[p2p-research] Fwd: Re: Growing the 21st Century Economy (more schooling?)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> These are ways to deal with joblessness:
> * temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and
> when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or
> be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount
> that has doubled in the last two years).
> * government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, 
> research,
> medicine, etc.)
> * a "basic income" for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid
> for all with no means testing. See: http://www.usbig.net/
> * improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening
> * a gift economy (like Wikipedia and GNU/Linux)
> * a shorter work week (like tried in France)
> * increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the
> current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst)
>   http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
> * more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool)
> * more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor
> pool)
> * more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and
> kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool)
> 
> Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of
> all those is what we have now.

I'm rather proud of the list of alternatives I've been accumulating. :-)

I feel that list is defining the landscape better and better, and showing 
connections between things that don't usually seem connected.

Looks like Obama has just pushed for more schooling. :-(
"Obama plan to lengthen kids' school days, shorten summer vacation could 
stress them out: experts"
http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2009/09/29/2009-09-29_obama_plan_to_lengthen_kids_school_days_shorten_summer_vacation_could_stress_the.html

which as one person suggests on slashdot would reduce the need for summer 
jobs in a down economy (and I'd add, be a public works program to give 
people jobs as teacher/guards):
"Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/29/228236/Obama-Makes-a-Push-To-Add-Time-To-the-School-Year

A lot of related news articles right now:
http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&cf=all&ncl=d4C6AGurOJpus4MGC1NjRC6Bp9DBM

Example, which is funny because this proposal would create jobs and reduce 
unemployment (even if I don't like it):
"Extended School Year Would Have Dire Economic Effects, Critics Say"
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/28/obamas-extended-school-year-dire-economic-effects-critics-claim/
"But while Obama's proposal is meant to improve education, critics say a 
curtailed summer vacation will have a dire economic impact on school 
systems, which could be forced to retrofit their schools for air 
conditioning, pay overtime to teachers and incur higher utility costs. They 
also warn that the leisure industry, which relies on family vacation travel, 
could take a major hit. "Fewer vacation days will dry up the industry's 
labor source and lead to huge losses of revenue for American hotels and 
resorts," said Joe McInerney, president and CEO of the American Hotel and 
Lodging Association."

But they, indirectly, make a good point in the sense that all initiatives 
have people who pay the costs (here, taxpayers, children with wasted lives, 
more dissolving families, and teachers developing stress disorders, given 
what John Taylor Gatto says on schooling) and people who get the benefits 
(not sure who that is? basically the wealthy because there is less unrest by 
less who are unemployed? but, also, providers of air conditioners, text 
books, those who need teaching jobs or the alternative is worse, electricity 
providers, janitors who need work, and others.)

Anyway, it's unfortunate that the mainstream media still can not disentangle 
the notion of "schooling" from "education", given the two are usually very 
different things.
   "How public education cripples our kids, and why" By John Taylor Gatto
   http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
"""
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in 
some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. 
Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often 
did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said 
the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They 
said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They 
said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly 
weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers 
were every bit as bored as they were.
    Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has 
spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, 
the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, 
the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get 
bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even 
that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year 
compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as 
school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than 
those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
   We all are. ...
   Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: 
six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. 
Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide 
behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million 
happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even 
if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went 
through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they 
turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas 
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were 
not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" 
from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally 
didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like 
Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and 
Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, 
like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the 
age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who 
co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with 
her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably 
claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but 
not uneducated.
   We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 
"success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but 
historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. 
And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate 
themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools 
that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse 
education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public 
schools?  ...
"""

One other thing that more schooling will mean, given schools tend to ban 
electronic communications, is less p2p. So, this is actually a skillful blow 
of resistance by the status quo against a p2p future, by keeping kids away 
from meshworked p2p communications technology through forcing them to spend 
in hierarchical authoritarian settings where p2p (like cell phones) is 
generally banned and any other access to things like Facebook or other 
social media restricted.
   "Court Upholds School Cellphone Ban"
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/court-upholds-school-cellphone-ban/
"""
It might feel a bit like déjà vu, but it’s official – no cellphones allowed 
in public schools. The Appellate Court has ruled that the Department of 
Education has the right to enforce a cellphone ban, despite the outcry from 
students and their parents.
   The battle has been waged for several years, with parents claiming that 
it was a violation of constitutional rights and that because they were 
unable to reach their children by phone, their safety was being endangered.
   The court ruled squarely in favor of the city, stating that: “Nothing 
about the cell phone policy forbids or prevents parents and their children 
from communicating with each other before or after school.
   “The Chancellor reasonably determined that a ban on cell phone possession 
was necessary to maintain order in the schools.”
"""

