>    1. John taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education -
>>    John Taylor Gatto,”
>>    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm.
>>
>>      2.   “digitalyouth-TwoPageSummary.pdf,”
>> http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-TwoPageSummary.pdf
>> .
>>
>>  On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:14 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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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sam Rose
>> Social Synergy
>> Tel:+1(517) 639-1552
>> Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451
>> AIM: Str9960
>> Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samrose
>> skype: samuelrose
>> email: samuel.rose at gmail.com
>> http://socialsynergyweb.org/network
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>> http://communitywiki.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> "Long ago, we brought you all this fire.
>> Do not imagine we are still chained to that rock...."
>>
>> http://notanemployee.net/
>>
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>
>
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