2002 08 28
Baby oysters are ready to start filter-feeding the moment they're born. A lion kitten won't be ready for independence for quite a bit longer. To the degree that lions are social creatures, the independence will never be total: a lone lion is a sorry critter, the more so if it's female: the females are "twice" as social as the males. Even social vegetarians — elephants, for example — have years of development to undergo, to endure, before they become a mature member of elephant society.Cooperating in groups is an old business. Bees and ants were at it long before there was such a human critter as an "Abel" or a "Cain." Bees have a kind of a "nursery": as do wolves, as do human-beans. "School" relates to ways in which man, the social creature, has corralled the young for periods of orientation, instruction, drill ... throughout the age of the species. I don't doubt that Cro-Magnon man sorted those who had undergone puberty from those who hadn't for certain occasions. Neither do I doubt that "boys" were separated from "girls" for even more occasions. I concede all of that: and yet insist:
Not only is school artificial, school is harmful: a pathology: a ruinously expensive pathology.
Such schools are incompatible with quality knowledge.
Such schools are incompatible with a quality society.
Such schools are intolerable for a spectrum of reasons.
2008 05 04
What's taught in schools is more akin on the one hand to propaganda, to brainwashing, than it is to knowledge. On the other hand, it's more akin to sheep herding, preparation for the abattoir, than practice for democracy.
Were we interested in education alone, mass-produced schooling would be an abomination.
I could, and still may, expand on the above points, but in this initial draft choose to proceed to this point: compulsory and universal schooling was not successfully resisted by those citizens of the nineteenth-century United States who allowed a half-assed Jeffersonian democracy to be transformed into an industrial fodder-feeder. The industrial captains and their lieutenants yanked the cloth from under the silver right while we were all sitting at table. Not bad as a magic trick (and just great for profits), but very bad for the health of the society. That's done: Indelible. What I see as worse:
FLEX literature was handed out on the streets of New York. Local, city wide, and national newspapers gave some publicity. News and interviews soon spread to radio and cable TV. Human resources began registering their availability. Would-be learners were writing and calling: to be put in touch with other learners or with "teachers" : their choice.
As the one actually trying to do it (as other learning networks in other cities, world-wide also opened for business (the Learning Exchange in Evanston having had Illich ties far longer than I), I envisaged a universal network: one whose scope would include Tierra del Fuego and the Aleutian Islands; but whose administration would remain decentralized: grass roots. I'll do NYC. Denis is doing Evanston. Once we hear from pks or Denises in Lima, in Seville, in Peking ... I'll hope to lead us in how we can interconnect. I saw my job, first, as being to actually start it, and second, to make sure, the best humanly possible (by this individual) to make sure that the institution, ideally publicly run as well as publicly financed, remained
pure. That is: no compulsion, no coercion may intrude: at the institutional level. That is, a teacher may compel students to, for example, read a particular book: just as a parent may; but there must be no social compulsion that any student must be a student of that coercive teacher. If you're coerced: it's voluntary. Either you entered the contract or your parents put you there and engaged in a contract on your behalf. Compulsion cannot be banished from human behavior so long as some humans are not yet adults. But compulsion should be tolerated only within the family; never by a state or a church.
I'll be back. I still haven't addressed the things that are the real target of this piece: schools, including universities, as a kleptocracy's way of assuring that certain ideas don't get discussed, that, like a church, schools have their own taboos, their own heresies: all unacknowledged by the (largely unconscious) participating censors.
I mention Abelard below. Abelard couldn't get a fair hearing in his own 11th century: he hasn't gotten one since. I can personally testify that his subject matter is still censored because Abelard's nominalism is a key part of my doctoral thesis that my university used a series of tricks to subvert: to prevent the clear presentation of. The Inquisition lives: but has gone secular!
There are now so many files on schools and schooling here at Knatz.com that a casual visitor may not be able to see how many trees there are or how many forests. Hitherto those files were concentrated in either of two directories: my FIX / FLEX directory (now Deschooling or the school experience section of my biographical narratives. Subsequently a third folder has further complicated things: additional school stories, stories that hadn't come in my original gush. Now I initiate this file and put it in my NoHier / Kleptocracy section as an overview from my current perspective. The FLEX directory is only just being moved to my new server. Next up there, perhaps even before the menu is renovated, will come my History of Universities [at my InfoAll blog].
Compulsion by Family vs. Compulsion by State
The right to coerce may be sub-contracted by a family member to someone outside the family. Eloise's father gave Abelard full-parental authority to be strict with her. Papa may not have liked the result once he learned that the priest was screwing Papa's teenager twelve ways from Sunday, but he had asked for it. And Eloise certainly seemed to like it.
M. Night Shyamalan's Hindu parents sent their son to a Roman Catholic school: not so that he would be Catholic; but so that he would experience strictness. And look at the result: he makes interesting films and makes them well: films in which some off-beat themes gain original treatment.
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