[p2p-research] Suggestions wanted for education to p2p practices and attitude

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> I work in an Education Ministry and can attest that you will get 8 ideas
> about how children should be educated for every 7 people.  About 1 out of 8
> won't be able to make up their minds between 2.

I half-agree with what you wrote here. :-)

Life is, as Manuel de Landa suggests, about an experimental balance between 
meshworks and hierarchies.
   http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

Part of the half-agreement is that anthropologists can tell us a lot about 
what it takes to have happy families and happy societies, and our current 
social framework in the USA is not it:
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent"
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/dp/0385483627
"Besides further opening my eyes to other cultures and other ways to raise 
babies, this book was most beneficial to me in emphasizing that evolution 
determines how the human race developed and why babies have the needs they 
do. People pushing in the 1950's and 60's for bottle feeding, putting babies 
face down to sleep, letting babies cry it out, putting babies in separate 
rooms to sleep, etc., not only did it without scientific evidence, they also 
were going against babies' biological needs, determined by millions of years 
of evolution. Now I think of evolution and what reasons babies have for a 
particular behavior when deciding how to deal with an issue."

I think we can make fairly well-informed an scientifically based statements 
about what human beings need to be happy. They are just counter to most of 
modern industrial consumerist society. And whatever the science says, I'm 
more likely to believe it when it syncs with compassionate intuition, which 
it more and more does about children.

And, it was an *intentional* tradeoff to harm children for industrial gains:
   "A conspiracy against ourselves"
   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.
"""

Many other US child rearing practices also flow from perceived industrial 
needs, including bottle feeding, day care, TV as a babysitter, and so on.

> But I think you raise a great question with no clear answers.  Here's the
> general problem:  What sort of world do you want to live in? 

As I wrote to someone else yesterday in regards to possible military 
deceptions, and how we would never know for sure about many things:

Once people are playing with smoke and mirrors, the whole system of trust 
needed to sustain mutual security and civilization is eroded. The deeper 
questions that remain, whatever the history of how we got where we are 
today, are:
* is this the society we *have* to build, and if not,
* is this the society we *want* to build?

Now, a lot of argument gets stuck on the first point. Such as, TINA, there 
is no alternative than the market as it is now with the current distribution 
of wealth directed to the military and guarding because, well, whatever the 
reason. And that then gets turned into a lot of personal decisions about 
what products to make and how to distribute them. Even by the non-profit sector.

It only when we get past the first implicit question, about whether things 
*have* to be this way, that we can get at the second or the one you raise.

 > If you can
> answer that question, the follow-on question is...can people find their way
> to that conclusion with logic and reason, or do they need indoctrination?

That's a good question. But as you say below, we are social creatures. 
"Monkey see, monkey do" actually applies more to human children than 
chimpanzee children.

Consider, for example:
   "Who's in Control? The Unhappy Consequences of Being Child-Centered"
   http://www.continuum-concept.org/reading/whosInControl.html
"The crucial difference is that the Yequana are not child-centered. They may 
occasionally nuzzle their babies affectionately, play peek-a-boo, or sing to 
them, yet the great majority of the caretaker's time is spent paying 
attention to something else...not the baby! Children taking care of babies 
also regard baby care as a non-activity and, although they carry them 
everywhere, rarely give them direct attention. Thus, Yequana babies find 
themselves in the midst of activities they will later join as they proceed 
through the stages of creeping, crawling, walking, and talking. The 
panoramic view of their future life's experiences, behavior, pace, and 
language provides a rich basis for their developing participation. Being 
played with, talked to, or admired all day deprives the babe of this in-arms 
spectator phase that would feel right to him. Unable to say what he needs, 
he will act out his discontentment. He is trying to get his caretaker's 
attention, yet — and here is the cause of the understandable confusion — his 
purpose is to get the caretaker to change his unsatisfactory experience, to 
go about her own business with confidence and without seeming to ask his 
permission. Once the situation is corrected, the attention-getting behavior 
we mistake for a permanent impulse can subside. The same principle applies 
in the stages following the in-arms phase."

> I am personally of a mind that some level of indoctrination into social
> norms is inevitable.  We are social animals--and we will norm ourselves.
> Grammar, driving rules, ettiquette, learning credentials, etc. are all
> normative values.  In short, we govern ourselves.  Children must learn those
> rules.  Many don't do so and the consequences are often tragic.

