[p2p-research] Terrafoam and schooling and peer networks (was Re: US/European...)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

  Kevin Carson wrote:
> On 7/29/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>> Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>>>  In theory, cradle-to-grave schooling could absorb any
>>> amount of excess workers (a trend we see all too much of in the USA
>>> already).
>
>> As I think more about this one point, I can wonder if maybe we should all
>> just give in gracefully to this trend and focus on reforming schools on
>> the assumption that they *will* be where most people will spend most of
>> their lives in the future? :-) It seems that to date, I have alway heard
>> most people (not homeschoolers or unschoolers or freeschoolers though)
>> describe the number of people in school in a society with great pride,
>> rather than derision. Maybe that pride is what could be built on to build
>> better schools on the assumption, like "The Hotel California" or "The
>> Village", you could never really leave such places?
>
> Perhaps if you put up a "School" sign over the terrafoam dorms,
> everybody would be happy.

Sadly, that's pretty much what we already have. :-(

Here is a somewhat extreme inside-out view of education in the USA from a
peer-to-peer perspective. :-)

It essentially develops the parallels between school and prison, and shows
suggests a peer-based economy needs a different educational system altogether.

It's meant to be shocking, and so maybe goes too far in some ways (there are
a lot of caring people in schools and most parents are tremendously well
meaning in thinking school success will give their child a happy life).

And it is probably too depressing, really, if you really think about what
this means as far as kids getting psychologically harmed even now by the
hundreds of millions globally every day. The mind recoils from the horror of
this interpretation, the same as most doctor's minds did when hearing the
insane suggestion of Ignaz Semmelweis that doctors wash their hands after
cutting up corpses so they would not be killing 10% of their patients. The
only reasonable thing to do with Semmelweis was to lock him up in a mental
hospital.

On 6/28/09 I had posted an essay about Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation where
   http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/c6b900db3b51c5bc
I mentioned in passing the notion of schools as like Terrafoam. This essay
takes that one idea and builds on it. While this essay builds on Marshall
Brain's writing, and links it to his own choices about schooling, it's not
meant specifically to criticize Marshall Brain in a big way (he's in good
company with 98% of US Americans), so much as to give him a broader
perspective on these topics if he should ever read it or write more on the
topic. (I BCC'd him.) It may well be too late for Marshall Brain's children
to benefit much from alternative education or homeschooling, since as John
Taylor Gatto suggests it is the first few years of compulsory education that
do the most damage, and generally it takes about a year for each year in
school to detoxify from it. Some homeschoolers do decide to do mainstream
high school, even as high school is a different experience for a
homeschooler because they know they could leave if they wanted to. So, while
I use Marshall Brain as an example in parallel with his writings, it's
understandable if he and his family make a choice for continuing public
school now that his kids are enmeshed in it on the basis it well be best for
his family at this point. These are very difficult choices to make.

====

Here is a section of an essay by John Taylor Gatto about schools:
   "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto
   http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
   The second lesson I teach is your class position.  I teach that
you must stay in class where you belong.  I don't know who decides that
my kids belong there but that's not my business.  The children are
numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right
class.  Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has
increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being plainly
under the burden of numbers he carries.  Numbering children is a big and
very profitable business, though what the strategy is designed to
accomplish is elusive.  I don't even know why parents would allow it to
be done to their kid without a fight.
   In any case, again, that's not my business.  My job is to make
them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers
like their own.  Or at the least endure it like good sports.  If I do my
job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because
I've shown how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have
contempt for the dumb classes.  Under this efficient discipline the
class mostly polices itself into good marching order.  That's the real
lesson of any rigged competition like school.  You come to know your
place.
   In spite of the overall class blueprint which assume that 99
percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless make a
public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test success,
hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a reward.  I
frequently insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire
them on the basis of test scores and grades, even though my own
experience is that employers are rightly indifferent to such things.  I
never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and schoolteaching
are, at bottom, incompatible just as Socrates said they were thousands
of years ago.  The lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a
proper place in they pyramid and that there is no way out of your class
except by number magic.  Until that happens you must stay where you are
put.
"""

Compare that with Marshall Brains' description of life in Terrafoam:
   "Manna"
   http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
"""
   The building we exited was another one of the terrafoam projects.
Terrafoam was a super-low-cost building material, and all of the welfare
dorms were made out of it. They took a clay-like mud, aerated it into a
thick foam, formed it into large panels and fired it like a brick with a
mobile furnace. It was cheap and it allowed them to erect large buildings
quickly. The robots had put up the building next to ours in a week. ...
   Was it prison? Yes. But there were no walls. The food was good. The
robots were as nice and respectful as they could be. You could walk outside
wherever and whenever you wanted to. But there was an invisible edge. When
you walked too far away from your building and approached that edge, two
robots would approach you. I had tried it many times.
   "Time to turn around Jacob Lewis105. There is construction in the next
zone and, for your safety, we cannot allow you to proceed." There were a
hundred reasons the robots gave for making you turn around. Construction,
blasting, contamination, flash flooding, train derailments, possible thunder
storms, animal migrations and so on. They could be quite creative in their
reasons. It was all part of their politeness. If you turned around you were
fine. If you made any move in any direction other than the one suggested,
you were immediately injected and woke up back in your room. I had only
tried it twice.
"""

See also:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truancy
"Truancy is any intentional unauthorized absence from compulsory schooling.
The term typically describes absences caused by students of their own free
will, and usually does not refer to legitimate "excused" absences, such as
ones related to medical conditions."

