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.
