[PLEASUREMAN]

Generally, I recommend Bob Somerby (The Daily Howler) on the subject of education; Somerby has actually taught for a living, and therefore tends to produce highly sensible writing on the subject. More specifically, he has long called attention to the inanity and foolishness of much media education punditry, especially the kind that proclaims every child an undiscovered genius and condemns schools for "failing to challenge our students".

Somerby in a nutshell: Some kids don't have the ability to succeed at the level of others, and some kids start the game so far back from the starting line that expecting the same results from them is absurd. And what is needed is not more educational gimmicks and fads, but serious rethinking of how best to help the students at all levels. What are sane expectations?

All of which is greatly refreshing. Nevertheless I did find Somerby's recent howler disappointing in one sense:

The Daily Howler:

The logic of statewide standards: Toward the end of his column, Herbert offers an intriguing, though rather imprecise, thought about “standardization.” We tend to agree with what Herbert says, although he’s imprecise:

Quote

HERBERT: When you look at the variety of public schools that have worked well in the U.S.—in cities big and small, and in suburban and rural areas—you wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea to throw a stultifying blanket of standardization over the education of millions of kids of different aptitudes, interests and levels of maturity.

The idea should always have been to develop a flexible system of public education that would allow all—or nearly all—children to thrive. One of the things Bard has shown is that kids from wildly different backgrounds—including large numbers of immigrant children—can thrive in an educational environment that is much more intellectually demanding than your typical high school.

We tend to agree with those highlighted passages, although they’re maddeningly imprecise—and although Herbert undercuts his general point with his instant, feel-good remark about “kids from wildly different backgrounds.” (All kids from those different backgrounds wouldn’t succeed at Bard.)

In that passage, Herbert has the germ of a crucial point. Within any age or grade group, there are vastly different levels of motivation, achievement and ability. It makes no sense to teach the same curriculum to all kids who are 15 years old—or to all kids who are high school sophomores. Some 15-year-old kids in New York can knock Bard’s curriculum out of the park. Some 15-year-old kids in New York can barely read or do math.

It’s absurd to think that all these kids should be taught the same curriculum. And yet, we constantly hear about the way the states are adjusting their grade-by-grade, statewide standards. We have never had the slightest idea how those “standards” are actually supposed to function inside actual classrooms—and we’ve never seen a journalist ask the obvious questions. But let’s understand: There is no set of curricular standards which is relevant to all tenth-graders. In New York, or in Los Angeles, some tenth-graders are ready to groan over fiendishly difficult math problems. And some such kids can’t pass Algebra 1, no matter how many times they’re forced to take it.

You wouldn't expect the liberal Somerby to talk about disadvantages other than cultural and socioeconomic, and he generally doesn't, but he acknowledges that kids need to be better matched to educational standards they are capable of meeting.

The part that disappointed me was Somerby's failure to condemn another problem in education: a two track system that greatly widens the cultural and equality gap between the two real classes in contemporary American, the managerial class and the servant class (let's call the "service economy" what it is--a servant economy).

Increasingly, the managerial class uses carefully shielded public schools (shielded by inflated housing costs) and expensive private schools to remove itself from the educational system it forces everyone else to use. These schools serve as the cognitive elite's time machine, allowing them to preserve an idyllic educational environment for use by class members which adds to their advantages in IQ, wealth, and social access (via nepotism and class chauvinism). Meanwhile immigration, diversity, and concentrations of underclass act as entropic forces on the rest of society.

But perhaps the most potent problem is the diminished interaction among the social strata; the managerial class is removed from the servant class not only by geography, status, profession, ethnicity (for it is overwhelmingly white, Jewish, and Asian), culture, and a great wall of wealth, but even from the very start of life in its access to different schools. In other words, the managerial class sees a smaller and smaller slice of its countrymen, and that slice is more and more homogenized, thereby distorting its view of the world almost to the point of dementia.