However, anyone who really spends time with children:
   http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
   http://www.holtgws.com/
will tell you that kids do this naturally if they are given good examples to 
draw from, and time to play about them. The problem is, kid's don't get good 
examples, and then between school and broadcast TV, they have no time to play:
"Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? " 
http://www.childinst.org/news/91-can-the-right-kinds-of-play-teach-self-control
"In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be 
to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and 
play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break 
from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on 
cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction 
disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. 
When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was 
new and potentially important about the program. "We often think about play 
as relaxing and doing what you want to do," she explained. "Maybe it's an 
American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have 
fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete 
hedonism. What Tools does - and maybe what we all need to do - is to blur 
the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something 
is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn't 
mean it can't be fun.""

Though I think Chris Mercogliano's insights are even better:
   http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

In any case, raising children should not be an industrial process at this 
point, if it ever should have been.

> Ask any long-time teacher about kids from Montesorri or other "free form"
> education models, and they'll generally paint a portrait of outlier behavior
> that is very difficult to work with.  

Broadcast TV. Excessive sugar. Bottle feeding. Keeping infants in cages. 
Lack of sunlight and vitamin D. Food products instead of food. Stressed out 
parents. Broken families and broken communities. No kids on the streets anymore.

I'd say, start with fixing those before we start saying kids learning what 
they want when they want is bad. :-)

But sure, take kids who have been broadly abused by our society in various 
profitable ways (broadcast TV, sugar, etc.), and maybe, to make them sit 
still and take it, in child prison five days a week, maybe they do need to 
be abused more to make the rest of the evil system work? It's all so sick 
and twisted. The dysfunction is so deep and evil, and we have become so 
desensitized to it, accepting now that it is "normal" to take a young human 
being at five or six years old and make them sit in one place for six hours 
a day doing paperwork and being lectured at, that it is easy not to see the 
horror anymore. Plus, the teachers get rewards of getting money and seeing 
trained seals jump through hoops on command, so the teachers have trouble 
seeing it too. We're several generations into this escalating fiasco, so the 
teachers themselves don't know what it felt like to be a real child anymore 
either.

> Now, outliers obviously aren't a bad
> thing (most all of us on this list are probably pretty far out of the norm);
> they're just not an orderly thing. 

Every kid is an outlier in some way, or could be. So, we need 
individualized, learner centric, educational experiences. Just to begin 
with, information means more when connected to a child's daily life. So, 
beyond learning from doing in the home, see also:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place-Based_Education

> If part of your answer to the first
> question is...order and discipline (e.g. most Asian cultures, Germany, etc.)
> you're not going to have much luck with a Finnish system where there is
> little measurement, much collaboration and a great deal of emphasis on the
> group versus the individual.  I'd guess that the US offers the broadest
> diversity of choices from military academies to very free-form no grades,
> etc.

Good points.

> In general, schools around the world are well ahead of society on
> social acceptance, green behavior and training and routing out bullies.

Except that "the medium is the message". If you have an authoritarian 
setting, locked doors, teachers who give orders, compulsion to attend 
(contrast with the public library), then what are kids really learning?
   "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: ..."

What school models is how to be a bully, in a bureaucratic way.

How can one have "social acceptance" when the only society around one is 
kids of similar age? That is so dysfunctional a concept (see "Brave New 
World"), but so widespread by now, that we cannot even see it anymore. Kids 
grow up healthiest from a mix of ages, from babies to old people. Then they 
can become well developed social beings.

> Teachers are often left-leaning, well-educated and in middling social
> classes.  

And also usually terribly conformist in subtle ways:
   "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream"
   http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it 
and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, 
and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along 
the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. 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."

See also:
   http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"The anti-racist charge of white racism gives persons like Dan a way of 
addressing their moral failure of nerve without having to face a harder 
truth that they acted in racist ways not because they were racist but 
because they were afraid of being rejected. The charge of racism does not 
heal this condition or even describe it. It simply punishes a person for 
being broken."

Most school teachers, who replicate the systems they were brought up in, are 
broken people by that standard. They perpetuate an evil that may be worse 
than racism, the destruction of children's minds and souls. And they do it 
as unthinkingly as most people made racial comments and racial decisions in 
the USA in the 1800s. Because, if they thought about what they were doing 
very deeply, like John Taylor Gatto did, and worked hard to get rid of those 
habits of authoritarianism, they would not do it anymore. Or they might 
moderate their behavior with a better balance of authoritative behavior 
mixed with learning *from* children. They might still be *educators* (which 
we desperately need), but they would not be *teachers*.

