Lord Vader said:
Unnecessary made up and contrived jargon and wordiness is the hallmark of the school teacher.
Where have I "contrived" jargon? Where have I "made up" words? If you are going to make accusations then back them up with demonstrable proof. You are the one keen to neologism and the use of such fanciful phrases as "corporatocracy". If anyone's coming close to 'making up' verbage it would be yourself.
I'm also curious as to why you take issue with a larger vocabulary. My experience has been that a more capable thinker, communicator and learner is someone that's ready to increase their capacity to communicate. Whether in learning new languages or in improving their grasp on their own language. I find your assault on the idea of one using their native language in the best way they can as being something inherently wrong as rather disturbing. I mean do you think it's GOOD that the average college graduate today leaves school with such a horribly small vocabulary? Are you advocating a minimalists aproach to communication? Is it best to just have everyone resort to binary communication?
College text books used in teachers colleges are bursting with them. It's actually comical to browse through one. They take "wordy" to a whole new level. It's like a little kid trying to sound like a chemistry text book!
Would a chemistry book be effective if it never endeavored to gain and use a level of jargon more apt to addressing routienly referenced concepts, ideas, objects and exercises? Can you imagine a chemistry book in which it had to forever give it's instructions in laymans terms? It would be like having to perform multiplication without using the format or terms standard to multiplication. Instead of 4x3 they'd have to write out 4+4+4 or 3+3+3+3. I mean the inanity (stupidity) redundancy and absurdity of such a view is agrivating and silly.
You think that by freedom I mean, "release someone into the woods and abandon them". :dizzy:
When you refuse to actualy clarify things yourself, when all you do is try to insult and demean efforts others make to understand your points more clearly, you end up with such opponents stating what they see your point to be. Your option now is to decide to clarify your view, that means more clearly defining what you've said, or you can role your eyes and make a statement like the one above. The statement effectively demonstrates the inanity of the proposed view of freedom, but does nothing to really distance yourself from it. You don't give any alternate view so, despite your presentation of such as absured, we have no other reference to what your true view is, and no substantive reason to believe that it is significantly different from the posited view as to warrent any less disdane.
On the planet I live on, people watch as their babies learn to crawl and then learn to walk - it's this process they do on their own.
So you don't think furniture, baby walkers, parents holding the hands of their childeren as they attempt to stand, availability of sustainable walls to lean on, examples of other walking humans, are items that should be utilized to aid in the development of this skill? Babies would learn to walk just fine even if all other adults around them only crawled?
There is no curriculum. There is no homework. There are no exercises or drills or grades. Just kids playing, parents playing with their kids, the scenario I thought every last human being was familiar with! Some ppl. attempted to employ "walkers", teaching them to walk before they learned to crawl, but that was revealed to actually be harmful, just as making a left handed person write with their right hand, and vice versa, actually harms the nerves of their arms.
Put another way, there is no coercion involved.
So you conceed outside intervention, parents. I think it's interesting that you find walkers to be potentialy harmful. To be true ANYTHING in incorrect proportions or applications, can be harmful. Parents can be harmful. Food can be harmful. People not learning to do things that do not naturaly come to them can be harmful. I'm not sure if you're aware of the fact that a good number of citizens in the world think it's just fine to releave themselves whenever and just about wherever they feel like it. A friend of mine that worked for som time in Taiwan noticed a young woman in a culturaly normal dress, as naturaly as she could, squated down close to the ground for a few seconds, got up without any fanfare or care from those that were all walking about and proceeded to walk away from her just deposited pile of solid human waste. Now there's freedom. No artificial restraint from some outside coercive force. Freedom. And boy did it teach my friend that witnessed it alot. I guess you are correct. Freedom does breed "learning". But all that comes from the fact that, in much of chinese culture, they've simply never seen public, random, defication, as a problem that's needed to be remidied. Many babies, in many areas in China, are dressed in clothing specificaly designed for ease in defication. No mass coercive use of those damned restraining diapers! No sir. FREEDOM (and learning!) Yes freedom from having to ever change babies diapers or purchase them or clean them (yes some people in the world still have to use cloth!). What knowledge enducing freedom from mass coersive measures. Brings to mind the cursing of one ficitonal Homer Simpson--"Stupid lack of public urinals!"
I use the word, "supportive". It takes a lot less time to type. What do unschooling parents do? They're supportive. That's all. It's natural. When someone needs your help, you help them. Isn't that easy enough to intuit? I feel like if I left you to unschool, after telling you that there isn't the coercion of schooling, that you'd sit by and ignore a kid who can't reach the faucet, smarmily commenting that "you're learning in freedom now, you're on yer own" leaving the kid to mutter to himself, "dumba**".
Ahh yes. I'm sure the kid learned the term "dumba**" from the "supportive" friends that help him when he asks for it but otherwise leave him be. Sounds like some gangs I've heard described. Kids get sick of their parents wanting the best for them to the point of "coercive" means of education so they turn to a slightly less, in their short sighted perspective, "coercive" group. Heck, no one telling them when to go to bed, what to watch or not watch. Yes, a libertarian dream, plenty of learning in those liberal centers.
Wow. That's what you think the phrase, "learn in freedom" means!
As I mentioned, your refusal to fully engage in constructive discussion demands that I'm left to guessing what you mean by using powers of deduction. You be more willing to provide clarification rather than unsupportable attempts at denegration and we might get further.
