Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency
From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com>
To: arch <gnu-arch-users@gnu.org>
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On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 09:05, Frank Pohlmann wrote:
> > * Zero home-schooled students are in prison.
> 
> I am not a great friend of schools as they exist
> today, but can you provide the source for this
> statement? Yes, I saw the link, but I dont have the
> time to read through the whole website:)

The link is a two (medium lengths) paragraph extract from Gatto's latest
book, which does not include the stats.

It's probably somewhere in the book, or pointed to in the book, but it's
a big book and I don't remember sorry, and I'm not about to go hunting
through the last 200 pages to find it, and it could have been one of the
first three books I read.

> > * Many (most?) of the wealthiest and most successful
> > people did not
> > matriculate, some (19th Century) doing little to no
> > schooling at all
> > (including America's founding fathers).
> 
> That is highly doubtful. Many were privately educated
> at tremendous cost. They might not have bragged about
> it, but nobody became a lawyer without some pretty
> serious study and education.

"Serious study and education" are entirely separate (and some would say
antithetical) to schooling. Yes the founding father's studied seriously.
There are extensive records of this (bigraphies, etc). _And_ at the
time, much of the US' free population was (similarly) very well read.

(Sure no TVs, but TV is actually much younger than the reduction in US
literacy that coincides with compulsory public schooling.)

> I am not in favour of
> compulsory schooling, but in the political arena it
> was and is fairly difficult to survive without formal
> schooling and subsequent university education.

Ahh, well now you're saying something I would tend to agree with, albeit
assuming your assumptions on what is "the political arena". Modern
politics (and modern consumption based economy and manufacturing) _is_
dependent on a predominantly-schooled populace.

It seems we're actually in agreement here...

> > Perhaps remember this: schooling, and education, are
> > two vastly
> > different things, despite the propaganda.
> 
> Of course they are. 
> 
> > 
> > Schooling has a purpose, and I put it to you that
> > it's not to educate,
> > liberate or provide for an active democracy.
> 
> Schools, it is true, have been in existence outside of
> democracy for millenia.

Please don't confuse schools in history, (most?) of which were more like
modern libraries (places free of the bell curve dunce caps of exams, the
personal ridicule of public exam scores, etc, etc), with the India
(ensuring cast system) -> Prussia (Germany; "Aryan race" theory) ->
modern US, schooling system. They are massively different, in various
ways.

> But I don't think it is
> possible to deliver broad-based education without it.

A study of post- US civial war, pre-compulsory schooling America refutes
this belief entirely.

America ranked 1st, the most literate nation in the world. A hundred and
fifty years later it now ranks 27th and is in decline. It seems to me
like the rise and fall of Rome.

(Again, you'll have to go to Gatto or other sources sorry - if you're
really interested, email me personally, and I'll keep you informed if I
come across data sources I think you might find interesting.)

> I am not an American and I only attended one semester
> in Berkeley, so I am not intimately familiar with the
> secondary education in the US.

I am not American either.

I thought Berkeley was a university (teritary level). I'm not talking
about tertiary, but primary, and secondary (high school) schooling.

cheers
zen


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