Client Exit Really Bothers the Central Planners
Of course, in free democratic countries, people are not physically compelled — other than in court-ordered situations — to do what is against their will. Oh —I forgot — taxes! Even “compulsory” public schooling can be bypassed by home education or independent school attendance.
Anyway — about universal public education as a means to change the minds and hearts of people so that they are more compliant and governable — that is a go-ahead in schools adopting 21st Century Learning. (I was dismayed today to find in my local paper a prestigious private school advertising 21st C skills focus.)
What we are gleaning today about the homogenizing 21st C Learning was foreseen 40 years ago when the “deschooling” issue was being discussed. I was in Mexico and heard Ivan Illich expound on deinstitutionalization and the need to retrieve individual responsibility from “disabling professionals”. He, by the way, was not keen on Paul Erhlich’s book, The Population Bomb (1968), or its predictions, or its coercive solutions.
Illich called public schools a “false public utility”.
An early school reformer, John Holt (How Children Fail), attended Illich’s Institute. Undoubtedly, Holt must also have recoiled from Ehrlich’s population solutions as he also deplored America’s authoritarian education. In one of his letters he wrote: “What scares me is the amount of Fascism in people’s spirit. It is the government that so many of our fellow citizens would get if they could that scares me — and I fear we are moving in that direction.” (Free Schools, Free People, Ron Miller, pg 89)
Holt was one of the few counterculture people of the 70s who went on to develop something concrete and positive from this period. He went on to promote and support home education — the biggest alternative we have yet to organized state education systems of the world.
However, who knows what lasting value there is to mankind to promote such alternatives? What’s the use? My jaundiced experience is that far too frequently critiques of the system only stimulate the establishment to produce more contrived ways to subvert and to keep seducing their captive audience. Using the cover of “democracy” the state and its hangers-on have become “predatory” as Revel explains in “How Democracies Perish”.
So glad Robin has brought forward Jean-François Revel. This Revel quote clearly illustrates the dichotomy we are working with: “The inequalities within productive liberal societies are constantly subject to a mixing process and always in flux. In statist, redistributionist societies, the inequalities are frozen in place.”
I interpret that this way — free liberal societies are dynamic and self-correcting whereas controlled socialist societies are rigid and require an “elite” to control and redistribute. Am I basically right?
Are there others like Revel who can help us claw out of this self-subversion we are slipping into?
Even researchers and PhDs are to fall into line. See “It takes a global village to develop the next generation of PhDs” http://depts.washington.edu/cirgeweb/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/NERAD-fin-Developing-the-Next-Generation-AASuppl2010_2_eversion-1.pdf
[NOTE: The above essay was published as a comment on blog — Invisible Serfs Collar — http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/progressively-producing-new-kinds-of-students-pre-equipped-via-schools-to-work-harmoniously/ — a site reviewing 21sr Century Learning and Common Corre Curriculum]