This applies not just to the managerial class but to the cognitive elite as a whole. The cognitive elite, already certain of its superior intelligence, tends to have little interaction with those who are merely average let alone below average. This results in a disastrously limited awareness of the varied environments in which public policy is carried out, or of the problems unique to the lower and what is left of the middle classes--even a limited awareness of the cognitive elite's own shortcomings. Society's elite is in essence sheltered from much of reality, given idealized environments to grow in, and then set the task of governance in a democracy that encompasses an impractically diverse population most of which is below it in aptitude and upbringing.

The result is that our elite's hubris is magnified far beyond its already alarming level, leaving pundits such as Bob Herbert to write about education like acid tripping Mensans, bemoaning that all students aren't made to groan with disappointment when math class ends (this is Friedman-level fantasy). There is evidence that the elite's patronizing views of the rest of the country are a product of its relative economic, cultural, and ethnic seclusion. But another element is its near total lack of humility, and one socially acceptable expression of its arrogance is the loud insistence that, if they were just pushed hard enough and made to pass enough tests, every child would be as smart as theirs!

Somerby doesn't quite pick up on the pitfalls of this two track system--he seems to think "tracking on steroids" is more or less laudable. I think what we have today is a system that simply can't work. A two track system won't produce a healthy democracy in which the elite are aware of and respectful to the classes beneath them. It will produce a managerial oligarchy. And yet we are too diverse and too large for a one track system to really work well--a system capable of creating the social equality that Bob Herbert cannot even fathom the need for.

The logic of scale and cognitive filtering have produced a hugely complex society that even the cognitive elite can barely manage for themselves, while it has left the cognitively disadvantaged incapable of finding a place that preserves a modicum of human dignity and self-respect.

To some degree a radical reshaping of the educational system might help. Transitioning lower IQ students to a more vocation- and skill-oriented path wouldn't increase class interaction but might place less capable students in environments where they can really succeed. However even were such an environment somehow protected from manipulation (for certainly parents would play the same games to get their kids into the "better", that is higher status, enviroment), this would still lead to many of the same problems as today's two track system.

[PRCalDude]

Quote

Increasingly, the managerial class uses carefully shielded public schools (shielded by inflated housing costs) and expensive private schools to remove itself from the educational system it forces everyone else to use. These schools serve as the cognitive elite's time machine, allowing them to preserve an idyllic educational environment for use by class members which adds to their advantages in IQ, wealth, and social access (via nepotism and class chauvinism). Meanwhile immigration, diversity, and concentrations of underclass act as entropic forces on the rest of society.

Having observed so much of this in Southern California, allow me to throw in a few comments.

Inflated housing costs were largely a function of the attack on lending standards, the mania of the last decade, and now the government's attempts to shore them up.

The place my parents live was considered working class and blue collar prior to the late 90s. Around 98, the same year Clinton revised the CRA, home prices really started taking off. Towards the early 2000s, all of my prole friends became mortgage brokers, and now most of them owe back taxes.

What originally destroyed housing in Los Angeles county, causing all the whites to move out, was busing. So immigration and diversity, while huge problems, are less destructive without government meddling.

Quote

But perhaps the most potent problem is the diminished interaction among the social strata; the managerial class is removed from the servant class not only by geography, status, profession, ethnicity (for it is overwhelmingly white, Jewish, and Asian), culture, and a great wall of wealth, but even from the very start of life in its access to different schools. In other words, the managerial class sees a smaller and smaller slice of its countrymen, and that slice is more and more homogenized, thereby distorting its view of the world almost to the point of dementia.

Let's extrapolate to the limit. I read recently that many of the middle management jobs are gone forever thanks to this recession. The upper class continues to concentrate wealth but continues to shrink in size. I'd venture to guess that, due to the complexity of finance nowadays, it's increasingly hard to hold onto wealth. I think that, in the limit, this elite disappears or gets wiped out. Demography is destiny, and the elite may go the way of the Boer in Zaffa.

Quote

Transitioning lower IQ students to a more vocation- and skill-oriented path wouldn't increase class interaction but might place less capable students in environments where they can really succeed.