What is interesting (in a sickening way) is how, in the USA, democracy is 
eroded piece by piece. It is rarely a frontal assault, it is just removing 
any chance for democratic processes to take place. So, there are "free 
speech" zones that are cages. There are times for dissent, but they are 
never now. You can talk via skype or email, but it may or may not be 
monitored and recorded by third parties (including the government). And in 
this case, children have access to social media and telecommunications, 
except when they are going to school, at school, or coming back from school 
(most of their day). LIkewise, US adults live in a democracy, except when 
they are awake and spend most of their time at work:
   http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"""
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have 
rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we 
are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no 
matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. 
State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The 
officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or 
private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report 
regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
   And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern 
workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament 
totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any 
moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American 
workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office 
or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and 
others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and 
their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A 
worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, 
and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how 
fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, 
if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the 
bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no 
reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a 
dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as 
if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it 
disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily 
endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in 
school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their 
supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who 
work?
"""

Anyway, the point of this list is in part to show how, as as society, there 
are many choices we can make about where on this landscape of possibilities 
we want to be. Apparently, the current administration is choosing to keep 
children in day prisons euphemistically called "schools" for longer to solve 
the jobs crisis caused by automation and better design. It is a very 
unfortunate choice, and the list shows that there were many other options 
open to helping the USA deal with this situation.

One thing I meant to put in that letter and did not was the fact that the 
USA workforce was 90% agricultural two hundred years ago, but is only 2% 
now. And the USA workforce was 30% manufacturing fifty years ago, but is 
only 12% now. But, what this also leaves out is that those were long hours 
on the farms. And kids were working hard on the farms, in the mines, and in 
the factories. So, schooling is part of not only getting children to accept 
18th century industrialization, but to keep them out of the workforce. That 
may be a good thing if they would be otherwise exploited or injured; but as 
Gatto points out it is a bad thing if kids are just given meaningless 
busywork and have no chance to learn useful productive skills that let them 
feel good about their ability to contribute to their communities. The entire 
structure is failing as we are reaching the point where the only solution is 
to have everyone in schools (prisons) all the time in order to prevent any 
other sort of change.

Related cartoon:
http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=CMUWXKEKTMEU9PNVB77UXF2VTPDS17UC&sitetype=1&sid=131308
"“I turned five. That’s why I’m here. What are you in for?”  (A 
kindergartner in a school bus talks to another child as if they were in jail.) "

Smart kid. At least, until school has a chance to work on him.

Gatto's latest 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
"""
"In this book, the noisy gadfly of U.S. education takes up the question of 
damage done in the name of schooling. Again he touches on many of the same 
questions and finds the same answers.  Gatto is a bold and compelling critic 
in a field defined by politic statements, and from the first pages of this 
book he takes even unwilling readers along with him. In Weapons of Mass 
Instruction, he speaks movingly to readers' deepest desires for an education 
that taps their talents and frees frustrated ambitions. It is a challenging 
and extraordinary book that is a must read for anyone navigating their way 
through the school system." - Ria Julien - Winnipeg Free Press
   John Taylor Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of 
familiar schooling that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, 
and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization 
drills. Gatto’s earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put that now-famous 
expression of the title into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass 
Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against 
schooling.
   Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational 
and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by 
Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the 
term “education” is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by 
necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of 
pedagogy is to render the common population manageable.
   Realizing that goal demands that the young be conditioned to rely upon 
experts, remain divided from natural alliances, and accept disconnections 
from the experiences that create self-reliance and independence.
   Escaping this trap requires a different way of growing up, one Gatto 
calls “open source learning.” In chapters such as “A Letter to Kristina, my 
Granddaughter”; “Fat Stanley”; and “Walkabout:London,” this different 
reality is illustrated.
   John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years in public schools before 
resigning from school-teaching in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal 
during the year he was named New York State’s official Teacher of the Year. 
Since then, he has traveled three million miles lecturing on school reform.
"""

So, what does peer-to-peer education look like? (Where peers are not 
strictly defined as age-peers?) This mailing list? :-)

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