In other words, kept inside a school building all day.
I never said that nor is it what I advocate. But a kid who thinks he never has to commit to an unpleasent location and task for extended periods of time never really has a prayer at developing skills needed to survive and thrive, so regardless the morality of their actions they will be weeded out via social darwinism---unless there's enough of them--then you have a society similar to the arch-typical old Russian commune--forever free and equitable yet never acheiving any type of marked prosperity.
Unless it's the kind of society that requires most of all that you obey orders; which is the only thing you learn how to do in school.
That's all simple minds learn to do whether they're left at home to "freely learn" or if they are placed in some governmental entity. The truth is that those who are, and strive to be, truely wise will grow and learn despite the inherent trends found in they're current environments.
But employers don't want that - hence the impetus to offer classes, CLASSES, in critical thinking skills! How do you turn someone off of something?
I'll be the first to admit that the current paradigms used in most of public education are not terribly wonderful motivators or purveyors of the stated intended purposes. I'd direct you to the following for a reference to the problems that have often, and greatly, infected learning and administrative endeavors from the dawn of humanity. I think you'll find much of this to be agreable to your view of education. Here's an excerpt from the article, it's talking about the difference in society between managers and leaders.
The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and being first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.7
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and even counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
"If you love me," said the greatest of all leaders, "you will keep my commandments. "If you know what is good for you," says the manager, "you will keep my commandments and not make waves." That is why the rise of management always marks the decline, alas, of culture. If the management does not go for Bach, very well, there will be no Bach in the meeting. If the management favors vile sentimental doggerel verse extolling the qualities that make for success, young people everywhere will be spouting long trade-journal jingles from the stand. If the management's taste in art is what will sell--trite, insipid, folksy kitsch--that is what we will get. If management finds maudlin, saccharine commercials appealing, that is what the public will get. If management must reflect the corporate image in tasteless, trendy new buildings, down come the fine old pioneer monuments.
http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=transcripts&id=125
Force them to do it. Hence the loss of interest in math and science, and oh, look, America is having an increasing problem with science illiteracy.
An even greater problem to the promotion of science and math is that we are trying to keep kids "free" from the worries and stresses of global competition. They live a life provided by many a scientist, engineer, and analytical mind, yet they are not permited to see the real obsticals that are heading toward them. They are given the illusion that they are intitled to things, they blur the line between 'freedom' and entitlement. They think that certain things are freedoms when they are really just socialist cushions that blind them to the fact that their current good life is more a result of a mortgaged future than it is simply a manifestation of the 'freedoms' they're 'entitled' to. Kids think that they can just sit at home and be "free" to "learn" whatever they "feel like" learning. Thus their false sense and conseption of "freedom" inherently leaves our kids entering the worlds work force thinking that they are as good as the rest of the world when they are generaly woefully behind it. In India and China kids are motivated by the fact that they are not "free" from the inconveniences of economic reality. They are restrained in their search for, and work in, obtaining an education. They are not free and they know it--so they work for it. Americans think they are free, so they do not work for it. Our real problem with a lack of motivation is not the forcing of kids to do math or reading, it is disconecting such from it's real future implications. If kids were shown what they could expect in the globalized market place when the socialist nets finaly fail they would have all the motivation they would need to actively try and learn on their own.
Unless we become as regimented as, say, Japan, we won't be able to compete. But first we have to shed our "Americanness"; that left over sense of liberty from Thomas Jefferson, before we can become complete robots (a society stricken with porn addiction -like manga- rampant alchoholism, child and teen and adult suicide... but quite economically formidable with all the other robot countries).
You fail to see what made Jefferson great. You are distorting Jefferson's views as to what is and isn't the best for learning in the same way that the French distorted the views of what a proper, and productive, revolution would concist of. I doubt you yourself would last more than a week in the America that Jefferson visualized.
Businessmen see the easy way out, making a society of robots - and people forget that America became the most advanced nation the world had ever seen in under 100 years after it's birth because people were free, not because they toiled like automatons in factories and education centers. That's not the recipe for innovation and real work.
The people were free from delusions about what freedom really is. They were freed from the concept of freedom as being the forced egalitarian "brotherhood" that the likes of france envisioned. They realized that freedom meant working WITH the limitations of nature rather than merely ignoring them. They realized that a CAPITALIST system was the only, despite it's grand problems and vast deficiencies, waste, unfairness, and conflict, that could produce a surpluss. They fought for freedoms, nor freedoms FROM nature but freedom to SEE nature and to intellegenly respond to such. To design systems that would ever increase efficiency, productivity etc.. Sure it's produced some counter productive things, technological, ideological, or beurocratic "lock in". Sure we've had times, especialy now, when much of the system has, at the moment, lost sight of it's original aims and gotten stuck in the mantra and motions of mere self perpetuation. Does that mean the whole system, capitalism, socialy demanded universal access to at least some degree of education, are entirely wrong? You need to discern between the true enemy and the misdirected, bias induced, anger at the concept of mass coercive education.
What you don't seem to see is that America became what it is because of the fact that some americans did work, in some way or another, like robots. Hard work and work of some concistancy and value are what helped to make America what it is. The capacity to combine both hard laborious work and the occasional gift of inspiration are what enabled us to go forward, not just one or the other.
Of what? Inanity from you? Possibly.