InfoAll

pKnatz blog

2011-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

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"][/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"][/caption]

Here's a FLEX-related graphic:

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

pk Online

2011-02-17T15:07:00.002-05:00

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.

Email pk

2011-02-16T13:41:00.000-05:00

Research: in a Terrarium

2011-02-10T14:05:00.000-05:00

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.

Compulsion?

2011-02-05T13:06:00.005-05:00

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.

School Teacher

2011-02-02T14:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Record Keeping

2011-01-26T12:21:00.000-05:00

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

Authority

2011-01-13T16:41:00.003-05:00

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."

Teacher Wars

2011-01-12T13:07:00.005-05:00

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.

FLEX, Life, & TIME

2010-12-23T16:23:00.000-05:00

Whew. I've not given quick versions of my stories about FLEX & IBM, FLEX & Ma Bell. At least some of what I told at Knatz.com / InfoAll.org is again somewhere. Here's a three syllable forecast of the most important of such stories:

1971, 1972: TIME-Life hired a guy. The guy saw FLEX's cable show, listing FLEX community learning resources 24/7. TIME told their new guy: find that guy: "that guy" meaning me: find the guy who was implementing Illichian learning webs in real time, real space, in a real city: New York City. The guy found me: it was no trouble. All that data was on the cable show! (How stupid did TIME have to be not to have seen it themselves?)

The guy interviewed me, got all excited. That got me all excited: it was about time that somebody recognized the revolution we were living. Newsweek had considered of giving FLEX seed money, as had IBM. But they didn't; not one penny. By this time NYSCA was stealing my (and Illich's) ideas. NYS was cringing from FLEX by founding pale imitations, run by the kleptocrats: schools without walls, school credit for life experience ... Cheez.

TIME's guy brings me in: to Madison Ave.: to introduce me to his bosses. He does. The bosses interview me: and shunted me out the back door: no trumpet blasts: not even the sound of a flushing toilet.

Now TIME puts the founder of FaceBook.com on its cover! Forty years after betraying the human species, entrenching kleptocracy, protecting the owners from information revolution. There isn't any part of FaceBook that doesn't devolve from Illich's Deschooling Society and from my Free Learning Exchange. Ditto Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com ... It's all plagiarism! Kleptocratic-kleptocracy encore.

I see it as simple. TIME wanted the information revolution. It wanted to control it. To ride it. To master it. I wanted to ride it, lead it, goad it, in a sense to master it; but not to control it. I didn't want TIME controlling the information any more than I wanted the school board controlling attendance, curriculum, costs ...

Help! Ma Bell

2010-12-23T13:50:00.050-05:00

The first company I solicited to help FLEX was the phone company. Realize: in 1970 Ma Bell was a monopoly. But I addressed the phone company in the person of an elder in my childhood church, Mr. Kraus, the father of two of my public school classmates. Had I a budget, a paid secretary, stationary to spare, I would have made copies of all my proposals. But no: in 1970 I was proposing digital data keeping for the world, but still had none myself. I typed a letter on erasable typing paper: and mailed it. Take my word for the accuracy of what I report: or wait till Judgment: I've trusted all along that God will have copies: of everything (and that God can prove that they're uncorrupted.) (Such a cosmology may be naive, but I'm referring to pk (and US) in 1970!)

My letter asked Ma Bell for seed money. My appeal to IBM was far more detailed. My phone company letter was my first draft of my first such appeal. I explained that the point was to implement Ivan Illich's design for a cybernetic learning web. I pointed out that the phone company would be instrumental in the operation of such a learning network: as would be the post office, local real estate ... People were phoning in their information; we were phoning out information.

My letter suggested that the phone company could cooperate with me in designing a way to use the phone company's infrastructure to bill FLEX uses. I even proposed something analogous to a area code for such billing. In other words, I was proposing that the phone company co-invent with me 900 numbers! Call FLEX, agree to pay, and $3 gets added to your bill, Ma Bell depositing all the $3s to a FLEX bank account. My royalty from the phone company alone could have financed everything!

Mr. Kraus never answered my letter. Mr. Kraus never told me whether or not he forwarded my request to the powers. For all I know Mr. Kraus, sunday school teacher in our church, could have destroyed the letter, and proposed 900 numbers to the Ma Bell Powers himself!

I've lots of details from Knatz.com yet to add to my Help! IBM post and many more never yet told anywhere. But I'm afraid there aren't many untold stories about my phone company letter of 1970. I never heard form Mr. Kraus or from anyone else in the phone company. You can speculate as freely as I can: depending on your interest, on your IQ, your power of imagination ...

Help! IBM

2010-12-23T02:02:00.000-05:00

I founded FLEX, the Free Learning Exchange, in New York City in 1970. By 1971 I was asked major companies for help: the phone company, IBM. The details are marvelous in themselves and I'll sprinkle some below, but first, buff outline.

I asked IMB for $100,000 seed money. The point was to extablish cybernetic, digital, community data bases.

This is a good idea.
I don't see IBM having much to do with good ideas.
IBM, Director of University Relations, 1971

A digital data base could serve a community cheaply; public schools taxed, enslaved. A voluntary (non-coercive) data base was all a society realy needed. The public could use cybernetics to pry the monkey Fraud off its back.

Government is force.
George Washington

I got a response from IBM's Director of University Relations. I showed up for my appointment. The two of us sat at a conference table big enough to land a plane on. He asked me how I'd come up with the figure of $100K. I confessed that I didn't know what I was doing: I'd be happy with $10,000. $1,000 would be better than nothing. The point was to try to save the public the $50B the US was spending to enslave and defraud, leaving Johnny still unable to read. With FLEX Johnny could learn to read for much less (or remain illiterate) for much less (either way). I needed to live, to rent a space, to install phones, to pay the secretary (already long-working as a volunteer), to buy materials, to buy publicity ... the rent space on mainframes, to learn to write relational data base software ...

The Director said that he thought that a realistic budget for what I intended would be something more like $20M a year! just for NYC! I told him I didn't doubt that he was right. But that in my first year (year and a half) I'd need to spend $100K before I could learn how to spend $20M well. If they wanted to give FLEX $20M, I'd take it. I'd certainly welcome anyone's advice, experience, expertise. $20M was nothing compared to what NYC's school budget. The point was to offer something better than the schools, an internet. The point was to become informationally free: for less than it cost us to be educational slaves.

I didn't spell out all of the implications, but hinted in several directions. My 2010 vocabulary is different from 1970, 1971, as is all of our vocabulary: I didn't use the term "internet": what Illich and I were inventing wouldn't come to be called an internet for quite a few more years yet. CERN, the pentagon, Congress, the universities would plagiarize Illich and me for years, for decades, before the term for what Illich and I were proposing would come to be settled on as "internet."

The Director told me that he'd present my proposal to "the Powers." He said I should hear within a few weeks. He warned me not to hold out too much hope, he himself was skeptical. He said, "You see, this is a good idea. I don't see IBM having much to do with good ideas."

Sure enough. IBM's answer was a brief Thanks, but no thanks.

Within months the IBM building had widow displays of cybernetics in classrooms. IBM had chosen to profit by working with Caesar, not with Spartacus, not with Jesus.

This and other such stories had been told at Knatz.com / InfoAll.org. The fed censored all my domains in 2007, destroying my business in the same fell swoop. Squashed, I still struggle to speak. The society's media still don't cooperate, still oppose. But God knows. And if we're wrong about that too, the Truth will still prevail: but perhaps in a world without Homo sapiens (or the defeated complex biosphere).

Expanding the story is important, the details have been buried. I'll add some as I can after I tell related stories about Ma Bell and TIME-Life.

R Subvert Independence

2010-12-21T08:56:00.001-05:00

I'm gathering school purpose modules into 2010 January. I add this one and place it on the 12. I duplicate it here today as a way of pointing to it as new.

Adding to Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / DeDe / School Purpose

Humans beings spread over the earth looking for resources: for food, for shelter, for a place with fewer enemies. Humans are born dependent: it's the parents' (and the group's) responsibility to train the kid to find resources on its own: as fast as possible: the parents, the group, never know when the earthquake is going to get them, or the lion, or the cold: maybe the kid will survive, maybe humankind will continue: the kid must learn, learn lots, learn well, learn fast.

Good. I'm all for learning. But are schools good for learning? Do schools teach the kid to find food? fast? well? Or do schools keep the kid from learning what roots are edible? what's under that girl's breechcloth? Don't the schools schedule what's taught and what's learned without having any idea when the earthquake is coming? where the lion is? Don't schools prevent parents and small groups from training their children? Isn't a school the state as kidnapper revealed?

Oh? But who's it for then? Why would parents and small groups let themselves be raped like that? Good question: but the super-groups, the major interest holders, the Fortune 500 ... control the magicians who false deal everybody.

The school doesn't train the child to find food but to conform, to wait till the school bell rings, to wait till the factory whistle sounds, to wait till some bureaucrat tells her what to do, to wait till Pavlov's bell steals his independence.

State Cheats

2010-12-17T15:14:00.000-05:00

The state cheats the state: and of course cheats the people: not to mention god, the universe, nature, the biosphere.

My beloved Jan just told me that school students were allowed to use calculators during tests. If they didn't, they wouldn't score well, and if they didn't score well, then the schools would not be entitled to quality funding by the state: so the state was cheating on behalf of the schools, so that the state would be cheated: as the students and population and marketplace, and god have been cheated all along.

But why tell me? I'm the deschooler? I don't believe that the state should have anything to do with education! with schools, with anything. Don't ask me if I believe the schools should forbid or allow calculators; I don't think state-run, state-interfered-with schools should exist. That's why I offered a cheap internet in 1970: as an alternative system for recording resources, one in which nothing was compelled.

Jan, not surprisingly didn't see my point right away. In seeing me not support a state prohibition of calculators, she took me to be soft on learning. Not at all: I just don't see that it's the state's business either way.

I went on to tell Jan that I saw nothing wrong with students using calculators, I use them myself. But if there was no electricity, then I could calculate with pencil and paper: and of course I believe that students should also be able to: but how and when and where they learn it should not be up to the state. Neither should how much it costs.

General DeDe

2010-12-15T15:02:00.001-05:00

Introducing: General DeDe!

This recent October I coined the term "DeDeDe" and offered it as a possible alternative to deschooling. Deschooling was only part of Illich's opposition to compulsory ritual in modern kleptocracies. He wanted us to De-License, and to De-Professionalize and to De-Regulate: all a part of DeSchooling.

Today I offer a related coinage: General DeDe. I, Paul Knatz, long nicknamed pk, occasionally called other names, both good and bad, propose that you may regard all pk deschooling writing as authored by General DeDe.

Picasso's name became a symbol of his powerful art: still, it was his surname, his patronymic surname. Pablo Picasso Ruiz became known as Pablo Picasso, then simply as Picasso! The likewise great Hokusai was not born with that name. He became known, loved, revered, by variations of his birth name, then dubbed himself Hokusai: which abbreviates Japanese slang which suggests "old man, crazy about painting." By golly, it means the same thing Picasso came to mean!

So, August Paul Knatz, Jr. I was born. Paul I was called, then pk. Now I'm the crazy old man, committed to Deschooling: to deregulation, to delicensing, to opposing the over-professionalization and the over-specialization of everything: all related to opposing government regulation of anything!

The first part, General, is itself a complex: largely a complex joke. I'm an Illich disciple but also a Bucky Fuller disciple. Bucky called himself a generalist, taking a stance against over-specialization. I second that proposal (even if I'm far from the hundredth to do so: I one hundred and nintety-fifth it!)

The term also recalls John Sutter to me: the first widely known white man that the expanding United States stole from. American settlers didn't give much of a damn what we took from the natives, we didn't much care how we treated the Irish or the Chinese let along the imported slaves. But we were typically less forthright the way we stole property from those we thought of as white. We stole Sutter's land, killed his livestock, and helped ourselves to his gold, all in violation of treaties with Sutter in which his New Helvetia was recognized as a sovereignty. (Now I don't believe in sovereignty, but neither do I believe in kleptocracy!) Anyway, Sutter promoted himself to Colonel once he discovered a route across the Rockies, first white man to do so, and developed the Sacramento Valley. A bit older he promoted himself to General: General Sutter. The same kleptocracy plagiarized my Free Learning Exchange and its offer of cybernetic digitization of resources both human and material, with peer matching and feedback. Illich's design, which I offered to implement at cost (enough for workers to live on being part of the cost)

HierCon Stories

2010-12-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

HierCon is a Knatz.com folder abbreviating concepts as well as words: the verbal references are to NoHier and to conviviality, the former being already a Knatz.com abbreviated reference to my censored domain AgainstHierarchy(.org) (meaning against politically imposed unnatural hierarchies). One idea of Christ is that Jesus taught us, or tried to teach us, how to live better together, better than humans were living in the Roman Empire, a Mediterranean kleptocracy under the Caesars: Augustus Caesar at the time. Jesus disciple Ivan Illich taught the concept of conviviality in that light. I, as a Christ / Illich disciple, try to teach the same: that's why my writing is mostly unpublished, why I'm blackballed by the schools I tried to displace with an offer of cybernetic social data basing, why I was jailed, bankrupted, censored.

