SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“We psychologists typically
construct tasks or tests to separate the children who can from those who
cannot, the former then being labeled ‘smarter’ or ‘more mature’. The ideal curriculum-maker – like Socrates instructing the slave in the Meno – arranges things in such a
way that everybody will understand, all will be among the ‘cans’ rather than
the ‘cannots.’” Jerome Bruner, In
Search of Mind, p. 181.
Did Socrates intend to convey anything
useful to the slave in Meno? Was it the Pythagorean Theorem? It was such a difficult oral presentation to
follow without the accompanying diagram.
Plus a gross exploitation, to boot.
What brilliance was there in the simple deduction that a clever slave
could be taught a complex idea? Note how
Socrates turned his back on someone he had just confirmed was a worthy
student. Golden Age brilliance, indeed!
Aristotle’s’ interpretation of slavery in The Politics shows what intellectual brambles a thoughtful
person must negotiate to retain membership in the info elite. This babble
resembles the fatal flaws slaveholders wrote into the American
Constitution. Such flaws reflect weapon
mentality’s worst habits. Its ‘strict
interpretation’ disciples hide rank hypocrisy behind rumbling vocabularies and
prestigious duty titles.
“We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man (and this is the case with all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service)—all such are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, on the very same principle as in the other cases just mentioned, to be ruled by a master. A man is thus by nature a slave if he is capable of becoming (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another, and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself. Herein he differs from animals, which do not apprehend reason, but simply obey their instincts. But the use which is made of the slave diverges but little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements.
“But it is nature’s intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter the strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and (though useless for physical labor) useful for the various purposes of civil life – a life which tends, as it develops, to be divided into military service and the occupations of peace. The contrary of nature’s intention, however, often happens: there are some slaves who have the bodies of freemen – as there are others who have a freeman’s soul. But if nature’s intention were realized – if men differed from one another in bodily form as much as the statues of the gods – it is obvious that we should all agree that the inferior class ought to be the slaves of the superior. And if this principle is true when the difference is one of the body, it may be affirmed with still greater justice when the difference is one of soul; though it is not as easy to see the beauty of the soul, as it is to see that of the body.
“It is thus clear that, just as some are by nature free, so others are by nature slaves, and for these latter the condition of slavery is both beneficial and just.”
Taken from Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings of Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; pp. 112-113.
One day, somebody will
explain to me why a hundred generations of students had to swallow and
regurgitate all this hogwash. Why, in
all our Latin and Greek writings, there remain none that call for universal
freedom. Why no trace remains of far
superior classical writings that branded slavery a scandal and called out for
the brotherhood of mankind.
Do you dare suggest this
brotherhood of man might have been an offshoot of Christianity or some more
recent monotheism, religious or ideological?
That ancient people did not understand they all belonged to one family
since human time began? That wise and
generous spirits wrote wisely and generously on this topic, ever since writing
began? Whether they came from ancient
Greece or beyond, they concluded that slavery was unjustifiable and forbidden
by natural law—denying the econologic of slave masters and all their historical
literature we’ve studied ad nauseum since.
Moral imperatives against slavery
were just as apparent to them then as they are to us today. Idealistic adolescents argued with their
parents about them then, just as they do with their parents today about current
social problems. Ethical philosophers
were just as numerous (indeed, more so) than the flaming hypocrites we worship
in school: Sock-Scratcheese, Play-Do, and Arse-Dottle, among others.
The Golden Rule never had
a patent date. God and good parents have
always taught their children to treat others like themselves, since human
understanding began.
Where did the teachings of
these moral superiors go? Into the
flaming maw of weapon mentality, that’s where.
Weapon management discards the findings of the gifted. It dictates that elite minorities publicize
nonsense, censor valid information and lie outright. Most info proletarians are never allowed to
develop their God-given talents in a meaningful way. Call it slavery, being a peasant, or “choosing”
to work as a wage-slave, Jive Drive stoker third class – that’s just info
proletarian lock-down.
Info elites are no smarter
than their host proletarians. On the
contrary, info elites pick their replacements from the host proletariat for
orthodoxy, combativeness as demonstrated in sport and battle, and loyalty through
family ties to the elite—not for exceptional brilliance or compassion. Those who have stunted their empathy enough
to satisfy weapon requirements have little use for real compassion and no use
at all for the truly compassionate.
