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!)