The deposed Knatz.com, a domino victim of federal censorship, gathered personal pk stories illustrating the non-convivial nature of our society's institutions, categorized by school, church, army, bureaucracy A, B, C. I'm locating my recreation of these censored stories in 2009 April. I've been telling these stories since they occurred, beginning in childhood. I wrote them at Knatz.com beginning around 1995. I recreated them at this blog this 2010.

My domains, Knatz.com for example, organized materials by category (logical hierarchies, not unnatural, not politically imposed, not coerced). Blogs string materials in time. I relocate and re-title this blogs postings of such stories in an attempt to make their biographical chronology clear.

This 2010 I've also started mounting Knatz.com / InfoAll.org posts on Reasons for School. They are being presented temporally in 2010 January (and will continue in February.)

While I move the school stories I'll leave the "original" post in 2010 until I'm satisfied that the move is complete.
Understand, stories of other institutions subversion of conviviality will follow.

Politics Trumps Scholarship

2010-11-30T13:35:00.000-05:00

In "education" politics trumps scholarship. The school board decides that Twain must be censored, not the English professors, or that Darwin and theories of evolution must be supervised by teachers colleges, not by biologists, zoologists ... scientists.

But watch out: all the teachers college has to do is start mass-graduating scientists! trained by the same morons who trained your Miss Tilly to tell you not to split your infinities. Hell, it's what the fundamentalist churches do: they erect assembly lines to cobble tame science teachers: to address the children in the church.

It won't matter what politics does so long as kleptocracy continues run by coalitions of selfish intellectual convenience.

All I want God to do is wait till we're dead, then point out to any intelligence left over in the universe that we had chances, that we refused to consider them: preferring fake science, fake intelligence, trick decision making ... to real.

Bell Curve Teachers

2010-11-30T13:26:00.000-05:00

The king can assassinate the critic. His propagandists meantime write speeches attributing such behavior to an enemy, denying that this administration would ever do such a thing. The Temple assassinates God while retaining authority in the name of God, the moron public in no position to challenge a thing.

Given enough time a Socrates will arise, a Jesus will overthrow the money tables. But Athens simply had Socrates arrested, then condemned him. The Jews' political and religious figures simply broke their sacred laws to blind-side Jesus, enlisting the Romans to do it for them, their political overlords violating their own Roman laws to do the Jews' religio-social dirty work.

In the US (and around the world) schools exhibit the same characteristics. The Temple pretended to represent God but actually side-railed, then murdered, God. The government imposed schools claim to represent "knowledge," but it's authority is political. Votes, appointments, determine who's version of facts, of knowledge, of evidence, of learning, gets fed to the helpless citizens' helpless children. Darwin is voted out, then voted in, then voted out. Twain is praised, then censored, then forgotten.

It's not evil, like the gospels would make it seem. It's not stupid like the science propagandists would make Galileo's story seem. It's just social homeostasis and the bell curve at work.

IQs Along a Bell Curve

The state-school graduate is shuffled into Socrates' role after the false dealers have kangarooed Socrates. The professors are left over after the Church purges Galileo and his evidence. Priests are still left in the Temple after the elders have sandbagged Jesus.

God makes a population of IQ 100, the population makes a faculty with IQ 110, God sends a Jesus with IQ 200, the 110-IQ faculty feels exposed, threatened, the 100-IQ public watches passively while the 110-IQ faculty suborn all witness to persecute the God-sent savior

Man's only hope lies in the faculty after devouring Jesus achieving an IQ of 111.

It would seem that they could have been raised way toward 200, but that's an illusion. If they settle for IQ-111 and if at the same time society continues to survive for another few years, it's OK, it's good, it's a gain. But the faculty average is just as likely to wind up at 109, 108, 107 ...

Licensed Authority

2010-11-30T13:08:00.001-05:00

Temples, churches, schools always have to power to interrupt and correct; never the obligation to listen or to understand.

Money Tables

2010-10-31T08:46:00.001-04:00

Jesus overturned the money tables in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Churches turn them business-side-up again.

Ivan Illich tried to overturn the money tables in the Church.
Ivan Illich and I tried to overturn the money tables in the schools (he with his Deschooling Society, I with my Free Learning Exchange, Inc). (With his Medical Nemesis Illich tried to overturn the money tables in the hospitals.) (My Free Learning Exchange, Inc. tried to overturn the money tables in government, in media, in our whole system of record keeping and market manipulation.)

Government, the whole society obeying, turn them business-side-up again.

Compulsory Education 1870

2010-10-30T11:57:00.006-04:00

Mises.org is currently emailing ads for EG West's Education and the State (1965). The email says,West explores the views on education of the nineteenth-century British reformers and classical economists who argued for state education. He demonstrates that by the Foster Act of 1870 the state system of education was superimposed upon successful private efforts, thereby suppressing an emerging and increasingly robust structure of private, voluntary, and competitive education funded by families, churches, and philanthropies.Good. Now Mises.org would catch us up with advanced education consciousness in 1965.

Mises.org is connected with LewRockwell.com. The latter published an article on Ivan Illich several years ago. That could have brought education consciousness in line with 1970 (but only early 1970, because it showed no awareness of what then happened in the rest of 1970, during and after the publication of Illich on the subject. And when I alerted them to their omission, they remained silent!) (Other good articles had appeared in the meantime: 1965 to 1970: Lauter & Howe's reverse engineering of "school's purpose. For example: the schools are commonly seen to fail in advancing literacy, numeracy: maybe, the author's hypothesized, advancing literacy and numeracy are not the real purpose of the schools: the schools succeed totally in making the majority of the children tractable morons who show up more or less on time and do what they're told: perfect fodder for industrial domination. Thus, the schools do not fail; they succeed: only too well.)

But neither Mises.org nor LewRockwell.com have reported on the further work of the deschoolers: Illich followers: me, pk, for example. Illich suggested cybernetic data basing at the community level as a way around state dominance of secular rituals. I pk offered the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in New York City. Similarly starting would be learning networks wrote me from all around the world asking for my advice. So too did state educational institutions. I answered them all: repeating Illich's basic points:
Llist resources.
Match interests.
Publish feedback.andDon't tolerate state-coercive ritual
Don't tolerate substitution of certificates for skill testing.I also encouraged these early learning networks to share resources. Thus, in that latter feature, I, even more than Ivan Illich (while standing on his shoulders) invented the internet. Illich invented social networking as a defense against state dominance of potentially free people: I proposed that digital public records be coordinated. I'd already spun a short story in the 1960s which had modeled an internet, and in 1969 offered for publication a short story in which banks had internet'd credit through modems, satellites, and voice recognition software.

I offer my own history as evidence that the practice of sabotaging reformers and burying evidence is alive and well: the most liberal institutions following suit along with the most repressive.

My AgainstHierarchy.org got censored by the US after they arrested me: my nearly three thousand other internet publications got eclipsed: my IS provider destroyed all my data in the wake of the court order to proscribe one section of one domain. My son rescued my data, the FBI having confiscated my equipment, but he didn't remount it. He kept Catfarmer.com alive, but not Knatz.com, not InfoAll.org, not Macroinformation.org.

Research this. You won't find the truth in the records of any university that I'm aware of. I doubt you'll find much in the Library of Congress. Though while alive I could show anyone who visited me proof galore from my records. (I'd said online I had proof. The FBI arrested me, went through my stuff: and left much of my evidence unmolested! The repressors will never have intelligence robots, not so long as they use humans.)

(Tell a dumb crook about fingerprints, and maybe he'll go back to the crime scene and destroy everything except the fingerprints!)

An English Illich fan posted an article on Illich more than a decade ago. He said, "We should read the deschoolers." But I see no evidence that he's even aware of who the deschoolers are. I see no evidence that he even know who I am! He doesn't mention contracting Denis Detzel, founder of the Evanston Learning Exchange. Denis, according to Illich, was talking deschooling even before I was!

Deschooling Society came out in 1970. It was a best seller. My Free Learning Exchange, Inc., Denis' Evanston Learning Exchange, started in 1970, mine only a week or two ahead of his. My deschooling writing has not been published, except by me, mailing it around the world, posting in online since 1995. I'd written voluminously to those teaching colleges which had contacted me. Was anything I wrote read by anyone who could read?

I have no evidence: then or now.

Dozens of people volunteered to help me. They must have understood something? Where are they now? We're further in the dark in 2010 than we were in 1970!

By the way, that Mises.org mailing also touted a related book by Albert Jay Nock: The Theory of Education in the United States (1931). I wish I could afford to buy either of them.

Illich Points Commentary

2010-10-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

Illich published his deschooling program in six points, some subdivisions necessary. The new world needs to be explained to the former world (which doesn't listen).

No Compulsory Ritual

Parochial cultures see nothing wrong with applying their customs among themselves. Problems arise when different cultures mix. We bump into a wall we need to back away from if we are to survive. If the Jews all start their Sabbath on Friday evening, that's fine. If the Jews kill all the Canaanites, they can still start their Sabbath on Friday evenings. But what happens when Jews, and Canaanites, and Greeks, and Egyptians all get squashed into Alexandria: then the Jews need to have their Sabbath any way they please, but leave the Canaanites and the Greeks and the Egyptians to themselves. In other words, in a Europe dominated by the Roman Catholic Church it rubbed few against the grain that the Church used its power to compel attendance at masses. The Protestant Reformation challenged that. Today's shrinking world needs to catch its secular side up to its sacred side: no compulsory school, no compulsory reveille ...
No Certification

Confusions of logical type trip us up. If a businessman wants a secretary who can type, he has every right to test the typing ability of the job applicant. But business farms the testing out to specialists, in advance: to the schools. The job applicant arrives with a diploma from Tilly's Typing School. In the short run a step is saved; in the long run the confusion of map for territory has been institutionalized. The government has enforced this confusion to the convenience of business and to the destruction of the society's reliance on its own native wits. Overnight, being a Harvard graduate reintroduces our imperialist ancestor's class system: if Harvard bestows superior skills let it show in the sausage, not in the recipe. No, no: a free society would not tolerate the institutionalization of doubtful shortcuts. See if she can type yourself, witness the Harvard grad's skill in action, in an active career. In a deschooled society, asking for a diploma would not be illegal; it would be very bad manners: and not be done.
Publish volunteered information on resources.

This is the area in which my presentation differs from Illich's: in detail, not at all in spirit. He distinguished between human and inanimate resources. I don't see the need as far as institutional structure is concerned. The same resource data base that lists English teachers could also list libraries. The same resource data base that lists stationary stores could also list plumbers.

In a class society a government may combine with an AMA to give preference to MDs. The pregnant woman is thwarted from hiring a midwife: midwives don't get listed in the phone book. But I'll bet midwives have killed far fewer women in childbirth than obstetricians have.

A free people would leave other people to be free to chose what they learn, how they learn, it, where they study, what it costs ... We wouldn't want to hold still while the state told us we couldn't buy rice, we must by potatoes; we may not walk, we must drive; we may not drive a bug, we must drive an SUV ... Why do we tolerate control over "education," over "health" ...?
Mutual Interest Matching
Feedback
Expert Feedback:
Client Feedback:

I'll edit these over time. Revisions, additions will cease when I'm dead.

FLEX 2 + 3

2010-10-21T13:29:00.003-04:00

In the forty years since I wedded my life to Ivan Illich's deschooling program I have come to see his four point learning networks as three points. The previous post, Illich 2 + 4, reviews his. This blog republishes his Deschooling Society of 1970 (online at InfoAll.org, restored here 2009 January once the fed destroyed my domains (2007 Feb) (and crippled me from getting them back up quickly).

His political foundation I retain as "two":
A. No Compulsory Ritual
B. No Certification
His four points for his proposed institution can be simplified to three points. It also covers more ground:

2.1. Publish Resources
2.2. Publish interest matching results
2.3. Publish feedbackof the same two kinds (except that butchers and bakers and Indian Chiefs (and clients) could use the same two feedback tools):3.1. Resource people on resource people
3.2. Clients on resource peopleThe following post will comment on the parts of this and the preceding post: Illich Points Commentary.

Illich 2 + 4

2010-10-21T13:18:00.000-04:00

Ivan Illich presented his deschooling principles in six parts: two plus four. (I'm going to represent the parts with letters, reserving the numbers for my condensation.)

A. No Compulsory Ritual
B. No Certification(His Deschooling Society, 1970 is online here [2009 Jan], see Chapter Six especially.) Those first two parts constitute the political aspect: the institution proposed to take over the society's learning needs was offered in four parts:C. Publish volunteered information on human learning resources
D. Publish volunteered information on material learning resources
E. Publish peer-matching wishes
F. Publish feedback on the human resources:that latter of two kinds:F.A. Resource people on resource people
F.B. Clients on resource peopleSee Illich's text for his explanations. See the following post, FLEX 2 + 3 for my version.

