[p2p-research] On compulsory schooling and p2p (was Re: Triarchy News, Accolades and GrassRoots Change)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Ryan,
> 
> some items for your phd?
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Alison Melvin <alison at triarchypress.com>
> Date: Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 10:12 PM
> Subject: Triarchy News July 2009 - Accolades and Grass Roots Change
> To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
> 
>    <http://www.triarchypress.com>
> 
>  July 2009
>    Dear Michel,
> 
>  *Author Wins Award*
> Buzz Wilms has won an award from the LA Press Club for his publication *Erasing
> Excellence* <http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book7.htm> (UK title),
> or *Liberating
> the Schoolhouse* <http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book7-us.htm> (US title).

"Why Grandmother, what a big nose you have!"

"All the better to smell you with, my dear Little Red Riding Hood."

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance"
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
"""
   In The Republic Plato asserted that the state should take responsibility
for training children from the age of three and that each citizen could be
guided by the system towards an ideal conception of justice and into the
social class and occupation best suited for him. Education had to be
universalized so that all citizens could be effectively screened and placed.
In this Plato was emphatic that it was the state’s job to support and
control schools and to make them compulsory. There was no question in
Plato’s mind that schools should be designed by the state to support the
state. ...
   Ferrer was intent upon loosing schools from both hegemonic teaching and
State control. At the turn of the 20th Century it was becoming evident that
no only were schools forging citizens but industrial workers, and that
government control was essential to their nature. "They know, better than
anyone else that their power is based almost entirely on the school. … [They
want schools] not because they hope for the revolution of society through
education, but because they need individuals, workmen, perfected instruments
of labor to make their industrial enterprises and the capital employed in
them profitable... [They] have never wanted the uplift of the individual,
but his enslavement; and it is perfectly useless to hope for anything but
the school of to-day."
   Much like Godwin, Ferrer regarded schools as powerful governmental tools,
made all the more dominant by their compulsory nature. After developing his
school, sparking the rise of the Modern School movement, starting the
International League for the Rational Education of Children as well as a
journal L’Ecole Renovee, Ferrer was executed in Spain in 1909 for plotting
an insurrection.
"""

> It tells the story of how an under-performing school achieved major
> improvements in performance, behaviour and academic standards by abandoning
> a hierarchical style of management and giving teachers greater autonomy and
> responsibility for their work.

"Why Grandma, what big ears you have!"

"All the better to hear you with, my dear."

"How Children Learn"
http://www.amazon.com/Children-Learn-Classics-Child-Development/dp/0201484048
"""
"Children do not need to be made to learn," Holt maintains, because each is
born with what Einstein called "the holy curiosity of inquiry." For them,
learning is as natural as breathing. First published in 1967, How Children
Learn has become a classic for parents and teachers, providing an
"effective, gentle voice of reason".
"""

"Growing without Schooling"
http://www.holtgws.com/
"""
TEACH YOUR OWN translated into German, June 2009. Germany is the only
country where homeschooling is illegal. However, homeschooling and other
educational alernatives are gaining reconsideration there as this
publication attests. For information about Teach Your Own in German visit
Genius Verlag.
"""

> Our present UK government slowly seems to be realising that teachers are
> capable of doing their jobs without being micro-managed by a 'juggernaut of
> policies, laws and regulations …. seemingly out of control'. But is this too
> little too late? As Karl Fisch observed in 2006:
> 
> 'We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using
> technologies that have not been invented, in order to solve problems we
> don’t even know are problems yet.’

"Why Grandma, what big arms you have!"

"All the better to hug you with, my dear."

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven
lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills.  They
constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you
can imagine, so you might as well know what it is.  You are at liberty,
of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when
I say I intend no irony in this presentation.  These are the things I
teach, these are the things you pay me to teach.  Make of them what you
will: ...
   Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching:  confusion,
class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual
dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things
are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of
finding the center of their own special genius.  And in later years it
became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to
regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy
and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from
schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's
original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the
middle classes. ...
   After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime.  All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.
   Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school.  But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time.  Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in.  A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost.  These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are.  School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned.
   I teach school and win awards doing it.
   I should know.
"""

> The urgent need for further innovative responses to the crisis in our
> education system is addressed in another recent publication from Triarchy
> Press, *Transformative Innovation in
> Education<http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book21.htm>
> *. The authors, from the International Futures Forum, offer real food for
> thought and an insight into the type of conversation and engagement that is
> essential if our children - and their future employers - are not to remain
> frustrated by ‘dinosaur’ type education policies in this rapidly changing
> world. A working framework and examples of its effectiveness show how more
> visionary and far-sighted changes in the Education system can emerge.