I agree that all men need to work and we're not all cut out for college, but the problem is that robotics and automation are rapidly taking over the lower class jobs. Manufacturing output has increased in this country for the past 70 years while manufacturing employment has plummeted, taking higher-wage middle class jobs with it. Just as we don't all work on farms anymore, we don't all work in factories anymore. This begs the question, what can the lower classes actually do for work that automation can't do better?

[PLEASUREMAN]

PRCalDude, 31 May 2010 - 11:35 AM:

I agree that all men need to work and we're not all cut out for college, but the problem is that robotics and automation are rapidly taking over the lower class jobs. Manufacturing output has increased in this country for the past 70 years while manufacturing employment has plummeted, taking higher-wage middle class jobs with it. Just as we don't all work on farms anymore, we don't all work in factories anymore. This begs the question, what can the lower classes actually do for work that automation can't do better?

It's by no means an easy problem to solve. Obviously a start is by stopping the assault on working class wages that is inherent in mass immigration and offshoring labor and manufacturing. There are many manufacturing and other blue collar jobs that are needed, the managerial class just prefers they be done somewhere far away where the workers can be treated with greater indifference and paid much less.

Something else that is going on is automatiing jobs in the name of efficiency and cheapness. This is the elimination of jobs that humans actually do better than machines, but not as cheaply. Consider for example how even lowly call center work is increasingly replaced with recordings and voice recognition systems (maddeningly, if you've ever tried to use one and had it fail to recognize your intention). Checkouts are giving way to self-service kiosks, and so on.

In some cases machines in factories do lesser quality work, but they do it more uniformly and cheaply hence are preferred by management. Can we find a way to return to more expensive human labor? Our scale is an obstacle.

I don't have a well-developed policy prescription at this point. These are just the beginnings of ideas.

[Cinco Jotas]

PLEASUREMAN, 31 May 2010 - 08:51 AM:

To some degree a radical reshaping of the educational system might help. Transitioning lower IQ students to a more vocation- and skill-oriented path wouldn't increase class interaction but might place less capable students in environments where they can really succeed. However even were such an environment somehow protected from manipulation (for certainly parents would play the same games to get their kids into the "better", that is higher status, enviroment), this would still lead to many of the same problems as today's two track system.

Exactly.

I don't know if you're familiar with John Taylor Gatto, but you should read his work (especially the Underground History of American Eduction). It's not especially deep, and it's filled with some happy-slappy "all children are snowflakes" nonsense, but he's dead right about much that he says.

http://www.johntaylo...ground/toc1.htm

Quote

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.

Dewey called this transformation "the new individualism." When I stepped into the job of schoolteacher in 1961, the new individualism was sitting in the driver’s seat all over urban America, a far cry from my own school days on the Monongahela when the Lone Ranger, not Sesame Street, was our nation’s teacher, and school things weren’t nearly so oppressive. But gradually they became something else in the euphoric times following WWII. Easy money and easy travel provided welcome relief from wartime austerity, the advent of television, the new nonstop theater, offered easy laughs, effortless entertainment. Thus preoccupied, Americans failed to notice the deliberate conversion of formal education that was taking place, a transformation that would turn school into an instrument of the leviathan state. Who made that happen and why is part of the story I have to tell.

Gatto's main point is that modern schools teach subservience and deference to power, all in an effort to fit one into a preconceived, industrialized notion of the social hierarchy. By comparison in the 18th and 19th century, schooling, such as existed in America, produced individuals capable of self-governance and independent thought.

He proposes reforming schools to be as localized as possible, completely controlled by parents, and geared towards giving children as much adult responsibility as possible, so that they develop habits of mind proper to an autonomous individual.

As I said, I don't think he's always right, and he's a romantic, but he's definitely onto something.