So, according to schools, "free will" is the enemy. It is illegal for
children to have free will about compulsory school attendance, something
that is not a trivial amount of time, but essentially often claims about
fifteen of their most energetic years (between pre-K and some college). That
makes compulsory schools essentially the same as day prisons, or much the
same in several ways as Marshall Brain's dystopian Terrafoam dorms.

And so is it any surprise many of the same construction firms build both
schools and prisons?

Here is Gatto on this correspondence of schools and prisons. There is a lot
there that applies to peer-to-peer issues too. That essay is
not specifically religious, though someone posted the only good copy I could
find on a religiously named site (sorry):
   "SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE EQUIVALENCIES BETWEEN FORCED SCHOOLING AND PRISON"
   http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/schoolpr.htm
"""
   ... In a dreamlike state in the Howard Johnson's motel in Norwich, New
York I heard that the first way to recognize a cult was that it "keeps its
victims unaware." 'Why, that's just what institutional schools do,' I said
to myself; I've spent the last 10 years of my life traveling a million and a
half miles to bear witness to that universal crime of forced schooling I had
been a party to over a 30-year public school teaching career.
  And, the television intoned in order, a cult controls its victims' time
and environment (by this time I was sitting up with pen and pad taking
notes), creates fear and dependency, suppresses old customs, instills new
beliefs, and allows no criticism. "But, but," I heard my conscience
sputtering, "that's the perfect formula for a government school." School was
structured to be an expression of cult discipline! School was a cult, not
unlike the murder cult Princess Grace ended her days on earth a member of,
or the legendary Thuggee in British India which worshipped Kali, the Destroyer!
   Prison, as we have evolved it following British and Hindu models, seeks
to impose the same discipline on its serious recruits, breaking them to an
understanding of their own profound worthlessness. It should be no secret to
anyone reading this that in America, the land of the free, more people are
imprisoned, by far, than in any nation past or present, including Communist
China or Stalin's Soviet Union. Prison in America is a booming business,
incarcerating about five times the percentage of our population who were
jailed in the middle of the Great Depression. Some fiendish spirit is loose
in our land whose bleak heart can only be plumbed by seeing the
correspondences among cults, prisons, and schools. ...
   Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied
their entire youth, an experience during which they were drilled thoroughly
in the culture and economy of the well-schooled greater society, in which
individuals have been rendered helpless to do much of anything except watch
television or punch buttons on a keypad.
   Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way and join the
chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the
schooling by force of children because there isn't any other way to handle
the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we've been
trained in childishness and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is
that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted upon
to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex
reality they are afraid of new experience. They're like animals whose
spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don't have
minds of their own, they are predictable, they won't surprise corporations
or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest
genetic patent -- or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on
to despise independent citizens and hence they act as a fifth column in
opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty.
   From a managerial standpoint, people addicted to defining their lives by
the stuff they buy, or by pats on the head, comprise a managerial utopia. In
prison, or school, the way to this condition, this safe condition, is
prepared by a drill in the extension of small privileges and honors, or the
withholding of same, by punishments and rewards externally imposed until the
inner ability of the human spirit to punish or reward itself --and hence by
free of tutelage -- is destroyed or suppressed. The animal trainers in
service to the rich and powerful through history - not B.F. Skinner or the
behaviorists - created this form of training. ...
   Corporate culture has become a resonator of low-level fearfulness to such
an extent that we gladly throw huge numbers of our fellow human beings in
jail, just as we abandon our children to penal institutionalization in
schools; the constant presentation of prison as our salvation, or school as
the essential trainer of children, makes us all prisoners. It corrupts our
inner life, it divides us from one another so that relationships lifelong
are thin and shallow. School teaches us to divorce one another, to put aside
loyalty for advantage, to quell our inner voices, subordinating them to
management.
   School and prison do the work that Rome's first emperor, Julius Cesear,
said was necessary to manage a conquered population. In order to keep the
conquered conquered, you have to keep them divided. School classrooms do
that job more gently than prison cells, but they do it more effectively.  ...
   But is it now too strong to be overthrown?
   I don't think so, but the road away from it will be long and difficult.
There is no mechanism in existence through which its antithesis can be
mobilized except the individual family, the particular family, the unique
family. Associations of families which waste their time in wholesale
opposition to the thing are doomed, I believe, to disappointment. We will
not see this power rolled back in our lifetimes.
   Yet saying this is a far cry from throwing up one's hands in despair.
Rust doesn't organize to bring down a powerful building nor do termites
organize to collapse a house. ...
"""

Gatto seems not to be familiar with "stigmergy" that organizes termites 
through the artifacts they build, like Wikipedia. :-)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
That is also why his timeframe may be off. Change may come sooner.

