SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“We psychologists typically construct tasks or tests to separate the children who can from those who cannot, the former then being labeled ‘smarter’ or ‘more mature’. The ideal curriculum-maker – like Socrates instructing the slave in the Meno – arranges things in such a way that everybody will understand, all will be among the ‘cans’ rather than the ‘cannots.’” Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind, p. 181.
Did Socrates
intend to convey anything useful to the slave in Meno? Was it the Pythagorean
Theorem? It was such a difficult recital
to follow without the accompanying diagram.
Plus a gross exploitation, to boot.
What brilliance was there in the simple deduction that a clever slave
could be taught a complicated idea? Note
how Socrates turned his back on someone he had just confirmed was a worthy
student. Golden Age brilliance, indeed!
Aristotle’s’
take on slavery in The Politics shows
what intellectual brambles a thoughtful person must negotiate to retain
membership in the info elite. His
babble, echoed below, reminds one of the fatal flaws slaveholders wrote into
the American Constitution. Such
hypocrisy reflects weapon mentality’s worst habits. Its ‘strict interpretation’ successors
conceal theirs behind rumbling vocabularies and prestigious duty titles.
“We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service)—all such are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, on the very same principle as in the other cases just mentioned, to be ruled by a master. A man is thus by nature a slave if he is capable of becoming (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another, and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself. Herein he differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply obey their instincts. But the use which is made of the slave diverges but little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements.
“But it is nature’s intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter the strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and (though useless for physical labor) useful for the various purposes of civil life – a life which tends, as it develops, to be divided into military service and the occupations of peace. The contrary of nature’s intention, however, often happens: there are some slaves who have the bodies of freemen – as there are others who have a freeman’s soul. But if nature’s intention were realized – if men differed from one another in bodily form as much as the statues of the gods – it is obvious that we should all agree that the inferior class ought to be the slaves of the superior. And if this principle is true when the difference is one of the body, it may be affirmed with still greater justice when the difference is one of soul; though it is not as easy to see the beauty of the soul, as it is to see that of the body.
“It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.”
Taken from Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings of Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 112-113.
One of these days, someone
will explain to me why a hundred generations of Learners had to ingest and
regurgitate this hogwash. Why, in all
our ancient Latin and Greek writings, none survived that called for universal
freedom (except Aesop). Why no trace
remains of far superior classical writings that declared slavery a scandal and
called for the brotherhood of mankind.
Do you dare suggest that
the brotherhood of man might have been some offshoot of Christianity or a more
recent monotheism, religious or ideological?
Dare imply that ancient people did not understand that we all belonged
to one family since human time began?
That wise and generous spirits wrote wisely and generously on this topic
ever since writing began? Whether they
came from ancient Greece or beyond, they concluded that slavery was
unjustifiable and forbidden by natural law—denying the econologic of slave masters and all their historical scribblings we’ve studied
ad nauseum ever since.
Moral imperatives against
slavery were just as apparent to them, then, as they are to us today. Idealistic adolescents argued with their
parents about them, then, just as they do today, about current social problems. Ethical philosophers were just as numerous
(indeed, more so) than the brilliant hypocrites we worship in school:
Sock-Scratcheese, Play-Do, and Arse-Dottle, among others.
The Golden Rule never held
a patent date. God and good parents
always taught their children to treat others like themselves since human
understanding began.
Where did the teachings of
these moral superiors go? Into the
flaming maw of weapon mentality, that’s where.
Weapon management rejects
the findings of the gifted; it dictates that elite minorities publicize
nonsense, censor valid information and lie outright. Most info proletarians are never allowed to
develop their God-given talents. Call it
slavery, call it being classed a peasant or call it “choosing” to work as Jive
Drive stoker, third class – it all boils down to info proletariat lock-down.
Info elites are no smarter
than their host proletarians. On the
contrary, info elites pick their replacements from among them, for orthodoxy,
combativeness as demonstrated in sport and battle, and loyalty through family
ties to the info elite—not exceptional brilliance or compassion. Those whose empathy is sufficiently stunted
to satisfy weapon requirements, have little use for compassion and no use at all
for the compassionate.
Academia pigeonholes
likely candidates for entrance into the info elite. Academic careerists
make it their business to eject the most gifted peace mentors from the
educational process. All those
idealistic young teacher burnouts illustrate this triage perfectly. Idealism and compassion are sacrificed on the
altar of weapon regimentation. For details, see Killing
the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith, Viking Penguin,
Harmonsworth, England, 1990. Like this
work, it could find no publisher in the United States since it was so
inflammatory and to the point.
