Deschooling Update

I founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in New York City in July of 1970 to try to implement Ivan Illich's recommendation that free societies develop cybernetic public data bases, all information voluntary, to replace government-run, compulsory, schooling. List resources, announce conditions of access, match people based on common interest, and maintain feedback on the resources, both from resource-peers and from consumers of the resource. In other words, both teachers and students get to rate teachers.

Expanded to a universal free market, an e-library of the public's voluntary population and territory, healers and patients would get to rate doctors, lawyers and clients would get to rate attorneys, mechanics and drivers would get to rate auto mechanics ...

I was ready to try this because I had been dreaming of an internet since the early 1960s, had composed fictions about it prior to 1969, and because, as a graduate student and college teacher, I was sick of a life time of experience in which the school (and university) was not required to understand a word that I (or Illich, or Jesus) ever said.

By 1971 FLEX was booming. By 1972 all our free publicity had dried up, contributions still didn't pay the phone bill let alone the rent, and my dozen or so loyal volunteers one by one decided they needed to eat. (The public by the way was not unaided in their financial indifference, but details on that point don't belong in this update.) My wife dissolved our family, kidnapping the kid so that I would have no say in how he was schooled (Brian then being five years of age).

I too tried to eat (a little bit) and by the late 1980s the government, the universities, and the public (dragged along by the government's hand in its pocket) plagiarized the internet we now know from Illich's and my action-ideas. I started a home page, and was soon adding posts on deschooling and my involvement. The public paid no more attention to me then than it had in 1972 so I escalated my attempts to communicate. In 2006 I got the attention of my fraudulence-sated university and the FBI assaulted me into jail. In 2007 a federal court censored my successful posts. The host of my five domains panicked and destroyed all my data. The FBI had stolen my computers. Till March 2008 I had no access to my life's work.

In 2005 I'd started this blog as a place to draft additions to InfoAll.org, my deschooling domain. Now it's all that remains. So now I am attempting, slowly, painfully, dangerously, to transfer some of my classic posts: from 1970 (at FLEX) ... and from 1995 (online) ... to this blog. My hypertext online had been dynamic; blogs are very limited in how they can layout text: Mother Hubbard's (cousin's) large family living in a shoe.

Currently, 2009 02 09, I am working to reduce my original FLEX post (its N^th edition, from 2006) to blog form.