This is not to say anything against education (as opposed to schooling) or
even educators as individuals even if they work in schools. This is not to
say tutorials are not needed, or that face-to-face learning in small groups
is not useful, or even that lecturing is not often mind-expanding. This is
not to say kids do not need guidance or adult involvement in their lives or
to be around other kids. This is instead to talk about the school form
inside which those activities sometimes happen, even as those activities can
happen outside of the school form too.

The sadly ironic thing is that, as brilliant and insightful and
compassionate as Marshall Brain is, he (along with most other parents in the
USA) has essentially terrafoamed his own kids, ultimately either for his own
convenience or out of ignorance or out of desperation, and he probably still
does not even realize what he has done, still thinking a Terrafoam building
labeled "school" run by robots is the best place for his kids. :-( He is
like 98% of US parents in that regard. What he has done is legal and, in
general, something his peers would praise him for (living in a "good" school
district, etc.). To do otherwise than pursue mainstream schooling would meet
with tremendous resistance, and also be at odds with his own personal
background of being heavily schooled. And it's not like the buildings were
labeled "Terrafoam" -- they were labeled something else, as something most
US Americans have been conditioned to accept without question, as "school",
that term used to describe a bunch of similar fishes.

Still, he has written on homeschooling a couple years ago, and so is aware
of at least that alternative possibility:
   "How does homeschooling work?"
   http://www.howstuffworks.com/question382.htm
   http://www.howstuffworks.com/homeschool.htm
   http://marshallbrain.blogspot.com/2006/06/do-you-have-anything-to-say.html

His family may well have had good reasons for making any tradeoffs in life
that it did; I don't want to judge him a bad person for doing the best he
could under the difficult circumstances a parent faces in the USA, even a
relatively affluent one. Still, it seems ironic. And so I am sad for him and
his family. Still, that could just as easily have been me years ago, so
again, I do not want to judge him as a person. It is very, very hard to
throw off the mental shackles of schooling. If I am making a point, that is
mostly what it is -- that even the smartest and most compassionate person
can get taken in by a racket, same as, say, Bernie Madoff's investors.
   "Madoff Investor Fraud Hits Non-Profits Hard"
   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99084451

And this person taken in by the system even now has created an alternative
to formal education with his howstuffworks web site and blog. So, doubly
ironic depending on what he knew when.

And, there are things one can do to cushion against the worst blows of
school, so, his family may well do them; it seems so from what Marshall
posts on his blog. One book with some suggestions:
   "Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or
Without School" by Grace Llewellyn, Amy Silver
http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Learning-Education-Without-School/dp/0471349607
"Llewellyn, a lecturer on the subject of home schooling and author of the
classic Teenage Liberation Handbook, and Silver, who teaches parenting
workshops, have come together to write this how-to book for parents who want
to become more involved in their children's education whether through home
schooling or by supplementing traditional instruction. The authors offer
five fundamental principles opportunity, timing, freedom, interest, and
support that, they claim, will transform the way we relate to our children
and greatly assist them in growing up to be joyful, passionate creators.
Useful for parents and teachers alike, this valuable book closely examines
how young people learn and illuminates its practical advice with many
stories that make for both insightful and enjoyable reading. Whatever
schooling venue parents choose, this book will help them instill a lifelong
love of learning in their children."

But remember, we as a society are spending vast sums of money to create an
institution that parents must then struggle against, as if parenting was not
hard enough already.

As Kevin Carson suggested, someone essentially put a big sign over the
Terrafoam buildings that said "school". All the robots there said living in
Terrafoam is for a kid's own good -- and why would they lie? Any property
owner sure pays a lot of money already every year in property taxes for the
Terrafoam schools and the robots, so, it all must be good for something for
families and the kids, right? I mean, it's not like the State would create
big buildings surrounded by fences unless it was for the good of the
inmates, right? And it sure is convenient, so Marshall Brain can run
companies and blog about things and so on, while his kids are locked up
somewhere "safe" where they are supposed to be being nurtured by caring
robots. He has important work to do, and There Is No Alternative (TINA),
right? Even homeschooling means one parent may have to make a "sacrifice" if
they had other plans for creative works, and unhappy parents may not make
the best educators or guides. So, there are reasons people don't pursue
alternatives in relation to their expectations, even when alternatives are
available:
   http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/regional/NorthCarolina.htm

And certainly in Marshall Brain's situation, even in the worst case, given
he is building an alternative informal science and technology educational
system for the world on the web with "How Stuff Works", it might have been a
heart breaking decision to sacrifice his own children on the altar of
schooling to have that time to help save the world. Just like Abraham went
to sacrifice his child Isaac in the Christian Bible after being commanded by
a God to do so for the public good.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham#Binding_of_Isaac
Let's hope a metaphorical Angel showed up in their lives first. :-)

And any private schools operates essentially the same way as public schools,
teaching the same seven lessons Gatto decries, with pretty much the same
outcomes. So it is not like there is much of a difference between a "good"
public school and a "good" private school. And why would there be nearly
identical private schools if public schools were not good ideas? So, each
justifies the other, whichever you pick.

One-on-one tutoring done centuries ago must have been replaced because it
was obsolete, right? Home education must be stupid if so few people do it,
right? And it is not like kids could teach themselves by doing stuff on
their own once they know how to read, right? And we all survived schooling,
and look how well we turned out and what a great job we are doing electing
good leaders and running the economy and avoiding wars, right? Surely, with
all that money spent on schools of a certain form, the entire schooling
infrastructure must be there for a good reason?

