originally posted at http://celestialforum.net/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=59
The plan for salvation was and is a very complex matter. Aside from the plan itself, the circumstances for every individual are unique. Each spirit in the pre-mortal world was in a unique state of advancement and each spirit had a unique belief system. Regardless of where a spirit was in relationship to other spirits, the mortal world must be a custom fit for each spirit and take into account the progression or lack thereof of each individual spirit.
Upon entering mortality, each spirit would be placed in circumstances that fit his or her individual state of progression, but also a custom fit of obstacles and tests that would allow each individual spirit the unique set of circumstances that would best build upon the existing qualities and place circumstances in their path to best grow the areas that may need enhancement. This is an infinitely complex school that fully exploits existing knowledge and prepares the spirit for advancement in the areas that only mortality could provide.
To say that God treats each person the same would be incredibly stupid. Mortality is a school and every school has different grades and different levels of achievement in each grade and each student is unique. The school is designed to maximize the learning of each student and in order to be fair, must treat every student different depending on the unique needs of each individual student. Surely if God treated everyone the same, the whole plan would be a farce and be 100% Satanic instead of 100% Christ-like.
Only Satan and his followers are politically correct or treat everyone the same. The United States Constitution states that all men are created equal under the law, and rightly so. The speed limit applies the same to a negro as a white man.
Adam and Eve were of the same race. White and delightsome. As people's behavior changed, so did their circumstances. When Cain killed Abel, Cain's behavior produced a different set of circumstances for certain spirits to be born into. Building the Tower of Babel and the resulting creation of multiple races, introduced an additional infinite set of circumstances for spirits to be born into. One thing that can not be disputed is that every individual was unique and was treated accordingly.
Satan could cause dissent by convincing people that they were the same as someone else or that they should be treated the same or that they should be entitled to the same possessions even though they had not earned them.
In nature and with God, no two people are ever equal, not even identical twins. Only Satan and his followers are evil enough to believe otherwise.
In fact, God rewards those that excel and punishes those that are disobedient. The same is true of all loving parents. To suggest otherwise is evil.
But just because God has a chosen people, does not mean that those not chosen can not become chosen or likewise excel. People are not equal. Opportunity is equal, however. When a man passes his examination to become a doctor, he become chosen for that profession. Likewise, anyone else that passes that same test can achieve the same status as a result. It is earned. Not given to the undeserving like socialism or Satanism.
Since Satan has taken over the Department of Education, the Dept. of Energy, HEW, as well as the White House, our children must be taught who the enemy really is and what to do about it.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Sunday, November 2, 2014
H1N1 virus confirmed at Duchesne High School
Duchesne High School has reported that at least one student has been confirmed with the deadly H1N1 virus. The virus which originated in Mexico may have spread through the massive influx of illegal aliens into the NE Utah community to get welfare and food stamps and obtain work in the oilfields in order to funnel money out of the United States into Mexico.
Stan Young, the school principal has been unavailable for comment over the weekend. The school notified parents of the potential threat to their children via an automated system which calls hundreds of numbers at the same time and delivers a message. Normally, the system is used to get parents to donate more money to the school after the administration has exhausted normal channels to raise money. This time however, the message was more ominous with the realization that at least one student could potentially cause the death of another student.
H1H1 is a swine flu that somehow mutated to be able to transmit to humans. It normally is not fatal except to the immune suppressed, the elderly, and the very young. There are students at the school that are immune suppressed in order for their bodies to not reject an organ that has been transplanted in order to save their life. For these students, the infected student is an attempted murderer.
The school has not yet released the name of the infected student or even the race of the student so that people at risk can save their own lives by avoiding contact with the infected. The local newspaper has a tendency to not report even the outbreak, let alone anything about it. The newspaper actually refused to report that the school was dropping children off at a location out in the desert, miles from the closest home, in the weather, and with no shelter. Sometimes children walk several miles if their parents can't pick them up for some reason.
Some say the County is ripe for a lawsuit. They were ordered by the Court to pay $3.5 million last year in a discrimination case.
Stan Young, the school principal has been unavailable for comment over the weekend. The school notified parents of the potential threat to their children via an automated system which calls hundreds of numbers at the same time and delivers a message. Normally, the system is used to get parents to donate more money to the school after the administration has exhausted normal channels to raise money. This time however, the message was more ominous with the realization that at least one student could potentially cause the death of another student.