Current academia
pigeonholes likely candidates for membership in the info elite. Academic
careerists make it their business to eject gifted peace mentors from the
process of education. All those young
and idealistic teacher burnouts illustrate this triage perfectly. Idealism and compassion are sacrificed on the
altar of weapon regimentation. For details, see Killing
the Spirit: Higher Education in America, by Page Smith, Viking Penguin,
Harmonsworth, England, 1990. Like my
text, it could find no publisher in the United States since it was so
inflammatory and to the point.
Picture the Earth as an
isolated lobe of a universal, trans-dimensional brain. Within this hollow-sphere lobe, (the
anthrosphere), billions of human neurons interact through more or less
effective networks. They do so across
cultural and environmental media that could only accommodate a few hundred
million ‘cells’ in natural comfort at current levels of peace incompetence.
First off, appropriate
nutrition rarely reaches each ‘cell.’
Many humans have a hard time merely subsisting from day to day. The rest of us offset our misery with
shameless over-indulgence.
The Earth produces enough
food for everyone. It always has,
barring catastrophe. Yet our
distribution networks are so shabby, the world’s population splits into
thirds. The first with its pandemic
obesity, obscene pets and ghastly meat livestock: vastly overstuffed. The next, underfed. The third, starving.
We’re exhausting the
Earth's fertility. Yet fifty percent of
the food we produce goes to waste. And
we make no effort to exploit those wasteful pests as narrow-footprint food
sources.
This hypothetical
planetary organism suffers from perpetual stroke, its heart is in partial
arrest, its frame flails between hypertrophy and necrosis. Many poor adults find just enough nourishment
to get by. Many of their vulnerable
children are starved and poisoned from birth.
Childhood starvation and pollution degrade youthful Learning in the
richest and poorest nations alike.
If all the good will in
the world were united behind one good plan, everyone could be fed, housed and
cared for properly—you name it. This
would be a thousand times easier and more profitable than managing the world
war we are entirely prepared for. Think
about that.
Second, our thinking
processes are hopelessly muddled and our learning tools are outdated. Even ‘educated’ majorities take far too long
to assimilate new concepts and ideas. A
full generation or longer, assuming they do so at all. Sometimes, popular culture adopts ideas more
advanced than status quo dogma. It has
begun to challenge the absolute value of Nineteenth Century science that had
frozen in place ever since, for example.
However, info elites often insist on retaining outdated ideas and
destructive habits beyond their useful lifespan.
Allow
me to show you the ARMCHAIR FORMULA.
Within our minds, random ideas surface to consciousness. We retain these ideas – no matter how
brilliant – about as long as the memory of a dream. We must reinforce new ideas right away in
order to register them into long-term memory.
Otherwise, we forget them; they return to the Collective Superconscience for
later retrieval.
This is indeed the case
for our fundamental definitions of reality.
If solitary confinement and sensory deprivation insulate us too long
from reality, we go insane.
It is difficult to find a
specialist or document to repeat, deny or confirm some passing thought. This is so even for scholars, much less for
everyone else.
Go ahead and try it. Sit down in your favorite armchair and come
up with a novel insight about some arcane topic. Now get up.
Go find someone, some book, class or recording, to repeat, elaborate,
confirm or disagree with your inspiration. How long did it take you? Hours?
Days? In most cases, especially
with really innovative thinking, it would take you longer than the few moments
your short-term memory retained the original idea.
The best scholars shorten
this time-delay in any way they can.
They cultivate special study skills, document collections and peer
information networks. They hoard
reference sources and information contacts.
In this manner, they can confirm or deny their latest ideas as soon as
they get up from their armchairs or even faster than that, by computer and
telephone.
I call their elaboration
of this process, the ARMCHAIR FORMULA.
Alone, a few thousand tenured professors and intelligence clerks operate
under optimized Armchair Formulas. Even
college students lack the means, motive and opportunity to research freely.
The World Wide Web is just
beginning to refine the Armchair Formula.
This refinement benefits everyone rich enough to claim access to
it. It augurs well for Learner
transformation, whether or not we grasp its long-term benefits. Predictably, it is the least publicized and
least capitalized benefit of the Web, and the one we take the least advantage
of.
