Chaos crisis pushes Obamaschool, not kids, over a slippery slope

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Posted on 30th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics

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We have arrived at a fork in the road for education caused because states and local governments do not have enough money for schools.  There are those who think that the Obama administration is intentionally forcing change by creating economic chaos. (See Control Through Chaos Theory below).

The Obamaschool fork in the education road is toward federalizing. They have already poured billions to supplement state education. A showy lure they have contrived is the billions of dollars of stimulus money being dangled before the states in the Race to the Top competition. In this “feds to the rescue” scheme, the states compete for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s approval of plans submitted to improve failing schools. These Obama education maneuvers attempt to push education toward the fork in the road that leads directly to the slippery slope of state loss of decision-making for education. A national curriculum lurks in the chaos.

The second fork in the education road in 2010, handschooling, goes in the opposite direction: away from top down control. As this website explains, in several important ways individual mobile connection to the open internet places the control of education into the hands of the student. Many advantages result. The global knowledge commons dwarfs any level of pipsqueak standardized curriculum.

But here is the huge irony for Obamaschool and control through economic chaos:  The feds would grab education by pouring in money, but handschooling is down right cheap. Comically — in the wonderful irony of serendipity — the economic chaos of Obama and Cloward-Piven, running out of money for education is going to force the education establishment and federal over-reach to disintegrate because the welfare state is going broke.

Handschooling is very cheap and will soon be essentially free. The device required is a mobile web browser, which already costs less than a textbook or two. Textbooks will be obsolete as mobile web browsers become ubiquitous. The learning content students use their mobile browsers to connect to in the global knowledge commons is free. With no textbooks to buy or ship, billions will be freed up from state and local coffers for the teaching and nurturing aspects of education.

In the orchestrated crisis we are experiencing now, the feds will lose — not gain —   collective control of the young generation, and that is a beautiful thing.

CONTROL THROUGH CHAOS STRATEGY
There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

A brief break for this blog

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Posted on 29th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Next

My relocation from New York to Texas, and related computer problems, are causing slowdowns and perhaps a brief break in my posting. I will resume writing in full force by June 7th.

In the meantime, I suggest you take 18 minutes to view this TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson. Some of his points that struck me as important include:

The folly — impossibility — of trying to “improve a broken model,” the need to “innovate fundamentally,” and the unfortunate truth that we now have “fast food” sort of education.

The funeral is now history for none-net knowledge

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Posted on 26th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Next

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Egyptian Funerary Stela

Because networks laws naturally and eagerly organize knowledge, essentially all (yes all) knowledge studied in a K-20 superior education has made its way into the open internet — and students who are not allowed to use the net knowledge are cheated. Knowledge locked away in a textbook or behind a firewall, grows stale by not linking into the open network for its subject. Knowledge chiseled into print cannot form patterns for students to mirror into their minds — as open, online study subjects can.

NOTE: Knowledge (as the word is used here) and a textbook, a standard, a curriculum are not the same thing. Knowledge is stuff like how cells divide, the life of Lincoln, or the conjugation of a French verb. The way educators think knowledge can be taught is a place they embed knowledge; educators embed knowledge in textbooks, standards, curricula. Educators do their embedding at such enormous cost in institutions where kids are embedded for years, that we tend to think the knowledge is part of all that is going on under the name of “education.” But knowledge is not education. Knowledge is the sum total of what is known by humankind — like about cells, Lincoln, and French grammar.

Knowledge itself is a network. Knowledge now has a new medium — the open internet — that is an elegant place where knowledge can do what comes naturally. What comes naturally to knowledge is to link into patterns. And there is something mThink about cells, Lincoln, or French and you will experience patterns arising from the network format of your mind. The fact that there is a new open network out there (the internet) where knowledge patterns can emerge has made any none-network way to organize what is known by humankind obsolete.

The situation is much like the change that devastated the powerful ancient Egyptian scribes when the Phoenicians invented their alphabet. Suddenly, by inventing just 26 symbols to represent sounds of words, the Phoenicians rendered their highly paid scribes obsolete. The thousands of pictures the scribes learned, during years at scribe school,  to represent ideas using hieroglyphics could not do nearly as good a job of writing down ideas as the 26 phonetic symbols could.

The invention of the alphabet caused a simple new method to leapfrog communication into an entirely new era. The simple fact that knowledge is embedded openly only has leapt learning into a golden age. All that is left is for the scribes education bundlers (textbook, standards, curricula folk) to access knowledge online (which is happening more and more).

