Monday, September 12, 2011

pKnatz blog

InfoAll was my original deschooling blog, IonaArc was my original blog. InfoAll blog was supposed to supplement InfoAll.org, which spun deschooling materials off from Knatz.com. The fed censored all but my blogs. I've had great difficulty living let alone updating InfoAll or rescuing the domain materials. but now I'm finding a way to fit my PKnatz blog to the purpose. In time I'll move all these materials there: after recreating InfoAll.org there.

2011 06 22
I'm moving InfoAll's pk school stories to pKnatz blog starting today. I'll try to do them quickly. Then I'll delete them here, leaving one link to the menu there.
Been real busy with developing pKnatz especially since mid March 2011.

Just posted at pKnatz:

Ivan Illich's editor at Harpers launched the word "deschooling." I tried to make it real by founding The Free Learning Exchange, Inc., 1970. Bob Price drew our logo:

[caption id="attachment_178" align="aligncenter" width="175" caption="FLEX"]Free Learning Exchange[/caption]

I wanted to trim the title and expand the service by offering a politically free Information Exchange.

[caption id="attachment_179" align="aligncenter" width="175" caption="FIX: Free Information Exchange"]FIX[/caption]

Here's a FLEX-related graphic:

[caption id="attachment_185" align="aligncenter" width="356" caption="Nix Curriculum!"]Curriculum[/caption]

We're so schooled we don't get it. Where does the state get off thinking it has the right to dictate what we should study, when, where, with whom, or how much it must cost? (Even if I agreed that the state had the right to mandate say literacy, then I might conceivably concede the state's right to test our literacy, before say granting the ballot to an individual. But how does it follow that the state also dictates how the literacy is achieved? (And of course the state has multiply proved its incompetence in testing literacy: it's always the "whites" that pass and the "niggers" that fail! Furthermore, throughout my life the state has failed to demonstrate its own literacy! (as have also my universities! as have also the media!!)

How should a redneck test an Ivy Leaguer that even the Ivy League is incompetent to test?
We failed to pry the state's hands off our children: what right do we have to expect to survive?

Anyone, were anyone permitted to speak, could demonstrate that the school board bows to politics, not truth. (But then, neither did the church, neither do the universities, neither does the public.

School history drawings:

[caption id="attachment_187" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="Lecture as Publishing"]Lecture as Publishing[/caption]

Understand, as my article commissioned by Edcentric (1970-01) pointed out, medieval monasteries were publishing houses! The monks copied Christian documents. Where there was one copy of The Gospel According to Mark and seven monks, there would soon be seven copies of Mark, then fourteen, then twenty-eight ... When classical secular documents were found, the monasteries split: into monasteries, for sacred copying, and universities, for secular copying. The lecturer was the guy with the copy of Aristotle. He sat and read it aloud: that's what lecture literally means. His students gathered before him and wrote down what he read. One copy of Aristotle, seven university scholars, seven copies of Aristotle: then then fourteen, then twenty-eight ...

A scholar with his own copy of Aristotle now graduated: he went off to a new university, one that lacked the book that he now had.
[caption id="attachment_188" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="Graduation as Publishing"]Graduate[/caption]

The university was its manuscripts, and its faculty, and its scholars: the scholars were its library, its publishers, its new copies.

But of course state-run school boards know nothing of this: they're there to impede and regulate the information, not let it flow.
I founded FLEX to let it flow. I got cut off at the ankles: so the retrograde institutions could re-entrench, and increase control, via this plagiarized internet: where pk, a lead inventor, is censored!

A sensible people would have used type setting, mechanical printing, to upgrade both church and university: and state. But of course church, school, and government bureaucracies used their leverage to pervert progress, and shore up their sinecures.

When I offered the world a cheap cybernetic internet-digital record keeper and publisher, a sensible people would have shoved all the sinecures, and the privileges (and perhaps too all the stolen klepto-properties) into oblivion, and lived as freedom-loving (if not God-loving) Christians. But of course what civilized society has ever had a sensible population? (And don't you dare think that my use of the common word "Christian" has anything to do with dogma: it means, to an Illich disciple, valuing conviviality!)

Thursday, February 17, 2011

pk Online

I had five domains, several blogs, thousands of essays and other text files, thousands of images on line. The fed destroyed all that, all but destroyed me.

I can't afford to repost, so I've been recreating some classic pk modules at blogs.