H1H1 is a swine flu that somehow mutated to be able to transmit to humans. It normally is not fatal except to the immune suppressed, the elderly, and the very young. There are students at the school that are immune suppressed in order for their bodies to not reject an organ that has been transplanted in order to save their life. For these students, the infected student is an attempted murderer.
The school has not yet released the name of the infected student or even the race of the student so that people at risk can save their own lives by avoiding contact with the infected. The local newspaper has a tendency to not report even the outbreak, let alone anything about it. The newspaper actually refused to report that the school was dropping children off at a location out in the desert, miles from the closest home, in the weather, and with no shelter. Sometimes children walk several miles if their parents can't pick them up for some reason.
Some say the County is ripe for a lawsuit. They were ordered by the Court to pay $3.5 million last year in a discrimination case.
Friday, September 5, 2014
New LDS Forum to come online
With the eternal war between good and evil about to reach it's prophesied climax, there are many LDS discussion forums on the Internet. There are every kind of apostate anti-mormon forums imaginable. Some throw a splash of freedom and politics, while others use the spice of Ordaining Women to the Priesthood or members excommunicated for supposedly simply asking the wrong question.
It's pretty hard to find an LDS Forum that is actually PRO LDS. One that isn't sponsored by the Church, that is. Some pretend to be pro LDS until you read some of their threads and find that their definition of LDS may differ considerably from yours.
Some forums have even become famous for banning members that support the Brethren or Follow the Prophet. In all the world, it is likely that the entire number of true LDS forums that are not run by the church can be counted on one hand.
One new forum to come online within the last 20 days is http://ldsfriendsandfun.freeforums.org/index.php and is comprised mostly of members that were banned from a site that pretends to be LDS, but is actually very much not.
Another site that is yet to go live is CelestialForum.net
It's pretty hard to find an LDS Forum that is actually PRO LDS. One that isn't sponsored by the Church, that is. Some pretend to be pro LDS until you read some of their threads and find that their definition of LDS may differ considerably from yours.
Some forums have even become famous for banning members that support the Brethren or Follow the Prophet. In all the world, it is likely that the entire number of true LDS forums that are not run by the church can be counted on one hand.
One new forum to come online within the last 20 days is http://ldsfriendsandfun.freeforums.org/index.php and is comprised mostly of members that were banned from a site that pretends to be LDS, but is actually very much not.
Another site that is yet to go live is CelestialForum.net
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Why political correctness is so evil
http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/1-common-link-among-worlds-most-brutal-terrorists/
Radical Islam expert Brigitte Gabriel says ISIS is capable of anything from shopping-mall shooting sprees to nuclear attacks in the U.S. and believes the best way to ward off calamity is for Americans to wake up their elected officials and demand they “throw political correctness in the garbage can” and confront the radical threat as it truly exists.
Actually, Political Correctness and tolerance are among the most evil things on the earth. For instance, we could stop black on white crime pretty quick by becoming intolerant and killing the lazy, welfare recipient, parasites wherever we find them. Likewise, we never should have quit calling blacks, niggers, until they first stop calling themselves niggers.
Instead of being mamsy pamsy pansies, we should treat blacks like the niggers they are until they begin to act differently.
Radical Islam expert Brigitte Gabriel says ISIS is capable of anything from shopping-mall shooting sprees to nuclear attacks in the U.S. and believes the best way to ward off calamity is for Americans to wake up their elected officials and demand they “throw political correctness in the garbage can” and confront the radical threat as it truly exists.
Actually, Political Correctness and tolerance are among the most evil things on the earth. For instance, we could stop black on white crime pretty quick by becoming intolerant and killing the lazy, welfare recipient, parasites wherever we find them. Likewise, we never should have quit calling blacks, niggers, until they first stop calling themselves niggers.
Instead of being mamsy pamsy pansies, we should treat blacks like the niggers they are until they begin to act differently.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
One man's peaceful visit to Idaho
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t300944/
Let me tell you what a great time I recently had in Idaho! I flew from near my home to Spokane and rented a car for my time in North Idaho.
One of the first and most obvious differences of life in an all-White area came at the gas pump. In "multi-cultural paradise", one must pre-pay for all gas. That's because of all the filthy subhumans who drive-off, without paying, after they fill their tanks. That practice raises the price, nationwide. In North Idaho, there is no need for the pre-pay system, because (like everywhere else) the vast majority of Whites are law abiding. It simply isn't a problem there. I spent a good chunk of my first full day in the company of Contact #1 and enjoyed myself immensely! We went to a great restaurant, where I ate a delicious elk steak with mushroom gravy. The restaurant had a huge buffalo head mounted on the wall, along with the heads of deer, elk and other examples of Idaho wildlife. After that, I spent a few hours talking with Contact #1 and enjoying the sights and smells of North Idaho. There wasn't much in the way of sound, compared to all the noise one would associate with a large city. That was just fine with me.
