Unexamined Assumptions regarding Children and Education

After a week of travel in Cornwall and a weekend at Triban’s Beltane Festival I am rested and also ready for the summer. My festie fitness is good, and my ears are fine. My travel pack is sorted, must remember to pack my flip-flops …. Walking around in steel toe capped boots in the sunshine is not the best way to treat my wonderful long enduring feet. I love my feet. They get me places.

One of the common threads in all my conversations with folks as I travel and sing, is the series of unexamined assumptions that we have all been indoctrinated with….

1. Children need an authority over them. (which excludes their own authority … the writing of their own script in the story of their own lives as much as it excludes their respect for competent adults who care for them, a respect for that which is deeper than ‘authority‘ … as in an empathetic moral code)

2. Children need both parents…. (which excludes the fact that a natural child needs an extended family that is merged with community…not to mention nature … nature deficit syndrome)

3. Children need to be taught to read, write and count. (which excludes childrens proven ability to learn these skills when their own motivation impels them to do so….and do this very quickly, 30 hours for reading, 50 for math, similar for writing - and when they do so ,their comprehension exceeds that of standard education on all tests!)

4. Children need school for ‘socialisation’. (see point 2)

5. Teachers are doing their best. Head-teachers are doing their best. (which excludes the activities and intent of Departments of Education Ideological Psychologists and their advisors from philanthropic foundations who pretty much design all the details of tests, texts, lessons and teachers documentation - tracking - of students progress, things which teachers and head teachers have no input into, and which they do not resist.) By NOT examining the foundations of education and by NOT resisting the imposed bureaucracy, teachers fail themselves and the children entrusted into their care.

6. Being a ‘good teacher’ can help children (which excludes that being a ‘good teacher’ in a bad system merely prolongs the bad systems life … in much the same way a ‘good prison guard’ will attempt to help those inmates he or she meets, yet his or her presence as a prison guard supports the toxic system and can be used by it’s originators as a PR tool. “Look at our nice smiling policeman who has helped a cat down from a tree!”) Of course individual teachers CAN and DO help individual children, these instances are in such a minority so as to be worthless. Not recognising and challenging that is a failing, even for 'good' teachers

These 6 unexamined assumptions form the basis of personal understanding of education for most people. The excluded realities are rarely mentioned. (don’t mention the war!).

The fundamental assumption underlying all these is that children are not to be trusted. This appears to me to be insane - we trust the seed to grow, we trust our legs to walk, our eyes to see our lungs to fill with air so why this mistrust of children?

Thus for most folks the constant revision and change appears to be attempting to resolve the ‘problems’ of schooling, whilst in reality it is by design and intent exacerbating those problems.

There are many unexamined assumptions that derive from the process of education, such as the desirability of ‘progress’, the benign intent of Kings and Prime Ministers, the supremacy of Western Industrial Democracy, or of Humankind over Animals, that exams prove the presence of intelligence and knowledge, that men and women are different in their core beings, and so on…..

The existence of Gods, or Aliens, or Demons, or Evil as a solitary force are other unexamined assumptions taken as though they are real …. These ones in particular derive from religious indoctrination.

It’s good practice to explore such assumptions, and to find one’s own intuitions and to then find ways to test those learnings.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

The Bears don S**T in the woods no more.... live!

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Let the will of the State act, then, instead of the will of the indiviual (or community)

Here's a nice quote to illustrate the way in which childrens minds were targetted through compulsory state education, on behalf of the Industrialists who were hell-bent on turning States into representatives of business, and to do that they felt it neccessary to exercise mind-control, to deflect dissent, especially reasoned dissent.

You will recognise the elements, and for sure, each of us has fallen foul of these. I know I have.

Charles Pierce, the eminence grise behind William James and John Dewey, architects of Compulsory State Education in the USA wrote :

“Let the will of the state act, then, instead of the will of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young, having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed.

Let all possible cause of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehension. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard … unusual opinions with hatred and horror. Then, let all men who reject the established belief be terrified into silence….