"Why Grandma, what big eyes you have!"

"All the better to see you with, my dear."

"The case against homework"
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
"The truth, according to Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, is that there is
almost no evidence that homework helps elementary school students achieve
academic success and little more that it helps older students. Yet the
nightly burden is taking a serious toll on America's families. It robs
children of the sleep, play, and exercise time they need for proper
physical, emotional, and neurological development. And it is a hidden cause
of the childhood obesity epidemic, creating a nation of "homework potatoes.""

"No Contest: The Case Against Competition"
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
"Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and
business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense
of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a
restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation."

"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's,
Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
" Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing
workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We
dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in
much the same way that we train the family pet. In this groundbreaking book,
Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to
work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does
lasting harm.  Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he
argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation
derived from laboratory animals."

"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
Researchers have found three consistent effects of using – and especially,
emphasizing the importance of – letter or number grades:
1.  Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself. ...
2.  Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks. ...
3.  Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. ...
The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious
educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades.  But as they say
on late-night TV commercials, Wait – there’s more.
4. Grades aren’t valid, reliable, or objective.  ...
5. Grades distort the curriculum. ...
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. ...
7. Grades encourage cheating. ...
8. Grades spoil teachers’ relationships with students. ...
9.  Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other. ...
Finally, there is the question of what classroom teachers can do while
grades continue to be required.  The short answer is that they should do
everything within their power to make grades as invisible as possible for as
long as possible.  Helping students forget about grades is the single best
piece of advice for creating a learning-oriented classroom. ...
"""

> *Petition for Public Services Tsar*
> John Seddon, author of *Systems Thinking in the Public
> Sector<http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/book5.htm>
> *, has been nominated for the position of ‘Public Services Tsar’ in a Number
> 10 e-petition. The petition has received over 1,000 signatures since its
> creation last month by Charlotte Pell, who identifies excessive paperwork,
> targets and bureacracy as the key factors that prevent public sector workers
> from doing their jobs. John Seddon outlines his ‘manifesto’ for minimising
> waste and maximising efficiency in the public sector. He proposes closing
> down the specifications industry, reining back the Audit Commission and
> placing the choice of measures and method in the hands of local service
> managers.

"Why Grandma, what big legs you have!"

"All the better to run to you with, my dear."

"The Land of Frankenstein"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse
was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century
style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the
professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business
is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your
soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be
done."

"The Art of Driving"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust
placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it
suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving,
which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel,
our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ
notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and
experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons
more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to
speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing
nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on
near-monopoly state schooling?"

"Sustainable Education"
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
"We've been though this before. The Eight Year Study of progressive schools
in the 1930's came up with a very definitive result: Progressive and
learner-centered schools were more effective for students than traditional
school! This was true during high school, during college and after college
for the progressive students. As of 1940 people expected a dramatic shift in
how schools were run. But then came the Second World War, followed
immediately by the creation of teacher's unions. Since there were no unions
for the students, the teacher's voice has held sway since then, freezing the
system in place in a form which continues today, almost unchanged, and
increasingly anachronistic."

> You can read John Seddon's response and manifesto in full by subscribing to
> his monthly newsletter <http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/0-2.asp>.
> Evident within all
> his thinking is his belief that the current system amplifies a culture of
> recrimination and fear rather than responsibility and accountability.
> Also arguing for systems of accountability to replace cycles of blame and
> supply-led reform is William Tate, author of *The Search for Leadership: An
> Organisational Perspective <http://searchforleadership.blogspot.com/>* and
> the accompanying *Systemic Leadership
> Toolkit<http://searchforleadership.blogspot.com/2009/03/self-assessment.html>
> * (available from this August). Tate takes Systems Thinking principles (he
> emphasises the lessons that can be learnt by looking not just at
> individuals, edicts or initiatives in organisations, but at what happens
> between them) and uses them to evaluate how leadership operates within and
> between a wide variety of organisations and systems, including governments,
> the financial sector a nd many high profile private companies.
> 
>  Both John Seddon and William Tate advocate looking at whole systems *in
> operation* rather than imposing one-size-fits-all solutions. With a Systems
> Thinking approach, the first step is to look at exactly what is happening –
> i.e. the contributing factors that lead to mistakes, the dynamics of power,
> the motivations and assumptions behind decisions, and so on – and how each
> part of the system affects both the other parts and the whole. Effective
> reform cannot be achieved by deciding what *should* happen but only through
> understanding why and how things *do* happen. This is a crucial lesson for
> any organisation.

