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Citizen Jimserac Citizen Jimserac is offline
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Default $4 dollar gas and its effects on metalworking

On Apr 22, 1:31 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"CitizenJimserac" wrote in message

...

On Apr 22, 1:48 am, "Ed Huntress"


I will repeat...


We are all products of some system or other
but there are enough misfits, loners and individualists
to escape the zombification process and become
real thinking human beings. Plenty have done it
and, with the incredibly liberating power of the Internet,
the medium in which we are now having this exchange,
the process is accelerated.


Yes, you said that. g That's quite a sweeping claim, predicated on the
idea that most school turns most people into "zombies" who can't think. That
isn't my experience.

Before I graduated from high school I attended 12 different schools in six
different states, two private and 10 public; I also attended one university
in the US and one in Europe, which had students from all over the world.
There were good ones and bad ones in that mix, to be sure, but I knew both
excellent and awful students who had been educated in a wide variety of
school types and systems.

The difference, as Larry also suggested here, seemed to be the students, not
the systems. Some were fortunate to have supportive families and/or a couple
or three exceptional teachers. That's what I experienced, as well. The worst
schools I attended produced a lower percentage of good students who could
think, who were creative and who were self-motivated by the time they were
upperclassmen in high school. The best schools produced more of them. But
those good schools also tended to be located in communities where education
was held in high esteem and there was little cynicism about school among the
students. The most outstanding example of that was the high school from
which I graduated: Princeton High School, a public school in a small town of
14,000 but located in the midst of Princeton University, Westminster Choir
College, The Princeton Theological Seminary, the Institute for Advanced
Study, and several top-rated prep schools, where more than a few of the
students were sons and daughters of university professors and where it was
cool to be smart and to get good grades. The school system was conventional;
the teachers were well above average; but, most importantly, the culture of
the students themselves was one that encouraged and motivated other
students.

That made all the difference. The opportunities to learn were there and,
while they were above average, they were based on the same state
requirements, the same institutional model, the same teaching credential
requirements, the same NEA, and the same salaries being paid throughout the
system.

Students -- or what they bring with them to school -- are the key. Families
are key to the students. Families collectively produce a community's culture
and attitudes. And attitudes in the general community shape the attitudes of
the students.



In addition I will offer the growing paroxysms of school violence,
which has accelerated since Columbine, as proof that the young
students will no longer suffer the zombification and strictures which
are forced upon them but will revolt, even to the death against it.


Columbine is proof that there are some very screwed up people attending our
schools, and that cultural aspects of the school environment itself can
provoke them to murderous behavior. How much the school, as an institution,
contributed to that is hard to say. In any case, the Columbine killers seem
to fit the profile you favor: misfits and loners who escaped being
socialized by the schools. They escaped it forever.



No, it was not video games, not arguments with the sports team members
nor our violent culture and media that had anything to do with it...
those things have been around for a long time. But the Internet and
the growing realization among young people that their future has been
mortgaged away, literally as well as figuratively speaking, inevitably
leads to the explosions of violence which have occured with increasing
frequency.


Look to the system itself, NOT THE STUDENTS, for the causes.


CitizenJimserac


It seems likely that you had an unhappy experience in school. It also seems
likely that you've force-fit the events into your theory, finding "proof" of
what you're saying by presuming causative relationships where none probably
exist.

--
Ed Huntress


Never mind me, I'm just one from many. My experiences are hardly
definitive and you've attended far more schools at all levels than
I ever did. But that very fact probably saved you from its
full effect. Besides, teachers are for the most part good
and well intentioned and they resent the system as much
as everyone else. Read Gatto's book, it's all there - the smuggled
in "guidelines" and "standards" about what our students
would or would not learn, could or could not learn,
should or should not learn and the role of "socialization"
(remember what was then called "social studies").

I took some education courses at Rhode Island College
in the late 1960's and I recall my astonishment at the
Maoist like intensity with which the views of Jean Jaques Rousseau,
Dewey and Horace Mann were propounded as if they were
the be all and end all of educational philosophies.

Citizen Jimserac