But who has forty hours to read John Taylor Gatto's online book?
   "The Underground History of American Education"
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
(Which has some errors and spin, true, same as this essay.) Let alone who
has time for hundreds or thousands of hours reading other stuff about
schooling? Starting with the How Stuff Works site?
   http://people.howstuffworks.com/homeschool.htm

Because kids experience so much more in an hour than adults, I suggest that
locking kids up in schools (public or private) from around age four to
twenty-one (with some college) in the USA is essentially like putting them
in Terrafoam for more than half of their waking conscious lives. It's true
that most kids get to visit their parents home to spend nights and weekends
in front of corporate advertising on the TV. But is that time in their
parent's home in front of a TV really much different than life inside
Terrafoam? Marshall Brain's Terrafoam dorms had TV too. Essentially,
considering that time differential for kids, most of the conscious time of
most US Americans is already spent in Terrafoam, even not including time
spent at work as as adult. So, Marshall Brain was not really writing about a
dystopian future -- he was, perhaps unwittingly, writing about our
*present*. And it is a present where we have sacrificed our children,
forcing them to sit in one place for many hours a day, in order to have an
"efficient" economy to produce a wonderful world for them when they graduate
out of Terrafoam someday, someday soon, like, really, never...

Because the rest of our society is becoming more and more like Terrafoam
every day. Still, there is the one green shoot of a plant that WALL-E found.
There is always hope, like with the internet being more a liberator than
another Terrafoam prison:
   "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times" by Studs Terkel
   http://www.amazon.com/Hope-Dies-Last-Keeping-Difficult/dp/1565848373

No doubt Marshall Brain's kids have a better time than most when they get to
temporarily leave the terrafoam dorms to visit their parent's house on
nights and weekends or on those temporary furlows called "vacations".
Although even then, "homework" keeps the scent of terrafoam about the
children, always reminding the children that they belong to the State, and
that they must eventually return to their true home of the terrafoam dorms,
where they will live most of their conscious lives alongside other inmates
marked with similar numbers, supervised by robots constructed by the State.
   http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
   http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm

Although it is true that the State still uses human parts to construct the
robots that run the Terrafoam dorms, given robots are not quite fast enough
to keep up with the children yet,
   http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/29/toyota-humanoid-robot-runs-at-7-kmhr/
should any human-derived robot demonstrate any residual humanity and deviate
from State programming, if detected, that robot will be sent for repair. And
if not repairable, that robot will be replaced. Occasionally some robots
break out of their programming and remain undetected for a time, as with
John Taylor Gatto, but that is rare. Sometimes a few broken robots work
together to liberate a few children, but that is even rarer, as there might
be good rewards for turning in the other broken robots (like continuing to
be able to eat). In WALL-E, you can see robots teaching the young kids.

Compulsory schooling is the law (that's what compulsory means). People
resisted it at first in Boston around 1850, and men with guns were brought
in to force parents to give up their children to the State. Maybe it was
even good for some kids, compared to a youth of forced labor on a farm.
That's just the way it was. Some people fought legally to get homeschooling
as an option. But realistically, most families can't live today on just one
income without huge lifestyle changes (often involving moving to a poor
area). And there is so little left of community life in the USA that it can
be hard to bring together a healthy experience for kids, at least until a
couple years go by and social networks slowly build with other
homeschoolers. So much of that is peer-to-peer family-to-family links, not
family-to-institution links. And family-to-family links take a lot of time
to build in dysfunctional communities ravaged by generations of schooling
and now two-income families, especially with families so mobile these days
chasing after diminishing job prospects.