The embedding of what is known by humankind into the open internet — where knowledge can emerge in dynamic patterns of ideas as students study — has been held back by the education establishment. Like the scribes of ancient Egypt, most textbook makers, standards devisers, curriculum authors, content managers, and other knowledge content managers dug in early on against the open network. The scribes did the same thing: they stuck a few phonetic symbols among their hieroglyphs and, for hundreds of years, refused to abandon their picture writing. In the meantime, Egypt slipped from power in the Mediterranean, as countries which adopted the new alphabet method grew powerful and rich through communication supporting commerce across their Sea.

Proprietary and otherwise locked-away is — like hieroglyphics — clumsy. It is disconnected in a connecting age. The living human knowledge now is unbundled into its smallest nodes, which which have been released into the internet as freely linkable urls, forming the global knowledge commons where everything is organized and vetted by network laws.

The walled gardens of early internet knowledge have become graveyards.

Handschooling takes students out of the classroom box

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Posted on 24th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Schools we now have

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An AP article in Yahoo! describes a return of kinder (kids) to the garden of nature for their school setting. An outdoor school in Oregon is described — where little ones get their hands on the real natural world.

Why not carry this idea in various forms to essentially all student/teaching situations? Since the invention of writing (think scrolls) and then printing a few centuries ago, the need for written educational resource materials — textbooks, library access, pencils and paper — has driven students into boxes called classrooms.

It is time to think outside of the classroom box. Students can have nature, work place tools (if they study some in real labs and workplaces) in one hand and everything known by humankind in their other hand (with an iPad sort of device).

Another round-up smartphone article that does not mention education

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Posted on 14th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have

The New York Times today has an article titled “Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls.” It ledes with:

She taps out her grocery lists, records voice memos, listens to music at the gym, tracks her caloric intake and posts frequent updates to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The one thing she doesn’t use her cellphone for? Making calls.

“I probably only talk to someone verbally on it once a week,” said Mrs. Colburn, a 40-year-old marketing consultant in Canton, Mass., who has an iPhone.

For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online. But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them very much.

The article continues to describe many ways iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones are used by adults. Kids are mentioned for sending lots of text messages.

So what has education done to use this now pervasive adult tool? Essentially: nada, almost zero.

Education’s turned back to these devices is particularly absurd when using them would save billions of dollars in textbooks and other learning tools like binders, paper, and pencils. There are potential educational applications for each of the adult activities described in the Times article.

Thirty years ago, when Mrs. Colburn was in school, something similar happened. The desktop computer was moving into offices. Almost always, each individual office worker was provided with his/her computer — the machines were not shared. The young Ms. Colburn, though, would not have her own computer. Schools were slow to get computers and almost always locked them away in “labs” — making students share them for brief times during a school day.

Today there are a few enlightened classrooms where students use their smartphones for educational purposes. The rest of education echoes my own school days in the 1940s and 50s, when we thought a ditto machine was modern, and a public address system cutting edge.

Education’s resistance to change is inexcusable.

School expectations send achievement both up and down

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Posted on 11th May 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality

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A lot is said about how attending a bad school can lower what students who are assigned to such schooling expect of themselves. Ellen Kagan attended a public high school in New York City that did quite the opposite: expected its girls to excel. An Associated Press article today describes how the US Supreme Court justice nominee attended Hunter High School where presumptions of intelligence and the ability to achieve were strong.

When we gripe about schools having low expectations of students, we are inclined to opine that at least some of the kids would have risen higher in their careers if more had been expected of them at school. Not much achievement is expected of Martin Luther King Jr. HS students. If Ellen Kagan had attended King HS — like Hunter HS, located in Manhattan where Ms. Kagan grew up — would she have achieved as she did at Hunter HS and risen through significant government and academic assignments?

Hunter and King are both New York City Public High Schools. Hunter taught Latin when Ms. Kagan attended; King did not teach Latin. Now, in the era of handschooling, a student can learn Latin online — for example from a Beginners’ Latin free National Archives tutorial.

An online tutorial not only makes the study accessible for students enrolled in schools that do not offer Latin. Something else happens that makes the school irrelevant to the confidence of the student. Online knowledge does not artificially increase or diminish the confidence of its students.

Where public schools have blatantly high expectations for students — or the opposite like King — young minds are easily confused and their expectations can be unrealistic for real world careers. Schools judging and putting their stamp on students is unfair. It surely holds some very smart kids back — and undoubtedly has caused others to expect to accomplish more than they can.

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