This could be a good conversation if you guys would define your terms and explore your paradigms. Keith is riddled with assumptions based in positivist technical rationalism. Models that have proven inadequate for complex organisms. Two examples are the diagnostics of healthcare and the abuse of anti-biotics and pesticides in the food chain. Both Technical Rationalist paradigms have failed to explain the way the world works and to do more than fix the most horrible conditions. Today, the technical rationalist assumptions buried in economic thinking is creating massive environmental disturbances and the inability of whole governments to resist the creative greed thinking of companies worth more than most nations. The link I sent on Monsanto and Vermont is an example. The assumptions that make it OK to put a private nuclear waste dump in Texas on top of the Aquifer for the entire central region of the U.S. bread basket all the way to Canada are Technical Rationalism in economics run amuck with scientific rationalism a mere pawn in the economic story put forward by the current Feudalists returning us to the Middle Ages.
There is rising in Middle and South America a whole cabal of wealthy Hispanic capitalists who figure that the next market is natural foods that will arise as a result of the crash of the economic policies decimating the U.S. environment and the resulting crash in Human telemeres arising from the food experiments that cut the fertility of designed seeds. The terms they are using in raising funds for the future is "the creation of a worldwide genocide through designed seed." They figure the U.S. will be the market for the import of their safe food products and with the breadbasket gone from nuclear pollution, America will be incapable of feeding itself. Who was the Anti-Christ? Karl Marx or Milton Friedman? I would vote the latter considering the propensity for planet wide destruction through the advocacy of his theories. One of the countries that is pushing this new food policy is Chile. Was it Friedman or was it the rise in culture? Again I would vote the latter with the collaboration of a suicidal impulse built into American capitalism and the destruction of community in America. REH PS the only food we find that really aids our health as Old Age pensioners is not cheap. It's Kosher and we are not Jewish. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2012 9:04 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] What's education really about? It seems that education is not about teaching kids to think, but teaching them to think as those in power want them to. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION ; Ed Weick Sent: Friday, April 06, 2012 11:53 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] What's education really about? Ed, Chomsky is right in saying that public education was set up for indoctrination purposes. In the 1860s, Count von Bismark in Germany was the first to dip his toes into it when he started free schools for the sons of his officer class. This ensured that he'd have a further fully conditioned, loyal generation of army officers. He then realized that if he could extend free education more widely he could indoctrinate a whole generation of boys as willing army conscripts if and when he needed them. He did this by bribing the parents with free health insurance and old age pensions. Meanwhile something was happening in England that was very disturbing to our government. In the 1860s/70s, factory workers in the big manufacturing cities such as Manchester were actually paying for their children to be educated in order to get them out of the factory trap. (There were some free charity schools but nowhere near enough.) Fees of two or three pennies a week were very low -- they had to be -- but a good basic education in maths and English was achieved by the age of 11 or 12 (fully equivalent to the literacy and numeracy standards of today at 13/14). This was economically feasible by the monitor method (otherwise known as the 'Victorian' method -- still widely practised in private schools in India, rural China, Africa and elsewhere). One (paid) teacher would teach a small number of the older and brightest children in an early morning session and then they would each take a class and re-teach the same lesson to the other children. The government didn't like this and set up large numbers of their own schools with smaller fees than the private schools. This didn't succeed so fees were lowered further in a second attempt. This didn't succeed either. It was only then that state schools became entirely free and the monitor schools disappeared. It was then that we started to have full-blown nationalistic indoctrination -- with the obligatory world map on the classroom wall showing the British Empire in red, marching drills in the playgrounds, etc, . It was no wonder that young men were so jingoistic that they volunteered in their hundreds of thousands at the outbreak of WWI in order to fight the conscripted (but equally gung-ho) German regiments. (But not for too long. When word of the terrible conditions came back from the battle-fronts, and of the largely stupid aristocratic officer class, then volunteering dropped away rapidly and even the British had to be conscripted. [We also know now that in the last year or two of the war, both the British and the German soldier had by then realized that they'd both been conned and were actually fighting the battles of their top social classes. They quickly learned not to kill their opposite numbers, unless forced to by a nearby officer. On Xmas Day 1917 British and German soldiers actually played football matches and shared food parcels and fags. Both sides also learned how to hang back a bit whenever the lower-ranking officers led them out of the trenches into bayonet charges. The rate of officer mortality among the younger officers was even higher than in the ordinary ranks. The se nior officers never went anywhere near the front-lines, of course. {Occasionally -- as in the Vietnam War -- the ordinary ranks would shoot the more obnoxious or enthusiastic of their own officers.} ] ) Keith At 14:44 06/04/2012, Ed wrote: Chomsky's take on the purposes of the education system: http://www.alternet.org/story/154849/chomsky%3A_how_the_young_are_indoctrina ted_to_obey?akid=8536.1074389.gTEx0n&rd=1&t=5 Ed _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