Political Impossibility

2010-10-20T12:41:00.002-04:00

bk just emailed me this link, hawking Political Impossibility by WH Hutt. "Should economists curb their rhetoric and prescriptions based on "political realities"? Should anyone attempt to conceal the truth about state intervention for fear of not fitting into the existing political culture?" asks the ad.

My FLEX in 1970, in offering a cybernetic data base to the public — human resources, material resources, interest matching and a feedback data base on the resources, offered a tool by which anyone could publish their own ad at nominal cost (provided the intfrastructure was supported). Thus not only could economists express themselves freely, so could anyone else, and on any subject, in any discipline: FLEX was history's only true free-speech organ. The regular culture's "free press" is given over to leaving faulty facts and faulty assumptions unchallenged, as is the school system. (Never forget, curriculum is set by school boards, not by an intercultural coalition of scholars. Flat-earthers rule. The culture rules, retarding change, preventing progress, growth, learning.)

I'll say more later, but notice immediately the cultural truth of Hunt's thesis and the fact that my FLEX (Illich's design with some pk expansions), supported, used, defended, addressed and could have solved forty years ago!

I answered bk: "Doesn't [Hunt's point] hold in All areas?
There's never been a better proposal for freedom than my FLEX. And I
see no better proof than FLEX that we've never had freedom, only
rhetoric and compromise and cowardice.

"Of course I have to admit that the fed could have taken over FLEX and
regulated and changed it utterly, the way the Church takes over and
perverts "Jesus," the way the fed did take over FLEX by creating its own meretricious Pentagon, CERN, university internet, then regulating it, crushing the inherent anarchism out of it. Still, some small increment of freedom might have escaped."

Actually, I edited a word or two while quoting the latter.

Misused References

2010-10-19T13:48:00.002-04:00

Isaac Asimov once told me that he had no control over the graphics or the headings and captions in his books. His publisher was responsible to him for his prose; his publisher had no responsibility to him for any other aspects of publishing. (Our topic was the Crab Nebula. I'd noticed that his pic of it in his Guide to Science seemed to be a mirror image of the same night object shown in my son's school text. He said, if there was a mistake, it was likely in his book (though it added that the Crab Nebula would look more or less like that fro some perspective somewhere in the universe. He was determined not to be too upset by the possibility that some graduate student working for low wages from the publisher could have mis-flipped the emulsion side of the negative.)

For a decade or so I've been getting email from EndCompulsoryEdu@yahoogroups.com. It quotes Illich on deschooling. Bravo. But it seems to be hustling biker-oriented porn! At the least it's a dating service.

Now it burns my ass more than anybody's to see dating services using Illich social networking concepts out of Deschooling Society to steal resources from the only legitimate request for funding for social cybernetics: my appeal for resources to build infrastructure of that nature beginning in 1970 and lasting through today (and tomorrow). But dating services sprang up within a half a year of my original such announcements: 1970, 1971. Such companies made millions, billions by now. I still have yet to reach $2,000 in funds raised: in 40 years!

Ivan Illich Disciples

2010-10-19T08:54:00.004-04:00

... Denis Detzel
Dennis Sullivan
Paul Knatz ...
John Quintero ...

General Background Information

Ivan Illich had had a world of associates, friends, and followers before I first read and contacted him in 1970, volunteering to be his disciple (something I couldn't afford to do unless he was going to pay me, because I had a wife and child and no income). His Church associations I knew nothing about at the time. Some of his intellectual associates, teachers and theorists, I knew a bit about: Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol ... One of Illich's first correspondences with me mentioned Denis Detzel as an American interested in establishing Illich-concept learning networks. (In that respect, in 1970, Dezel was #1. The best I can tell I therefore became #2.) Others I read or met and perhaps got to know a bit as a result of my interest: Everett Reimer, Larry Grimes ... Visiting CIDOC (Illich's Center for Intercultural Documentation, Cuernavaca, Mexico), (at Detzel's invitation) in 1971 I met and became acquainted with some of the core people then in attendance: Dennis Sullivan most notably.

By 1972 my Free Learning Exchange, Inc.'s newsletter gave contact information for well more than one hundred incipient or functioning learning exchanges around the globe: mine was the first so far as I can tell, though Denis' was the first announced as imminent. (From 1970 to 1973 my FLEX mailed dozens of announcements to Denis's Evanston Learning Exchange; that latter in that time mailed me one back! And Denis, having invited me to meet him at CIDOC disappeared, not keeping his classes, run off with a girl to Acapulco!) Other would-be learning webs sprang up like mushrooms, one hundred thirty-odd contacting me, me passing their existence on while answering their requests for advice and so forth. By 2006 my domains had posted nearly three thousand web files: hundreds of those in my deschooling domain: InfoAll.org, ancestor to this blog. I posted a deschooling history at a new domain, AgainstHierarchy.org, and emailed a revenge fantasy to the department at NYU which had done more to screw my academic career than any other, driving me into Illich's arms. The FBI arrested and the judge censored a folder, prompting my internet host to destroy all five of my domains and all of their content, my family having paid all my bills while I was in jail except the one that mattered most: my IS! Thus, the fed and my son tag teamed me, subtracting my gospels from the public ken: the public not having been paying much attention, as usual, anyway. Nevertheless, I've been re-posting Knatz.com files as fast as I can to a set of blogs, so there's a great deal of information online about pk however much has been destroyed.

Once I'd announced the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in NY in 1970 any number of Illich friends and associates contacted me: Noreen Connolly helped as a full-time secretary for nearly three years, unpaid, as was I too, alas. CIDOC alumna Helen Volkomener steered some Methodist Women funds our way. (Unfortunately, we needed more than one patron, the public keeping its pockets zipped.)

At CIDOC I got to know Dennis Sullivan a bit. I got to like and admire him. He got to understand my style a bit: it had rubbed him wrong at first (and he's not the only one). Dezel and I exchanged a few words. I'll add more information about Detzel, Sullivan, and pk; but today I must tell a few starter things about a later-coming Illich disciple, John Quintero: the one I feel closest to.

John Quintero

I first heard of John Quintero when he phoned me in the late 1990s. He introduced himself as a follower of Ivan Illich and told me that he regarded me as one of the greatest philosophers of the Twentieth Century because of founding of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. In NY in 1970, with its Illichian deschooling principles at its heart. John asked permission to visit me in Florida sometime: which he did, on his way to Illich's memorial service in Germany after his death in 2002. I'll tell more about all that, but first:

Two individuals from my small list of Illich disciples have been arrested, done jail time: me and John. Others could have, I don't know everything. Now of course it's theoretically possible that we were arrested because we'd done something wrong. The Nazis may have arrested vastly more than the eighteen million they killed in concentration camps and some of those arrested may actually have committed a crime: snatching a purse, rape, murder ... Since political regimes keep their own records, and anthropologists find only a few objective facts compared to the reams of fictions spun by rulers, it's impossible to know what proportion of persons arrested and convicted were actually guilty of anything a cross-cultural plurality would agree was criminal. I know the truth in my case: the US made a satire of mine to be incendiary after ruling that whatever it interprets to be incendiary is not protected by the Constitution. In other words, the Nazis can safely censor anything they can get away with misreading. So: technically, acording to the fed, I'm guilty; actually, according to liberal philosophy, I'm not only innocent, I'm a hero. John was arrested and convicted of statutory rape: he hugged his niece. He says he did very much in fact hug his niece, many times, but not improperly. I believe him.

I further believe his explanation: John's a Pope-extolling, rosary-carrying Catholic as well as a disciple of the late Monseigneur Ivan Illich. I am not Catholic at all, not to any extent, but I know that he is. And our difference there makes no difference in my recognition of his embodying the essence of Illich's convivial living principlies. (John founded Subsistence.info. I helped him compose, code, and publish it.)

more to come

Society, Coercion, DeDe

2010-10-15T11:36:00.000-04:00

We're social animals. Me too. I love society. But I hate this society.

(Society, on the other hand, loves itself: and hates me.)

Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)

Previous draft:
We are social creatures. Me too. I am loyal to "society," in the abstract. Concretely, I oppose, I hate, this society. I want to kill it. I want to put it out of its misery. I don't care that I suffer and die trying to do so. I can't help that I may fail to do so. I recognize that I have, thus far, so far as I can tell, failed to do so. But I try. I try to transform the society: the society resists transformation.

I knew that. Everyone knows that. Everyone automatically understands that that's what the Christian stories symbolize: the individual failing to transform the society, the society breaking all its most sacred rules to oppose the would be reformer, then the society getting reformed, at least partly, and deifying the failed transformer it had murdered.

I'm not the only individual trying to participate in that pattern: but I do, I have, I am. And none of us know which of today's martyrs will be recognized by tomorrow's "Christians" to have been on the side of God, Christ ... Buddha ... evloution ... the right. And none of us know if any of us will be here tomorrow to have any such opinions. Christian symbols too may evaporate: with the dinosaurs, and the dodo.

previous draft's beginning:

Societies exhibit different standards than individuals, much fuzzier standards.

We are members of the Genus Homo, the species sapiens, the modern subspecies, the redundant sapines sapiens: wise wise man, the talker. We are a social species. Our ancestors chose, genetically, to follow the survival stretegy of grouping. In danger we don't scatter, we group. Or: we may first scatter, but then try to group: to regroup.

We reproduce, we try to clone ourselves. We reproduce sexually, meaning that our young are partly ours and partly other. My son resembles me, but he also resembles his mother; my son resembles my father, but he also resembles his mother's father. Our "identity" gets diluted over time. We change whether we would or not.

I am a social animal, you are a social animal. We talk about being individuals, and we are, so to are marbles, maybe for all we really know so too are electrons, but we group. There are lots of symbols, some of them fuzzy clouds of symbols, that we group under: Christians, Americans, Republicans ... Any of those groups can (and do) claim to be "under" "God," or on the "good" "side," or among the "good guys." Other groups have different slogans. None are dictated by Truth, or Reason; none are wholly without truth, or utterly without basis in reason.

The fossil record shows species swallowed in oblivion, extinct. Their strategies worked, or there would be no fossils, then the didn't work, or they'd still be here.

Continue:

I love society. I hate This society. I love intelligence, in the abstract. I hate our failures to become intelligent. I despise our instututions that claim allegiance to intelligence while actually opposing it, sabotaging it, entrenching mediocrity: bombing others while wrapped in symbols of freedom.

I understand that societies train their young. I wouldn't change that. But I oppose (and have sacrificed my life to opposing) coercion, doubly so where instituions such as church or state, school board or draft board, put their weight behind the coercion.

I urge us to recognize the difference between papa telling junior "You must speak English," or "You mustn't say 'ain't'" and the church saying "You must attend mass (and it must be in Latin)" and the state saying "You mut attend English class" (and "You must put on this uniform and go and burn that village of gooks").

Christian churchs tell us that we're no good. (I agree: basically.) Our (falsely) "liberal" institutions tell us that we're inteligent, have found reason, have superceded Original Sin. (I disagree, utterly. and scream my disagreement.) Media today tell us that we're the good guys (while burying mountains of evidence to the contrary). (Universities bury evidence, hide ideas, silence speech, just as inexorably as any Spanish Inquisiiton ever did.) (And they get away with it because they're the record repository.) (We're in truly fatal trouble when all the record keeping institutions coordinate their false record keeping!) (Thank God for the parts of the universe not under our command, where fingerprints of unknown kinds contradict our orthodoxy.)

I be back quick to edit and contine

InfoAll: DeDeDe

2010-10-09T13:44:00.005-04:00

InfoAll
or: All the Information
(a blog associated with InfoAll.org, the deschooling domain spun off from Knatz.com:
Knatz.com a fatality of federal censorship: all pk's domains evaporating after pk's arrest and silencing.)

"Deschooling" opposes coercion. The Church lost its power to force people to attend particular sacred rituals: the public should oppose the state's power to coerce attendance at secular rituals: from compulsory pledges of allegiance to compulsory attendance at math classes.

I've been working up some synonyms for "deschooling": and currently propose two additional associated "de"s:

DeReg
(DeRegulate) and
DePro
(DeProfessionalize)

Thus:

DeReg
DePro
DeSch

Information should be deregulated. We don't need Big Brother, we don't want Big Brother. (Alas, we've got Big Brother.)

Society is sinking itself under the pressure of experts: liscensed professionals. It wouldn't be so bad if the licensed experts were in any way actually the best experts, but the society that crucifies Jesus while honoring Augustus, Herod, Pilat ... Barabas does not have the right experts in place, nor the right healers, nor the right teachers. Deregulate information, deregulate skills, and society just might become human: without human being a bad word.

DeSchool was an unfortunate diction choice: can't be helped. Revolutions never have time to polish their rhetoric. I like DeDeDe better, but I just invented it. After forty years people still don't know what deschool means, how are they going to understand DeDeDe? Well, maybe they will, maybe they won't: the dead or crippled or broken martyr can't control what the crucifiers will say. But it's my term, and from here on I'm abbreviating it: DeDe. Read it to symbolize all the De's: deschool, deregulate, de-anything: anything kleptocratic and manipulating: anything where a bureaucracy witlessly coerces others.