Even today, Learners must
satisfy a multitude of certification criteria before they’re encouraged to
learn. University obstacle courses
bristle with monetary and geographic barriers, arbitrary credentials,
certifications and performance criteria.
Every step of an academic career must be carefully renegotiated, up to
and including the ‘highest’ ranks of scholarship.
Academia is not so much
interested in 'what' we want to learn, as 'why' and 'how' we must learn
it. In order to gain access to its
services, we must accept that our knowledge will be used to promote something
else: status, moneymaking, job placement and propaganda manipulation. Instead of enhancing intellect, college
professors erode it. They bury their
students’ interests in mountains of compulsory trivia until every scholarly
career is reduced to one all-consuming research thesis.
The academic community
erects massive barriers between itself and the laity. Amateur scholars have a hard time keeping up
with professionals scholars of any given topic.
Decades of secondary studies (useless, for the most part) must be
certified in order to achieve student-teacher relationships with relevant
scholars. A Learner cannot access needed
information unless she commits years of study to one avenue of research. Then she must submit the first fruits of her
zeal to the whimsy of academic superiors.
Universities are
intellectual catacombs. Most research is
buried there, never to see daylight again.
Admitted, most of it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on—in conformity
with the general rule: “95% of everything is crap.”
"… but in every era, and every country, and every
category, the bad throngs and the good is rare." Voltaire, Romans et contes, « Le monde comme il va », Garnier Flamarion, Paris, 1966, p. 104.
Some of it might be
valuable, sight unseen. And a lot more valuable
research was nipped in the bud before it could be written up. Catacombs full of frustrated ghosts …
The foundations of the
current academic pyramid consist of masses of illiterates and
semi-literates. On their shoulders
stands a shrinking minority of undergraduate and graduate scholars. On their pointy-heads perch a handful of
certified academics. More and more
often, these topmost scholastic elites devote themselves to the logistics of
education: finance, politics and business.
The higher they climb the ziggurat of academia, the more they divorce
themselves from the most worthwhile processes of Learning.
Learners shall flip these
pyramids over. Voluntary know-nothings,
religious fanatics and disability-illiterates will form three tiny minorities
at inverted tips, buried in ignorance, of these trumps of plenty. Massed Learners will broadcast from uplifting
cornucopias of Learning the full fruit of expertise in their topics of passion. Learning will be subsidized throughout
everyone’s lifetime. This may be the
final alternative to our bureaucratic/industrial jobs once automation and
post-industrial efficiencies bring near-total unemployment.
Corporate propaganda never
tires of warning us about a growing number of retirees compared to the shrinking
population of workers, and the corresponding necessity to reduce retiree
benefits. The ultimate outcome of this
incessant propaganda may be to add hundreds of millions of elderly workers to
the scandalous population of poor people in the richest societies mankind has
even known.
No one ever addresses the
fact that, for all these modern workers, hundreds and thousands of machines
just as able to be taxed have multiplied their productivity and corresponding
corporate profit a thousandfold. Honoring
obvious obligations to prior workers might slightly reduce an exponential
increase in direct profits. Those
exploiters will choke on that excess of profit if they don’t recognize their
obligation and honor it. Their future
profits will freeze up and throttle them, otherwise. Such massive, propaganda-driven stupidity in
the service of weapon technology! Peace
technology would see through these cooked books immediately and amend them
without a second thought.
Progressive,
government-subsidized education, no matter how crude, boosts overall
prosperity. Adopting this policy on a
global scale would skyrocket prosperity.
Any alternative leads to various forms of Auschwitz for former workers,
in the name of raw corporate profit.
Good luck with that!
Music education offers an
elegant model of Learning. It relies on
voluntarism, (at least in theory; horror stories abound of children being
forced to practice music against their will).
It favors small classes and one-on-one tutoring. This tutoring begins at the earliest
receptive age and accelerates to match the pupil’s growing talent. Maturity of performance is expected at
puberty with ongoing improvement though adulthood.
Music is one of the few
areas of teaching where this true mastery goes unsuppressed. We are enjoying a Golden Age of tempered
music because this field has zero impact on weapon management. Valid learning methods are tolerated in this
restricted field of learning.