Here's what I'm going to do now: get all my files into a blog, sorting by blog specialty.
Then, reorder, as logically as I can, so visitors can browse by Knatz.com type categories: Teaching / or Personal /

I'm going to stop explaining all this every time I mount a new post.
Then I'm going to my five destroyed domains back up, restoring the original logic, improving on the original logic.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Email pk

Post a Comment: or,
EMail to:

pk@Knatz.com

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Research: in a Terrarium

The assignment is to assess German involvement in the holocaust:
The anthropologist will want license to dig up the earth all over eastern Europe in search of bodies to examine.
The journalist will go to the libraries in major cities, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, to see what records the Nazis and their clients kept of Nazi atrocities. How funny is it how little such a journalist will find?
The investigative journalist will know how inappropriate the former behavior is, but if he values his perks, he'll do the same.

Existence is one question, in many guises:
will the rats understand why they're dying before they die?
Or will they die without a clue?

Or, will they learn to become truthful in time to perhaps survive?

My money is on death: and no learning.

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Compulsion?

Compulsion?
Group Humility, Group Ceiling

No compulsory ritual, said Ivan Illich.
I've been seconding him as loudly as I can.

Bread and Wine

The majority do not agree with me that the state has no proper business at all; yet I still wish more agreed that the state has no business mandating school attendance.

Even if I agree that a state had the right to exist which set skill standards for the public (to vote, a citizen must demonstrate literacy, numeracy ...), it does not follow that the state has the right to dictate where one learns what, when, or under whose tutelage.
(When we go to market, does the state dictate how much meat we must buy that day? which brand? at what price?)
(When I entered school already knowing how to read, why wasn't I allowed to go home?)
(When I demonstrated via the GRE that I could read better than 99% of the university faculty,
why didn't they give me the damn doctorate and release me?
(Such degrees are little more than fraternity initiation bullying anyway!)

I've said all that – for over four decades. I've been jailed for it, censored, denied an income, my business and gifts from patrons destroyed. Today I try to add a clarification of a side point:

In opposing state compulsion, I am not opposing compulsion. I grant the mother's right to pull baby back from the fire. I grant the father's right to smack those not pulling the plow in one direction. (I say it's their obligation.) And I concede the right of a family to hire a magician to feed them ritual bread and wine: never mind whether or not I see it doing any good.

Group Humility
We are a social species. I don't object. But we've overdone the group power bit. I want us to back up on that issue, practice a little group humility.

Below a certain threshold conformity is a friend to survival; beyond it, an enemy. I see small societies as having evolutionarily positive rights that large populations forfeit. I don't want to see a billion and a half Chinese telling a billion Indians what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and compelling obedience to this or that guild of professional service experts: all Chinese of course.

I don't want a million Roman Catholics telling two thirds of a million Greek Orthodox how they must do something. Two hundred Cro-magnon telling one Cro-magnon that one must use the right hand to absturge the podex, while circling the left hand over the belly, is none of my business. The US with its media tools seeing that scholars who don't like to see napalm dropped on village girls get silenced is prescribing disaster for all.

But then the public had long lost any right to complain: sitting passive while teachers are murdered, sucking their thumb while degenerate authority mislabels everything.


A word on distinguishing authority from degenerate authority I'll add at IonaArc.

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

School Teacher

Remember to distinguish between teacher and school teacher.

Without teachers civilization could not survive. Perhaps neither could the species.

But under kleptocracy, teachers get hemlock poured into their ear, get crucified ... These days, crucifixion no longer being popular among kleptocracies, teachers get the rug pulled out from under them in a variety of ways: they don't get published, they get side-railed.

Perhaps worst, they get replaced by school teachers.

School teachers get mass produced by the state. They're so ignorant they don't even realize that they're not teachers; they're robots for the school board: and the school board is never made up of scientists, philosophers, scholars ... truth tellers. It's made up of politicians and political appointees: they'll say that the earth is flat: until told to say something else.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Record Keeping

Record Keeping
Human Record Keeping:
None too honest, none too bright, foaming with opportunism
(and filtered by mass-ego).

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Authority

The mother warns the kid not to touch the hot stove. The father helps: he grabs the kid and wails the daylights out of him. Neither the mother nor the father invest time explaining the nature of their authority to the kid: or to themselves, or their neighbors. The neighbors share the same assumptions: all without rational analysis: all knowing perfectly well that rational analysis cannot establish itself beyond doubt by rational analysis: at some point we jump, and have faith: in the natural authority of parents.

(If we can't trust our parents, it's tough; the state cannot do better. The Church had already failed.)

So how does the above translate into Hitler and his Brown Shirts herding Jews, gypsies, queers, dissidents into gas chambers without resistance from the population? It don't.

I don't trust mama or papa to be wise or fair, let alone infallible: still, I won't interfere with their wailing the kid who keeps flirting with the hot stove. But I do not support any right of the neighbor to wail my kid, whether he's near the stove or not. I don't support the draft board, the IRS, or the school board. I don't support the state telling my kid or your kid what to study, what to think, where to study it, what it should cost, how long it must take: which Miss Moron should supervise. I could read before my school brought it up: and I've never met a teacher up close and personal who could unequivocally read better than I. Where does the state get off assigning me teachers?