2010 12 15 I also offer the name "General DeDe" as an alias for pk. pk is my nickname from college: Paul Knatz, my initials: written lower case for compex reasons gone into elsewhere.

Given the above anyone should see that the DeDe part of the proposed nom de plume shortens the DeDeDe above to simply DeDe. But all De- associations are welcome: three, and more.

The first part, General, is itself a complex: largely a complex joke. I'll elucidatein a new post dated today.

lllich Diction: She/Her

2010-10-05T14:48:00.005-04:00

Ivan llich symbols, diction, attitudes ...

pk has preached deschooling since 1970, devoted, sacrificed, his life to it, been martyred by the Nazis of schooling (that is, of coercion, of interferring with other people's business). My home page, published to the internet since the early mid-1990s, gathered relevent materials: first in Knatz.com's FLEX section, than at InfoAll.org, a domain dedicated to the purpose, then additionally at this InfoAll blog, and now at a Knatz.com being resurrected first on my hard drive, in hope of getting back into cyberspace (cyberspace, an invention largely of Ivan Illich and Paul Knatz, the anti-centralization cyberneticists stolen by the conventional US thieving politicians (and bureautcrats) in a section renamed DeDeDe: for DeRegulate, DeProfessionalize, DeSchool: a trinity of aspects of deschooling. I took to Illich like a fish to water because he embodied many of my own ideas and attitudes, but also added fresh perspectives and analyses and alternatives that I'd never thought of. His being a Roman Catholic priest, a monseignor, threw me for a loop, but then again the Church had already defrocked him before I ever heard of him: thus his Imitation-of-Jesus crown of thorns, his stigmata, were already in place for any Christian to see and marvel at. (If the kleptocratis is chauffeured in a chariot, you know almost for sure that it isn't Jesus, isn't a disciple of Jesus; if he's hanging upside down while everyone else is dripping gravy on their tie, then it might be Jesus, or a Jesus disciple. Anyway, here's the first a a series of presentations of Illich images:

Church as

She

versus

Her

Illich distinguished between the Church (that he loved) as She and the Church (that he hated) as Her. The Church as She was the bride of Christ; the Church as Her was the Whore of Babylon.

The Church as She served God: that is, Truth, evolution, progress ... grace; the Church as Her servied the fat, ignorant, lazy, stupid, vain, selfish, gluttonous ... priests. (Ivan isn't around to ratify or to disavow some of my diction: "evolution" there may represent pk more than Illich.) (I can't wholly represent Illich's will anymore than he (or I) could wholly represent Jesus' values.) (The Bible changes a word, a letter, a comma; next thing you know the Bible is grossly misrepresenting what it purports to serve.) (That's life, that's scholarship, that's service.) (Don't worry, the truth will still sort out: just with nobody having been right all the time: no human.)

Think it out from there yourself. Think of other institutions that can be so divided: the school as genuinely interested in learning, in skill, in mutual service ... vs. the school as authority-bound, ignorant, vain, serving hubris ...

Deschooling's 3Ds

2010-10-03T14:49:00.003-04:00

De-Schooling
as De-Regulating
as De-Professionalizing

I say again, the term we've used for the philosophy of liberty that opposed compulsory religion, compulsory party membership, compulsory schooling has been "deschooling" since Illich's Deschooling Society was published in 1970. I repeat further that Illich did not coin the term, that distinction belongs to an editor at Harper's. Illich did not like the term, and neither did I. I don't know anyone who did. But movements don't always get to name themselves. Typically, like the "Impressionists" (or the "kikes" or the "niggers") the term is coined as an insult by enemies of the style (the culture, the group). Ah, but sometimes a movement can propose alternate names for itself. Earlier at this blog I wrote the following:

A better term might be "Christian"; but that term is already misleading, long-appropriated by the recent millennia's crops of Christ mockers. For "deschooling" just think uncoerced: free of secularly imposed ritual (as well as Church-imposed ritual): think "free."

Since then I've been toying with a coinage of my own: DePro: short for de-professionalize.

(DeReg for deregulatory should also be considered.)

"School" and "profession" are not synonyms, but in deschooling contexts they sure are related: deeply. Illich argued that schooling prepares the young for a consortium of prescriptions. Once upon a time if your pharmacist had arsenic, or opium, you could buy it. The pharmacist prepared and sold chemicals. He might also offer information about the chemicals, he might offer advice about the chemicals. But he didn't imagine that it was his business to tell you what you could have or what you should do with it. Someone with the leisure could learn to read, or not. Able to, one could read scripture, or novels, or polemics ...

Cultures naturally wants members to think and do and consume certain things. But until recently it was not the state's business to tell you that you couldn't buy opium, even with a prescription. The Temple told Jews how much to donate, which children to donate as student priests, the Church told "Christians" what to pray, when to pray, what to believe, what to think, how much to pay for candles, but the government didn't presume to tell you that you musn't own gold, mustn't ride a motorcycle, or must spend $X for Y years studying Z subject or that you must do it at MNO venues sitting before ABC teachers. But states do, and they don't stop there. You also must "get a note from your doctor"; a note from the shaman (or the witch) will not do.

It's easy for the state to get the ignorant to believe that the state is competent to imitate Harvard, to mass produce Harvard, to give you a $100,000 education just up the road for only $50,000 in tax money (to be paid in your stead by lotteries and flat tracks). The state gets the citizens to swallow the competence of the state to "educate" "teachers," at state facilities, funded by compulsory taxation. (Harvard has to sell you on the idea of Harvard; the state just threatens you with pariah-hood, even with jail.)

Soon you can't do anything without state prescription. The state grants near monopoly power to this bunch of doctors, that bunch of lawyers, the other group of nurses: one post office, one money printer, these couple of banks, those couple of pharmaceutical labs. You can no longer buy your rat poison from the guy in the neighborhood who has it; you have to buy only what the state doesn't forbid, and only from the state-licensed monopolist. It "ought" to be your own sense of things that tells you to use this mechanic or that obstetrician rather than this or that gypsy; not state-pre-or-pro-scription.

In nature we could be intelligent or stupid on our own: stupid meant we didn't live well or long. Now we all have to cooperate with unending compulsory stupidities. In nature an individual's life might get lucky, be good, and be long. In state managed civilization I don't think we'll survive much longer, or be any healthier, or smarter, than chickens crowding cages till they can't stand up.

Kiss & Tell

2010-09-27T12:10:00.006-04:00

Where do schools get the right to detain children for training?
Even if they have the right, and those who bestowed it had the right to bestow it, where did they get the right to test children?
And where, oh, where, did they then get the right to blab the results to strangers?
In other words: some school board, accountable neither to God nor to scholars, kidnaps your kid, tests your kid ... and decades later blabs your kid's test scores to some college, to IBM, to GM or Ford ... to Washington DC!

Individuals don't have the same standards as institutions.

When I was a kid our warring parents sent my sister and me to a summer camp, to see if the two of them alone could do better than the four of us together. Star Crest was the name of this camp: woods, a lake, canoes ...

pk (and cute girl)
at Star Crest Camp

There was a kid in my dorm who shit his bed regularly. The counselors displayed his shitty sheets on a line behind the dorm: airing the dirty laundry of the one social retrograde for all to see. I ask you: who made that decision? The counselors? the camp administration? the sleeping-shitter's parents? Someone explained to little me that public humiliation was supposed to embarrass the incontinent into learning bowel control in their sleep: bright, huh?
I don't know, but I imagine that in time this kid did learn to shit less in bed; but did his humiliations help? I doubt it.

Humans evolved as a social species. The group does things as a group that it wouldn't tolerate from individuals. If I throw stones at a woman and kill her, it's murder; if the group throws stones and kills her, hollering that she's an adulteress, it's justice, it's what God said ... it's anything the group agrees to call it. (2011 09 17 Check out the movie Agora: the stoning of Hypatia, the math genius, the Christians calling her a whore and witch.)

I'm an adult now (some of the time, some people would agree) and I see more and more behaviors by groups that I can't endorse. I see gathering the young into state-run pens called "schools" and then publiclly displaying the kids' shitty sheets, in the form of grades, as appalling. If General Sternwood hires Philip Marlowe to test his youngest daughter to see if she's a nymphomaniac, I see that as General Sternwood's business, and Philip Marlowe's, and possibly Camilla Sternwood's too; not my business, not your business. If Philip Marlowe markets his findings through Geiger's dirty bookstore, now he and General Sternwood begin to resemble Camp Star Crest in my mind.

If my father (or mother) (or I myself) hire a math teacher to test and grade how well I know my multiplication tables, I see it as every bit my father's, my mother's, and my right to do so. I see it as the hired teacher's right to perform the test, and I see it not only as a right but an obligation on the teacher's part to share the results with my father, or my mother, or me: depending on who hired him. If however the math teachers tells our neighbors, it's a violation of trust: far worse than the braggart telling the boys at the bar that Cindy let him feel her up behind the harvester. That's bad enough — but now tell me this: what if the teacher also blabs my grade to the municipal authorities? what if the municipals then blab my grade to some university? what if that university then sets itself up to blab that grade to IBM? to GM? to the US ARMY?

Under government your private business becomes the business of organizations that have no business knowing your business. But of course it's our fault: we let the government get away with a little arrogance, soon their insolence is boundless.

Kissing and telling is an ethical matter if it's kissing we're talking about. If it's institutional betrayal of confidence we're talking about, as in the recording and publishing of grades, the government ought to be made to walk the plank: and would be, if there were more than two or three real people in the society. But here's a situation where I'm all in favor public disclosure of intelligence test results. My IQ not the state's business; but the President's IQ is very much my business, and yours. The school teacher's SATs and GREs are very much public business, as is the IQ of the rude lady at the motor vehicle bureau.

Every public official should have their IQ tattooed on their forehead.

And you know, maybe the public should know the IQ, the SATs, and the GREs of Fortune 500 CEOs too.

The CEO of X Corp has an IQ of 135? Why so low? How come the zillion people with IQs of 140 or 150 or 180 didn't get the job? That's what we ought to know: what percentage of highly intelligent people are unemployable? got sandbagged, like me?

We're a society of people of average intelligence avoiding communication with people of high intelligence. We listen to stupid gods, why don't we listen to smart gods now and then?

Coercion

2010-09-17T08:44:00.016-04:00

To deschool means to resist coercion: to resist involuntary attendance at rituals. No church "should" compel attendance at a "mass"; no government should compel attendance at a history class. Deschooling has other meanings which Illich argued in his book on the subject of 1970, and which I've argued as founder of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in 1970 (and since): from soap boxes, in newsletters, on the phone, in fliers ... and online since 1995 (when I added philosophy and politics to business activities online): no compulsory curriculum, no substitution of certificates for demonstration of skills (it's OK to ask for proof of typing skill, illegit to ask to see a diploma) ...

Here by the way is a picture of pk and his son bk from that period: 1969 or 1970: it's a passport photo: we were on our way to see his grandma in Switzerland.

I share an email I just sent to bk:

Today's Straight Dope has this question: "People diagnosed as clinically obese are sometimes said to have a hormonal condition that makes them unable to lose weight even if they cut calorie intake to a minimum. Surely if you forced them to exercise while making certain their dietary intake and vital signs were healthy, they'd be slim and trim in a couple of years. In the end, isn't obesity always in the mind and not in the hormones? — Guy Scarsbrook"

I love it except for the "if you forced them to exercise" part. Who's "you"? I believe mama should be able to force Benjamin to eat his carrots and papa ought to be able to force Benjamin to wear a hat in the winter, but who else should have rights to force anybody to do anything? People can force people, but then they're rapists, thugs, muggers ... without general social support. Only parents of infants "should" be exempted.

I say "should" meaning: IF we want life to be what I (or any speaker) want(s). (If we don't, if we want to be dead, then we "should" misbehave in all possible manners.)

Anyway, groups, political groups, seem generally to think without thinking that force is OK if the mass of men do it ... then that that force is OK if the mass of men appoint the brown shirts to do it ...

The anarchist who first invited me in 1970 to be interviewed with her Free U anarchists on WRVR radio was called by her anarchists "Mercury." They met at the Methodist Church on Sheridan Square in the Village: big People's Yellow Pages banner out front: they were doing community bulletin boarding before Illich, before me!

Mercury also had a speaking gig at Hunter College, and invited me along. in 1971 I was getting most of my speaking gigs through her. (She and that group also introduced me to a wonderful bunch of European anarchists.) (Though my favorite guy of all was local: he wore a Stamp Out Human Chauvinism button!)

Anyway, at Hunter: some woman wanted to "take" children from abusing parents. Clearly she seemed intent on "helping" children: children who weren't hers! and was willing to trespass to do it. I wanted us to watch our trespasses. So I dragged my feet with her.

She didn't get it. No one got it.

The original email has been edited a bit: improved I hope.

PS: Benjamin is the four year old son of bk and his wife Nathalie.
PPS: There was a Quaker church which also supported the Sheridan Square anarchists. All FLEX literature was printed by me on a Quaker owned multilith in a loft on W 18 St. (Mercury taught me to clean it, ink it, run it ... and loaned me the plates, paper ...)
The only church that supported my FLEX was the United Methodist Women division. Every church ought to have.

