by frog
Happy Bastille Day!
Published in THE ISSUES by frog on Sat, July 14th, 2012
Tags: general debate
General debate, July 14, 2012
Published: July 14, 2012
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A new incorporated society was formed on Sunday to protect Fiordland from inappropriate commercial development. It was wonderful to have Eugenie Sage present at the meeting to inspire and advise us. Eugenie is the only MP from any party to both submit against the proposals and front up to a public meeting on the issues.
I’m hoping the Green Party could make the threats to Fiordland and its World Heritage status a nationally recognized issue, especially as it is images of Fiordland that largely underpins our clean green brand.
http://localbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/save-fiordland-society-incorporated.html
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The wealthy deserve their wealth
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48160711
Wow!
I knew that they were promoting ignorance in the USA when I left, but I had no notion that they were going to succeed so profoundly.
It will take a decade or so, or a complete monetary collapse, before the kids grow old and wise enough to recognize how wholly pwned they’ve become.
I could wish my fellow Americans were smarter, but I am astonished by the Aussies and the Canucks…
… except that both countries are currently intent on or actually growing their income by selling their resources out from under their kids.
One could call them names, but it isn’t necessary. We already do.
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BJ,
If you are not selling or utilising a resource it is not a resource.
Take ironsand as an example, it has no value as a resource if it is left on the ocean floor or in sand dunes along the west coast.
Even if we, as a generation, left it there, our kids face the same scenario.
Do they leave it for the their kids or dig it up and realise the value of the ironsand?
What is more important is that if we dig up the ironsand and realise the value, what do we spend it on to make our childrens children life better.
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National Standards are seriously flawed and their inconsistent unmoderated nature means there will be no value in their collective data and for the Government to endorse a league table based on them would be unethical and dishonest. Judging by the government’s performance generally, perhaps honesty and ethics are not regarded as criteria important enough to reverse their decision.
http://localbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/implementing-league-tables-dishonest.html
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Climate change deniers wasting taxpayer money
The problem here is that Climate Science Education “Trust” (CSET) is wasting NIWA, the Ombudsman and the courts time and therefore our tax money, and because CSET is operating through a trust, there is little hope of recovering costs when their claims are found to be frivolous!
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Their problem, among MANY problems, is that no court can have the ability to invalidate science. It is for scientists to do, and they generally have done a good job of it where it is needful.
This mob are going to court because their “many” can be counted on the fingers of one hand and they have no scientific case to make.
One does wish they had the sense to be something other than idiots, but I reckon you’ve made the point just fine there. Funny how it is almost always some superannuated guy who is in this camp.
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But THIS is really really good…
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1207/S00185/flat-earth-society-weighs-in-on-niwa-high-court-case.htm
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Jeez, their website is like a forest of disinformation. One has to wonder at their reasoning powers beyond quoting Monckton, Ball and Lindzen.
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Schooling: Engagement or disengagement?
John Taylor Gatto was told by one of his students about how to train flees. You first put them in a covered glass where the flees try to jump out. After the flees bang their heads on the lid for a couple of hours they come to lose their will to jump. From here you can train them, because you have then first broken their will – their drive to follow their own way.
Gatto, as a schoolteacher, said he immediately realised that he was the lid on the pot for his students, after hearing this story. So schooling is not about engagement – it’s about disengagement. That is, where the student disengages from their will to follow their own way, and likewise becomes a primarily passive recipient to somebody else’s developmental agenda (HUMAN RESOURCE).
I never forgot this story about flees because that’s exactly what schooling felt like for me. The work in itself was a joke – trivia. It’s the suppression of your own will and way that’s so hard and strenuous, especially for boys I believe. (Girls seem to be inherently more conformist when it comes to schoolwork for some reason).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exGYyV7yMpY&feature=BFa&list=PL463AA90FD04EC7A2
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Andrew Atkin – avid promoter of alternative education, critic of all that is to be found in our present education system, writes a comprehensive comment on…flees, those tiny creatures that are forever fleeing…
oh
my
goodness!
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greenfly:
Read it again and think about it.
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Sorry Andrew, I must have lost any edge I thought I had. I was sure the spelling was ‘fleas’ but somehow I’ve misunderstood the whole thing. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten anything so wrong as I did with this one. Perhaps I ought to retire from commenting, having missed the point so spectacularly here.
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Flee Greenflea, flee!
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greenfly:
Did you know that when you deprive a child of their needs for long enough, and severely enough, they then lose conscious access to the need altogether? Their system “gives up”, and usually they don’t even know that it’s happened (the flee example was just a simple expression of this – which I am sure you knew). It’s also called repression. What comes in to replace the originally lost need is a substitute need (also called a neurotic need), like maybe the need to suck on cigarettes because you didn’t get enough titty as a baby.
If schooling crushes the human need to follow self-determination, and it does it well enough, long enough, and at a young enough age, then we will not even know that the ‘crush’ has happened because we then just won’t care. Once a child has been made a follower they are happy to follow. And people like that won’t even know what I’m talking about – they will just lumber through life in an apathetic state wondering where their natural curiosity went. Happy to eat whatever junk is handed to them by their dotty socialist schoolteacher because they don’t know else to do with themselves.