It is ironic that crime
may be the only other trade that complies with these mentoring guidelines. Indeed, the budding criminal engages in crime
as soon as he discovers a personal interest in it. The courts send all but the best criminals to
‘reform’ schools and penitentiaries where veteran crime instructors await
them. Their educational and vocational
alternatives to crime are deliberately sabotaged. Many emerge from prison to perform more
sophisticated infractions. We don’t
punish criminals for their crime, but for demonstrating incompetence by getting
caught. Weapon society practices
Darwinian selection for better criminals.
Big surprise!
Many other prejudices
retard Learning. One weapon myth presumes that knowledge is a
special privilege that should be rationed according to arbitrary qualification
criteria.
Another myth states that
valid information must be discovered and confirmed locally. Insolent claims to the contrary, rabid
nationalism (each country claims its own, the evil twin of every other) and
national borders are gross barriers to Learning. Behind these obstacles, patriots and
fundamentalists promote blatant obscurantism.
National governments pirate information, homogenize educational mediocrity,
and foster redundant research.
Unique breakthroughs are
corporate secrets carefully guarded in absolute defiance of scientific
transparency. Corporate and military
science violate the most straightforward principles of scientific inquiry. They insist on secrecy and proprietary
knowledge. Secret science is like soundless
music: worthless to anyone but its paid practitioners. Of what value is knowledge that no one may be
permitted to know? The threat of
terrorism compounds this problem.
Just as corporate weapon
Christianity herded Europe into a Dark Age of ignorance, corporate-fostered
weapon scientists are herding us into another Dark Age of suspicion, paranoia
and fostered anti-science.
Another weapon myth
suggests that information immediately available to an exclusive elite is more
valuable than information many proletarians acquire more gradually.
In plow field and
smokestack societies, an item’s rarity increased its value. Zero-sum anal retentives competed for limited
advancement opportunities—social, economic and reproductive. Their feeding
frenzy produced the info elites of today, which splurge in relative opulence
but unprincipled degeneracy amidst abject masses of info proletarians. Horrified by this injustice, righteous people
abandon the claim to leadership that was always theirs by right. Lacking fair role models, even exceptional
ones, weapon leaders imitate the worst exemplars that teem everywhere.
Thus the long-term public
example of better leaders – information known by everyone – is more beneficial
to society than the latest high-tech secrets known by a privileged few. Nearly complete transparency would be even
more beneficial. Correct knowledge is
wealth. Common knowledge is more
fruitful than many secrets stockpiled in obscurity for their status-value. In the commerce of ideas, distribution
creates wealth, and generosity leads to prosperity.
This paradox promises us
untold prosperity. We’re like pirates
who’ve cast aside their treasure map.
We’ve flung ourselves over a deeply buried treasure trove, bewailing in
tears our self-induced poverty.
Competitive education is
about as sensible as for-profit sex.
Both are cooperative endeavors where competition is a losing
proposition. Short-term competition
produces trivial gains or outright loss.
Long-term cooperation is more fruitful.
Learning Networks can
stretch and reweave themselves much more elegantly than clumsy
production/consumption machinery. We
could do this at small expense, for much greater rewards.
In the meantime, academia
crowns itself with wreaths of paternalistic compulsion whose invasive tendrils
smother any usefulness it could once claim.
Once most students emerge from this ordeal, they shun further study
beyond the absolute minimum required for their jobs. They consider Learning a sorry chore best
left to journalists, government spokespeople and commercial copywriters. Those intellectual mercenaries are paid to
satisfy hidden agendas with censorship, oversimplification and rote repetition
of official lies. They drop into
oblivion any idea that deviates from the mass media norm and that cannot be
co-opted to reinforce that norm.
Learners will treat
Learning like the ultimate game.
Instead, official
‘education’ is a monotonous grind.
Schools impose a prison atmosphere of incarceration and
regimentation. They prepare their
victims for punishing routines of the barrack square, the munitions plant and
the battlefield. Weapon managers dictate
that education be a slow torture, an intellectual manual at arms, a repetitive
drudgery. According to them, it should
be a drain of time, interest and energy.
Every hour of every school day, nit-picked and nit-picking teachers
disgorge predigested curricula.
Disinterest in those topics and interest in others are punishable offenses. Everyone must drag ass through this
dozen-year Calvary at the pace of the slowest.