"Why Grandma, what big teeth you have!"

"All the better to eat you with."

"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
http://books.google.com/books?id=KS0jIGX0sOEC&pg=PR20
"Gatto provided, and continues to provide the key to comprehending this
conundrum. Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not
failing. On the contrary, there are spectacularly successful in doing
precisely what they were intended to do, and what the have been intended to
do since their inception. [Schooling] ensures a workforce that will not
rebel -- the greatest fear at the turn of the 20th century -- that will be
physically, intellectually, and emotionally dependent upon corporate
institutions for their incomes, self-esteem, and stimulation, and that will
learn to find social meaning in their lives solely in the production and
consumption of material goods. We all grew up in these institutions and we
know they work. They haven't changed much since the 1890s because they don't
need to -- they perform precisely as the are intended."

"Schooling: The Hidden Agenda"
http://www.ishmael.org/Education/Writings/unschooling.shtml
"""
     Within our cultural matrix, every medium tells us that the schools
exist to prepare children for a successful and fulfilling life in our
civilization (and are therefore failing). This is beyond argument, beyond
doubt, beyond question. In Ishmael I said that the voice of Mother Culture
speaks to us from every newspaper and magazine article, every movie, every
sermon, every book, every parent, every teacher, every school administrator,
and what she has to say about the schools is that they exist to prepare
children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization (and are
therefore failing). Once we step outside our cultural matrix, this voice no
longer fills our ears and we're free to ask some new questions. Suppose the
schools aren't failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want
them to do--but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
     Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a
successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do they
do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of keeping
young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming wage-earners at age
twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only--and they consume billions of
dollars worth of merchandise, using money that their parents earn. Just
imagine what would happen to our economy if overnight the high schools
closed their doors. Instead of having fifty million active consumers out
there, we would suddenly have fifty million unemployed youth. It would be
nothing short of an economic catastrophe. ...
     But keeping young people off the job market is only half of what the
schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children in
aboriginal societies--tribal societies--have completed what we, from our
point of view, would call their "education." They're ready to "graduate" and
become adults. In these societies, what this means is that their survival
value is 100%. All their elders could disappear overnight, and there
wouldn't be chaos, anarchy, and famine among these new adults. They would be
able to carry on without a hitch. None of the skills and technologies
practiced by their parents would be lost. If they wanted to, they could live
quite independently of the tribal structure in which they were reared.
     But the last thing we want our children to be able to do is to live
independently of our society. We don't want our graduates to have a survival
value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of our carefully
constructed economic system and do whatever they please. We don't want them
to do whatever they please, we want them to have exactly two choices
(assuming they're not independently wealthy). Get a job or go to college.
Either choice is good for us, because we need a constant supply of
entry-level workers and we also need doctors, lawyers, physicists,
mathematicians, psychologists, geologists, biologists, school teachers, and
so on. The citizen's education accomplishes this almost without fail.
Ninety-nine point nine percent of our high school graduates make one of
these two choices.
     And it should be noted that our high-school graduates are reliably
entry-level workers. We want them to have to grab the lowest rung on the
ladder. What sense would it make to give them skills that would make it
possible for them to grab the second rung or the third rung? Those are the
rungs their older brothers and sisters are reaching for. And if this year's
graduates were reaching for the second or third rungs, who would be doing
the work at the bottom? The business people who do the hiring constantly
complain that graduates know absolutely nothing, have virtually no useful
skills at all. But in truth how could it be otherwise?
     So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in
ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with no
survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of
the system, they are features of the system. These are the things the system
must do to keep things going on as they are.
"""

====

http://xahlee.org/p/little_red_riding_hood.html
"And, saying these words, the wicked wolf fell upon Little Red Riding Hood,
and ate her all up."

We need to very *deeply* ask ourselves what connection compulsory mass
schooling could ever have to a peer economy, given what schooling was
constructed to do, and given that reformers after reformers have tried and 
failed to change it significantly for the better for decades.

The above quotes suggest that our current organization of the mean of
production as an economy is tightly linked to compulsory mass schooling --
even if schooling was producing straight "A" students across all classes.