After my visit with Contact #1 concluded, it was late afternoon. I then decided to make the relaxing and refreshing drive from the Coeur D'Alene area north to Sandpoint. The drive consists of forty-five miles of beautiful scenery. One pine-covered mountain, after another. I saw a herd of buffalo grazing near their ranch. I shared the road with huge lumber trucks, carrying the trunks of huge trees that would never be missed, where so many remained. I saw a bald eagle in flight, along that stretch, last year. Just outside of Sandpoint, I crossed a bridge spanning two miles over the juncture of the Pend Oreille (pronounced "pond-o-ray") River and Lake Pend Oreille. The lake glistened, as the sun began its descent. I drove and walked around Sandpoint for about an hour, before making the trip back to Coeur D'Alene. I grabbed a quick dinner, returned to my hotel and went to bed, feeling blissfully content.
The next day, I made the same drive and continued beyond Sandpoint, east to Clark Fork and then a few miles into Montana (just so I could say I've been there). The drive from Sandpoint to Clark Fork contains scenery even more spectacular than that which exists between Couer D'Alene and Sandpoint. Mile after mile of mountains and the massive Lake Pend Oreille. A few of the mountains consisted of jagged gray rock, but most were covered in pine trees. Some of the mountains were capped with snow.
I felt a year's worth of stress dissipate, as I made that drive. However, my feelings of decompression were augmented by a sense of "survivor's guilt", as I reflected upon all of the recently murdered Whites whose names had been added to cemetery headstones (more than a few of which were also added to the memorial wall honoring fallen law enforcement officers). I mentally superimposed their faces upon the mountains and wished they could be sitting next to me, as I drove...
My final full day in North Idaho included another drive to Sandpoint, followed by a stroll through downtown Coeur D'Alene.
Every time I visit Idaho, I make a point of conducting a "chimp count". This trip, I only saw four monkoids in North Idaho. One day, I didn't see ANY!
I got a good night's sleep, woke up early the next day and drove my rental car back to the Spokane Airport. I then flew down to Boise and got checked into my hotel. Next, I hopped on a bus and went to the Boise Towne Square Mall. I walked a few blocks from the mall and had lunch at Hooters, where I was served by a great looking Aryan beauty. I returned to the mall and began to search for new Idaho souveneirs (as if anything would be new, after visits over the previous five years...).
It started to get late, so I returned to my hotel and watched TV. The news was boring, compared to where I live - no murders, no robberies. That's okay - I'm more than ready to be bored, in that sense!
The next morning, I was met by Contact #2 and his wife. We had a great breakfast in a fifties-themed restaurant and spent the rest of the day driving around the Greater Boise area. We visited a dam, overlooking a resivoir, and the view was awesome. We the drove up a winding road and I was surprised by the transition from high-desert terrain to green vegetation and finally, pine covered mountains outside of Boise. Contact #2 showed me a place where a very steep mountain rose to a height somewhere between three and eight hundred feet. It was like looking at a wall of pine trees and I absolutely loved it! We also visited Idaho City and it was great, too! During the drive, I was surprised to see a big black bear, lounging under a tree! We got back to Boise in the late afternoon and had dinner at Hooters. I'd enjoyed myself immensely! The next day, I strolled around downtown and went back to the mall (and Hooters).
If you have to live in a city, I strongly recommend Boise!
As my return flight climbed out of Boise, I looked down and saw the dam we had visited and the winding road we'd been on two days prior...
My chimp count in Boise reached twenty and, amazingly, the day I spent with Contact #2 and his wife, I didn't see any!
Seven days in Idaho and I only saw twenty-four of those disgusting creatures. And, let me tell you, they were very tame and well-behaved!
A few days after I got back home, I went to a suburban mall and conducted a chimp count. From the time I started, it only took me ten minutes and twenty-six seconds to count twenty-four. It was an unusually light day for them, at that mall.
I wish I could have stayed in Idaho! Someday, it will be my home...
.............14.............
Let me tell you what a great time I recently had in Idaho! I flew from near my home to Spokane and rented a car for my time in North Idaho.