Healthy young minds,
however, are naturally inquisitive. They
delight in learning the most trifling things, with or without adult
approval. Schools do their utmost to
suppress this curiosity. Instead of
encouraging info proletarians, they regiment them mercilessly.
From our first acts of
socialization to canned graduation rites, we endure endless years of fostered
boredom, meaningless repetition, stifled initiative and quashed curiosity. Homework merely franchises this intellectual
garage sale. It saturates children's
private time with mind-numbing drudgery.
Homogenized cultural pap is force-fed and regurgitated in endless
competitive exams. Anxious parents and
school officials resist every effort to enrich this putrid gruel. Age-cohort bullies, know-nothing parents and
petty adult tyrants dominate school culture.
The lowest common denominator marks the high tide of cultural
achievement. To put it mildly, precocious
Learners are in for a hard time.
Children in Finland score
the best standardized test results in the Western world. They are sent out to recess at least ten
minutes for every hour in class. They
are the only ones who do so and the only ones who benefit from it. All the rest must remain brutish in
accordance with the brutal standards of paramilitary instructional
bureaucracies.
This brutal acculturation
is so widespread, it must serve some hidden purpose (weapon mentality). It is somewhat relaxed in private schools
where info elites warehouse their own children.
Here, class snobbery, crushing discipline, isolation from family,
religious mumbo jumbo and cockpit competition combine to subvert Learning
excellence.
I can imagine no worse way
to learn anything—except how to be bored out of one’s skull. There is no better way to repress natural
curiosity.
Victor Villaseñor, in his book Burro Genius,
wrote that he asked several classes of young students, “Who here is a genius?” In kindergarten, everybody raised their
hand. By third grade, no one dared
to. That is what weapons education
intends to accomplish.
It will be up to Learner
schools to identify and nurture the genius of every student. If a student has nothing but destructive
talents, then those must be exposed as early as possible and housebroken with
even more affection and doggedness.
This procedure will lead
nowhere if it is practiced the way we do today: as an exception by a few gifted
teachers with respect to a few gifted students, in spite of orthodox standards
and an acceptable majority of academic mediocrities. In order to achieve significant progress, we
must practice it universally and holistically.
Instead of advancing a few meritorious students picked out from a
punished mass of mediocre ones, we should cultivate every student’s foremost
talents. Every student would be a genius
in one or more topics of his or her choosing.
We must become smart enough to encourage that choice. Responsibility for that failure belongs to us
and not to those innocent students.
In self-defense against
current ‘education,’ common folk take complacent pride in their ignorance. What choice do they have, since their
vulnerable talents were crushed? All they
have left are sports, commercial advertising and the media idiocy that frames
them. Raw genius is more threatening to
them than raw greed.
When this prejudice
overtakes a society, its members become clueless pawns of the Routine of
Evil. Once artful propaganda cripples our
moral faculties, we may expect nothing more from our leaders than expert
wrongdoing, unforeseen consequences and inevitable catastrophe. Distracted by the empty summons to ‘pursue
happiness,’ we forsake our neighbors’ flight from misery and our duty to assist
them.
Three topics dominate
popular discourse: sports, sex and money.
None of them have anything to do with civilization’s major
advances. Rather, they divert attention
from progress and impede it. Men escape
into macho fetishism and stupid, statistics-driven sport; women, into the
trivia of gossip, shopping and fashion.
We ‘lucky’ somnambulists
condemn ourselves to self-indulgence, over-consumption and social
insignificance. Wearily, we warehouse,
care-take and re-inventory mountains of redundant stuff. We never needed this stuff to begin
with. We can’t afford it sustainably in
any case. It is merely a proxy for the
world-destroying clutter of useless junk that total war calls for.
The unlucky poor are
stupefied by toxic malnutrition, engineered misery and cultural anxiety. They are reduced to hopelessness aggravated
by their inability to fulfill basic needs and achieve basic comforts.
It is no accident that
education and military conscription became compulsory at the same time, after the
French Revolution. By the way, universal
conscription is another weapon misnomer.
The entire military age population (pubescent to barely ambulatory,
including men and their female age-group equivalents) has always been liable to
call-up on demand. The only limitations
were the number of weapons available; the need to staff workshops and farms
with women, children, old folks and war slaves when necessary; and the enormous
logistical burden of holding armies together despite their tendency to sicken,
starve, run riot and fly apart.