For one distasteful example, the very reason "class rooms" are called
"class" rooms in the USA is because they are about putting people in social
*classes*, including, Gatto suggests, to ensure the perpetuation of
specialized classes (and protect the upper classes) by making likely only
the interbreeding individuals with the same abilities and other
characteristics (including income and race), all things that he says were
*openly* discussed when the current schooling system was designed. See:
   "Eugenics Arrives"
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/11b.htm
"Between 1890 and 1920, the percentage of our population adjudged
"feeble-minded" and condemned to institutional confinement more than
doubled. The long-contemplated hygienic form of social control formulated by
eighteenth-century German social thinker Johann Frank, "complete medical
policing," was launched with a vengeance. Few intimidations are more
effective than the threat of a stay in an insane asylum. Did the population
of crazies really double in those three decades? The answer given by one
contemporary was elliptically Darwinian: "Marriage of these inferiors is a
veritable manufactory of degenerates." It could no longer go unchecked. The
American Birth Control League left no doubt about its plans. Its position,
as expressed by Yale psychologist Arnold L. Gesell, was that "society need
not wait for perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding
upon a course which will prevent renewal of defective protoplasm
contaminating the stream of life." Gesell’s The Family and the Nation
(1909), a thorough product of the new zeitgeist, advocated "eugenic
violence" in dealing with inferiors. According to Gesell, "We must do as
with the feebleminded, organize the extinction of the tribe." "

And:
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/11d.htm
"The famous humanitarian anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber remarked acidly to
a newsman that anti-eugenic protests came only from the "orthodoxly
religious," rarely from the enlightened camp of science. So there it was.
Keep them all in mind: Kroeber, Gesell, Ripley, McDougall, Huntington,
Osborn, great scientific humanist names whose work underscored how important
a role forced schooling was designed to play. Scientific studies had shown
conclusively that extending the duration and intensity of schooling caused
sharp declines in fertility—and sterility in many. Part of school’s stealth
curriculum would be a steady expansion of its reach throughout the century.
... All evolution might be in jeopardy if there were no more pretty faces to
look at, this was the thesis. Today, there is an aura of the absurd to these
assertions, but it would be well to reflect on the institutional world that
emerged from the other end of this same forge, for it is the new moral world
you and I live in, a fully scientized and organized society, managed by the
best people — people who prefer to remain out of sight of the hoi polloi,
segregated in their own in walled villages and other redoubts."

Just as an anti-eugenics point, note that the current science of ecology and
evolution tell us that resistance to disease and parasites is usually the
most important thing nature is generally selecting for, and immune system
function may have little to no connection to classical definitions of
"intelligence", but it does sometimes have a lot to do with a sense of smell
which underlies a lot of human social dynamics related to attractiveness and
maybe even "love at first sight". The carefully planned and inbred
"ubermensch" would likely have died out from the common cold were that
program otherwise to have succeeded. Diversity of immune system genetics as
well as intellectual perspective and emotional reactions has a lot of
survival value of groups of people, and natural processes of attraction seem
tuned already for maximum survival value there. It is almost like nature
understands that a world of supermen and superwomen would collapse for the
want of bicycle repair people; or maybe Nature watches Monty Python? :-)
   "Bicycle Repairman"
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U01xasUtlvw

And even selecting or engineering for human immune system function someday
could have unexpected side effects: :-(
   http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Unnatural_Selection_(episode)
"When Enterprise arrives and hails the ship, there is no answer, and Data
reads no life signs, but all systems seem functional. At Commander William
T. Riker's suggestion, they establish a remote link with the Lantree's
computer. When they turn on the bridge monitor, the entire crew is dead. Dr.
Pulaski's scans find they died of natural causes through aging.  ... Once in
orbit, they hail the station. Doctor Sara Kingsley answers, and explains
they have declared a medical emergency. Their staff is suffering from the
same thing. She is convinced they were infected from a supply ship that was
there a few days ago. She wants Enterprise to help them evacuate their
genetically-engineered children to protect them.  ... Aboard the station,
Kingsley still cannot believe it is the children who transmit the disease.
... In fact, their immune system is aggressive, creating an antibody to
destroy the virus in midair by altering its genetic code. It works at a
distance. That's when the light bulb goes on in Pulaski's mind; she tells
Data to run an analysis of the genetic interaction between the flu virus and
the antigen. ... Data's analysis is conclusive, and unfortunate: the
antibody the children created to counteract the virus interacts with normal
Human DNA to change sequences which affect the aging process. Since DNA is
self-replicating, the effects are irreversible. ..."

