Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

Ask yourself whether, at any stage in your formalized education, you were encouraged to think outside the boundaries of the assigned curriculum. Were the institutional keepers of the questions you were expected to pursue tolerant of any independent inquiries you might undertake? Might continued efforts to pursue your own agenda of discovery land you in the principal’s office or, worse, subject you to behavior-modifying drugs or other treatment? At what point – if at all – did it become evident to you that the system of formal education to which you had been sentenced had, as its purpose, the turning of you and your fellow inmates into well-conditioned servo-mechanisms whose energies were to be devoted to fostering institutional interests?

More: Schools as Black-Holes by Butler Shaffer

I personally think that public institutional schools are like prisons, or maybe more like purgatory, because when you wake up and have the desire to escape, it is within your power. If only students weren't being institutionalized en mass, almost fast-tracked from school to the prison system.

Autodidactic: Individual Self-Learning

Millions of people pay a king's ransom for college tuition to learn what is free for the taking when motivated by a compelling desire to learn. In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will (played by Matt Damon) chides an arrogant Ivy League student for paying a fortune for an education that would be free but for the price of a library card. Although this is absolutely valid, very few people believe it. Instead they are convinced the knowledge they could acquire on their own is secondary to paying a lot of money to an institution which will attest that they have, even if they cheated their way through the process. 

As they say, cheating only suffers the cheater.

Credentialism has existed for centuries in one form or another as groups with an information or knowledge advantage have tried to maintain their position of superiority with everything from guilds and associations to secret societies and esoteric languages. And even though teachers and educators have noble intentions, their position in our economy, by design is dependent upon a psychology of the scarcity of knowledge. 

Time is the most scarce resource, with knowledge being freely available, whether in institutional settings, or for the individual to discover. There are also those in between, who look to those before them for guidance or example, and then set off on their own.

Whole categories of attributes from self-help to self-directed inquiry have been coined to disguise and set apart individual learning as an aberration so as not to displace the hierarchical power of educators. And yet, throughout history self-educated men and women from all walks of life and social stations have risen to the occasion of the challenges facing them. In so doing, they have set new standards for learning, which without question have raised the bar of achievement for their respective societies. But only in the latter half of the twentieth-century has the insidious notion that one must have the blessing of an institution to function in society been generally accepted without protest. 

More: Autodidactic Hall of Fame

We don't necessarily need more teachers and schools, but more educators and more willing students. Institutionalization or confirmation of knowledge by universities isn't what we need, but simply a facilitation of the process of learning. What we have now is a predatory system which simply uses and feeds off of students through debt. 

The Costs of Education

I benefit from and am vested in the success of this company and industry, but can see a need to end waste and increase efficiency, a shift away from public education back toward the private sector. Why would anyone seek to dismiss that which benefits them? Reason:

“There's no other state in the country that comes even close to this level of punitive requirement on students," her mother, Dineen Majcher, explains.
The Austin mother is a member of TAMSA, or Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment.
The group believes the state puts an unnecessary emphasis on standardized testing and pays Pearson, the British company hired to administer the tests, too much money.
According to state records, the Defenders found Texans spend more money on standardized testing than any other state.

The state's contract with Pearson requires Texas to pay the company $95 million this year. By 2015, tax payers will have paid the company $1.1 billion.

Pearson does not set policy in Texas. It won its contract after multiple companies submitted bids about 13 years ago.

Consider that the gross waste of the education industry is funded through theft, and that there is little economic incentive for efficiency as a result.

The Price of Pearson | kvue.com Austin

A Mises Academy Education in Economics

When interventionism becomes more and more apparent in markets, we need more than ever to look to those with a practical and factual understanding of economics. With the Mises Academy, we see the door opening and more and more minds coming online, seeking out this knowledge:

This is also my first course. I'm looking forward to it. It is impossible to find an education in the Austrian School anywhere else but here.

Sign up at: Course: Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln: The Curse of Economic Nationalism

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, you are mentally ill if you:
Are addicted to coffee —Caffeine-Related Disorders, page 212,
Have trouble speaking in public —Expressive Language Disorder, page 55
Can’t handle math problems —Mathematics Disorders, page 50
Can’t write a good essay —Disorder of Written Expression, page 51
Don’t think you're crazy? Then you’re suffering from Noncompliance With Treatment , page 683.
"To read about the evolution of the DSM is to know this: It is an entirely political document. What it includes, what it does not include, are the result of intensive campaigning, lengthy negotiating, infighting, and power plays."
—Louise Armstrong, And They Call It Help: The Psychiatric Policing of America’s Children, 1993 (Addison-Wesley)

More: In Their Own Words

In Their Own Words

"Schools will become clinics whose purposes is to provide individualized, psycho-social treatment for the student, and teachers must become psycho-social therapists. This will include bio-chemical and psychological mediation of learning, as drugs are introduced experimentally to improve in the learner such qualities as personality, concentration and memory… Children are to become the objects of experimentation." (Emphasis added)
—A U. S. National Education Association report, titled: Education in the 70s.

In Their Own Words

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

This video is just a brief introduction to a very serious subject. There are six books listed at the end which will go much further into the subject.

The soundtrack is now available at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/exposed-the-soundtrack-ep/id444615015 and https://market.android.com/details?id=artist-Add5o4qqbmxyhwr7qwdawbyvcmu

To see/hear more of Neal's work go to http://www.TheRealNealFox.com and http://www.TheArtOffensive.com

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America - YouTube

Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln: The Curse of Economic Nationalism

I almost forgot to Sign up for this course. I've been wanting to, even though my statist educational cycle begins again next week. If nothing else, I'll save the course reading materials for future reading. If you are concerned about government encroachment into individual liberties, your have a penchant for economics, or you are a history geek, join me in diLorenzo's course that starts shortly.