Picture the Earth as an
isolated lobe of a universal, trans-dimensional brain. Within this hollow-sphere lobe (the
anthrosphere), billions of human neurons interact through more or less
effective networks of cultural media and transportation systems that could only
accommodate a few hundred million ‘cells’ in natural comfort at current levels
of peace incompetence.
First off, appropriate
nutrition rarely reaches each ‘cell.’
Many humans have a hard time merely subsisting from day to day. The rest of us compensate for our misery with
shameless over-indulgence even though the quality of most of our food can be
just as bad.
The Earth produces enough
food for everyone; it always has, barring catastrophe. Yet our distribution networks are so shabby,
the world’s population splits into thirds.
The first, with its pandemic obesity, diabetes addictions, obscene pets
and ghastly meat livestock: vastly overstuffed; the next, underfed; the third,
starving. In truth, those provided with
enough good water, with just enough borderline water, and bad water or not
enough of it.
We’re exhausting the
Earth's fertility, yet fifty percent of the food we produce goes to waste. And we make no effort to exploit those wasteful
pests (bacteria, fungi, molds and vermin) as narrow-footprint food
sources.
This hypothetical
planetary organism suffers from perpetual stroke, its heart is in partial
arrest, its frame flails between hypertrophy and necrosis. Many poor adults find just enough nourishment
to get by; many more of their vulnerable children are starved and poisoned from
conception. Childhood starvation and
pollution degrade youthful Learning in rich and poor nations alike.
If all those of good will
in the world were to rally behind one good plan, everyone could be fed, housed
and cared for properly—you name it. This
would be a thousand times easier and more profitable than managing the world
war we have prepared for so carefully.
Think about that.
Second, our thought
processes are hopelessly muddled and our learning tools, outdated. Even ‘educated’ majorities take too long to
assimilate new concepts and ideas: a full generation or longer, assuming they
do so at all. Occasionally, popular
culture will adopt ideas more advanced than those of status quo dogma. For example, it has begun to challenge the
absolute value of 19th Century science, otherwise frozen in place
ever since. On the other hand, info
elites often retain outdated ideas and destructive habits long past their
useful lifespan.
Let
me tell you about the Armchair Formula.
Within our minds, random ideas surface to consciousness. We retain those ideas – no matter how
brilliant – about as long as the memory of a dream. We must reinforce new ideas right away, so as
to register them into long-term memory.
Otherwise we forget them and they return to the collective superconscience for
retrieval at some later, more propitious time, perhaps by someone better
prepared.
This is indeed the case
for our fundamental definitions of reality.
If solitary confinement or sensory deprivation insulate us too long from
reality, we go insane.
It is hard to find a
specialist or document to repeat, deny or confirm some passing thought. This is so even for scholars, much less for
everyone else.
Go ahead and try it. Sit down in your favorite armchair and come
up with a novel insight about an arcane topic.
Now, get up. Go find someone,
some book, class or recording, to repeat, elaborate, confirm or oppose your
inspiration. How long did it take
you? Hours? Days?
In most cases, especially with really innovative thought, it would take
longer than the few moments your short-term memory retained the original
idea.
The best scholars shorten
this time-delay in any way they can.
They cultivate special study skills, document collections and peer
information networks; they hoard reference sources and information contacts. In this manner, they can confirm or deny
their latest ideas as soon as they get up from their armchairs or even faster
than that, by computer and telephone or in person.
I call their elaboration
of this process, the Armchair Formula.
Alone, a few thousand tenured professors and intelligence clerks operate
under optimized Armchair Formulas. Even
college students lack the means, motive and opportunity to research freely.
The World Wide Web is just
beginning to refine this Armchair Formula.
Its perfection will benefit everyone privileged enough to claim access
to it. This augurs well for Learner
transformation, whether or not we grasp its long-term benefits. Predictably, it is the least publicized and
least capitalized benefit of the Web, and the one we take the least advantage
of.
Especially nowadays,
Learners must satisfy a multitude of certification criteria before they’re
encouraged to learn. University obstacle
courses bristle with monetary and geographic hurdles, arbitrary credentials, certifications
and performance criteria. Every step of
an academic career must be carefully negotiated, up to and including the
‘highest’ rungs of scholarship.