One of the first and most obvious differences of life in an all-White area came at the gas pump. In "multi-cultural paradise", one must pre-pay for all gas. That's because of all the filthy subhumans who drive-off, without paying, after they fill their tanks. That practice raises the price, nationwide. In North Idaho, there is no need for the pre-pay system, because (like everywhere else) the vast majority of Whites are law abiding. It simply isn't a problem there. I spent a good chunk of my first full day in the company of Contact #1 and enjoyed myself immensely! We went to a great restaurant, where I ate a delicious elk steak with mushroom gravy. The restaurant had a huge buffalo head mounted on the wall, along with the heads of deer, elk and other examples of Idaho wildlife. After that, I spent a few hours talking with Contact #1 and enjoying the sights and smells of North Idaho. There wasn't much in the way of sound, compared to all the noise one would associate with a large city. That was just fine with me.
After my visit with Contact #1 concluded, it was late afternoon. I then decided to make the relaxing and refreshing drive from the Coeur D'Alene area north to Sandpoint. The drive consists of forty-five miles of beautiful scenery. One pine-covered mountain, after another. I saw a herd of buffalo grazing near their ranch. I shared the road with huge lumber trucks, carrying the trunks of huge trees that would never be missed, where so many remained. I saw a bald eagle in flight, along that stretch, last year. Just outside of Sandpoint, I crossed a bridge spanning two miles over the juncture of the Pend Oreille (pronounced "pond-o-ray") River and Lake Pend Oreille. The lake glistened, as the sun began its descent. I drove and walked around Sandpoint for about an hour, before making the trip back to Coeur D'Alene. I grabbed a quick dinner, returned to my hotel and went to bed, feeling blissfully content.
The next day, I made the same drive and continued beyond Sandpoint, east to Clark Fork and then a few miles into Montana (just so I could say I've been there). The drive from Sandpoint to Clark Fork contains scenery even more spectacular than that which exists between Couer D'Alene and Sandpoint. Mile after mile of mountains and the massive Lake Pend Oreille. A few of the mountains consisted of jagged gray rock, but most were covered in pine trees. Some of the mountains were capped with snow.
I felt a year's worth of stress dissipate, as I made that drive. However, my feelings of decompression were augmented by a sense of "survivor's guilt", as I reflected upon all of the recently murdered Whites whose names had been added to cemetery headstones (more than a few of which were also added to the memorial wall honoring fallen law enforcement officers). I mentally superimposed their faces upon the mountains and wished they could be sitting next to me, as I drove...
My final full day in North Idaho included another drive to Sandpoint, followed by a stroll through downtown Coeur D'Alene.
Every time I visit Idaho, I make a point of conducting a "chimp count". This trip, I only saw four monkoids in North Idaho. One day, I didn't see ANY!
I got a good night's sleep, woke up early the next day and drove my rental car back to the Spokane Airport. I then flew down to Boise and got checked into my hotel. Next, I hopped on a bus and went to the Boise Towne Square Mall. I walked a few blocks from the mall and had lunch at Hooters, where I was served by a great looking Aryan beauty. I returned to the mall and began to search for new Idaho souveneirs (as if anything would be new, after visits over the previous five years...).
It started to get late, so I returned to my hotel and watched TV. The news was boring, compared to where I live - no murders, no robberies. That's okay - I'm more than ready to be bored, in that sense!
The next morning, I was met by Contact #2 and his wife. We had a great breakfast in a fifties-themed restaurant and spent the rest of the day driving around the Greater Boise area. We visited a dam, overlooking a resivoir, and the view was awesome. We the drove up a winding road and I was surprised by the transition from high-desert terrain to green vegetation and finally, pine covered mountains outside of Boise. Contact #2 showed me a place where a very steep mountain rose to a height somewhere between three and eight hundred feet. It was like looking at a wall of pine trees and I absolutely loved it! We also visited Idaho City and it was great, too! During the drive, I was surprised to see a big black bear, lounging under a tree! We got back to Boise in the late afternoon and had dinner at Hooters. I'd enjoyed myself immensely! The next day, I strolled around downtown and went back to the mall (and Hooters).
If you have to live in a city, I strongly recommend Boise!
As my return flight climbed out of Boise, I looked down and saw the dam we had visited and the winding road we'd been on two days prior...
My chimp count in Boise reached twenty and, amazingly, the day I spent with Contact #2 and his wife, I didn't see any!
Seven days in Idaho and I only saw twenty-four of those disgusting creatures. And, let me tell you, they were very tame and well-behaved!