PSS: Jan came over as I had the above pic open in Photoshop for retouching: I cloned out the passport stamps, fixed my teeth a bit ... Jan didn't know me in 1969, had seen only one photo from 1971: she assumed that the above was a pic of Brian and Benjamin; not pk and bk! Hilary, bk's mom agrees: she likes our passport photo, always did, and sees a lot in common among grandpa, son, and grandson.

Jan knocked my socks off when she noted resemblances between pk of 1970 and Shakespeare of the woodcut in the 1623 Folio (which I always have on the wall by my computers)! Sure: look at the shape of the hair over the ears.

Convivial: Freedom From Religion

2010-09-16T11:55:00.010-04:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / NoHier / DePro/Deschool /
Health Care — Feedback
Freedom From Religion

Catherine Kaltner

Catherine was my best friend and my patron from 1990 till her death in 2004, aged ninety-six: my only patron: my best patron ever!

Here's the basic story, real quick: Catherine was ninety-five. She got ill. Just before she went terminal and before I arranged for help and services through Hospice, I arranged for services through a medical agency. A nurse came. I showed the nurse Catherine's Living Will. I showed the nurse where Catherine was utterly clear: she didn't want any religious services, any prayers. Don't try being a missionary to this ancient atheist.

I didn't impose my religiosity on Catherine; she didn't impose her bleak views of the cosmos on me. I wanted the nurse to be on the same page with us.

Immediately upon being introduced to Catherine, the nurse started preaching at her! I reminded her of her obligation. Oh, no, she said, talking about God is good!

I got rid of that nurse fast: and that nursing service. But no one seemed able to understand what had been wrong. No one cared why we objected to the nurse. It might as well have been her breath! She entered our house under false pretences. She committed fraud. She was a menace to society.

No one cared. Next nurse, next agency. When I didn't like the second agency either, that was tough. You can have, as Illich cracked, Ford or Chevy, but not good transportation.

revisions will follow:

Understand: I am a follower, call it a disciple, of Ivan Illich: because I recognize him to be a disciple of Jesus. I think the society, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, in which he was not only a priest, but a Monseigneur, recognized it too, because they defrocked him: took his resources, tried to take his influence. I see that the society recognizes me as his disciple, that is, as a disciple of Jesus, because I've remained unpublished, gotten sabotaged, misrepresented, wrongfully interfered with, arrested, wrongfully convicted ...

Catherine didn't want to hear any of that. She supported me because she loved me; not because she understood or believed anything I wrote or said. Catherine couldn't read a word I'd ever written, neither could she read Illich, nor did she want to try. I also loved her, and it had nothing to do with philosophy. (And I was glad not to repeat the mistake I'd made with my wife (and my son): expecting them to understand.)

Further understand: I seconded Illich in opposing compulsory ritual. I further seconded Illich in opposing state interference with any human behavior. And I was with him 100% in his opposition to our dependence on the imposed services of experts, of professionals. In other words, we're for liberty.

I further supported his criticism of the US and its foreign aid: particularly in Third World countries. It's bad enough that the US has cut down its forests and covered everything with concrete: do with really think that we should "lead" Peru to do the same? Illich said that giving Peru GM trucks could do more harm to Peru than sending a tank and opening fire!

Once again, Catherine didn't follow any of that (any more than did anyone else I was aware of). What Catherine did do was get old: very old. She was blind when I met her, and crippled. She was really blind and crippled as medical incompetence supervised her getting terminal. OK, she'd had enough by then anyway, never mind that medical incompetence killed her a little earlier than might have transpired without their administrations.

Reasons for School

2010-08-25T14:59:00.010-04:00

Blogs publish like a diary, chronologically reversed. Knatz.com, InfoAll.org ... were hypertext, webbed, you could meta-jump, burrow, skip. I want my Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling modules together in a row: therefore I'm posting them as though I'd put them up beginning in January 2010. Actually of course they were thought out since 1970, and mounted at Knatz.com / InfoAll.org starting in 1995.

Anyway, skip back to January 2010.

Knatz.com Deschooling Posts

2010-07-30T14:34:00.004-04:00

As I remount Knatz.com modules at blogs in the wake of my arrest and censorship, the destruction of all of my domains, of my life, my business ... I have the joy of a loved one reading some of it over my shoulder as it were: and I see how very difficult some of my writing is. Yesterday I compared it to spooning tablespoons of instant coffee directly into your mouth and trying to swallow. Some of that can't be helped: lobster meat is dense, don't expect it to be cotton candy. Some of that can't be helped for other reasons: the modules are scribbled fast, then years pass as other notes get added. The style doesn't always get smoothed.

I fix the fixable as I can, as I see it. The intrinsic density I make no apology for. Blame the truth, blame the universe, blame God.

Some of the density I can try to dilute, maybe. Meantime It's more important to get the messages back online in whatever form. Better instant coffee than no coffee.

Hierarchy vs. Conviviality

2010-07-23T13:40:00.004-04:00

The personal stories at Knatz.com expressed a common purpose: to illustrate that a convivial society would better fulfill human nature than the hierarchical coercions that kleptocracies have foisted onto us since civilization over-extended everything: from population to agriculture to industry. The term "convivial" is Ivan Illich's. It is the Jesus-inspired context for "deschooling."

This is the common theme of my biographical stories whether of school or church or army or work place.

Informational Hysteria

2010-06-28T17:33:00.005-04:00

As a kid I like chaotic streams of information, I liked the vaudeville hams bumping each other out of the spot light, I loved the Dixieland musicians coming in on top it seemed of each other's solo. But the habits of the culture that I came to prefer and that we are now bereft of offered information in single doses, with time to absorb it. When I went into Columbia's stacks or NYU's stacks or Colby College's stacks I was able to look in the nineteenth-century English novelists section without being interfered with by shelves or volumes from seventeenth-century French poets. Melville's Moby Dick minded its own business while I browsed Ben Jonson's plays. Today I was reduced to a nervous wreck as I tried to enjoy TV coverage of the tennis championships at Wimbledon. ESPN2, switching in and out with NBC, put on a match between Federer and Melzer — great — but then the screen would split and two, then four, matches would be shown simultaneously, Patrick McEnroe or Brad Gilbert or Hannah Storm talking the while, switching to cameos from Pam Shriver or from Dennis Cahill. Then a match between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova would intervene. The whole time soccer scores occupied a graphic at the bottom of the screen.

When I was a kid I looked forward to the circus, but then three rings proved to be too much. Maybe God can listen to six billion prayers simultaneously but I don't even want to try.

The internet I offered in 1970 was intended to offer us a tool with which we could pry ourselves loose from the strangle hold of managed information. Everyone could have had a cheap ad; no one's ad would have interrupted any one else's ad! On your honeymoon did the hotel's whores come into your bridal suite and flash their pussies under your nose while you tried to embrace your wife? Did you pick up the remote and switch from your bride to Elizabeth Taylor to Marilyn Monroe to Claudia Cardinale?

Good Reasons

2010-01-15T01:39:00.024-05:00

Adding to Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

No matter how evil the kleptocracy's reasons for kidnapping the young for choreographed indoctrination, good things can still, can also, come of it. For example, the orthodox Jew may meet a radical Catholic, actually come to see another viewpoint. The girl trained to keep her legs crossed may meet the guy who makes her knees buckle. Some of this is "accident": God is not mocked: it doesn't matter what we humans try, life, the universe, will have a still later word. I mention it because individual choice may come into play: you hate the history class? Good, you have a right to; but: open your eyes occasionally anyway: you may encounter something you wind up loving. I hated grammar in school, but wound up loving linguistics in graduate school.

I never would have loved it taught by the school board, but I adored it taught by scholars: and I wouldn't likely know it had I not been "forced" (by the desire to teach college).

R Subvert Independence

2010-01-12T08:38:00.033-05:00

Adding to Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / DeDe / School Purpose

Humans beings spread over the earth looking for resources: for food, for shelter, for a place with fewer enemies. Humans are born dependent: it's the parents' (and the group's) responsibility to train the kid to find resources on its own: as fast as possible: the parents, the group, never know when the earthquake is going to get them, or the lion, or the cold: maybe the kid will survive, maybe humankind will continue: the kid must learn, learn lots, learn well, learn fast.

Good. I'm all for learning. But are schools good for learning? Do schools teach the kid to find food? fast? well? Or do schools keep the kid from learning what roots are edible? what's under that girl's breechcloth? Don't the schools schedule what's taught and what's learned without having any idea when the earthquake is coming? where the lion is? Don't schools prevent parents and small groups from training their children? Isn't a school the state as kidnapper revealed?

Oh? But who's it for then? Why would parents and small groups let themselves be raped like that? Good question: but the super-groups, the major interest holders, the Fortune 500 ... control the magicians who false deal everybody.

The school doesn't train the child to find food but to conform, to wait till the school bell rings, to wait till the factory whistle sounds, to wait till some bureaucrat tells her what to do, to wait till Pavlov's bell steals his independence.

Bureaucrats

2010-01-11T09:37:00.012-05:00

The purpose of state-run education is to flush scholars from the schools and replace them with bureaucrats, rendering knowledge difficult to impossible.

Let me flesh that out a tad further: The purpose of state-run education is to flush scholars, scientists, artists, teachers (most with a touch of bureaucrat to them) from the schools and replace them with bureaucrats (some with a taint of scholar, scientist, artist to them), rendering knowledge difficult to impossible but in all cases (or almost all): controllable!

Experts

2010-01-10T16:38:00.000-05:00

(Not from Knatz.com / InfoAll.org: posted directed to this blog:)

Rulers guide the public to believe that the experts are there because they know best; actually the experts are there to train the public to sit passively while mumbo jumbo trumps sense.

The purpose of school is to accustom the future consumers to passively accept the services of experts: and, I repeat, the purpose of experts to to train the passive consumers, the obediant workers, to allow mumbo jumbo to trump sense.

Myth Displaces Experience

2010-01-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / DeSchool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling
(Reverse Engineering Society's Purpose for Education)

Myth Displaces Experience

Science depends on evidence, culture depends on myth. Politics can be depended upon to use coercion to introduce new myths and to empower them over experience. One king will drive his culture into seeing that their nearly flat earth has become curved; but most kings will drive their culture into insisting that the curved earth is flat.

Authorities are typically retrograde.

In the contemporary world, Nazi-run since the early industrial revolution, all hoi poloi must attend ritual "learning" sessions called school. In the United States we repeat to the children, more often than the magician insists that his trick deck is "an ordinary deck of playing cards," that the children — penned there by law, by gun, by jail — have free speech. At no point do the children, or the parents, or their journalists, get to visit the jails, full of the censored, the falsely-accused, the kangaroo-convicted. The first guy I talked to in federal prison said he was there so he couldn't publish a sequel to his I Know Who Shot JFK.

If I say "I've been censored," the schooled don't ask where they could find evidence; they correct me: with their imposed myth of liberty and justice for all.

Even the scientists know that, if they want their government handouts to continue, they'll find the evidence for their experiments in government-kept terrariums of Potemkin information.

Halter

2010-01-08T09:35:00.000-05:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling
(Reverse Engineering Society's Purpose for Education)

School as Halter

The horseman prepares the young horse for work (such as carrying a rider) by confining the horse to a pen with the trainer. Gradually most candidate horses will accept the presence of the trainer (most are born to captivity anyway), then the horse accepts a halter, then a blanket, then a saddle, then a bit ... Once the trainer mounts the horse to finish "breaking" it, most horses comply after only a little protest kicking. Those that don't are sent to the glue factory, not put on welfare. Schools do the same for young kleptocrats.

Sure some skills are offered, some actually learned, in part, by some: math, grammar, history ... football, typing ... But always, as background, so familiar as to be as invisible as water to a fish, the young kleptocrat is trained in the kleptocracy's justifications for its brand of kleptocracy: It was right of us Jews to take Canaan from the Canaanites, Because .... God loves us, not them ...

Reasons: Myth will continue to develop that reason further: then I'll resurrect the bulk of Knatz.com's forty-year long list of additions to Illich's quorum of reasons kleptocracies compel the young to consume schooling.

Monopolize, Homogenize

2010-01-07T11:45:00.003-05:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling:
Monopolize Time
While Homogenizing the Population

Modern schools monopolize the population's time and attention from early (early enough for children to be utterly impressionable) to the very borderline of adulthood (where habits of thought have already been formed).

If the schools were conversant with good habits of thought and tried to pass them along, that might be a good thing, but developing healthy minds is the opposite of the schools' true purpose: monopolize time while homogenizing the population. The most successfully homogenized, honor students, are sent onto universities which continue the processing. My Academic Bestiary of examples of school atrocities [reassmebled here] narrates the case of my fourth grade teacher pointedly avoiding thanking me for the cookies I'd baked for the class. She attributed the gift to my mother whom she thanked warmly in absentia. She called me a liar when I reasserted the cookies' true provenance (they were mine!) I was convicted without a formal accusation or a trial before my peers (twelve fourth grade boys who baked cookies: how would that be for a jury?)