Academia is not so much
interested in 'what' we want to learn, as 'why' and 'how' we are supposed to
learn it. In order to gain access to its
services, we must accept that our knowledge will serve to promote something
else: status, moneymaking, job placement and propaganda manipulation. Instead of enhancing intellect, college
professors erode it. They bury their
students’ interests in mountains of compulsory trivia, until every scholarly
career is reduced to one all-consuming research thesis.
The academic community
erects massive barriers between itself and the laity. Amateur scholars have a hard time keeping up
with professional scholars of any given topic.
Decades of secondary studies (useless, for the most part) must be
certified in order to achieve student-teacher relationships with relevant
scholars. A Learner cannot access needed
information unless she commits years of study to one avenue of research. Then, she must submit the first fruits of her
zeal to the whims of academic superiors.
Universities are
intellectual catacombs. Most research is
buried there, never to see the light of day again. Admitted, most of it isn’t worth the paper
it’s printed on—in conformity with the general rule: “95% of everything is
crap.”
"… but in every era and in every country and in every
category, evil swarms and the good is rare." Voltaire,
Romans et contes, « Le monde
comme il va », Garnier
Flamarion, Paris, 1966, p. 104.
Some of it might be
valuable, at first glance. And a lot
more valuable research got nipped in the bud before it could be written
up. Catacombs haunted by frustrated
ghosts …
The foundation of today’s academic
pyramid consists of a mass of illiterates and semi-literates. On their shoulders, a shrinking minority of
undergraduate and graduate scholars. On
their pointy-heads perch a handful of certified academics. More and more often, senior scholastic managers
devote themselves to the logistics of education: finance, politics and
business. The higher they climb the
ziggurat of academia, the more they divorce themselves from Learning.
Learners shall flip these
pyramids upside-down. Intentional
know-nothings, religious fanatics and disability-illiterates will form three
tiny minorities buried in ignorance at the inverted tips of these trumps of
plenty. Massed Learners will broadcast
the full fruit of their topics of passion from upright cornucopias of Learning
subsidized throughout everyone’s lifetime.
This may be the ultimate substitute for our bureaucratic/industrial
jobs, once automation and post-industrial efficiencies induce near-total
unemployment.
Corporate propaganda never
cease to warn about a growing population of retirees versus a shrinking number
of workers, and the consequent necessity to reduce retiree benefits. The ultimate outcome of this incessant
propaganda may be hundreds of millions of elderly workers added to the
scandalous count of the poor, in the richest societies mankind has ever known.
Otherwise this may be the
justification for the next wave of fascist genocide: simply kill off all those
wide-open old beaks in the blast ovens of newly built death camps (free
electricity!) instead of taking care of them at great cost. We self-indulgent baby-boomers are the most
likely candidates for this sorry fate, and our studied indifference to current
abuses may have earned it for us.
No one addresses the fact
that, for every modern worker, hundreds and thousands of machines just as
taxable, multiplied by a thousand times his productivity and corresponding
corporate profit.
Honoring obvious
obligations to prior workers might reduce by a trifle their exponential
increment of profit. Those exploiters
will choke on that excess of profit, if they don’t recognize their obligation
and honor it. Their future profits will
freeze up and throttle them, otherwise.
Such massive, propaganda-driven idiocy in the service of weapon
technology! The peace variant would see
right through those cooked books and make amends without a second’s hesitation.
Progressive,
government-subsidized education, no matter how crude, boosts overall
prosperity. The adoption of this policy
on a global scale would skyrocket world prosperity. Any other alternative leads to some variant
of Auschwitz for former workers, in the name of raw corporate greed. Good luck with that!
An elegant model of
Learning is offered by music education. It
relies on voluntarism, (at least in theory; horror stories abound of children
being forced to practice music against their will. On PeaceWorld, it would be limited to those
who loved it). It favors small classes
and one-on-one tutoring. This tutoring
begins at the earliest receptive age and accelerates at the pace of the pupil’s
growing talent. Maturity of performance
is expected by puberty, with ongoing development though adulthood.
Music is one of the few
fields of Learning where true mastery goes unsuppressed. We are enjoying a Golden Age of tempered
music because this restricted field has zero impact on weapon management, so
valid teaching methods are tolerated.