Let a list of opinions be drawn up to which no man of the least independence of thought can assent, and let the faithful be required to accept all these propositions in order to segregate them as radically as possible from the influence of the rest of the world.”

We can see this in operation in the media, and in school text-books. And we can see this in operation in our own minds as we sometimes struggle to grasp the truth of our current situation. Unexamined assumptions are a good guide to those areas of our thinking that have been 'adjusted' to fit into this 'sick society', an adjustment that Martin Luther King made clear was unacceptable.

Here's a few more quotes to flesh this process out a bit.

Woodrow Wilson speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909 :

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

This is the technology of modern management ……this is the doctrine which drove William James in “Principles of Psychology” (1890), to assign habit-training, not intellectual development, the place of honour in schooling :

“Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, it’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what … saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor … it alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive (jobs) from being deserted. It holds the miner in his darkness. It keeps different strata of society from mixing.”

All of us who attended state schooling have been exposed to and conditioned to accept the imposed and limited ideas that are taught through that education, reinforced through the media and that underpin the success of marketing.

This is the core technology of psychological state control upon which the likes of Tony Blair, David Cameron and the leaders of Indusrty et al depend upon.

Of course they retain that other oh-so familiar stick, that of poverty, physical violence or imprisonment to curtail those few who escape this conditioning. That’s what the War Against Terror and the consistent attack on civil liberties is all about.


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

Bees, the BBC and the obvious but obscured truths about food production

Just watched a docu on the BEE BEE SEE about bees and the massive die-offs of bees everywhere except Autralia.

It’s really obvious, to me at least, that the single most important factor in this occurrence, and in many other similar ‘events’ throughout nature HAS GOT TO BE the kinds of human interventions that tend to undermine natural resilience, which is founded on bio-diversity …. variety is the spice of life, so to speak, and when humans monocrop for profit, on a huge scale, the natural resilience and variety is destroyed....

Nature is a huge ineteraction of trillions upon trillions of creatures and plants, with no hierarchy other than that which human beings of the ‘civilised... Read more’ sort project onto it…(we project our own ideas onto others, because we have an inability to see others as they see themselves).


Thus messing around with something that works (nature definitely works, which is the strength of permaculture) is utterly stupid, and pretending that we are somehow ‘more intelligent’ than that which makes us is hubris of the worst sort.


We (industrial civilisation as is) are to nature as Tony Blair is to Iraq, Education and Spirituality.. and we brag about it….
sheesh!

Somethings got to give, and unless we revert to localised food production, and in ways that rebuild natural diversity, and fast, we are seriously and possibly fatally compromising our very existence.

There have been a few other programmes on the BBC which show how food production has changed since the end of World War II, when the Pharmaceutical Industry switched from killing people to killing bugs and plants - the same chemicals are used to 'fertilise' crops as were used to make bombs - and what nobody mentions is that the HUGE profits that the Pharmaceutical Companies made out of the war (while everybody else near starved on rations) allowed them to expend huge efforts to lobby Governments excessively so as to promote their chemcials as the 'green revolution', which has led inexorably to Monsanto, GMOs and patented seeds etc etc... and has been the cause of massive toxicity in our foods, our soils, our waters and also placed us in a very vulnerable position as food growing is ever more concentrated if fewer and fewer hands (only 1400 dairy farmers left in the UK.....!).


Keep on blowing the trumpet for local growing and eating. It’s the only tune that nature knows… apart from some species that travel to food such as some whales, great white sharks, birds etc etc….


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe

A school run by children, assisted by adults

Short documentary on an independent 'school' in Copenhagen, from the 70s, that explores why such a school might exist. The footage shows happy lively children and adults learning together, and the commentary reveals the thinking behind the school.



This is what all children and parents need to understand, that childrens learning is best driven by their own motivations, that children want to become competent in the world they are born into, that 'thinking alone' is a vital creative drive in all people and that democracy without this in place in all it's constituents is a farce, a soap opera that distracts attention and enables control by forces whose interests are not the same as those of most 'ordinary folk'.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's your gift to universe