Might that experience have a little something to do with my never having been an honor student? not in high school, not before, not at Columbia, not in graduate school? The same zoo reports the school's response to my challenge to the high school geometry teacher's axioms as being neither Euclidean nor improved: zero: note she just repeated the axioms. My challenge wasn't passed on to her supervisors, to the school board. No board of mathematicians met to review her text's axioms or my charges against them. How can such a charade pass for "education"? It's simple. The answer is the same as the answer for so many questions: kleptocracy. Education means whatever the kleptocracy wants it to mean. Geometry means whatever the kleptocracy wants it to mean. Law, order, democracy .. they all mean whatever the kleptocracy wants them to mean. And the school is the pacifier kept stuck in your mouth till you've missed all chances to grow into a man. The honor students, the most homogenized, most pliable, among the mass of castrati, are rewarded to rehearse the lies at Time-Life, at NBC ... Some of them actually keep a corner of themselves intelligent: Bob Costas, Pat Buchanan ... But most are Kennedies and Nixons and have no unpolluted intelligence anywhere: cleverness merely: together with a plentiful lack of principle.

Notes

Man:
Knatz.com had already repeated Paul Quinnet's title point of his Pavlov's Trout, but it bears repeating here.
We all know how Pavlov rang a bell while dogs were being fed. He then rang the bell and noted that he'd "conditioned" the dogs to salivate at the bell, even when no food was being served: response by association. Fine. How many of us know that the dogs were put on a table and put into a harness? How many of us know that one dog simply wouldn't cooperate? Pavlov could kill it, but he couldn't get it to wear the harness or to "behave" on the table. Paul Quinnett tells this story to "explain" to us why we love to catch fish: "because" the fish is like Pavlov's undomesticated, untamed dog; while we are like the rest of Pavlov's dogs. We are like the cow stupidly walking up the ramp where some guy will smash it in the face with a sledge hammer. Cows are so well "schooled" they need no school. Think of Jesus. We imagine him standing still, cooperating while the soldiers nailed him to the cross. I wish he'd torn himself to pieces, trying to escape.
2009 03 23 I insert a reminder to develop a comparison to "why" we love crime fiction: we know we're tame; we love to imagine heroes who aren't: Ned Kelly, Billy the Kid, Robin Hood ...
PS: I received a bee sting a couple of hours ago, my first in decades. I've suffered very few bee stings in my life. I used to offer to capture the bees in my bare hands so I could release them unharmed out the school window rather than allow the teacher's order that some "boy" kill the bee: eek! The bee never stung me. I was lucky, the bee had fewer than half its wits, it didn't like my smell ... or it sensed (correctly) no harm from me. Indeed, I saved it. Someone sees a bee, not just women, they become agitated, they wave their arms ... What I did, I felt something crawling around in my leg hairs, near my knee: inside thigh. Without thinking or looking, I pawed at it. It was a yellow jacket. It stung me: but good. I didn't blame the bee. I didn't judge the bee. I just killed it Hell, it was going to die anyway, it's stinger ripped by my flesh from its bowels. If I'd let the bee crawl around amid my thigh hairs to its heart content, it never would have stung me. As the Nazi colonel says at the end of Rossellini's Generale della Rovere, "It's my fault." (Hasn't anyone else seen that great movie? I've never heard it mentioned since I saw it back in the 50s.) I don't blame the teachers either. They're just conditioned domesticated animals: cattle so stupid they cooperate in their own slaughter: protecting the kidnappers who feed them. I don't blame even the fourth grade teacher who called me a liar. She was just protecting her prejudices from the truth: something any domesticated dog might do. What I wish is that I had just killed her. No judgment: just escape. Tear yourself apart rather than accept the hook and line. Does the fish think, "Wait a minute: why fight? maybe whatever has hooked me has only good intentions for me. maybe I'll be put in clear water, surrounded by healthy females, no other predators: my own private paradise ... No. The fish is a predator. In a world of predators. Real predators know better than to trust anybody. It's bad enough to trust your mate, or your litter. Sometimes that too backfires. Why trust God? Who knows what kind of a predator he is? Spiders like the black widow are one predator who've safely solved any social needs: they simply kill any bug they can reach: they have to be hypnotized to mate. ... Oh well: it would be very interesting to see what constitutes the biosphere one hundred, one thousand, five thousand years ... from now. How much of it will be domesticated? Will any part of it be human?

Zero:
I unintentionally for the moment penned a pun above, a profound pun. Gregory Bateson identifies a series of levels of meta-learning as Learning0, Learning1, Learning2 ... [The Knatz.com / Thinking Tools module is to be recreated at my pkTools blog.] A creature operating entirely on what used to be called "instinct" exhibits Learning0 in a pure form. My favorite illustration is one from a science doc, possibly by Sir David Attenborough. The female wasp goes through her routine of preparing her next for egg laying. She clears a path, then the inside of the nest, then goes back up the path to reach the next stage. If a mean scientist puts any kind of debris on the path while she's clearing the nest, she's go back and clean the next again: endlessly, forever: if you keep putting new debris in the path. Instead of going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... What was that, Paul? Of yes, these texts are written by idiots. But that's the school system for you. 6, 7, 8 ... The interrupted insect went 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3 ....

The Medium School is the Message

2010-01-06T10:41:00.009-05:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling:
The Medium Is the Message

Marshall McLuhan said it. The public repeated it (without understanding it). Illich analyzed its truth with regard to schools: It doesn't matter what tripe you parrot in school; what matters is that you're there: where you've been told to be: by people (not your parents) who do not have your independence or maturity at heart.

What could be more ironic than a captive audience of young consumers being told by the jailers that they're free, and what they're forced to consume is their free choice in a free market?

I don't challenge father's right to tell his son to get behind the plow or mother's right to tell Sissie to keep her legs crossed; I do challenge the state's right to tell our children anything: let alone where they have to be when told (or how much the force-feeders should be paid) (from public funds!)

Schools Clone the Society

2010-01-05T17:41:00.008-05:00

Resurrecting Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling
(Reverse Engineering Society's Purpose for Education)

Society's Reproductive Organ

School's Purpose

To Clone Culture

(And Our Culture Is Kleptocratic)

Illich said it. I can't overemphasize it. School is society's reproductive organ. But it's a vegetative process — budding; not sexual reproduction : where different informations mix: to unpredictable results. The results of schools are highly predictable.

The school does not engage in education or learning: it dispenses it. The school isn't a communication system; it's a broadcasting system. It dispenses messages: it doesn't receive them.

What school does wonderfully well is propagate the kleptocracy's basic message to its new cells:

Submit: and you'll be allowed to live.

What Christmas tells children at high volume and on every channel for a month or so before the winter solstice, the school tells children in a never-flagging whisper five days a week for ever more of the children's year:

Submit to absurdity or you'll get at best a minimum share of the kleptocracy's loot.

That minority of children who seem to submit well, regurgitating what's poured into them without choking or carrying on, get a special formula of the message:

Submit to absurdity gladly, submit to it well, and you'll not just be on the dole of the loot, you'll participate in the doling.

Some few not only participate in the dole but get to live in the palace. Truly glad participants, ones who wouldn't dream of giving the game away, may even get to abuse living in the palace. Now that's real success, abusing your position: get blow jobs under the desk, get to bomb poor people in far away countries.

(I don't mean drop the bombs: some loser does that; I mean order the dropping: decide who lives and who dies: in numbers the most insane Caesar never dreamed of. Poor Muslims in Afghanistan don't get no loot. They don't get to live!)

If you still say that Santa brings the loot even after you've caught your parents wrapping the gift, you're well ready for school. If you can remember how to spell "principle" from "principal" because the head administrator of your school is your "princi-pal"; if you can still say that Christians follow Jesus, or that churches serve God, or that government serves the People, or that Democracy is by the People, or that ETS tests intelligence ... by the time you graduate, why then you're ready for ... a life time of ... more of the same.

My graduate school told me what English was; it never heard a thing I said about what English was. But then society in general has never heard a thing I've said back to it.

I would rather fail to live than to abase myself to absurdity.
(I do want to live: just get out of my way and let me do it.)

I also say

There really are great teachers: Ivan Illich, Bucky Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Jared Diamond ... You just don't listen to them
(or to pk, trying his best).

At Knatz.com my HTML controlled the appearance of the data; here, Google rewrites my HTML: drives me crazy.

2011 09 17 I won't bother to rewrite code since all will soon be movd to pKnatz blog: there I'll sweat the code.

Speaking of Cloning:

I wish I could stimulate everyone to see a book, movie, painting I recommend. If I could I'd "make" everyone see Tarkovsky's Solaris. Critic Roger Ebert noted one of the film's astonishing effects: at the end, it's raining. It's been raining throughout the film's scenes on earth. We recognize the house, we learned the house as Kelvin's father's house. It's raining inside the house!
Ah, but Ebert failed to mention: it is not earth, it is not Kelvin's father's house; Solaris has a sentient ocean, the ocean is assimilating ideas from the human cosmonauts. Now Solaris is cloning was it has impressions of. But the planet does not know what it's doing!

Are these clones harmless? Wait and find out; or fight to the death.

Generic Institutional Reasons

2010-01-04T23:29:00.001-05:00

Resurrecting Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /
Institutional Purpose: Generic

All institutions have one prime purpose in common: to discourage the spread of ideas perceived to be incompatible with the perceived health of the institution.

Vocabulary:
2010 12 21 My censored Knatz.com distinguished theoretical purpose from actual purpose. The institutions' stated purpose is the obverse purpose: the head of the coin. Watch out for magical misdirection: the real purpose may not be the obverse purpose; the real purpose may be the inverse purpose: a hidden purpose. The Church says it's there to receive and transmit messages from God: did they get them all? Did they get them right? When will God declare the truth? Meantime, the gospels suggest that the Temple was there to block God's messages, not to transmit them! The state compels you to go to school, the cost skyrockets. Literacy, numeracy, slides down the toilet. Is the school really there to help you? Or have inverse purposes given the raspberry to the obverse purpose of the institution?

My contempt for school dates from my being dragged to kindergarten, my deschooling activism dates from 1970. My contempt for all civilized institutions developed in the wake of my deschooling activity. My results are near zero: I've never met a single individual that I judge understands a quorum amount of what Illich said, wrote, and published: or what I've said, written, and offered for publication as his follower-disciple-colleague. The above comment is made about institutions in general: it necessarily applies to schooling as well.

Reverse Engineering the Purpose of Institutions kinds of spread all over the Teaching portion of Knatz.com. Who should be surprised how I got arrested, my work censored?

Reverse-Engineering Society's Reasons for School

2010-01-03T17:24:00.000-05:00

Resurrecting Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory School

Reverse-Engineering School's Purpose

2000 07 22

If you follow the magician's patter you will very likely "see" what the magician wants you to see: that is, the illusion; and not the trick. That is again: you won't see the trick, you will be deceived.

If, in contrast, you want to see the trick and not the illusion, a different kind, a higher level, of seeing and hearing must be practiced.

Government schooling
is the explicit attempt
to coerce people into accepting
their appropriate place in hierarchical, industrial capitalism
Matt Helm

I'll say off the bat that one of school's prime (true) purposes (in harmony with other institutions in any modern kleptocracy — employing coercion: making its life easy via time-proven illusions, and riding under whatever banners fit effectively into the patter of illusion: civilization, order, Christianity, education, equality, democracy ...) is to identify early those who see the trick (and are willing to say so) and to make sure that those individuals have additional obstacles strewn in their way and never advance: way being made for, preferment bestowed on, the least incompetent of the tractable.

No (ahem) democracy will allow a citizen promoted who says aloud, "Uh, if the Athenians murdered Socrates, what makes us latecomers believe that we're fit for self-government?" Or: "Since the US Constitution is half-plagiarism and half-illiberal dilution of the Five Nations' Great Law of Peace, how come we don't pay half-royalites to the Iroquois?"

No Catholic will promote to priest let alone to bishop if he says out loud, "Uh, if man is fallible, is born to original sin, added new sins on top of that, railroading and torturing Jesus, for example, then how come Christians sit still and tolerate secular governments run by humans? Indeed, how can Christians sit still and tolerate a Church run by humans? Why don't we all just sit down, shut up, and wait for God?"

Society gives preference to those
with the most flattering cognitive dissonances:
you don't become president or pope by seeing that the territory
has been taken illegitimately

And no school will make life easy for the young'un who asks the public school English teacher what novels she's written, what their reception was ... or asks the physics teacher what new principles she's theorized. Understand, in a theater, the magician's assistants, ushers, for example, don't have to spot mere hecklers among the ticket-bearers: so long as they seem more belligerent than intelligent. It's the reasonable skeptic who must be exhorted out to the alley way and forced (if necessary) to accept that his ticket is no good: wrong date, no Jews on Friday ... whatever. Oh, and how's this for a reason?[Punch to the gut!]
The ushers will always outnumber the reasonable skeptics. The kleptocrats act as a pack; the reasonable woman or man, boy or girl, acts in isolation. (Few such boys or girls grow to adulthood: the dumpsters dispose of their corpses: in the extreme case where they didn't just see that their bread could be buttered by just shutting up and agreeing, "Oh, yes the lady in tights is levitating."