Authority might be nice if it were reliable. The state assigned me a physics teacher: did she know physics better than I did? Yes, for sure. Did she know physics well? No. Once I'd read the text I saw that she didn't understand physics well at all: and when quantum mechanics was first getting rolling, neither did Einstein!

If you went to Princeton, and said, "Einstein, please teach me physics," that's well and good. Falibility has nothing to do with your free market choice. Of course when Princeton gets in the way and won't let you see Einstein, that's different: that's authority interfering with authority: something fraudulent authority always winds up doing. And fraudulent authority is the only garden variety we have in kleptocracy. Jesus gets crucified, pk doesn't get published, Illich gets defrocked ... Bull-shiters grab all the marbles, and all the morons let them.

Authority: Smart or Understanding

Here's a delicious passage from a current best seller: Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo:
Unfortunately society was not very smart or understanding; she had to protect herself from social authorities, child welfare authorities, guardianship authorities, tax authorities, police, curators, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers, and bouncers, who (apart from the guys watching the door at Kvarnen, who by this time knew who she was) would never let her into the bar even though she was twenty-five. There was a whole army of people who seemed not to have anything better to do than to try to disrupt her life, and, if they were given the opportunity, to correct the way she had chosen to live it.
It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on. She had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse. Consequently it was up to her to solve her problems by herself, using whatever methods she deemed necessary.



Knatz.com had loads of modules on Authority, as had InfoAll.org: all censored in the same backhand from the fed. I was thinking of reposting them at IonaArc, but perhaps they should all go here. I find temporal space for them in "2006 January."

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Teacher Wars

Jesus went to the Temple. Jesus, a Jew, called Rabbi (or Teacher), was surrounded by other Jews, also called Rabbi (or Teacher). Those other rabbis had a hierarchy: a Sanhedrin, with relations to secular hierarchies: a king, called Herod.

Jesus came with something to teach: messages, from God. The other rabbis were supposed to teach messages from God. Jesus was supposed to have cleansed the temple. Obviously, the other rabbis just turned the money tables business-side back up again. They sandbagged Jesus, had him arrested, got rid of him; not without teaching him some severe lessons of their own.

Kleptocrats are presented with institutions they are told, as children, are there to serve them, to educate them, to protect them. Universities, for example, are there to foster learning. Universities are full of teachers: and students, and deans, and administrators.

Jesus' temple was a site of teacher wars: Jesus being imagined as the losing teacher, the teacher who was right.

Universities too are sites of teacher wars. Do any right teachers ever win there? Sure.

What percentage? All? Some? Few?

How could we tell? Wait! See if anyone is left alive. If there's a surviving population, then sufficient learning took place: sufficient at least for the moment.

But consider this: where new learning is involved, the wrong teachers will always outnumber the right teacher: and the population at large will always back the teachings they're familiar with; not the teachings that could help them survive.

Don't think for one second that I'm blaming leaders for our fix. There is no belfry without a foundation.



I add a word to be further developed later: Don't imagine that I'm just talking about religion, or politics, or humans: the same applies to any phenotype of any species living in time, within evolution. The mosquito that mates with this mosquito instead of that mosquito, the heron that eats this fish instead of that fish, the leaf that gathers this light instead of the light a millimeter further away, is determining the future of its descendants: and the future of its entire ecology!



The following I don't doubt belongs in a post of its own: I scratch a note to be developed and perhaps moved at another time:

One

Was Jesus, entering the Temple, one? or many? Were his disciples with him? Thus: was he one? or thirteen? or some number in between

Three Magi

The gospels tell of three Magi coming to visit the infant Jesus. Was that three men fitting into a stable already occupying Mary, Joseph, Jesus and assorted sheep, cattle, goats? Or more?

Magi were known never to travel without at least forty-thousand troops. Were there thus three armies, totally at least one hundred-twenty thousand men at arms? (and who knows how many camp followers, whores, and hangers on? all crowded into a tiny stable? Or did the magi's troops remain outside? in the court yard? or nearby, at the K-Kourt?

Shakespeare's kings refer to themselves as "we." A second latter they call themselves "England": or "France." Feudal kings didn't think of themselves as individuals the way contemporary American individualists do

Notice: these questions have a great deal to do with the idea of monotheism! Is God one? or three? Or infinity?

When the terminator promised, "I'll be back," he meant himself, the cyborg, individually. When US General Douglas MacArthur said, "I shall return," he did not mean alone.