Maybe school *was* a good sounding idea back around 1850 when that
particular form of social control was refined in Prussia and leading to
military victories. But back then, doctors also thought it was a good idea
not to wash their hands after cutting up cadavers before they delivered
babies, too:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
"""
The First Clinic had an average maternal mortality rate due to puerperal
fever of about 10% (actual rates fluctuated wildly) ... Semmelweis described
desperate women begging on their knees not to be admitted to the First
Clinic. Some women even preferred to give birth in the streets, pretending
to have given sudden birth en route to the hospital (a practice known as
street births), which meant they would still qualify for the child care
benefits without having been admitted to the clinic. Semmelweis was puzzled
that puerperal fever was rare amongst women giving street births. "To me, it
appeared logical that patients who experienced street births would become
ill at least as frequently as those who delivered in the clinic. [...] What
protected those who delivered outside the clinic from these destructive
unknown endemic influences?" ... The germ theory of disease had not yet been
developed at the time. Thus, Semmelweis concluded that some unknown
"cadaverous material" caused childbed fever. He instituted a policy of using
a solution of chlorinated lime for washing hands between autopsy work and
the examination of patients and the mortality rate dropped ten-fold,
comparable to the Second Clinic's. The mortality rate in April 1847 was 18.3
percent, handwashing was instituted mid-May, the rates in June were 2.2
percent, July 1.2 percent, August 1.9 percent and, for the first time since
the introduction of anatomical orientation, the death rate was zero in two
months in the year following this discovery. ... Semmelweis' observations
went against all established scientific medical opinion of the time. As a
result, his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Other more subtle
factors may also have played a role. Some doctors, for instance, were
offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands; they felt that
their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their
hands could be unclean. ... Semmelweis had now achieved dramatic successes
at three obstetrical facilities — even so, his ideas continued to be
ridiculed and rejected both in Vienna and in Pest-Buda. ... It has been
contended that Semmelweis could have had an even greater impact if he had
managed to communicate his findings more effectively and avoid antagonising
the medical establishment, even given the opposition from entrenched
viewpoints. [Note to self: avoid antagonizing the establishment. :-)] ...
Beginning from 1861 Semmelweis suffered from various nervous complaints. He
suffered from severe depression and became excessively absent minded.
Paintings from 1857 to 1864 show that he aged rapidly. He turned every
conversation to the topic of childbed fever. ... In 1865 János Balassa wrote
a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution. ... Semmelweis
surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by
several guards, secured in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened cell.
Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included
dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died
after two weeks, on 13 August 1865, aged 47, from a gangreneous wound,
possibly inflicted by the beating. ... Yet a legacy is the so-called
Semmelweis reflex or Semmelweis effect. It is a metaphor for a certain type
of human behaviour characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge
because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms — named after
Semmelweis whose perfectly reasonable hand-washing suggestions were
ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries. ...
"""

OK, so the 1850s was around the time when a doctor who suggested other
doctors wash their hands after cutting up corpses (instead of having 10% to
20% of their patients die) was then confined to a mental institution and
essentially beaten to death. Enlightened times? But, that is the time and
approximately the part of the world from which the USA adopted compulsory
schooling.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
"American educators were fascinated by German educational trends. ... In
1843 Mann traveled to Germany to investigate how the educational process
worked. Upon his return to the United States he lobbied heavily to have the
Prussian model adopted. ..."

Having compulsory schooling today is like a doctor not washing their hands
between patients. By the way, compulsory schooling is good for spreading
diseases like the flu, too, so there is even a physical analogy beyond the
metaphorical one of often causing great harm.

No, the mind recoils from that. This guy is as nutty as Semmelweis, despite
his Navy Science Award, and a Princeton diploma earned the same year as
Michelle Obama's. See, even pointing to his own credentials proves the
importance of the schooling system, right? He undermines his own point.
   "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
   http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may
be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media
as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist
states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic."

School is not killing 10% of the population by spreading general harm; how
could it? It would be shut down instantly, right? Parents would never
tolerate such a thing, right? Or students?
"Education at Gunpoint - Legal Force a Misguided Way of Ending Truancy"
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1527015/education_at_gunpoint_legal_force_a.html?singlepage=true&cat=4
"Students, particularly high school students, who are truant or who drop out
are often voting with their feet. They are saying that school is not
challenging, that they are tired of being made fun of and being bullied,
that they are tired of the cliques, that they are tired of teachers who
favor popular and wealthy students, that they are tired of teachers who
don't seem to care about them — who exit the building faster than they do at
the end of the day. ...  In a society where people fail to see that the
phrase "compulsory education" is an oxymoron, where high schools look more
and more like minimum-security prisons, we will have to rethink what
education is before we can find truly effective measures to reduce truancy."

Well, what if schooling really is deadly, in a metaphorical way? How much
could a half million US dollars per child do as a basic income annual income
(like social security payments from birth) to decrease a child's life long
stress like by giving them and their parents time to learn Yoga? How much
would a half million dollars per child extend children's lives through
research into new medicines or the value of old ones, improving the quality
of medical care globally? How much does the stress of schooling itself (and
a related competitive mindset) contribute to years of lost life in many
children? How much does being turned into a robot shorten a child's life? I
have no specific statistics to prove this correlation (though I could point
to murder or suicide rates), especially since there is no controlled
experiment about the difference between, say, an unschooled kid getting a
half-million dollars when they turn eighteen instead of a high school
diploma. Why is that obvious experiment not done? Well, even if it was, it
would miss the point. Schooling exists precisely because it is so murderous
and wasteful.

Even of those who feed it with charitable dollars later:
   "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
[In] 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair,
becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do so". Though see where that got him
in the end: :-(
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Goldman
     (July 17, 1964 -- December 26, 2003)
"""

So, I'd suggest, in life years, schooling takes at least 10% off the top. It
takes more than 10% of life years just in the time it takes away from
children being in the neighborhood. Schooling is *worse* than doctors not
washing their hands after they dissect corpses and 10% of their patients
die. Schooling is *worse*. And schooling is *designed* to be worse. Because,
if we did not dumb down kids so they could not engage in peer production
easily, if we did not send them to an early grave, if we did not use up a
half-million dollar per child to do this, then our society would have to be
different because of all the abundance we would be drowning in. And, we as a
society are more scared of drowning in an abundance of free time, and an
abundance of high quality medical care, and an abundance of competent
self-directing citizens than we are scared of killing 10% of our children
(in aggregate life years) and maiming the rest. And at this point, the whole
process is such an institution that it is unquestionable, like the could be
no question that a gentleman doctor's hands could ever be unclean or cause
disease. How could all those well fed school administrators and well fed
schooteachers, all having received many years of schooling and lots of
diplomas, and subject to the most stringent background checks looking for
criminal records, possibly harm children? It makes no sense. Just like
handwashing after cutting up corpses made no sense in the 1850s, the years
that gave the USA compulsory education.

