On 17/04/2008, Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 02:17 +0100, Tim Dobson wrote: > > I actually think that secondary schools and 6th form colleges are a > > better way for a wider audience. If you think, rightly probably, that > > "wayne" isn't going to give a shit about RMS's talk because he only took > > computing to go on myfacespacebook, then looking at independent schools > > might be an idea. > > Do you realise how bigoted that sounds? What you are saying is only the > 5 percent from rich families who can afford school fees are worthy of > any effort because the other 95% are too stupid to take the message on > board.
I'm not sure Tim was equating intelligence with money or class, and you have exaggerated his position to make it seem bigoted. "Jean Anyon, a professor at Rutgers, recently examined four major types of covert career preparation going on simultaneously in the school world, all traveling together under the label "public education." All use state-certified schoolteachers, all share roughly common budgets, all lead to intensely political outcomes. In the first type of classroom, students are prepared for future wage labor that is mechanical and routine. Of course neither students nor parents are told this, and almost certainly teachers are not consciously aware of it themselves. The training regimen is this: all work is done in sequential fashion starting with simple tasks, working very slowly and progressing gradually to more difficult ones (but never to very difficult work). There is little decision-making or choice on the part of students, much rote behavior is practiced. Teachers hardly ever explain why any particular work is assigned or how one piece of work connects to other assignments. When explanations are undertaken they are shallow and platitudinous. "You'll need this later in life." Teachers spend most of their day at school controlling the time and space of children, and giving commands. In the second type of classroom, students are prepared for low-level bureaucratic work, work with little creative element to it, work which does not reward critical appraisals of management. Directions are followed just as in the first type of classroom, but those directions often call for some deductive thinking, offer some selection, and leave a bit of room for student decision-making. The third type of classroom finds students being trained for work that requires them to be producers of artistic, intellectual, scientific, and other kinds of productive enterprise. Often children work creatively and independently here. Through this experience, children learn how to interpret and evaluate reality, how to become their own best critics and supporters. They are trained to be alone with themselves without a need for constant authority intervention and approval. The teacher controls this class through endless negotiation. Anyon concludes: "In their schooling these children are acquiring symbolic capital, they are given opportunity to develop skills of linguistic, artistic, and scientific expression and creative elaboration of ideas in concrete form." The fourth type of public school classroom trains students for ownership, leadership, and control. Every hot social issue is discussed, students are urged to look at a point from all sides. A leader, after all, has to understand every possible shade of human nature in order to effectively mobilize, organize, or defeat any possible opponent. In this kind of schoolroom bells are not used to begin and end periods. This classroom offers something none of the others do: "knowledge of and practice in manipulating socially legitimated tools of systems analysis." It strikes me as curious how far Anyon's "elite" public school classroom number four still falls far short of the goals of elite private boarding schools, almost as if the very best government schools are willing to offer is only a weak approximation of the leadership style of St. Paul's or Groton. What fascinates me most is the cold-blooded quality of this shortfall because Groton's expectations cost almost nothing to meet on a different playing field—say a homeschool setting or even in John Gatto's classroom—while the therapeutic community of psychologized public schooling is extremely expensive to maintain. Virtually everyone could be educated the Groton way for less money than the average public school costs." -- http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17r.htm Tim is talking about the "3rd type" of schooling here, and his assessment is correct IMO: The people attending independent schools, grammar schools, the upper classes/sets of comprehensive 6th form schools, and science/technology students at community colleges are indeed the slice of society who go on to make decisions about IT policy in the current economy. But the people participating in the 1st and 2nd types of schooling are just as intelligent, and indeed a much larger number of people; our culture and their lack of access to resources inhibits their innate abilities, though. But with free software, if they can secure access to the hardware side, which has only become easier, the software side is state of the art. And people attending that kind of schooling are as capable of running a business on the Cygnus Model as anyone (find a feature someone wants, find two other people that want it, and charge all 3 half the total price). I suspect that doing so may be more socially acceptable - straying out of their predestined roles as employees is harder for middle classes, because they think they have somewhere to fall. As the recession bites down, the middle class idea of "job security" is going to look even more silly. -- Regards, Dave
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