It is ironic that crime
may be the only other trade that complies with these learning guidelines. Indeed, the budding criminal engages in crime
as soon as he discovers a personal interest in it. The courts send all but the best criminals to
‘reform’ schools and penitentiaries where veteran crime instructors await
them. Their educational and vocational
alternatives to crime are deliberately sabotaged. Many emerge from prison to perform more and
more sophisticated infractions. We don’t
punish criminals for their crime, but for demonstrating incompetence by getting
caught. Weapon society practices
Darwinian selection for better criminals.
Big surprise!
Many other prejudices
retard Learning. One weapon myth presumes that knowledge is a
special privilege that should be rationed according to arbitrary qualification
criteria.
Another myth asserts that
valid information must be discovered and confirmed locally. Insolent claims to the contrary, rabid
nationalism (each nation claiming its own, the evil twin of every other) and
national borders are gross barriers to Learning. Behind these obstacles, patriots and
fundamentalists promote blatant obscurantism.
National governments pirate information, standardize educational
mediocrity, and foster redundant research.
Unique breakthroughs are
corporate secrets carefully guarded in defiance of scientific
transparency. Corporate and military
science violate straightforward principles of scientific inquiry. They insist on secrecy and proprietary
knowledge. Secret science is like
soundless music: worthless to anyone but its paid practitioners. Of what value is knowledge no-one else may
know? The threat of terrorism compounds
this problem.
Just as corporate weapon
Christianity herded Europe into a Dark Age of ignorance, corporate-fostered
weapon scientists are herding us into another Dark Age of suspicion, paranoia
and fostered anti-science.
Another weapon myth
suggests that information immediately only available to an exclusive elite is
more valuable than that which many proletarians may acquire more
gradually.
In plowfield and
smokestack societies, an item’s rarity raised its value. Zero-sum anal retentives competed for limited
advancement opportunities—social, economic and reproductive. Their feeding frenzy created the info elites
of today, that wallow in relative opulence but unprincipled degeneracy,
surrounded by abject masses of info proletarians.
Appalled by this
injustice, those who are righteous abandon their claim to leadership that was
always theirs by right. Lacking fair
role models, even exceptional ones, weapon leaders imitate the worst exemplars
that teem everywhere.
Thus, the long-term,
public example of better leaders – common knowledge for everyone – is more
beneficial to society than the latest, high-tech secrets known only by a
privileged few. Complete transparency
would be even more beneficial. Correct
knowledge is wealth. Common knowledge is
more fruitful than many secrets stockpiled in obscurity for their
status-value. In the commerce of ideas,
distribution creates wealth, and generosity leads to prosperity.
This paradox holds forth
the promise of untold prosperity. We’re
like pirates who have cast aside their treasure map and flung themselves on the
ground over a deeply buried treasure trove, bewailing their self-induced
poverty.
Competitive education is
about as sensible as for-profit sex.
Both are cooperative endeavors where competition is a losing
proposition. Short-term, it produces
trivial gains or outright loss; long-term cooperation is more fruitful.
Learning Networks could
stretch and reweave themselves with a lot more elegance than clumsy
production/consumption machinery. We
could do this at little expense, for much greater rewards.
In the meantime, academia
crowns itself with wreaths of paternalistic compulsion whose invasive tendrils
smother any usefulness it could once claim.
Once most students emerge from this ordeal, they shun further study
beyond the minimum required for their jobs.
They consider Learning a sorry chore best left to journalists, government
spokespeople and commercial copywriters.
Those info mercenaries are paid to satisfy hidden agendas with
censorship, oversimplification and the rote repetition of official lies. They cast into oblivion any idea that
deviates from the mass media norm and that cannot be co-opted to reinforce it.
Learners will handle
Learning as if it were the ultimate game.
Instead, official
‘education’ is a monotonous grind.
Schools impose a prison atmosphere of incarceration and regimentation
that prepares their inmates for the punishing routines of the barrack square,
the munitions plant and the battlefield.
Weapon managers dictate
that education be a slow torture, an intellectual manual at arms, a repetitive
drudgery. According to them, it should
be a drain of time, interest and energy.
Every hour of every school day, nit-picked and nit-picking teachers
disgorge predigested curricula.
Disinterest in those topics and interest in others are punishable offenses. Everyone must drag ass through this
dozen-year Calvary, at the pace of the slowest.
Healthy young Learners,
however, are naturally inquisitive. They
delight in learning the most trifling things, with or without adult
approval. Schools do their utmost to
suppress this curiosity. Instead of
encouraging info proletarians, they regiment them mercilessly.
