Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency
From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com>
To: arch <gnu-arch-users@gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <87actzvpnb.fsf@cenderis.demon.co.uk>
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	<87ekjcswdn.fsf@tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <418765A9.2040206@diku.dk>
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> Zenaan Harkness <zen@cashpoolcomps.com> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > * 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).
> 
> If some unschooled people are wealthy and successful, how many aren't?

Today, massive numbers. In 1850 the US was at it's height of freedom and
liberty for those within its borders. The common man was well educated,
though almost entirely unschooled. Educated means able to communicate
with subtlety and finesse, being wide read (and difficult texts, read in
the early teens, which today you're lucky to see in _any_ university
course, let alone "high" school education - sorry, you'll have to go to
Gatto for details).

> And how does that compare with people with good education?

The facts are, today Americans are far less educated than they were
before forced schooling entered existence in the US. If you can't
believe it possible, that is the clearest example of how little we are
really tought in school (some might consider history worthless; that
appears to be a held belief, given todays pedagogical menu).

> And is it really true that there are no home-schooled students
> (presumably "formerly home-schooled students") in prison?  Even in the

yes

And, it is also true that of those who are in prison for the worst
crimes (eg murder), they have the lowest literacy of all Americans -
many not being able to even read a fucking bus timetable! Imagine the
rage one would feel, having spent say 9 years at school, and the system
is such that you can't even get to that level of (extremely basic)
competance to live in modern society. Is it any wonder these people
resort to crime?

And if you believe that it is biological, that everyone fits in a bell
curve and these people happen to have fallen off that bad end of the
curve:

1) You don't know jack about history, and the almost Utopian reality the
US once was.

2) Forgive yourself, since you are simply a perfect product of the very
indoctrination of modern schooling.

(Speaking generally here, don't (whoever I'm replying to) take it
personally please.)

> US (which puts an extraordinary proportion of its population in
> prison, for a free country)?

Puts THE MOST in prison, per capita.

Americans aren't "bad". American's are systematized. American's are
reduced to bell curves. Americans are humiliated in the most formative
years of their lives. Americans are indoctrinated, are robbed of basic
skills such as effective reading (the 'new' (1950s) "symbolic"/
heiroglyphic technique, versus the old but oh-so-effective "sounds and
letters" technique) and mental arithmetic. Simple stuff that gives an
individual a sense of competance, achievement, self worth and personal
ability.

> If so, I find that quite remarkable: I'm
> surprised that it doesn't get more publicity.  (I assume it doesn't,
> anyway---it's the first time I've heard the claim, anyway.)

'Tis indeed remarkable. It has happened steadily over 150 years, and
given that we are mostly a product of the system ourselves, is why we
are pretty well blind to our own reality.

For those who're too lazy to click to it, but might like those two
paragraphs anyway, this might also surprize you:

---
http://members.iinet.net.au/~zenaan/zenaan/do-you-know-america.html
Do You Know America?
American Education
The following quotes are from The Underground History of American
Education, by John Taylor Gatto, former New York State and New York City
Teacher of the Year.

"Did the abstract and rather arcane discipline of Bionomics [a subject
born at Indiana University] have any effect on real life? Well, consider
this: the first formal legislation making forced sterilization a legal
act on planet Earth was passed, not in Germany or Japan, but in the
American state of Indiana, a law which became official in the famous
1927 Supreme Court test case Buck vs. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote the majority opinion allowing seventeen-year-old Carrie
Buck to be sterilized against her will to prevent her "degenerate
offspring," in Holmes' words, from being born. Twenty years after the
momentous decision, in the trial of German doctors at Nuremberg, Nazi
physicians testified that their precedents were American - aimed at
combating racial degeneracy. The German name for forced sterilization
was "the Indiana Procedure."

"To say this bionomical spirit infected public schooling is only to say
birds fly [Footnote 5]. Once you know it's there, the principle jumps
out at you from behind every school bush. It suffused public discourse
in many areas where it had claimed superior insight. Walter Lippmann, in
1922, demanded "severe restrictions on public debate," in light of the
allegedly enormous number of feeble-minded Americans. The old ideal of
participatory democracy was insane, according to Lippmann."

"[Footnote 5]: The following questions were put to schoolchildren in the
South Dearborn School District in Aurora, Indiana, in 1994, with which
they were asked to: Strongly Agree/Agree/Disagree/Strongly Disagree: "I
approve the practice of sterilizing the feeble-minded living in state
institutions," and "I think it is unacceptable to society to use medical
procedures to keep genetically defective humans alive so they can marry
and reproduce." "


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