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Actually, Andrew, I don’t think anyone here would argue against education that truly excites a person’t cuirosity and wonder.
However, your comments about “dotty socialist schoolteacher” do make me wonder whether you have a personal problem with teachers and schools rather than an educational philosophy that we can talk about.
I’m really interested in an intelligent conversation on education – how it might be expressed in both the kind of rich western society we live and how it might be expressed in countries that are not doing so well.
Are you suggesting leaving a child’e education entirely up to the parents? Or an alternative collective approach for those who have to work or are not interested or up to the job?
I am serious – it is for me one of the most important topics to discuss, but your negative ranting is not useful.
(I think Greenfly was pointing out your spelling error of “flea”)
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You’ve described me perfectly!!
It’s uncanny, Andrew. Somehow, you discovered that I went to a conventional school and suffered several of those dotty socialist schoolteachers. I regard them as worse than flees.
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greenfly:
I am impressed by your honesty.
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Andrew Atkin – I am impressed by your apparently complete incognizance of sarcastic irony.
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Janine:
“dotty socialist schoolteacher” is based on personal observation. Not all schoolteachers are wide-eyed idiots – but many are, I believe. Though I do believe that you have to be a socialist in substance to bring yourself to control other people’s children under the authority of the state. Which to me is a bit sick.
My personal perspective on schooling, as far as philosophy goes, is here:
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co.nz/2010/11/education-new-model.html
and here:
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co.nz/2011/10/do-schools-bribe-people-out-of-their.html
and here:
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/education-notes.html
Gregor W:
I was returning the sarcasm.
Ps: sorry for spelling flea as flee.
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I don’t have the time to read through and comment on your website – there is some quite interesting stuff, but if you do want to talk about how we can create a better way of educating people then how about you start with something specific.
For me, education doesn’t happen in a physical or social vacuum. We don’t have an equal society or a flat playing field so simply announcing that all children should just teach themselves using computers is just a statement of aspiration without much relevance to real lives or circumstances.
For example, what do you think about parents as first teachers?
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Keys assurance to the Maori party means nothing
Keys assurance to the Maori party that National will not legislate away any rights to water is patently false and has been used to score a cheap hit on the previous Labour government.
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I always refer people to Sudbury Valley School, in the USA. It’s been running for decades. It’s the unschooling method.
http://www.sudval.org/
The contrasting philosophy of Sudbury is that a child is a tree – not a building. Children should (and do, actually) grow into the demands of their culture autonomously – and not (necessarily) by having someone else “programme” them. The teacher is more of a consultant than a director. And Sudbury school has been successful by any reasonable measure.
Our measure of children’s educational development is ultimately based on what our industrial society wants, and it can drive bulldozers over kids brains to that end. What we are told today is “quality” education is really just meaning an education system that creates good corporate drones – the better the drone, the better the “quality”. (Henry Ford OPENLY admitted this when he was backing the introduction of the Prussian education model into the USA, which is also our system).
The great question is: To what degree should society ‘make’ the individual, like a resource to meet its own needs, rather than let the individual make themselves and, in turn, let society evolve to the demands/dependencies of those individuals?
If we give the corporate’s a blank cheque on our kids then we can (and in part already have) go all the way to Huxley’s Brave New World. The economy should first represent humanity – not the other way around.
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Why is this? American “productivity” has done nothing but increase.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/business/what-happened-to-the-craftsmanship-spirit-essay.html?_r=2&hpw
Yet as a society it is losing its way.
Perhaps…. productivity is good for an ECONOMY, but not necessarily good for a SOCIETY?
(meaning that there is such a thing as too much)
??
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Andrew, I don’t actually disagree with some of what you say, but you are confusing education with schooling, not the same thing at all. Education begins before a child is born; the early years are the most important in terms of the whole educational picture, the embedding of language, culture, self-image, physical competence and so on.
The generalisations about computers and unschooling don’t even begin to address this.
If you have parents who have few skills then babies are at risk – no amount of “unschooling” is going to make up for that. You have to start thinking about it much sooner – and what do you do? Write them off? Intervene? How? Really not so simple.
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bjchip:
Humans are the only animal that wants more than it needs (to successfully and securely maintain health and reproduce). This is because we are all fucked up because we grow up with fucked up parents.
We sometimes try to use excessive wealth to create a private world that our childhood wasn’t. We live like donkey’s chasing the carrot – happy in the impossible neurotic fantasy that we will one day get there. But when we get rich we still end up like John Key because the pain doesn’t go away…so we then have to become the Prime Minister too. And so on and so on…neurosis is the thirst that can never be quenched. A symbolic gratification of a real need can never satisfy it.
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co.nz/2009/06/understanding-mental-sickness.html
Janine:
Some kids need institutional schooling. Some kids need to get away from their parents – and need other stimulants/ators. Yes it’s more complex…but many, many kids need the state seriously out of their faces, too. It has always been the compulsory word that I have a problem with.
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