There is very deep eugenic rot buried in the whole concept of compulsory
schooling. Someday Germany will may see the inconsistency in Germany being
the one country to have outlawed homeschooling and instead elevated the
"Klassenzimmer" which historically has "Klass" eugenics at the heart of the
idea, compared to the many very successful attempts Germany has made to move
beyond its horrendous eugenics history and to support diversity and equality
of opportunity. Someday, this statement from Wikipedia below may read as
repugnant, while to most it will now just read as common sense:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany
"In contrast, secondary education includes four types of schools based on a
pupil's ability as determined by teacher recommendations: the Gymnasium
includes the most gifted children and prepares students for university
studies; the Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediary
students; the Hauptschule prepares pupils for vocational education, and the
Gesamtschule, or comprehensive school, combines the three approaches. There
are also Förderschulen (schools for the mentally challenged and physically
challenged). One in 21 students attends a Förderschule."

(Note: this is not to be against vocational education, and most any other 
country has a similar system of tracking.)

Contrast that model with this reality even for the highest scoring students:
   "The Case for Working With Your Hands "
   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=all
"After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of
Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral
fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. ... As it
happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy
organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities
became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to
reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The
organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was
more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t
fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according
to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he
had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of
rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K
Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that
I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing
himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it.
He also seemed to be having a lot of fun."

The above difference is made understandable by this book by Jeff Schmidt:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional
and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined
managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the
employer's doctrine and outlook."

Jeff Schmidt also talks about selection for "assignable curiosity":
   http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
"""
A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through
their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual
effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for
this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts
of things. Along the road to becoming a professional, they learn how to
orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others. Consider, for example, a
typical essay in a university class. The teacher sets the topic and the
students write on it. To do really well, students need to figure out what
will please the teacher. If the teacher had assigned a completely different
topic, the conscientious student would have directed effort to that topic.
Well-trained students do not even think about writing about topics that are
not assigned. They wait to be told where to direct their curiosity. Schmidt
has a teaching credential and has taught junior high school math in
Pasadena, California and in El Salvador. However, it is his experiences
pursuing a PhD in physics that come through most strongly in Disciplined
Minds. "Assignable curiosity" has a special significance for researchers.
Military funding of science, for example, works well to direct research into
military-relevant directions because scientists are willing to take up
whatever project is offering. When scientists put in research proposals to
military funders, they anticipate what will be most useful and attractive
for military purposes, while maintaining the illusion that they are
directing the research. Nearly half of Disciplined Minds is devoted to
selection of professionals, a process that weeds out most of those whose
attitudes are not appropriate and molds the survivors into a narrow
political mindset. On entering professional training, Schmidt says, students
are optimistic and idealistic. On leaving they are "pressured and troubled"
because they have gradually submerged their ideals and become willing to
join the occupational hierarchy. So different are they on completion of
training that "the primary goal for many becomes, in essence, getting
compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals".
"""

Always remember this: "schooling" and "education" are two completely
different things. Schooling was invented for a very specific state-related
purpose, to organized a hierarchical economy and to win state-waged wars.
Education has always been with us in an organic and diverse way.

Or, another quote from New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
   I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately
subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds
of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In
an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families
like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of
Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but
not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth
would they fit?
   In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor
Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua,
Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training
than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its
requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in
four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like
work was quietly abandoned.
   Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists,
dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people,
handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful
human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the
periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run
afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the
dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a
centralized command system.
   Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own
children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery,
you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with
a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond.
Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an
abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you
have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in
systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs;
the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live,
and die there.
"""

If you want true "Grass Roots" change, above are some quotes to think about
in shaping it. It is highly questionable to me when people try to reform the
schooling system without first starting from this understanding. Maybe those
writers do have this understanding, but, while the goals seem laudable, and
the approaches seem innovative, people have tried that all before, to no
effect, over and over again, so I question if they know this?

Don't let compulsory mass schooling eat up peer networks -- you're just
feeding children to the wolf otherwise, even if you dress one up like
Grandmother.

Contrast the above quotes with this comment to the list in the "On
unschooling" thread on 4/27/09 whose author can remain momentarily nameless:
"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."

Gatto might suggest that's the kind of thing we've all been taught to think
in school, by a Grandma with big ears and big eyes and big teeth. :-(

Contrast spending US$20K per year per child (as in my home state of New
York) to put children in inescapable public day prisons bombarded with such
propaganda for most of their waking hours five days a week versus just
giving the money to the parents to use as they see fit to educate their
children (as a basic income). Defenders of school often confuse the
potential wealth redistribution aspects of schooling with what actually goes
on in schools in terms of destroying the lives of children. As Gatto
suggests, the more money you give schools, the better they will do their
primary functions -- which are generally the exact opposite of everything
that Michel advocates on this list, even when it is done in the "best 
schools" producing straight "A" students.