Now, maybe those deaths and maimings caused by schooling did make sense even 
as late as the 1990s, before the spread of the internet. Maybe? But can they 
possibly make any sense now in the internet age?
   "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Contrast what is on the virtual door of a public school in Cary, NC, one
local to Marshall Brain:
   http://caryhs.wcpss.net/
"""
In a global community, Cary High School will educate responsible life-long
learners who:
     * Strive for excellence
     * Think critically
     * Practice democratic ideals
     * Respect themselves and others
"""

with what is at another page linked right beside that statement:
"""
Regular Bell Schedule
  7:20 Warning Bell
Period 	Class 	Lunch
1 	7:25-8:55 	
2 	9:01-10:34 	
3 	11:20-12:52 	10:34-11:14 (lunch)
3 	10:40-11:25 	11:25-12:05 (second)
3 	12:07-12:52 	
3 	10:40-12:12 	12:12-12:52 (lunch)
4 	12:58-2:28 	
"""

Again from New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto Semmelweis:
"""
The third lesson I teach kids is indifference.  I teach children not to care
about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they
do.  How I do this is very subtle.  I do it by demanding that they become
totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with
anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor.  It's
heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me.  When I'm at
my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of
enthusiasm.  But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is
that we've been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station.
They must turn on and off like a light switch.  Nothing important is ever
finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.  Students never have
a complete experience except on the installment plan. Indeed, the lesson of
the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about
anything?  Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world
that can no longer offer important work to do.  Bells are the secret logic
of schooltime; their argument is inexorable.  Bells destroy the past and
future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes
every living mountain and river the same even though they are not.  Bells
inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
"""

School bells are perhaps the single biggest reason a peer economy or gift
economy is difficult to put together today -- because the first rule of
doing excellent crafts or other good work is you have to intrinsically care
about the task. But this *taught* indifference to the intrinsic rewards of
work actually disables people, and this disability leaves people vulnerable
to a hierarchical system structured around extrinsic rewards. In such a
hierarchical system, kids become like trained seals balancing balls on their
noses while walking on their front flippers with their tails in the air, all
the time being insecure and stressed, always looking for the next fish
stingily doled out by the hierarchical trainer as a reward for doing such an
unnatural act. They are no longer able to swim in the ocean and catch their
own fish, they are so used to using their flippers for walking and their
nose for balancing balls. What was natural has become unnatural; what was
unnatural has become expected. Both for physical and mental health reasons,
it is not good for children to sit in one place indoors day after day, as
Chris Mercola (previously of the Albany Free school) points out here:
   "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness"
http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Childhood-Protecting-Inner-Wildness/dp/0807032875

Naturally, it is *so* hard to break the will of most children, given it is
very hard to teach indifference to a naturally involved and caring human
being like a young child, that places like New York State have to spend
about half a million dollars (including interest) per child to chop down a
kid's inner wildness by the time a kid is eighteen (and even then, the State
often fails). Teaching indifference is a skill that also requires extensive
training of the trainers, because you still want to be able to get some use
out of the child after they have been broken into being like a robot, so you
can't break them either too much that they mentally disintegrate
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
or too little that they are still able to rebel:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
You need to break them in just the right way, especially in such a way that
they never move towards solidarity and always see themselves at most as an
isolated prisoner, never part of a peer network resisting indoctrination:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

And if you can't do that, you need to stamp them in such a way (or rather,
withhold a forehead stamp) so that the children are never part of the formal
hierarchy of military-industrial-prison-schooling-media complex:
   http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a
pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through
college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding
conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So,
it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really
honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and
attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society."

Still, any society needs a balance of hierarchy and meshwork. It is not bad
that kids learn to function within hierarchies when they need to -- the
issue is more one of balance. Also, unlike in hunter-gatherer societies,
children never get a chance to be part of a larger peer network (peer here
meaning, again, not the same age, but a peer in the sense of a human being
of any age or class or diversity or ability being an equal in some sense).
So children now never have no chance to practice those skills of being an
important part of a varied team or diverse village in a serious way.

Now, if you as a parent need the day care service schools provide (our
society having fallen into a "Two-Income Trap"), but you really want your
kid to learn democracy for real by doing democracy and living democracy, not
just by reading about democracy while inside an authoritarian-run Terrafoam
school, then here is one approach:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_education
"Democratic education is a complex theory of learning and school governance
in which students and staff in a democratic school participate in a free and
equal school democracy. In such institutions, there is typically shared
decision-making among students and staff on matters concerning living,
working, and learning together."

Of course, one may also suggest that if democracy is a good thing, kids
should live that way whenever feasible, so a democratic school is a good
thing intrinsically, if you are to have schools at all and believe in
democracy. But, kids just being happy doesn't see much of a justification
for anything in this society, otherwise the USA would not be second from
last in happiness of children in industrialized countries.