As for left-leaning, so were the National Socialists in Germany. There can 
be a tyranny of the left, as well as a tyranny from the right. We need to 
transcend both IMHO, and come to some new synthesis of what is best in each 
of them, and add in stuff they both ignore.

> They indoctrinate to their own moral values.  In my view, the best
> schools in the world are Finnish and Norwegian schools--but those would be
> terrible models in a Singapore or Japanese cultural framework.  Cultures
> establish how people want to live...not schools.

They all interact. The way schools are set up reflects the actions of people 
in a certain culture. The schools then perpetuate certain ideas and 
attitudes. But the biggest thing most schools do is intentionally cripple 
children, using the seven lesson Gatto outlines above. Even if the origins 
of that structure have been lost in decades of past history, and most school 
personnel have plenty of justifications for what they do, as evil as it is, 
just like most racists have plenty of justifications for what they do. And 
many racists have made a good living at it, and not just by owning slaves.

> So a person it seems has to be judgmental.  

We all need to make judgments all the time, and use our judgment. Sure, 
"judgemental" is going too far, but that's part of good judgment. School is 
not very good at helping people learn how to have good judgment. And with 
parents at work, and the TV as a babysitter, and with most neighborhoods 
destroyed between the car and TV and work, who is to help the young learn to 
have good judgment? The churches? That just pits one hierarchy (the church) 
against another hierarchy (the state). But yes, a good church can help.

> You've got to decide you know
> better than others and that you are going to indoctrinate to your way of
> thinking.  

As I said at the start, there is a consilience of ideas from traditional 
culture, from science, from people who spent decades with actual children, 
and from compassionate intuition on this. Discussion about this is not as 
arbitrary as you make it seem.

But sure, you could frame "peer to peer" in those terms. :-) Thinking you 
have something worthwhile to say and saying it. :-)

 > Nation-states don't trust parents to do that well, by and large,
> so they establish strong normative standards and curriculums (e.g.
> Germany--where, as Paul says, homeschooling is illegal.)  Japan has the most
> rigid curriculum on earth.  It is almost robotic and the students turn out
> as people who tolerate intense crowds at train stations without breaking
> down, etc.  Some do crash and burn.  That's true in all systems.

Sure:
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance"
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm

> We have trouble in our little group here establishing P2P norms in a strong
> sense, so educating people to weak norms--terribly difficult with children
> in general--would be even harder.  

I don't think you can compare adult people's behavior on an electronic 
mailing list, when such mailing lists did not even exist for most people 
twenty years ago, with children learning social norms face-to-face in 
healthy communities.

 > Sharing is widely taught but one
> aggressive selfish child can turn a whole group rapidly.

What is your evidence for this? Where are the parents and family and friends 
and neighbors? Where are the years of learning how to deal with these sorts 
of issues, as above, through play?

Also, forced sharing is not sharing. It might be better to distinguish 
between shared big resources and gift giving on small things?

> Learning by doing is probably the best shot--with strong oversite and
> "enabling."  

Agreed. If we add the other aspect of good role models. Where are the P2P 
role models for kids?

Someone posted this to the OM list a while back:
"The critical delusion of the condition of digitisation or the prosecution 
of sharing and seduction"
http://hyperdrome.net/people/dafermos/21c3/delusion_of_digitisation.html
"Specifically, let us recall that Niklas Zennström, the CEO of Skype, – a 
major player in the rapidly expanding and highly competitive Voice-over-IP 
(VoIP) telephony business arena - is not allowed to set foot upon US 
soil.[1] Why would the US, with its long history of encouraging and 
rewarding new capitalist innovations, prevent the CEO of such an innovative 
and profit-making enterprise from entering its premises? The answer lies in 
the fact that Niklas Zennström is also the developer of Kazaa – one of the 
P2P networks that further led the 'napsterisation' of the music industry. 
Or, alternatively, remember that the developer of the Winnie P2P technology 
– has been put behind bars in Japan.[2]"

> Explain what a P2P system is, and hope students can find
> benefit in the application.  

