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

[Ryan Lanham]

I think P2P education for the workforce (a topic I think about everyday at
some length) looks a lot like a Make Magazine laboratory with people sharing
knowledge by publicizing their capacities and then offering to transfer them
to those who can understand them, and improve through electronic means, the
quality of their delivery.  In the new world everyone must be a teacher and
a learner.  And we need ways to bridge between informal and formal learning.

Ryan

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:17 AM, Paul D. Fernhout <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
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>



-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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