A few days after I got back home, I went to a suburban mall and conducted a chimp count. From the time I started, it only took me ten minutes and twenty-six seconds to count twenty-four. It was an unusually light day for them, at that mall.
I wish I could have stayed in Idaho! Someday, it will be my home...
.............14.............
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Here is a Youtube of an illegal alien calling into a radio station and bragging about how much stuff she gets for free from the U.S. taxpayer and how she intends to receive welfare and food stamps for the rest of her life.
It is almost the ONLY reason that the scum from down south come to a country that they hate and intend to destroy.
http://youtu.be/-uLRCfLuP0A
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-uLRCfLuP0A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
She, the caller, speaks English as a result of being born into this country from illegal aliens that were themselves lifelong parasites.
Maybe if non Americans were shot when they left the store after using food stamps, they would not be so quick to brag about being scum.
It is almost the ONLY reason that the scum from down south come to a country that they hate and intend to destroy.
http://youtu.be/-uLRCfLuP0A
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-uLRCfLuP0A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
She, the caller, speaks English as a result of being born into this country from illegal aliens that were themselves lifelong parasites.
Maybe if non Americans were shot when they left the store after using food stamps, they would not be so quick to brag about being scum.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Thursday, August 14, 2014
The truth about the LDS Freedom Forum
There was a time when the LDSFF was an LDS Forum about freedom. That is no longer the case and hasn't been for quite some time. The creator of the forum, BrianM has crossed over to the dark side and now uses the site to recruit for his new church of the firstborn. There are secret forums to discuss Denver Snuffer and other persons that have been excommunicated from the LDS Church. True LDS members are not allowed to participate in the secret combinations within the secret forums.
One person that I know of has posted publicly about his experiences at LDSFF at: http://megasatire.blogspot.com His blogs are interesting and well written. He defends his faith in the LDS Church and sometimes you have to read the entire blog before you see the satire, but he also has other blogs with deep doctrine that you can access from his satire blog.
One person that I know of has posted publicly about his experiences at LDSFF at: http://megasatire.blogspot.com His blogs are interesting and well written. He defends his faith in the LDS Church and sometimes you have to read the entire blog before you see the satire, but he also has other blogs with deep doctrine that you can access from his satire blog.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Democracies always fail!
When the Founding Fathers of the United States wrote the Constitution, they wanted to make sure that the U.S. never became a democracy. There are several reasons why there has never been or ever will be a successful democracy. The most important reason is that democracies are evil by nature. Mob rule is never a good idea. Uninformed voters are hazardous the the freedom of people willing to research the issues. Stupid people make stupid choices. Lazy bums want a free lunch and can be bought with a welfare check. The democratic platform is far more evil than the communist manifesto.
Decline of the Empire says it better than I can:
Decline of the Empire says it better than I can:
Democracies Always Fail
Many Americans believe they live in a democracy. They don't. Yes, there are names on the ballot, campaigns are waged, votes are cast, and the winners serve their terms in Washington. But some votes count more than others. Way more. Those who vote with their checkbooks have far more sway than those who do nothing but push buttons or pull levers in a voting booth. The further you move away from the "one person, one vote" principle, the less of a democracy you have. Here in America we've moved a vast distance away from this ideal principle. That is especially evident this year now that we live in the Age of the Superpacs after the Citizens United decision.
Unfortunately, there is no good word to describe what we've got in the United States. We could call it an oligarchy, but that implies a concentration of power that doesn't exist. The elites who make the rules in America are a relatively large, diverse group. Power is widely and loosely distributed, although most of the power broking goes on in Washington, D.C.
But suppose we did live in a democracy in which all votes were equal. It would fail anyway scientists say, for People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish.
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]
I have a lot more to say about people's competence to evaluate their own competence or the ideas of others, including mine, so I will return to that subject on Sunday. Let's stick with how their "lack of mental tools" affects democracy.
In an ideal democracy where "one person, one vote" actually holds, people's inability to judge ideas and issues would be a big problem. But we live in the Real World, not an ideal world. And the further away you move from an ideal democracy, the less rational the voting process becomes. Here in the United States, party allegiance and voting have become primarily emotional processes. And of course for candidates or those working directly for the political parties or those buying their allegiance, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The issues are unimportant, being merely emotional touchstones for uninformed voters. There's hardly anything rational about it for most of these dupes. The advent of Mass Media in the 20th century changed the game in a profound way. Emotional messages can now be disseminated far and wide in 30-second or 60-second spots on TV or radio. Certainly it is not possible to intelligently address a real issue (e.g. tax policy or government deficits) in such a short period of time. Soundbites, not rational thinking, govern the election process from beginning to end.
