Getting back to my
Brazilian slum, one should not think of the people living in it as having sunk
to the bottom, but as having risen to the highest level open to
them.
There is an old Ghost Dance song that goes "I
circle around the boundries of the Earth." Well, the
education post I wrote several years ago about the superior educational
opportunities under the Old Soviet System is covered pretty well by what you
two have written. I still encounter daily the former
peasants and still Gypsies who were trained to be far beyond anything they
would have ever been or will ever be in the current system or pre-Communist
system. I realize there were holes but there were and are more
trained people as a heritage from that system then most of the rest of the
world. Note that literacy in Cuba is 100% and if you complain with
"but what is there to do with it once they can read" then that is
another issues. You might very well be making the case for a limit
to literacy although I would be surprised if you would admit to
that. The wealthy claim that they are also stressed by
wealth and that stress is stress and is equivelant. That
being the defense of rigid social stratas with the same defense they use for
lousy artistic business stimulation. Only "the best deserves
to get through" and "it is better for society to move
slowly".
At the time that I wrote the earlier post, Ed
defended the West and I became a "stand in" for the local communist although I
am not, have never supported, or believe in that form of 19th century
European "Scaleism". I don't much appreciate the
Masses or any other type of Mass production, being also a believer in birth
control. I believe in conserving what you have and
growing a logical future. That includes people.
My reason for educating everyone is
simple. It is a better and more interesting planet when
everyone can talk to each other and have a decent sense of aesthetic
taste. People also tend to value the genius of their own cultures
and share them when they are intelligent as well. I liked the
dialogue that I saw and still see between survivors of the old Soviet
System. All systems are brutish if they are big enough or
stressed enough. People also tend to be lazy when they are
taught only external motivation which is the big problem with mechanistic
thought. If you punch this economic button then that
will happen except the world isn't a machine but a tree and therein lies the
problem with the lies about being committed to systems
thought.
Ed would imagine stealing a child to save the
child. The same solution the Swiss had to apologize for when they
stole the children from the Gypsies in the middle 20th
century. Meanwhile the Russians developed the world's finest
Romany Theater in Moscow and Nicolai Slichenko became a national hero and
treasure. I prefer the latter solution even if it did
come from a bloated system and a lousy ability to supply toilet paper to their
washrooms. Good education is good education no matter
where you find it. The first public schools were in Tenochtitlan
where they sacrificed a person once a day to make sure the Sun would rise in
the morning. It is not just the technique but the content that
makes the difference.
Ray Evans Harrell