This post has been edited by Cinco Jotas: 31 May 2010 - 12:21 PM

[Cinco Jotas]

Here's a little more Gatto...

http://www.johntaylo...d/prologue6.htm

Quote

Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:

Quote

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

Quote

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can’t do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Cinco Jotas, 31 May 2010 - 12:32 PM:

I don't know if you're familiar with John Taylor Gatto, but you should read his work (especially the Underground History of American Eduction). It's not especially deep, and it's filled with some happy-slappy "all children are snowflakes" nonsense, but he's dead right about much that he says.

http://www.johntaylo...ground/toc1.htm

This excerpt from the prologue is tantalizingly provocative:

Quote

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.

[ash]

Quote

I agree that all men need to work and we're not all cut out for college, but the problem is that robotics and automation are rapidly taking over the lower class jobs. Manufacturing output has increased in this country for the past 70 years while manufacturing employment has plummeted, taking higher-wage middle class jobs with it. Just as we don't all work on farms anymore, we don't all work in factories anymore. This begs the question, what can the lower classes actually do for work that automation can't do better?

How about the Amish solution?

The majority of people cannot live a meaningful life in a modern capitalist society. Currently, if you don't fit in, you either don't work at all or do some terrible boring low status job. The state ensures that certain basic needs are met (food, medicine, shelter).

So, how about you live in a pre-modern agrarian type society? And then, if you hurt yourself very badly or something, the modern capitalist state can step in and take care of you. This is what happens when the Amish get into bad accidents.

People regard the Amish as weird. But I don't think people regard them with *contempt* say for instance the way they do the Walmart cashier lady.

[ash]

ash, 31 May 2010 - 11:32 PM:

Quote

I agree that all men need to work and we're not all cut out for college, but the problem is that robotics and automation are rapidly taking over the lower class jobs. Manufacturing output has increased in this country for the past 70 years while manufacturing employment has plummeted, taking higher-wage middle class jobs with it. Just as we don't all work on farms anymore, we don't all work in factories anymore. This begs the question, what can the lower classes actually do for work that automation can't do better?

How about the Amish solution?

The majority of people cannot live a meaningful life in a modern capitalist society. Currently, if you don't fit in, you either don't work at all or do some terrible boring low status job. The state ensures that certain basic needs are met (food, medicine, shelter).

So, how about you live in a pre-modern agrarian type society? And then, if you hurt yourself very badly or something, the modern capitalist state can step in and take care of you. This is what happens when the Amish get into bad accidents.

People regard the Amish as weird. But I don't think people regard them with *contempt* say for instance the way they do the Walmart cashier lady.

[ash]

The Amish way:

An 8th grade education is enough.

No stuff.

I think this is the way to go. It doesn't really matter if you don't have much in the way of education or things if everyone else around also doesn't have much education or stuff and everyone happens to be pretty well behaved.

This post has been edited by ash: 31 May 2010 - 10:44 PM

[PLEASUREMAN]

I wouldn't go quite that extreme. Horse and buggies, etc. But, Nietzsche notwithstanding, we need to figure out how to move in that direction. Seems hopeless until you can do something about the cognitive elite driving all this super-complexity and assault on the middle class. How do you get a non-brainless populist movement going? It's a stumper.

[Cinco Jotas]

ash, 31 May 2010 - 09:32 PM:

How about the Amish solution?

The majority of people cannot live a meaningful life in a modern capitalist society. Currently, if you don't fit in, you either don't work at all or do some terrible boring low status job. The state ensures that certain basic needs are met (food, medicine, shelter).

So, how about you live in a pre-modern agrarian type society? And then, if you hurt yourself very badly or something, the modern capitalist state can step in and take care of you. This is what happens when the Amish get into bad accidents.

People regard the Amish as weird. But I don't think people regard them with *contempt* say for instance the way they do the Walmart cashier lady.

The Amish have much to recommend them, their emphasis on family, work, faith, and tradition in particular.


I think they're an extreme example of something that's been often discussed on this forum, how to maintain beneficial traditions and social cohesion in the face of dehumanizing problems of scale. The Amish don't reject electricity and automobiles because they believe them to be intrinsically evil, they reject them because they believe they will change the nature of their society for the worse. Private cars make it too easy to leave the family behind, centralized electricity means you're beholding to the outside world.