From our first acts of
socialization to canned graduation rites, we endure endless years of fostered
boredom, meaningless repetition, stifled initiative and quashed curiosity. Homogenized cultural pap is force-fed and
regurgitated in endless competitive examinations. Homework merely franchises this intellectual
garage sale, it saturates children's private time with mind-numbing
drudgery.
Anxious parents and school
officials resist efforts to enrich this putrid gruel. Age-cohort bullies, know-nothing parents and
petty adult tyrants dominate school culture.
The lowest common denominator indicates the high tide of cultural
achievement. To put it mildly,
precocious Learners are in for a hard time.
Children in Finland scored
the highest standardized test results in the Western world. They were sent to recess fifteen minutes for
every forty-five they spend in class.
They were the only ones to do so and thus the only ones to benefit from
it. Nowadays, everyone must remain
brutish, in accordance with the brutal norms of paramilitary, para-educational
bureaucracies.
This fierce acculturation
is so widespread, it must serve some hidden purpose
(weapon mentality). It is somewhat
relaxed in private schools where info elites warehouse their own children. Here, class snobbery, crushing discipline,
isolation from family, religious mumbo jumbo and cockpit competition combine to
subvert Learning excellence.
I can imagine no worse way
to learn anything—except how to be bored out of one’s skull. There is no better way to repress natural
curiosity.
Victor Villaseñor, in his
book Burro Genius, wrote that he
asked several classes of young students, “Who here is a genius?” In kindergarten, everyone’s hand went up; by
third grade, no one dared. That is the
objective of weapons education.
It will be up to Learner
schools to identify and nurture the genius of every student. If a student has nothing but destructive
tendencies, those must be exposed as early as possible and housebroken with
even more affection and doggedness.
This procedure would lead
nowhere if practiced the way we do today: as an exception by a few gifted
teachers with respect to a few gifted students, in spite of orthodox standards
and its tolerable majority of mediocrities and rejects. To make significant progress, we must
practice it universally and holistically.
Instead of advancing a few high-merit students selected from a neglected
mass of the mediocre ones, we should cultivate every student’s foremost
talents. All students would be genial in
one or more topics of their choosing. We
must become smart enough to encourage that choice. Blame for that failure belongs to us, not to
those innocent students.
In self-defense against
current ‘instruction,’ common folk take complacent pride in their
ignorance. What choice do they have,
since their vulnerable talents were crushed early? All they have left are sports, commercial advertising
and the media stupidity that frames them.
Raw genius is more threatening to them than raw greed. Three topics dominate popular discourse:
sports, sex and money. None of them have
anything to do with civilization’s major advances. Rather, they divert attention from progress
and freeze it in that vacuum. Men escape
into macho fetishism and stupid, statistics-driven sport; women, into the
trivia of gossip, shopping and fashion.
Once this prejudice
overtakes a society, its members become clueless pawns of the Routine of
Evil. Once artful propaganda has
crippled our moral faculties, we may expect nothing more from our leaders than
expert wrongdoing, unforeseen consequences and inevitable catastrophe. Distracted by the empty summons to ‘pursue happiness,’
we forsake our neighbors’ flight from misery and our duty to assist them.
We ‘lucky’ somnambulists
condemn ourselves to self-indulgence, over-consumption and social
insignificance. Wearily, we warehouse,
care-take and re-inventory mountains of redundant stuff. Stuff we never needed to begin with and we
can’t afford sustainably in any case. It
is merely an industrial proxy for the world-wrecking clutter of toxic junk and
refuse that total war calls for.
The unlucky poor are
stupefied by a lifetime of toxic malnutrition, engineered misery and cultural
anxiety. Their hopelessness is
aggravated by their inability to fulfill basic needs and achieve basic
comforts.
It is no accident that
education and military conscription became compulsory at the same time, after
the French Revolution. These military
necessities were taken to their logical conclusion by Jules Ferry, whose Law of
1882 mandated free, secular and mandatory education for all French children. He was one of the most fanatical French
colonial imperialists. The other
military/industrial nations would match his law within a few decades.
By the way, universal
conscription is another weapon misnomer.
The entire military age population (pubescent to barely ambulatory,
including males and their female age group equivalents) has always been liable
to call-up on demand. The only
limitations were the number of weapons available; the need to staff workshops
and farms with women, children, old folks and war slaves when necessary; and
the enormous logistical burden of holding armies together despite their
tendency to sicken, starve, run riot and fall apart.