Alan Ginsberg wasn't kidding when he howled about the best minds being destroyed by madness: he just didn't list enough of the ways intelligence, imagination, honesty, knowledge, reason ... are flushed from the culture.

Far more than to educate
(whatever that means),
the purpose of school is to indoctrinate:
to civilize a candidate for a particular sect of kleptocracy:
like breaking a horse for a particular rider.
In sum, to domesticate us
for purposes not our own.

Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society first came before the general public in an issue of NYR (c. 1970). At least an issue ot two before that I'd read a piece reverse-engineering school's purpose by Florence Howe and Paul Lauter. Their position was that if you follow the school's magical mis-leads, you'll believe that the schools' purpose is to educate, to prepare citizens for democracy, to train the young in the tools of survival: finding food, building shelter, self- and group-protection ... If so, they continued, the schools are miserable failures by any measure. Yet the schools continue to receive ever larger budgets, ever more personnel, ever more power ... Can the advertised purpose be true? Howe and Lauter proceeded to reverse engineer the school system: what does it actually do? Perhaps its true "purpose" can be deduced not from its claims, but from its accomplishments.

The Illich testament was driven out of print (even as it sold well!), but I've mounted the text online. [See ] I have the text for the Howe and Lauter article and will try to mount it as well.

Meanwhile, my own scribbles on the subject (over and above offering FLEX (1970) as a potentially complete, non-managed, non-censored, free, open, public information clearing house: the first internet!)
have collected in a data base, in scraps of paper here and there, and in a series of HTML files online in one form or another since I've been online regularly (1995) (on this internet). I hope soon to revise and restructure them, relating them to acknowledged lists of basic magicians' tools for illusion: lying, switching trick properties for real ...

[And] broken men are blind to what they should see
Lorenzo Carcaterra

[Society's] offspring,its sick conscience —
a living reminder of all the hidden crimes we commit
when we close ranks to live among each other
The Alienist

I'm afraid that this important section still remains a botch this 12 03 2003: at least compared to what I intend to make of it. Then again, anything at all is infinitely better than nothing. I'm making good progress redocorating the files, making them visually more readable (I hope). I'm itching to spend more effort on content!

Notes
Physics Teacher
An honest physics teacher, were there such a thing in school's magical theater of illusion, would have to say, "I'm not a real physicist any more than I'm a real teacher, any more than you're a real student. Now shut up, and let's pretend." (Or, it goes without saying, if you don't keep mum about Santa Claus, and your church, and your government, and your leaders, and your school, and your teacher, then you won't get your unfair share of what this kleptocracy has stolen: (even the further building on the theft being half-by theft!))

School Reasons Posts Dating

2010-01-02T17:16:00.014-05:00

I'm placing the introductory Reasons for School post on January 1st of 2010.

2011 09 16 But now all deschooling materials, from here, from K., are getting moved or recreated and updated at pKnatz blog.

Reasons for School

2010-01-01T15:37:00.005-05:00

Recreating Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Deschool /

Reasons for Kleptocracy's Compulsory Schooling

That is to say:

Reverse Engineering School's True Purpose
(Not Swallowing the Reasons Offered by the Managers)

Deschooling Society detailed a host of reasons modern secular societies have compulsory schooling (Ivan Illich, 1970). In 1970 I found his reasons to be as encyclopedic as I could imagine. Since then I've been adding my own reasons as well as expanding on his. Illich's book was published, became a best seller. My offer to actualize what he was proposing received next to no support, only one of my articles was published, what I published online from the 1990s onward got sabotaged and censored following my arrest in 2006. First Knatz.com, then its deschooling spin-off, InfoAll.org, listed my "reasons" for schooling (a list very unflattering to kleptocratic civilization). I mean to transfer all that to this InfoAll blog. Additionally I began a data base for such reasons in the mid-1990s. That too must be sorted through. And of course I think of new reasons regularly.

I believe I should first put up all that I can: then edit them down, extract the essence: maybe edit them way-down.

Reasons: Halter, my next post, in another few seconds, will not though begin with Knatz.com's published reasons, but rather with an analogy I hadn't used previously:

But never forget, Ivan Illich and I, Paul Knatz, offered the world a way out: cybernetic community information networks, a public- (not government-) internet. You, the public, didn't pay for the infrastructure (you let your saints starve, as usual, you didn't get it).

Illich and I get sandbagged. He's dead, I soon will be. But we're wrapped in Jesus' arms. (Guess where we'll see "you"!)

First, all institutions have one purpose in common:

To Reproduce the Society!

[See the posts Generic & Clone in particular.]

More titles to follow:Magical Misdirection

Imposing Agendas

Civilized Substitutions

Order-Takers

Premature Commitment

Career Fixing

Teacher Dependence

World of Employees

The Medium Is The Message

pk's Law of Conservation: the Part on Promotion

Follow the Magician's Lead

The Rabbis Test Jesus

Rehearsal for Group Illusion

Power Grabbing State

Promote Compliance

Manage (Homeostatic) Promotions

Hobble Honesty

Klockwork Kulture: School as an Industrial Artifact

Fodder for Kleptocracy

Managed Magic

Orthodoxy

Public Arrogance

To Condition Belief

Cottom's Useless, Clueless

Confusing Education

Institutional Purpose: Generic

Disestablish the Individual

Confidence Game

Intimidate

Inure to Absurdity

School Purpose: Notes

Bad Software

Majority Delusion

Mold Perception

Monopolize Time

Logical Monte

Obedience School

Postpone Adulthood

Institutional Pretense

Public vs. Private

School Purpose: original intros

Regulating Information

Society's Reproductive Organ

Subvert Language

Warp Minds

War WagonThose are modules already written and long posted online, then destroyed with federal censorship of pk. Still to be written are themes gathering for decades now in a data base.

Deschooling Quotes: FLEX

2009-12-21T12:46:00.009-05:00

All my quote files were moved to pKnatzQuotes blog, then to pKnatz blog.

Deschooling Quotes moved

2009-12-21T11:30:00.015-05:00

All my quote files were moved to pKnatzQuotes blog, then to pKnatz blog.

Testing 1, 2, 3

2009-12-19T15:32:00.004-05:00

"Who would test me?"

That's what George Lyman Kittredge, Harvard professor of Shakespeare, quipped when asked why he didn't have a Ph.D. Right. He knew more on the subject than anyone: who indeed would test him?

The professors in my graduate English department at NYU proved incapable of testing me. I freely admit that I might have proved incapable of testing them on some idea they are inspired by but that I am opaque to.

God can test us at Judgment, but who's to test God's competence to do so?Nested incapacities may be infinite.

Resources

2009-12-01T10:32:00.003-05:00

Ivan Illich's proposed learning webs recommended that the public avail itself of community data bases, cybernetic where the population was large. Illich distinguished between human resources and inanimate resources. Thus a teacher, expert, or skill model would be listed in one yellow pages; a book store, a stationary store, or an art supplies store would be listed in another.

My Free Learning Exchange, Inc., founded in New York City in 1970, did exactly that: and I talked, wrote, and published suggestions that the learning webs sprouting up around the world expand to become general public resource data bases: where doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs could advertise together with the "teachers." But today I launch this post to make an additional distinction: one to which human or inanimate is immaterial: I wish to distinguish the category of resources into sub-categories of degree of development.
Developed resources
Under-developed resources
Over-developed resources
Missed resources
Tobacco is in my judgment an over-developed resource: over-produced, over-sold, over-consumed. Intelligence is an under-developed resource: church, school, government ... chase it away with a stick. And the public watches with its thumb in its ass: just like we watched Jesus get railroaded: and then Jesus' followers: and still Jesus' followers ...

Three Internets

2009-11-15T16:03:00.006-05:00

You'll see the world clearest if you realize that there have been at least three internets: different, incompatible. First try to understand the internet of local community human resource data bases that I offered to keep and make cybernetic which I and my Illich-inspired Free Learning Exchange, Inc. offered in 1970. My internet was intended as an alternative information system / market place to the state-dominated schools and heavy industrial heavy capital dominated markets we were already pummeled by. The state compels us to study English for twelve years under some string of state-licensed morons. Left alone we could study English for twenty years, or for none: our choice. The watchword for FLEX's proposed internet was free: as in freedom, as in liberty. In other words, my associates and I were offering a purified version of what the state claimed to give but actually made impossible.

(I admit that there was a first internet before mine: a "zero" internet as it were: the internet I'd imagined, and wasn't alone in imagining, as I read futurists: Arthur C. Clarke, Marshall McLuhan, Bucky Fuller (and talked with in Bucky's case) ... But I was the first dreamer to say aloud and in public that I'd do it. (Denis Detzel had spoken before me, but not publicly the best I can tell. My FLEX was on the street in NYC ahead of his Learning Exchange in Evanston.))

Then by the late 1980s there was the internet that universities and university students talked and joked over. But my internet was for everybody, no matter how poor; the universities' internet was exclusive, privileged almost by definition. But it, like mine, was anarchic in other ways. One got published because one had something to say; not because one had the backing of Alfred A. Knopf & Co.

Now Fourth, meretricious beyond belief, today's familiar internet. Run by robots, for robots. More mindless hysterical consumerism.

My internet would have functioned in the ancient Greek tradition: Socrates, Plato, etc: ideally (if not actually) seeking clarity. This internet I now publish this post on is dominated by banners, intrusive ads, popups ... You ask for one things, but first the robots give you something else.

My ideal was like a dictionary: any word could be there, organized by a simple principle: the alphabet, following a known order: A, B, C ... Look up the word "acrobat": no Coke ad should pop up and smack you in the eye. You shouldn't need to fret while an 800 pixel color picture of Pamela Anderson's ass blocks the word "acrobat."

Universities: Cultural Sales Tool

2009-11-14T13:52:00.005-05:00

Churches used to pretend that they were a doorway to truth. Some still pretend that. But more and more of us (few of us any too rational either) see that they're but sales tools for butressing the dominance of some superstitions profitable to the priests; not to the culture. Rational discussion is neigh impossible anywhere near a church: of any denomination. Ah: so those who see the fraud flock to universities.

Universities currently pretend that they are a doorway to truth: they pretend that they're honestly trying even if they don't yet claim infallibility.

Ivan Illich showed that schools weren't what they seemed. A few people, very few, actually got the point. So how come no one has allowed my extension of his points, extending "school" to include universities? I say that universities are for the most part merely secular churches: sales tools for maintaining the epistemological errors of our top-down controlled, big-capital-controlled marketplace culture.

Rational discussion is neigh impossible anywhere near a university.

(Boy! And if you think the university is bad, try dealing with the public! with the media!! with the government!!!

Free Learning Exchange note

2009-10-31T13:36:00.003-04:00

In 1970 I founded the Free Learning Exchange, Inc., following Ivan Illich's saintly genius in trying to offer the public a cheap low-tech internet by which that public could sidestep regulation into freedom: any community with a cybernetic bulletin board of human and inanimate resources, together with both interest matching services and feedback on quality, on behavioral irregularies, could recreate the ancient marketplace into a new Phoenix of liberty, upgrading interfering regulatory government into direct cybernetic democracy at the same time: Congress was designed for representatives to renew information from their constituency annually; with networked cybernetics opinions can be updated at the speed of light. In 1973 my wife stopped paying the bills and kidnapped our son: a handy way of not having to discuss his education with the deschooler.

The above statement recaps my deschooling history with brevity. I wrote it an hour ago at my PaulKnatz blog and now copy it here. Lots of details had been at the destroyed InfoAll.org, having previously been at the simultaneously destroyed Knatz.com.

Illich / Shaw

2009-07-11T11:27:00.009-04:00

My InfoAll.org domain had a section on philosophers who'd influenced my ideas of learning, education, school ... prior to 1970 and my discovery of Ivan Illich. George Bernard Shaw was among them: though I've not yet been satisfied with what I'd posted on this complex and important subject.

Only a small percentage of the materials at InfoAll.org have yet been re-posted here at my InfoAll blog. None of my background philosopher writings have been. This post, newly penned this hour, will precede the re-posting. It's an email just sent to the social worker the fed assigned to me after releasing me from jail. More explanations of what follows will follow after:

Sandy, we talk and talk, and the more we talk about the more there is to talk about. The more said—the more understood, the more left out, the more not understood.

Coming into your office yesterday I commented on your cute Frog: No Perfumes sign, but repressed my urge to say anything further, my mind being already jumping balks about1) Waiting for Jean (While Meeting Linda), and
2) Ahn giving me authority over my idea for ballroom lessons, then taking it away from me in the middle of the Social chaos of Wed. July 8.

blog readers, note:
Sandy's "House of Wellness" ask visitors not to enter wearing any chemical scents.
I asked if she herself was allergic. She said she was.