But unfortunately, in our supposed democracy, democratic schools receive no
state support, and they are rare and generally marginally funded places with
crumbling infrastructures and peeling paint. So they look shabby by contrast
to well maintained authoritarian public Terrafoam schools, especially since
the community of the democratic school is not as obvious as the old paint on
first inspection:
   http://albanyfreeschool.com

So, it would be hard for any well-schooled parent to send their kid to an
alternative school that looks rundown. Very hard. There are, of course, a
handful of such democratic schools across the USA, enough to prove the
democratic USA does not actively suppress them.

Even such democratic schools may never be truly democratic. Like Iraq, the
first truly democratic vote would be to eject the oppressors. But, within
that limit, such schools at least can be more democratic than most
mainstream schools.

Whether a school is public or private, it makes little difference. By their
very form, almost none can teach the claimed goals above of excellence,
critical thinking, democracy, or respect for self and others. As Gatto
suggests, it is exactly the point of schools to teach the opposite of all
these things, whatever they claim or even believe themselves, in order to
create standardized products that can then be used as workers or soldiers.
Structurally, you would need more of a peer experience to teach those four
things, with a broad experience across a network of peers of different
abilities and different strengths and weaknesses (and peer as in people of
all ages, not peer as in someone of the same age). Obviously, this does not
mean children don't need some adult supervision and guidance by family,
neighbors, mentors, and so on -- the issue is more what sort of life the
guides are guiding the kid through, a life in Terrafoam or a life in the
vanishing remains of a peer-based society and functional neighborhoods
(which ideally would be rejuvenated, including by the presence of children
on the sidewalks again).

Then, we can dispense with the childcatchers we pay so well in the USA:
   http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=childcatcher
and justify with this sort of rhetoric:
   http://www.ehow.com/how_2081395_become-truant-officer.html
"School truancy is when a student is absent from school without permission.
Truancy can be a serious problem, especially when children are left alone
with no adult supervision. At worst, truancy can lead to violent crime. At
least, it can lead to an unsuccessful, unproductive life. Read on to learn
how to launch your career as a truant officer."

See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to
prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be
imprisoned. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and
families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very
neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets
that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully
destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling
instead of napalm.

It is questionable to me if one can integrate such learning about those four
things into schools intended for narrow age ranges. And those four things
are just a tiny part of becoming a whole person, to begin with, as their
complements are needed too, stuff like learning when it is OK to be good
enough or even not good enough, learning to think compassionately, learning
to function in a variety of social contexts including transforming
authoritarian regimes like mainstream schools into democracies, and learning
when to disrespect the disrespectful. This might be possible if schools
change to be more intrinsically democratic. They also would need to change
to support "learning on demand" like via the internet instead of "learning
just in case" via a formal curriculum (curriculum literally means a race
track for chariots in Latin).

But nothing about age-based schools can be done in terms of addressing the
central problem of locking kids away from the rest of society, even though
the kids have done nothing wrong except to be guilty of youth. The young
imprisoned in Terrafoam schools miss out on learning from the old, and the
old miss out on the energy and enthusiasm and zest for life and for learning
of the young. An alternative is that public schools might get somewhat
better if they became more like public libraries, where any peer could come
and go as they wished to learn specific skills that they were interested in
learning for their own reasons.

Then the educational aspect would be separated from the terrafoam
imprisonment aspect. If parents needed their children imprisoned while they
worked, like because no one was around otherwise to help guide their
children, and they did not have a  basic income to pay for childcare
assistance, then a separate system could emerge to do just that. Perhaps
this guardian system would bring children to a variety of different
locations during the day, including these public library-like schools. That
is what one can see now at many museums, with kids all wearing the same
color t-shirt go to museums as groups. By separating the educational and
imprisonment aspect of current schooling, at least everyone would know there
were institutions in society devoted to teaching peers, and anyone, even
children, would have access to them if they could slip away from their robot
guards for a moment. :-)

Such an system would at least allow the word "truancy" to fade from use and
become a laughable idea, both that some kid would not spend all the time
they could at school if they wanted to learn something, and also that public
schools would lock their doors or track their visitors or require attendance
any more than public libraries do.

Another alternative to the formalism of terrafoam schools entirely is
"unschooling":
   http://www.unschooling.com/library/essays/index.shtml
Though even it has its issues and cult-like aspects. Most families need to
find their own balance between structure and disorder. :-)

We have chosen to homeschool. Here is an imaginary conversation with our
school superintendent that I will never have because, frankly, I am afraid
of these people who have so much power over our family. And also, they
likely know enough to never ask.