The point being, that the Amish make conscious group decisions about what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Milking machines, small gas engines, and pneumatic powered saws have all been deemed acceptable in specific roles, but only after lengthy consideration and trial periods.

The Amish are very deliberate about evaluating and debating change.

We are not; the slightest promise of benefit effects great change, with little thought given to side-effects and consequences. Somewhere along the line, we've decided that greater manufacturing efficiency and lower consumer prices were the greatest good, with all other human considerations ranked well below. The Amish have not made that bargain.

This is not to say that the Amish, with their emphasis on extreme godliness and agrarian virtue, are the best model for a nation of 310 million people, rather it is a recognition that other options are possible if we can be more deliberate in our choices.


As for Amish-style education, it works for them, it would probably work for us. Let us agree that the vast majority of people require nothing more than a good 8th grade education.

Reading, writing, civic virtue (a.k.a. American history properly taught), and basic mathematical skills (up to algebra) is pretty much all that's really absolutely necessary to make a functioning citizen. After that, at 8th grade graduation, the parents and teachers decide what's best for the young person, continuation on to secondary schooling or an apprenticeship of some sort.

We should also agree that most jobs that now require a college degree for entry, shouldn't, and in fact would be better suited for apprenticeships.

For example: insurance agent. You don't need a college degree, much less an MBA, to be an effective insurance agent.

Take a boy at 14, with a good elementary education, and start him as an unpaid clerk in an insurance office. Slowly over the course of four or five years, move him into positions of increasing responsibility, and have him go slowly from unpaid to low paid, to finally, a full fledged insurance agent at 18 or 19 years old. He'll have a better understanding, and be better prepared to do his job than a 22-year-old fresh out of college. And, even better, you'll have an 18-year-old young man who's confident and responsible, compared to today's 18-year-old adolescent college student.

Progression to adult responsibility starting at an early age is the key to turning children into autonomous, responsible adults.

If you read Patrick O'Brien's sea novels, one thing that strikes you forcefully is the amount of responsibility given to very young midshipmen. You go to sea as a boy at 11 or 12, and by 14 or 15, you're commanding small boats and gangs of sailors in combat. By 16 or 17, you're judged capable of taking a prize ship back to port, and by 18 or 19, if you can pass a lieutenant's exam, you might be ready to be the second or third in command of a man-of-war, with responsibility for several hundred sailors.

Our children are less responsible and more infantile only because we make them so, not because human nature has changed wildly over the past two centuries.

This post has been edited by Cinco Jotas: 01 June 2010 - 02:28 AM

[The Jewish Conspiracy]

Cinco Jotas, 01 June 2010 - 02:16 AM:

Our children are less responsible and more infantile only because we make them so, not because human nature has changed wildly over the past two centuries.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Cinco Jotas, 01 June 2010 - 03:16 AM:

The Amish are very deliberate about evaluating and debating change.

This is the quality we lack, replaced with an antsy desire for novelty and an outright hostility toward those who value tradition.

[PLEASUREMAN]

The Jewish Conspiracy, 01 June 2010 - 05:01 AM:

Cinco Jotas, 01 June 2010 - 02:16 AM:

Our children are less responsible and more infantile only because we make them so, not because human nature has changed wildly over the past two centuries.

One mustn't underestimate the effects of overcomplexity amid large populations, which appears to produce an infantile passivity--the effects perhaps of disintegrating community as well. It is not the product of conscious choice, or even necessarily the actions of parents. A wise parent is still at the mercy of social forces; although if I were raising a child I would certainly move away from the city and suburbs to do so. There are still pockets of tradition and peacefulness.

[isamu]

PRCalDude, 31 May 2010 - 10:35 AM:

Having observed so much of this in Southern California, allow me to throw in a few comments.

Inflated housing costs were largely a function of the attack on lending standards, the mania of the last decade, and now the government's attempts to shore them up.