This is not to disagree that some kids and/or parents do thrive with more
structure. Generally, the biggest issues are when the parenting style and
the child's learning style are at odds:
   http://www.motherstyles.com/

Even if kids loved schools, because they served them ice cream every day, or
always made exciting and fun learning the stuff schools wanted to teach
them, compulsory schools would still be against everything p2p stands for.
One more Gatto quote:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"""
   Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed
from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity
like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which
learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no
longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned
with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for
tranquilizing purposes.
    Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon,
warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the
effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and
security for yielding wholly:
   "Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be
collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for
himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of
values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political
situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power
of the truth by...the word of experts."
   The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class
kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the
outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of
age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and
licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal
divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of
meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity,
their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil
was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the
twentieth century with evil.
   Ellul puts it this way: "The individual has no chance to exercise his
judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads
to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of]
conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared
or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is
suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed
to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda,
will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding
himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion."
   Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate
morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in
my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great
machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can’t do is
to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling
crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily
exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
    According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim),
but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the
workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the
mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a
small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental
life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio
occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational
Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts,
the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re
a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class
system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted
and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by
"proper" social order.
   If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because
it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors
have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if
you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or
that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction
sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to
clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of
bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various
explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have,
then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed
necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
   The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient
numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem
incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be
imagined; it isn’t real.
   Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions:
as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified,
disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced,
jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made
socially useful. Either way you want it, hundreds of millions of perpetual
children require paid attention from millions of adult custodians. An
ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another.
"""

Humanity got by for tens of thousands of years without schools, operating a
mostly peer-to-peer economy. After reading the above, what makes anyone here
think compulsory schooling and p2p are in any way compatible in practice?

Note: many absolutely wonderful people work as teachers and school
administrators, and many wonderful educational materials have been created
by school teachers. The fact that the institution is evil does not mean the
people within are evil. That is why Gatto call schooling "an abstraction
that has escaped its handlers".

Here is why it is impossible to change schools:
   "Power ÷ 22"
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these
twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring
factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple
accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are
served whether children learn to read or not."

Neither does that fact that schooling is evil mean it was a conspiracy:
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part
of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major
institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial
efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once
depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be
subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and
mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American
marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth
century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the
subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to
regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was
conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect
was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong
families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren’t aware
they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck. A huge price had to be
paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the
quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of
being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius.
Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching
social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a
conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of
rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men —
but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we
gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders,
becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It
was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius.
The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the
promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy
against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children,
consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state
factory schooling.
"""

Granted my knowledge of this is mostly focused on the US side. Western
European schools are somewhat different (and better in many ways), but I
suspect, not that different at the core in being at odds with p2p ideals.
Please don't confuse the fact that Western Europe in general has a better
social safety net and less income inequality than the USA due to better
politics and cultures (in many ways) with the idea that Western European
schools are then necessarily a lot better about the sorts of issues outlined
in these quotes -- problems involving grading, competition, homework,
rewarding assignable curiosity and then destroying a love of independent
learning, the propagation of hierarchical dogma, the creation of
intellectual and emotional dependence, and so on. These are all things that
have for thousands of years been working towards undermining peer
economies.

To be clear, like Manuel de Landa suggests, I feel we need a balance of
meshwork and hierarchy in our social institutions. But how to achieve that
balance is a complex issue requiring experiment, made more difficult in the
face of a population altered by generations of compulsory schooling that was
mainly about celebrating the state hierarchy. It is not clear that anything
about the current schooling system is worth preserving, even in developing
an educational system that balances grassroots meshworks and top-down
hierarchies. And it is not clear to me that a post-scarcity p2p economy even
needs an institution in any way analogous to a current compulsory school.
Expanding the public library system to a place where you could go to to
learn new skills on demand or practice them when desired may be a better
approach than trying to reform compulsory public schools yet again, fighting
those twenty-two vested interest groups all the way.

Those vested interest groups have huge amounts of funding, and the reformers
have next to nothing. The reformers generally have not even the support of
the people, who have, even against the facts of their own experience and
perceptions, been told for generations by schools that schools are good for
them, and that schools are best as is, including with huge amounts of
funding taken across the society, and much of a person's youth, such a with 
the dialog:
   "Why School, what huge funding you have! And how much of my life you have!"
   "All the better to teach you with, my dear".

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/