One of the themes of Murray Rothbard's writings on the nature of the state is that state power ultimately depends on the perpetuation of a body of beliefs and superstitions about the benevolence and necessity of the state, and the alleged evils of private property, free enterprise, individual liberty, and the civil society. Because the citizens always outnumber any ruling class by many orders of magnitude, they must somehow be made to acquiesce in the ruling class's plundering of their society in the name of "progress," "nationalism," "the greater good," "socialism," or whatever.

Beatings, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder are time-tested tools of the state, but they can be very costly and can instigate a revolution. Therefore, relentless propaganda is often relied upon instead to secure the power and privileges of the state and statists.

Once the people of the Soviet empire finally understood that socialist propaganda was all a big lie, the regime was doomed. At that point it was always just a matter of how much beating, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder the thugs and criminals who ran the Soviet government could get away with to keep the system going.

American history is vastly different from the grotesque history of Soviet Russia, but in some ways it is similar. Until recently, there has never been much of a movement to bring full-fledged socialism to America. The ideological battle was not so much capitalism versus socialism but capitalism and freedom versus interventionism and paternalistic regulation and taxation. The interventionists eventually won out, so that today's political/economic system (in the U.S. and in many other copycat countries) can be described as "participatory fascism," to borrow a phrase used by Robert Higgs. It is a system of crony capitalism financed by a central bank, government borrowing, and pervasive taxation. It is a system that is of plutocratic elites, for plutocratic elites, and by plutocratic elites (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the true founding father of this system). The massive welfare state is merely used to buy enough votes to maintain the "legitimacy" of the system.

Like Soviet socialism, this system is grounded on a particular ideology or collection of superstitions about the evils of private, competitive markets and the supposed benevolence and necessity of state intervention. The ideology is not socialism but goes under several different names, such as "economic nationalism" or "Hamiltonianism."

Beginning on Thursday, January 3, I will be teaching a five-week online course under the auspices of the Mises Academy on the historical evolution of this interventionist ideology, and on what it means for Americans (and others) today. The course will be entitled "Participatory Fascism: Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and the Curse of Economic Nationalism." This system was almost entirely cemented into place during the American "Civil War," and was the ultimate victory of a political movement that was led at first by Alexander Hamilton, and then by Henry Clay, and then Lincoln. 

Sign up or read more: 

http://academy.mises.org/courses/economic_nationalism

The Failing Modern Education Paradigm

"Why is it that we still educate children in batches? Why is there this assumption that the most inportant thing that kids have in common is how old they are?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SYM3noXpVQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award. For more information on Sir Ken's work visit: http://www.sirkenrobinson.com

A Paradigm Shift in the Learning Process

I am not supporter if this applies equally to everyone, but I learn better at my own pace than under institutional instruction or guidance. The term autodidactism refers to the process of self-education, a method by which more and more people are learning, from scholarly studies to practical knowledge and even job experience. This also means that companies in the education industry have to constantly innovate to stay competitive, such as my employer, Pearson. While the core principles guiding some companies in economically uncertain times may help them stay ahead, it is my belief that capitalization on the process of learning may someday cease to be a profitable endeavor.

The head of the MIT Medialab, whom some of us met last year, has picked out 'lifelong learning' as one of four big trends for 2013: "Education is something people do to you, whereas learning is something you do for yourself," he argues. "Today, the ability to learn on your own or from your peers has become really easy . . . this change is leading to a fundamental disruption in education . . . there is an inflection point coming in how people learn."

Technology is a huge driving force behind this shift, but as information becomes more accessible and affordable, the need for formal instruction in every area declines (though in some fields this will likely remain). Tablets and ereaders become more affordable, the opportunity to consume and share information grows, as does the need to facilitate this new direction in learning, rather than adhere to antiquated institutionalized learning methods. Private companies and public entities alike need to recognize this shift and promote it, rather than hold it back.

The Only Good State is a Dead State

An excerpt from The Utopian Myth of the Good State:

Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed. The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people. The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified. Most politicians and pundits are aware of the problems we face but spend all their time in trying to reform government. The sad part is that the suggested reforms almost always lead to less freedom and the importance of a virtuous and moral people is either ignored, or not understood. The new reforms serve only to further undermine liberty. The compounding effect has given us this steady erosion of liberty and the massive expansion of debt. 

The real question is: if it is liberty we seek, should most of the emphasis be placed on government reform or trying to understand what "a virtuous and moral people" means and how to promote it. The Constitution has not prevented the people from demanding handouts for both rich and poor in their efforts to reform the government, while ignoring the principles of a free society. All branches of our government today are controlled by individuals who use their power to undermine liberty and enhance the welfare/warfare state—and frequently their own wealth and power. [...]

More: http://mises.org/daily/6331/The-Utopian-Myth-of-the-Good-State?noredirect=1#noredirect

"The Constitution shall never be construed … to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." – Samuel Adams

Yet so often, we hear emotional cries for the government to save the people, despite the state being the greatest threat in society to liberty, prosperity, and security. As I often argue, the state does not exist. All actions are individual ones by individuals, even when acting in unison with a collective. Point to what you can think the state is and I will show you where you have made error in observation. The White House is merely a building, the Constitution a document. We give them meaning through our consent. And when the state grows corrupt and becomes unworthy of saving, we can just as maternity withdraw our consent and shift toward voluntary society.