Before anyone ever uttered the phrase "housing bubble", there was always a huge price premium for the neighbourhoods zoned for the good schools. My parents bought overpriced houses in neighbourhoods they had no desire to live in soley to get my siblings and I into good schools.

[isamu]

ash, 31 May 2010 - 10:32 PM:

How about the Amish solution?

The Amish solution is to found colonies and then contribute almost nothing to the state. While they receive very little in direct benefits from the government, they still get to enjoy the huge public-good benefits of a modern state -- most importantly, for a bunch of sworn pacifists, the protection of a modern and incredibly expensive military. Essentially they are free-loaders who are tolerated because they are unobtrusive, make few demands and America is still rich enough not to care. However, if there is ever a real resource competition, which there will be eventually, they are going to get shit-on, and hard.

You can have all tradition-preserving you want, but if your traditions put you at a huge disadvantage in a struggle with non-traditionalists, your traditions will go extinct.

This post has been edited by isamu: 01 June 2010 - 02:35 PM

[Cinco Jotas]

isamu, 01 June 2010 - 01:33 PM:

ash, 31 May 2010 - 10:32 PM:

How about the Amish solution?

The Amish solution is to found colonies and then contribute almost nothing to the state. While they receive very little in direct benefits from the government, they still get to enjoy the huge public-good benefits of a modern state -- most importantly, for a bunch of sworn pacifists, the protection of a modern and incredibly expensive military. Essentially they are free-loaders who are tolerated because they are unobtrusive, make few demands and America is still rich enough not to care. However, if there is ever a real resource competition, which there will be eventually, they are going to get shit-on, and hard.

You can have all tradition-preserving you want, but if your traditions put you at a huge disadvantage in a struggle with non-traditionalists, your traditions will go extinct.

I agree that the Amish solution is not viable on the grand scale, for the very reasons you cite, the wider world is a dangerous place.

However, to call them free-loaders is incorrect. They pay every tax except for social security.

http://www.holycross...mishfaq.htm#tax

Quote

Self-employed Amish do not pay Social Security tax. Those employed by non- Amish employers do pay Social Security tax. The Amish do pay real estate, state and federal income taxes, county taxes, sales tax, etc.

The Amish do not collect Social Security benefits, nor would they collect unemployment or welfare funds. Self sufficiency is the Amish community's answer to government aid programs. Section 310 of the Medicare section of the Social Security act has a sub-section that permits individuals to apply for exemption from the self-employment tax if he is a member of a religious body that is conscientiously opposed to Social Security benefits but that makes reasonable provision of taking care of their own elderly or dependent members. The Amish have a long history of taking care of their own members. They do not have retirement communities or nursing homes; in most cases, each family takes care of their own, and the Amish community gives assistance as needed.

As for their receiving the protection of the American military while refusing to contribute manpower to that military, I would say that I find refusal based on honorable religious beliefs infinitely preferable to the current leftist practice of avoiding (and denigrating) service on lifestyle grounds. The Amish know perfectly well that there's often a price to be paid for pacifism; their history prior to their arrival in America is one of persecution for that belief.

Finally, I wouldn't advocate an Amish lifestyle for anyone, except those most committed to living a simple life. My citation of the Amish was to show that there are communities who make conscious decisions about the adoption of technology, decisions based upon human considerations, not just short term economics.

This post has been edited by Cinco Jotas: 01 June 2010 - 03:45 PM

[Wido Incognitus]

Wrote something here. It was too long so is now edited to this. The main point was that things weren't as different from John Taylor Gatto seems to think.

This post has been edited by Wido Incognitus: 01 June 2010 - 10:36 PM

[Wido Incognitus]

PMan, before you comment, I'm taking down my earlier comment. It's not right for this medium.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Wido Incognitus, 01 June 2010 - 11:35 PM:

PMan, before you comment, I'm taking down my earlier comment. It's not right for this medium.

I liked your comment, what was not right about it? It was not too long. Have you seen any of my posts here???