It’s only recently that
bloated industrial capacities caught up with insane birth rates. Until then, making weapons and keeping them
out of the hands of rebels were self-limiting tasks. There was some logic in separating trained
combatants from civilians. Now, this
rule no longer applies. Now that weapons training has become a custom-crafted
routine once again, (look at the insertion techniques of a simple commando
raid), our social institutions are devolving to medieval levels of hierarchic
simplicity.
There is no difference
between armed and unarmed combatants.
All of us are legitimate targets of warfare and its routine
victims.
For example, military
pilots, submariners and commandos undergo elaborate rituals of initiation,
training and graduation. These rituals
resemble those undergone by ancient knights.
Their equipment and steeds cost many lifetimes’ wages, too. For the most part, peasants took the
resulting murderousness in the face.
While the rewards of weapon technology go to smaller and smaller
minorities, its spiraling costs are increasingly born by everyone.
The so-called free market
sanctions personal ambition; it does so within carefully restrained parameters
of weapon technology. This is an
incredible advantage compared to older weapon dogmas that crushed personal
dreams under obligations of caste. This
last barrier to excellence (weapon technology) may soon come down. At last, financially independent Learners
will pursue their talents wherever they may lead. At that point, we may anticipate floods of
additional abundance.
In the meantime, most of
us receive a nominal education, commensurate with the complexity of our
society’s weapon systems… and no more.
Barely educated individuals are taught to curb their curiosity, serious
culture and imagination. Useless trivia
is fed to them instead, in enormous quantities, and they are taught to prefer
this force-feeding. They should be more
or less handy with tools (in direct proportion to the complexity … etc.). Tamed to blind obedience, they should be
capable of independent decision-making under rigidly defined
circumstances. Most of them are expected
to be politically naive, closed-minded, indifferent to their political
obligations and intolerant of progress.
They should be cryptically self-destructive and violent on a hair
trigger. In moderately good health
during their military years, they should be indifferent to preventive care and
ready to cripple themselves for no apparent reason.
A vast majority of info
proletarians are imbued with these attributes most handy for modern
armies. Once a military age cohort
‘completes’ its mandatory miseducation, weapon management grants its favorite
candidates nominal career ladders and license to study. This economic subversion is so harsh that
many youths have no choice but the military, permanent unemployment and/or
crime. Banks, insurance companies and
public service agencies redline entire neighborhoods for no better reason than
socio-economic and race prejudice.
Legitimate capital never reaches these ghettos, only criminal funds that
coach more war.
Poverty – the most
expensive social policy by far – is the best nursery for lots of good soldiers.
The International Monetary
Fund, the Politburo and carefully hobbled UN agencies have treated Third World
nations this way for decades. They’ve
promoted showboat mega-buck projects to pay off local elites and increase their
addiction to Wimpish institutions.
Meanwhile, the average person’s standard of living has shrunk
dramatically from runaway population growth and ecological devastation, all of
it induced by paramilitary corporations.
Why doesn’t everyone
receive mandatory college education? Or
better yet, four subsidized years off as young adults to learn non-college
skills? After all, there’s mandatory
High School. Why that cut-off when
college-level skills are mandatory these days?
In developmental biology,
the longer the stage of infantile development, the better prepared the adult is
to survive. Wouldn’t this be the case
with young human beings?
The educational system in
a weapon state picks an elite officer corps to command a vast majority of
enlisted and civilian slaves: armed and unarmed combatants. The demand for weapon managers dictates the
exact number of degrees awarded. This
way, universities select new info elites from the info proletariat.
There isn’t mandatory
college education because colleges (non- and for-profit) produce enough
military officers and bureaucrats already.
Deliberately restricted weapon technology is glutted with talent, even
though peace technology is starved under similar circumstances.
Universal education is
just another weapon myth: a carrot dangled in front of peace mentors to co-opt
their good will efforts. In the United
States, 60% of the population has done some time on the university
treadmill. This doesn’t mean much, since
nearly 60% are functionally illiterate, more don't vote, and only a handful
gain ready access to the corridors of power.
We should feel guilty and make amends.
Some specific Learner
technologies, replacements for top-down, mass-consumption, ‘tell-and-test’
systems currently in use, are discussed in the chapter Computer Yellow Pages.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
CONTACT PAGE (under development)