Thus these scientists have committed the fallacy I called the Imputation of Rationality in my post Humans Are Not Rational Problem Solvers. If that were all there is to it, we could conclude that democracies always fail because voters can not distinguish between a good idea and a bad idea.
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."
As I pointed out above, the real problem is that ideal democracies do not exist. Clueless voters are a secondary issue. In fact, I would go much further. I would say that ideal or close-to-ideal democracies are inherently unstable and therefore must fail. They are unsustainable. The reason for this is simple: ideal democracies are incompatible with Human Nature, i.e. power corrupts, governing inherently requires humans to wield power, and thus the democratic process must become subverted at some point or other.
American democracy failed decades ago—we could argue about exactly when that occurred—but we are seeing that process at work in Europe today. Greece and Italy are now run by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels who, along with the ECB and big private banks, will increasingly call the shots in other countries on Europe's southern rim. Great power is being wielded and corruption is part & parcel of that. The governing process in EU member states is becoming more and more undemocratic every day. If you doubt this, just ask a Greek or an Italian. Next year you can ask the Portuguese or the Spanish.
So my view is that democracies always fail sooner or later. Although the United States never had a pure democracy, it is remarkable how long the old Republic was sustained. But when America became a great global power after World War II, the jig was up. It was only a matter of time until the U.S. became as undemocratic as it is today. What's ironic about this is that the less we live in a democracy, the more those looking to maintain the status quo trumpet the idea of America-as-a-democracy and the importance of voting. Frankly, that's ridiculous, and provides us with yet another example of how crazy life in the United States has become.
In psychological terms, this looks like the biggest case of overcompensation in human history. In the media it is totally unacceptable to call a spade a spade and admit we don't live in a democracy. It is taboo, verboten. When a subject is taboo, that's always a strong indicator that deep psychological forces (i.e. basic instincts or defense mechanisms) are in play.
Read the rest at: http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/03/democracies-always-fail.html
Thursday, June 5, 2014
FBI tracks iPhone users
The FBI in the palm of your hands
2012 10 31 gonzo.wordpress.com
With the release of iPhone 5 and its clear success, Apple is making great strides to entrench itself as the most widely used smartphone. What is surprising is that iPhone sales have been strong since release despite the fact that a few weeks prior, it was reported that the FBI may be tracking iPhone users.
According to various news outlets, 12 million iPhone and iPad device identifiers were swiped from an FBI computer by hackers associating themselves with the group Anonymous. Luckily for consumers the hack was meant to expose the tracking that was going on and not to compromise any individual accounts. To further credit this attack, the hackers posted one million unique identification numbers that were verified by a third party.
This begs the question, why is the FBI monitoring and tracking people via their iPhones? On what grounds is this legal? What starts to make things even stranger is the fact that almost a month after this story broke the FBI stated that Android phones, iPhone’s competition, are prone to malware and viruses. Why did the FBI specifically single out Android phones? This statement does give more credibility to the claims made by Anonymous. If the FBI had managed to hack iPhones or make a deal with Apple, it would be in their best interest to get everyone using an iPhone.
This doesn’t mean that people should rid themselves of their iPhones, but it does mean that a critical eye must be placed on the FBI and their actions. Monitoring what people spend their time doing is a step in the wrong direction; a step further from freedom. How can a person be free when their every move is scrutinized? How can someone express themselves when there is the possibility that every word they say, every action the take, can be twisted and used against them? The very technology that is suppose to allow us a new degree of freedom, bring us all closer together, can end up destroying the very foundations of liberty.
One can expect that the reasoning behind this blatant breach of constitutional rights will be to protect the country from terrorists or any other vague evil out there. How much more freedom will be lost to ensure our safety? The FBI has stayed quiet about this hack and the public seems to have grown apathetic.Benjamin Franklin said it best “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Related articles
FBI hack yielded 12 million iPhone and iPad IDs, Anonymous claims (zdnet.com)
Hackers claim 12 mn Apple IDs from FBI – NEWS.com.au (news.com.au)
FBI Denies Hackers Claim To Have Retrieved Apple UDIDs From Computer (valuewalk.com)
12 million iPhone and iPad device IDs hacked from the FBI, Anonymous claims(nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
Sunday, June 1, 2014
The six things public schools teach
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
We've had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the demonstration.
"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a national curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition" that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26 years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)