"Superintendent: Well, this is a fine school, why do you want to homeschool?"
"Me: Well, it sure looks nice. I'd love for it to be a place to visit when
we wanted to, to learn specific things, like a public library."
"So, why not send your child here? We have small class sizes and very caring
teachers?"
"Well, that's all true, but you see, are there any scientific studies that
the hour of nightly homework you assign each child helps their life success?"
"No, but that does not need to be tested; the benefit is obvious, like
handwashing by doctors between patients."
"Well, are there any scientific studies about the value of grading?"
"Oh come now, the value of grading is as obvious as the fact that the Earth
is round. This is nonsense to question it. How could a school function
without grades? We need to know how each child is doing statistically so we
can plot their course through life."
"Well, can you show in any way that a kid who goes through the school system
in New York State is better off with a High School diploma, than getting a
half million dollars when they turn eighteen?"
"A half million dollars? Where did that come from? You think our society has
so much wealth it can just hand a kid a half million dollars when they turn
eighteen? Why, our school budget was voted down just this year and we are on
austerity. Clearly there is not enough to go around. School is the only
thing holding this community together."
"But maybe if every family could just use the school building as a hangout
place when they wanted, then it could be like a community center for everyone?"
"But then how would children learn anything?"
"They'd learn from their parents, from friends, from relatives, from
neighbors, from the community."
"That suggestion would leave children incapable of surviving in modern
society. Do you have any idea how hard it is to teach a child to read or do
basic math?"
"One hundred contact hours with a peer who knows those skills, according to
John Holt, fifty for each, to get up to a level where they improve on their
own."
"That's nonsense, we spend thousands of contact hours to teach those things.
And it takes a trained specialist to do it right in the classroom. Clearly
if you care about your child's life success, you will send them to school
where we can teach them based on the latest scientific standards."
"And do you have any evidence those standards help kids learn important life
lessons is self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity,
love, and service to others?"
"Oh, come on, it is obvious you can only learn that kind of stuff by
thousands of hours sitting at a desk in a classroom. That's how I learned 
them. And just recently our fifth graders raised $100 to give to charity by 
selling cookies. So, we're teaching all sorts of important stuff, like the 
importance of money and sugar to a good life."
"Well, do you teach technical literacy in reading blueprints like Lego
plans? Or do you teach botanical literacy like knowing what plants are safe
to eat? Or do you teach social literacy in terms of getting along with all
sorts of people of different ages? Do you teach physical literacy in terms 
of knowing how much a rock weighs, or how water moves in a sandbox?"
"We don't have time for that kind of stuff. We have to teach kids to pass 
important standardized tests done with paper and pencil."
"And is their any substantial correlation between standardized test scores 
and life happiness or lifetime productivity? And is there anyway to prove 
that schools have much to do with any such correlation if there is one?"
"What a silly question. Of course there is, the value of standardized 
testing and standardized minds is as obvious as the fact that 
heavier-than-air aircraft can fly. You would know all this stuff if you had 
attended a good school. This all makes me question your ability to home 
educate if you can't see these obvious truths, stuff as obvious as the 
importance of handwashing, the earth being spherical, and airplanes being 
able to fly. This is the kind of stuff we teach kids so they don't need to 
waste time figuring out these issues for themselves, and so they can go on 
to do more important things in their lives than puzzle for a long time over 
basic facts or how they were discovered. There are literally thousands of 
facts we need to teach kids just in case they need to know them when they 
get a job."
"But do you really think that by the time a pre-schooler of today graduates 
from college and graduate school in about twenty years, with computers about 
a million times faster than today, fast enough to do a lot of things humans 
do and run robots that can do most physical labor, and with the spread of 3D 
printing that is available even now, that there will even *be* any jobs in 
any recognizable form, especially ones based on knowing a lot of facts that 
can be looked up on the internet when one wants to know them?"
"Oh, that's just speculation about faster computers and robots. I don't have 
time for that. I have to plan for the future of my students as workers and 
soldiers. It's a lot of work and I don't get the feeling you appreciate it 
enough."
"But even the military is saying how it needs flexible creative minds to 
solve global security problems. Is it possible to learn to be flexible and 
creative if you never have a chance to practice those skills?"
"We have lots of creativity here. We had a science fair last year where kids 
were assigned the task of coming up with a science experiment and making a 
presentation about it. Sure, a couple kids did not want to do that 
assignment and wanted to do something else, but we gave them bad grades and 
they learned an important lesson about how important creativity is. Our best 
project was a kid who developed a laser mounted to a robot that could be 
used to blind terrorists and other enemies of the state. That shows a lot of 
skill. So, I just don't see where you are coming from on this."
"But, you mean, you're giving them rewards for building killer robots? But 
these kind of weapons would spell doom for all of humanity... And you're 
also teaching them competition with their peers instead of cooperation..."
"Look, you really just don't understand what goes on in modern schools at 
all. Our economic system is based on competition, and we get kids to be 
cooperative enough to fit into a factory workplace. Look, let us have your 
child for a few years, just to learn the basics, then you can make a more 
informed decision based on first hand experience of our school system. Sure, 
it is more money in our budget for every child that we can help, but it is 
not like it really cost you much of anything directly. And otherwise you'd 
be missing out on that $20,000 a year we have to spend to help your kid. 
It's just foolish not to want to take advantage of all the resources here 
intended to help your child become well adjusted to modern society. And you 
want your kid to fit in with all the other kids the same age, right? You 
want your kid well socialized, right?"

And I imagine the conversation would spiral downward from there... :-(

But, maybe not. :-) I have no doubt that as an individual, the 
superintendent of my local school district is a wonderful person. He's just 
fallen in with a bad crowd of other caring well meaning people. People like 
me. :-)

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