How about a learning by doing exercise about team building and sharing?
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=cooperative+games

That's a deeper issue, schools teaching competition by celebrating it.
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm

Even the process of grading itself sends the wrong message:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
9.  Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other.  The quality of 
students’ thinking has been shown to depend partly on the extent to which 
they are permitted to learn cooperatively (Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Kohn, 
1992).  Thus, the ill feelings, suspicion, and resentment generated by 
grades aren’t just disagreeable in their own right; they interfere with 
learning.
  The most destructive form of grading by far is that which is done “on a 
curve,” such that the number of top grades is artificially limited:  no 
matter how well all the students do, not all of them can get an A.  Apart 
from the intrinsic unfairness of this arrangement, its practical effect is 
to teach students that others are potential obstacles to their own success. 
  The kind of collaboration that can help all students to learn more 
effectively doesn’t stand a chance in such an environment.
   Sadly, even teachers who don’t explicitly grade on a curve may assume, 
perhaps unconsciously, that the final grades “ought to” come out looking 
more or less this way:  a few very good grades, a few very bad grades, and 
the majority somewhere in the middle.  But as one group of researchers 
pointed out, "It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a 
'normal' distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure -- failure to teach 
well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the 
intellectual lives of students” (Milton et al., 1986, p. 225).
   The competition that turns schooling into a quest for triumph and 
ruptures relationships among students doesn’t just happen within classrooms, 
of course.  The same effect is witnessed at a schoolwide level when kids are 
not just rated but ranked, sending the message that the point isn’t to 
learn, or even to perform well, but to defeat others.  Some students might 
be motivated to improve their class rank, but that is completely different 
from being motivated to understand ideas.  (Wise educators realize that it 
doesn’t matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are 
motivated.  It is the type of motivation that counts, not the amount.)
"""

> Most parents will probably reject it.

Sadly, I agree that most parents have been so schooled and indoctrinated, 
they will have a tough time seeing any alternative.

Examples:
http://www.helium.com/items/1049501-the-case-against-unschooling
"""
As a homeschooling mother of four, I am mostly opposed to this method. I 
believe that it sets the child or children up for a rather harsh reality 
check later. There are no colleges or Universities that "unschool" and 
certainly no jobs that "unjob". There are, and always will be, rules and 
regulations that must be met and adhered to. That's just the way it is.
"""

Contrast with:
   http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the 
worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the 
little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- 
or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe 
in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in 
work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else."

> Realistically, getting along in the world requires something of a selfish
> and aggressive attitude.  

And you've been taught this by ... school? :-(

Let's say you're right. How big should your sense of "self" be? Fingertips? 
Body? Family? Neighborhood? Society? Ecosystem? Cosmos?

Against what targets, and in what ways, should you direct your "aggression"?
   http://www.antiwar.com/
   http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html
"""
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong...
And nothing you do seems very right?
"""

I'm pretty aggressive about vitamin D deficiency and stopping war these 
days, and how the two may even be connected. :-)

As well as mad about mental illness among the affluent: :-)
   "The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of affluence are generally presumed to be at low risk. However, 
recent studies have suggested problems in several domains—notably, substance 
use, anxiety, and depression—and 2 sets of potential causes: pressures to 
achieve and isolation from parents. Recognizing the limited awareness of 
these issues, the objectives in this paper are to collate evidence on the 
nature of problems among the wealthy and their likely causes. The first half 
of the paper is focused on disturbances among affluent children and the 
second half is focused on characteristics of their families and 
neighborhoods. Widespread negative sentiments toward the rich are then 
discussed, and the paper concludes with suggestions for future work with 
families at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum."

"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/
"Growing up in the culture of affluence can connote various psychosocial 
risks. Studies have shown that upper-class children can manifest elevated 
disturbance in several areas—such as substance use, anxiety, and 
depression—and that two sets of factors seem to be implicated, that is, 
excessive pressures to achieve and isolation from parents (both literal and 
emotional). Whereas stereotypically, affluent youth and poor youth are 
respectively thought of as being at “low risk” and “high risk,” comparative 
studies have revealed more similarities than differences in their adjustment 
patterns and socialization processes. In the years ahead, psychologists must 
correct the long-standing neglect of a group of youngsters treated, thus 
far, as not needing their attention. Family wealth does not automatically 
confer either wisdom in parenting or equanimity of spirit; whereas children 
rendered atypical by virtue of their parents' wealth are undoubtedly 
privileged in many respects, there is also, clearly, the potential for some 
nontrivial threats to their psychological well-being."