It is only recently that
bloated industrial capacities caught up with insane birth rates. Until then, making weapons and keeping them
out of the hands of rebels were self-limiting tasks, and there was some reason
to separate trained combatants from civilians.
These days, this rule no longer applies.
Now that weapons training has once again become a custom-crafted routine
(look at the insertion techniques of a simple commando raid), our social
institutions are devolving to medieval levels of hierarchic simplicity.
There is no difference
between armed and unarmed combatants.
All of us have become legitimate targets and routine victims of
warfare.
For example, military
pilots, submariners and commandos undergo elaborate rituals of initiation,
training and graduation, rituals that resemble those undergone by ancient
knights. Their equipment and steeds cost
many lifetimes’ wages, too. For the most
part, peasants took the resulting murderousness in the face.
While the rewards of
weapon technology have gone to smaller and smaller minorities, its spiraling
costs have been born by all the rest of us, the poor foremost.
The so-called free market
sanctions personal ambition within weapon technology’s carefully restricted
parameters. This is an incredible
advantage compared to older weapon dogmas that crushed personal dreams under
obligations of caste. This last barrier
to excellence (weapon technology) may soon come down. At last, financially independent Learners
will pursue their talents wherever they may lead. At that point, we may anticipate a plethora
of abundance.
In the meantime, most of
us receive a nominal education commensurate with the complexity of our
society’s weapon systems… and no more.
Barely educated citizens are taught to curb their curiosity, serious
culture and imagination. Instead,
useless trivia is fed to them in enormous quantities and they are taught to
prefer this force-feeding. They should
be more or less handy with tools (in direct proportion to the complexity …
etc.). Tamed to blind obedience, they
should be comfortable with independent decision-making only under rigidly
defined circumstances. Most of them are
expected to be politically naive, closed-minded, indifferent to their political
obligations and intolerant of progress.
They should be cryptically self-destructive and violent on a hair
trigger. In moderately good health
during their military years, they should be indifferent to preventive care and
ready to cripple themselves for no apparent reason.
The majority of info
proletarians are imbued with these attributes, the handiest ones for modern
armies. Once a military age cohort
‘completes’ its mandatory miseducation, weapon management grants its favorite
candidates nominal license to study and climb career ladders. This economic subversion is so harsh that
many youths have no choice but the military, permanent unemployment and/or
crime. Banks, insurance companies and
public service agencies redline entire neighborhoods for no better reason than
socio-economic and race prejudice.
Legitimate capital never reaches these ghettos, only criminal funding
that coaches more war.
Poverty – the most expensive
social policy by far – is the best nursery for lots of good soldiers.
The International Monetary
Fund, the Politburo and carefully hobbled UN agencies have treated Third World
nations this way for decades. They have
promoted showboat, mega-buck projects to pay off local elites and increase
their addiction to Wimpish institutions.
Meanwhile, the average person’s standard of living has shrunk from
runaway population growth, expropriated public services and ecological
devastation, all induced by paramilitary corporations.
Why don’t all of us
benefit from mandatory college education?
Or, better yet, four subsidized years off as a young adult to learn
non-college skills? After all, there’s
mandatory High School. Why that cut-off,
when college-level skills are mandatory, these days?
In comparative biology,
the longer the stage of infantile development, the better prepared the adult is
to survive. Wouldn’t this be the case
with young human beings?
A weapon state’s
educational system selects an elite officer corps to command a vast majority of
enlisted and civilian slaves: armed and unarmed combatants. The demand for weapon managers dictates the
exact number of degrees awarded. In this
manner, universities select new info elites from the info proletariat.
There isn’t mandatory
college education because colleges (both non- and for-profit) produce enough
military officers and bureaucrats already.
Deliberately restricted weapon technology is glutted with talent, even
though peace technology is starved under the same circumstances.
Universal education is
just another weapon myth: a carrot dangled in front of peace mentors to co-opt
their goodwill efforts. In the United
States, 60% of the population has done some time on the university treadmill. This doesn’t mean much, since nearly 60% are
functionally illiterate, more choose not to vote, and only a handful gain ready
access to the corridors of power.
We should feel guilt and make amends.
Some specific Learner
methods – replacing the top-down, mass-consumption, ‘tell-and-test’ systems in
use today – are discussed in the chapter Computer Yellow Pages.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld