"Education," Yuck

Learning₀ comes with our genes: our body knows how to grow eyes, a liver ... hair. Learning₁ — how best to look for food, how to find water — is a process common to living things: non-sentient as well as sentient. Fancy Learning₁ — how to jump higher, how to throw the fastball ... how to read, how to add — is a process possible to any human. Education though is not a process but a thing, coercively marketed by kleptocracies, administered by the kleptocracy: used to be a church, now it's a state, telling us what to do: telling us how to do it, when to do it ... how long it should take and what it should cost.

Education is centralized, top-down. Quality control is in one direction only. The student must understand the teacher; but there's no way to tell if the teacher understands the student, or the source material.

Key thought: I have no reason to believe that any university is competent to understand my science. No appropriate feedback has come my way. Neither do I know of a single teacher who understood my Shakespeare thesis forty years ago: or since: or any of my other original work.

In nature, that's just misfortune: evolution not being ready; but in civilization, it's fraud: fraud that the fraudulent are too stupid to understand or too dishonest to admit. How can they pretend to teach if they don't also understand?

2005 12 27

Knatz.com talks about education, learning, indoctrination, training, propaganda ... This section addresses 's personal experiences with it.

The visitor cannot understand Knatz.com properly without knowing that pk founded FLEX in 1970, the world's first offer of a public internet, with the express hope of destroying the school system, replacing it with every community having its own network-library-bulletin board, all the networks worldwide able to exchange information.

Officials can cite Jesus to interrupt Galileo,
and cite Galileo to interrupt Jesus.

The visitor cannot understand pk's founding FLEX properly without knowing that pk's own experience with school had proved communication to be another kleptocratic vanity. Again: top-down only: my Ph.D. orals committee actually interrupted me, prevented me from answering their questions. Five of them ganged up on me. I saw no way to gang up on them; but I'd already founded FLEX: to replace them. To this day I see no reason to believe that any university I have ever had contact with is capable of understanding my contributions. Alas the public is no better (but no worse either).

The same system could have replaced governments, markets, media ... all the old institutions.

The design for replacing schools was Ivan Illich's. The expansion of the same design to include every kind of information exchange was pk's. Coordinate the anarchy; record and publish all; prescribe nothing (but the free system itself) ... And so forth.

Who better than pk to have done it? School for me had never been anything but Lucy offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown, then pulling it away: so he falls flat on his back.