 > Much as I wish that weren't so, I don't expect
> anyone to rebutt the fact that most people believe in a merit-based,
> market-driven reality--even in so-called communist and socialist states.

There are worlds beyond money. It is the seventh law of money:
   http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Commerce/RATNA/june2.html
"7. There are worlds without money. They are the worlds of art, poetry, 
music, dance, sex, etc. the essentials of human life. The seventh law is 
like a star that is your guide. You know that you cannot live on the star; 
it is not physically a part of your life, but rather an aid to orientation. 
You are not going to reach this star, but in some sense neither are you 
going to reach your destination without it to guide you."

But even within a "merit-based, market-drive reality", we can talk about 
moving beyond rankism with a dignitarian movement that extends to children, 
and a basic income that extents to all.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism
   http://www.dignitarians.org/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Childhood
   http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

> Nationalism is, in my opinion, stronger today than it has ever been. 

Well, there are counter trends:
   http://www.blessedunrest.com/

> People
> live and die by state borders and citizenships.  

And they live and die by traffic laws. And they live and die by what they 
eat, and how much sunlight or vitamin D3 they get. So what?

Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces:
  http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm

 > Changing cultures is
> perhaps the most difficult process humans undertake.

Raising children well is probably harder. :-)

> So, it is a great topic, but I doubt there are answers.

Well, maybe, maybe not, but we can begin with by trying to ask useful questions.

What is the purpose of schooling? Who decides? What is its history?

Gatto raises these sorts of issues, in other free resources, or this new book:
"Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark 
World of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteachers-Compulsory/dp/0865716315

Or, as I mentioned here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html

People have envisioned alternatives in all sorts of ways. Some are mentioned 
in the above links.

It's a subject worth devoting a lot of time to exploring, because so much of 
what we have become, and so much of the artificial limits in our lives, one 
way or another, have come through schooling.

But, so many of the healthy roots in our lives have come from outside of 
schooling, which is getting harder and harder for most kids. Again from Gatto:
   http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
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.
"""

And then there is all the *money* that could be spent in other ways. :-)
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html


But, as you raise earlier on, it is a good question to think about how we 
want to live, and what kind of society we want to build. We know a lot more 
than we did 200 years ago when Prussian-style schooling began to be put in 
place, leading to global wars originating from schooling's place of origin
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm

Hopefully we can do better now. Many, many people are trying. Many are 
succeeding in various ways. But it's hard. Not just do you have to raise 
children well (something that takes a lot of time), but you have to protect 
them against many aspects of a dysfunctional industrial system, while still 
participating with them in healthy communities. It's very hard.

And whatever you do, you have to deal with the aftermath of a schooled society:
   http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"""
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now 
regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
    1. Gives Jane’s car a ticket before the meter runs out.
    2. Throws away Jane’s passport application after Jane leaves the office.
    3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates 
Bianca’s apartment from Jane’s while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for 
relief.
    4. All the above.
"""

See also:
   Video: "State Controlled Consciousness" by John Taylor Gatto
   http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most 
plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes 
stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better 
how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your 
grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off 
so adopted. But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the 
option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of 
friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers 
have reared the kid."

 > Ryan

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

> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 1:48 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> 
>> Greetings,
>>
>> here's a question: if you were preparing a proposal for education in
>> the 6-12 years age range, what would you write in it in order to
>> educate the children to a p2p-like attitude and practice with respect
>> to nutrition, (self) healthcare, protection of the environment? I
>> mean, what do you think the children should learn and how? Which
>> practices? Which success and failure stories (please let's keep in
>> mind the age range, that is use only simple examples in limited time,
>> only suggest things/activities that children that age may do
>> personally, etc...!)  should they know?
>>
>> Context: I am preparing a talk which should also touch the theme
>> above, and hopefully there will also be space for examples from other
>> parts of the world. Right after the event the talk will be published
>> with a CC license at http://mfioretti.com .
>>
>> Sorry for vagueness, but my schedule for the next days changed without
>> notice this morning (nothing bad) so I have to leave the computer
>> right now and don't know how much I'll be at home in the next hours/
>> days.
>>
>> Thank you in advance for any feedback
>>
>>      Marco
>>      http://stop.zona-m.net
>> --
>> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
>> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84