To School Or Not to School

In 1970 Ivan Illich began publishing his design for Learning Webs: a set of information repositories by which a society could map its resources: bottom-up. A Learning Web was to list the community's tools available for learning: both human and inanimate. The web would also list information volunteered by individuals so that people could know with whom they might form their own learning circles: bull sessions, practice or discussion groups ... see who they might want to see a movie with or join in a walk. The Learning Web must also publish feedback both from the resources and from the users of the Web: "teachers," "experts" ... may evaluate fellow experts; students, consumers ... may evaluate the resources. If you hire a math teacher, and you say she raped you, the community should have an opportunity to know that you say so.
The Learning Web would not endorse its content: merely list it. Users should do their own evaluating via the Feedback option. Thus, incompetence as well as dangerous behavior would be exposed.

In 1970 pk got very excited by Illich's design. Here was the perfect mechanism for the global village I'd by then seen forecast for a decade. I told Illich that I'd actually do it: become the librarian for the bottom-up community. Anyone who would listen, few as they were, I told that the same design naturally extended to all possible kinds of free markets: doctors, farmers, mechanics ...

Three by five cards could begin the record keeping. With increasing traffic, time on a main frame would be necessary. Star IBM programmers were ready for a pittance to write the software.

By 1975 we should have been in Nirvana. The Web of any community should link with the Webs of any other communities.
Instead what we had was the same-old same-old: politics, wars, elections ... top-down, managed markets, no modern possibly able to figure out the real price any anything from food to shelter to medicine to roads and gas.

By 1975 pk was barely able to stay alive, barely able to keep issuing the message. In 1995 my views on many things had changed; but not my view that the public should be told of the window of opportunity that had closed forever by the mid-1970s. PCs are private, not public: and expensive: especially where the industry is coordinated with planned obsolescence. Hardware and software prices may come down but the budget for them goes up and up. Mainframe time would merely have come down and down: and a community could have subsidized the resourceless with little effort (so long as the population doesn't explode out of bounds).

Ten years of such online scribbling have made my directories a mess, and few people seem to understand the message any better in 2005 than did in 1970. Any god at any judgment should have an easy time showing the public that it has never heard key messages in time for salvation of any sort. I'd rather be a fifteen thousand and sixth unpublished Jesus than Pope of any funded church. (The Church had thrown Illich out before he had designed his Web, lending credence to my conviction that the message was indeed divine.)

Anyway, as awful as the internet that the magicians palmed onto us is, blogging may just solve some of my scribbling problems. Launching an InfoAll.org module takes minutes; posting a blog entry can be accomplished in seconds. Then, I can worry about better ordering InfoAll.org.

See:
InfoAll.org
Illich Learning Webs
FLEX