At our next meeting there will again be too much to talk about pressing against me, so let me scratch this itch over a missing detail by sending your this (quick I hope) email:

You know I'm a disciple of Ivan Illich, you know Ivan Illich is a disciple of Christ, I think you already knew a little bit about Illich before I came in, but of course, due to my being a disciple of Illich and Illich and all his ideas being anathema to the kleptocracy, you, like everyone else, did NOT know a thing about me: except that I'm a convicted, confessed, "felon": more kleptocracy-imposed delusion, the confession having been tricked out of me by a combination of threats and mild but continuous tortures (refrigerating prisons, stripping us naked at 55 degrees — a friend joked, "I'll plead guilty if you'll just send me back to my cell, where it's 60 degrees, not 55.")

[The thieves band together, 90% unconsciously, to sift through facts, blocking, shading, blackening, those facts that contradict their illusion of legitimacy. The magicians' illusions will work (on a stupid-enough, conditioned-enough audience) IF the ushers have a free hand to silence the rational skeptics.

What there's never been time to add to my introduction of myself to you is that long before I was a disciple of Illich (and long after I was a (yet-minor) disciple of Christ), I was an enthusiastic disciple of George Bernard Shaw. Now: Illich is not normally associated with Shaw, Shaw is not normally seen as related to Illich: but the relationship is there: even if only through me (and I'll relate this where it belongs, next to the idea of No Perfume, in a moment).

I was the better ready to read and understand Illich thanks to my long-trained reading and interpreting Shaw (AKA: GBS).

It's seems odd, but it's not really. GBS was the famous atheist, the famous socialist.
Well I loved Shaw DESPITE that. Because he is the great humorist: who, Twain-like, looks at conventional compositions Up-Side-Down!
It's a good exercise, should Always be done. Take an argument, don't either believe it or disbelieve it until you're pondered it: right side up, as given, and ALSO upside down, as Not given.

That's essential for the reverse engineering behind Illich's deconstruction of contemporary society's institutions:
The school system is supposed to "educate"; look at it: the school system takes potential individuals, potentially fit for democracy, and machines them into robots for industry, with the occasional privileged-robot-executive for industry.
The schools fail to make us literate, numerate, rational ... but succeed in making us conventional, bland, easily foolable ...

Now: things upside down are not automatically true (though things not examined through every possible orientation are, almost automatically, probably false).
But look it over, check it out,
And enjoy laughing at us fools.

OK, now what about perfume?

I love Shaw, that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with him on much: I agree with his comic procedure: look at the idea dressed in a clown suit, as well as posed for the executive portrait.

Now, specifically:
Shaw, acknowledging that majorities rule, accepted society's right to disregard the discomforts of minorities. (I wish I could afford to find the specific literary reference among the plays and prefaces I have in mind — I haven't read any Shaw since 1965, but till then I'd read more than sixty of the plays, most of the prefaces, and lots of letter: meantime, just believe me.)

I disagree, I don't believe that, I don't think it's automatically OK for the majority to blink at booze production and distribution just because only a minority of people are noticed to become drunks. I don't think it's OK for the majority to profit from tobacco while only some start showing symptoms of emphysema, cancer, etc. I accept that the society does not care for the discomforts of minorities; I do not accept that the society has any right to not care about what's toxic. If the one canary dies in the coal mine, get everybody out of the coal mine, don't wait for a million canaries to die.

I also differ from Shaw's acceptance that "government" is a necessary evil. I don't want to accept any evil as necessary. (Unavoidable and necessary are not the same concept.)
(I did my Shaw reading before 1965. In 1965 I too accepted the right of society to make rules, believing that groups could behave rationally; now I don't accept that assumption, at all: I vehemently deny it. I'm an anarchist now because I'm a total atheist with regard to the possibility of any society larger than 200 individuals doing anything whatsoever that is not destructive. THAT may be why I was arrested!)

There are many more distinctions to draw, but this isn't bad for a first draft, written as fast as I can type. (There are also contradictions not yet addressed: I say "get everybody out of the coal mine"; but I do not mean by coercive authority!) (How? except by coercive authority? Simple: just wait for nature to kill us off so no society exceeds 200 members: if there are no such societies, we'll be extinct: and that might be the best thing in the end.) (I don't want it to be up to Stalin, Hitler, Nixon. I don't want it to be up to you. I don't want it to be up to me!) (I don't want it to be up to Jehovah, planning to give every privilege to the Jews, I don't want it to be up to Jehovah, planning to give every privilege to the Christians; I want it to "be up to" nature! Uncapitalized!)

OK OutSide World: the above is better than nothing. If I live long enough, once I've reposted everything of mine that the fed censored (and that the public accepted the censorship of), I'll come back to to recompose the above as a coherent relationing of GBS, Illich, and .

Secular Protestantism

2009-07-06T10:43:00.013-04:00

Lots of peoples have believed in lots of gods. The Jews' God acknowledged this bedlam of gods; he just insisted on being acknowledged as the best among them: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

The Christians adopted the Jews' God but additionally assigned him a triple nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three quarters of a millennium later the Muslims gave their Allah a more exclusive exclusive: There is no other God!

Watch out: Johnny admits that there might be some sort of "divine" "principle" in existence, then the Creationist claps his hand over Johnny's mouth and declares that Johnny has accepted some Byzantine creed hook-line-and-sinker.

But it's worse: the ambiguities between "religion" and "atheism," already making a near infinite number of fudges, comes in two radically different party systems: authoritarian and "protestant." That too is complicated: and I'm trying to make less fudge, not more. And I see other treacheries ready to sink any boat trying to navigate the shoals of fudge. Since 1970 has hailed the great Roman Catholic priest, Monseigneur Ivan Illich, as the great "Protestant" among Christians, yet I have no awareness of having clarified anything (except once to a fellow Mutualist Anarchist, opening his eyes with an Illich metaphor) amid the seas of fudge. (My son instantly got my clarification as wrong as it's possible to get anything: but that was a predetermined snarl if ever there was one.)

My Magic section of Knatz.com's Society section argues that man's basic hope for his relationship with his environment is magical, not rational. We don't want to wait for spring; we want to make spring magically appear. Farmers don't want to wait for rain, they want ... etc. Religion is how we delude ourselves that we are magicians in command of magic. Thousands of years ago the average Joe realized that he, Joe, couldn't make it rain, but he hasn't yet learned that neither can the shaman, neither can the priest, neither can the minister, neither can the congressman, neither can the President: neither can God: and you don't need magic: just wait for the rain, and accept your death if it doesn't come (or have fewer children, need less water) ...

In the Jews' religion, a magical entity created a magical existence and that magical God loves the sad-sack Jews. Everything belongs to God, and God intends to give everything, in time, to the Jews, taking it from whichever Egyptians, Phoenicians ... Canaanites ... he has to.

In the Christians' religion a similar God hates the Jews but loves the Christians in their place: and once the Christians have stolen everything from the Indians, and the niggers, and the Mexicans ... well then ... But God has no need to give anything to the whites; they just take it themselves.

Still: there's a radically different attitude toward authority between the left wing and the right wing of authoritarian credulity. The Catholic Christian is taught, by a bunch of priests, by a bunch of nuns, that every sinning-little-boy-with-a-dirty-mind (and every sinning-little-girl-with-a-dirty-mind too) can only be saved by the direct intervention of the great magical Holy Catholic Church.

In other words: once upon a time, the magical human living in a magical universe in which he wanted spring, or rain, was magician adequate to get the spring, or the rain. But with the Fall, our magic is no good: we need the true professional magic of the true professional priest: and his priesthood: we need a true magical Church!

The Church kept no records (that we have access to) of how many priests came along between the First Century AD and the Fourteenth Century AD and said, You don't need us professionals, do your own magic. We know of none. That does not mean that there were none. We do know though that in the Fourteenth Century AD John Wicliff tried to translate the Church's Latin Bible into the common English of England. That was a stepped-on-hornets'-nest that we do have records of. The Church squashed Wicliff. But a bit latter the Church failed to squash Martin Luther. Luther got a few German princes on his side, the princes none too happy about how much power the sacred magicians had, and so Luther escaped the Pope's hit men, the Bible did get translated: into German, and into English: and "Christianity" divided: again.

First you had your Christian east and your Christian west: Byzantium and Rome. The east split between Greek and Cyrillic. The west split between Roman and non-Roman. And the non-Roman split between Anglican and Protestant.

Anyway, simplifying, unavoidably, "Protestant," for me, here in this writing, pk online, means "no-middle-man": or at least fewer middle men. With the Church, you had a middle man: you didn't pray to God (for spring, for rain ... for a pony), you prayed to Frere John, and Frere John prayed for you to the Divine Father: or, you prayed to Sister Berthe: and Sister Berthe prayed to the Holy Mother, and the Holy Mother prayed to the Divine Father.

Ivan Illich was a Roman Catholic priest, but he wanted politics to be secular. He wanted each of us to be able to find what we wanted without having to go through a priest: and that includes especially Not Having To Go Through a Secular Priest: no sacred middle men; no secular middle men either: no doctor, no lawyer, no teacher, no bureaucrat! (That does not mean that Illich would forbid you to go to a doctor or a lawyer: no, he's against coercion either way. But principally he's against the magicians creating artificial needs for magicians.)

I was "born" a Protestant, Illich became a Catholic priest. This Protestant is still not used to the idea that I became associated with a Catholic. (Illich may not have been at all comfortable with being associated with someone conspicuously non-Catholic.) I warn any newcomers against believing that I speak for Illich in all things. Don't confuse my history of religion with his. I don't doubt that he would agree with me on many a particular. Unfortunately he and I never got much of a chance to discuss anything.

My secular metaphors come basically from him, as does this particular metaphor of Protestantism.

I am in 100% agreement with Illich on "deschooling": in being against compulsory rituals whether the ritual is claimed to be sacred or secular. I have extended some of Illich's arguments in the thirty-nine years since 1970, and believe that he would in large agree with my expansions. I have no expectation that we would agree on God, or on Christianity. Don't blame him for my theology, or for my philosophy.

Of great importance though: I recognized him as "divinely" inspired. I feel sure that he recognized me as similarly inspired.

On meeting him at his CIDOC in Cuernavaca, I put my arms around him, but felt I wasn't lifting and whirling a human body but rather a bolt of pure almost-levitating energy. I don't know what he felt. We never really did get to talk. But I hope he too felt something not exactly average.

Interrupted Orals: Original Version

2009-04-30T23:31:00.001-04:00

pk School Stories: University, Grad School

pk's Interrupted Orals

See the foregoing summary. Now I read in the Knatz.com HTML code (My old HTML doesn't display well at this blog: I'll tighten it later):

Path: / Personal / Overview / Training / Academic Bestiary /

Module initiated 1998 10 28

Ph.D. Orals:

Discounted

(School of Anti-intellectuals)

This file climaxes my biographical narratives on pk's indoctrination by church and state. It offers personal evidence that private schools and universities are at one with the homeostatic tendencies of the culture at large: including major private universities: famous ones, universities with celebrated faculties. Universities answer to the conservatism of the society at large. Look for what ails us, but don't find it. If you do find it, even a clue, universities have an infinitude of feudally-derived (stone age-derived) devices for not getting the message, assuring that the message does not spread.

This file is a keystone of Knatz.com. It pairs with the deschooling keystone of my life's work, climaxed in my founding
The Free Learning Exchange, Inc.
Ivan Illich was the main spokesman for the group that invented information networking for a free society in 1970: the internet that was shunned: left to die on the vine: thirty-some years ago. My FLEX expanded the idea beyond deschooling: toward a wholly free marketplace for public information. But of course state, church, and universities prefer their own managed (false) version of history: and, apart from
,
the gull public remains ignorant of the path to survival it ignored. When we're all dead, soon, within a century in all likelihood, I hope some alien intelligence notices the path offered and not taken. The morons didn't have to go extinct; they chose to.

Original file resumes:

The purpose of school
is to shade any light
before it can illuminate anything

Unfortunately the latter is still true even at the university level (even in the Ivy League).

1999 09 01

My companion directory for Meta-Oxymoron is now, finally, getting to a point where it makes more than a couple of my most basic points about Shakespeare's sonnets. Once I get a bit further with it, I'll have to return here to rewrite as well as "finish" the story.

"To Prove":
that however schools and universities (see my
History of Universities,
see also
FLEX)
are equipped to propagate knowledge both long understood and approved, they are not equipped to recognize let alone encourage new knowledge, new ideas. The phenomenon is simultaneously one of
homeostasis
and Big Brotherism. Once anything becomes institutionalized any genuine content initially present gets replaced by imitation content, healthy tissue becomes clogged with fat. And the fake can never tolerate the real.

My Doctoral Orals

The Final Straw in pk's Decision

to Divorce Himself

From Society's

Disinformation Machinery

Church, State, School ...

I'll postpone relating incidents between junior high school and the end of graduate school in order to, as they say in Hollywood, cut to the chase.

It's the morning of my doctoral orals. The medievalist asks the first question: "Tell me something about the Wife of Bath's Tale."

You're not likely to follow the significance of what happened next if you haven't already perused my thesis on
Meta-Oxymoron:
but don't jump there yet: I'll partly rephrase, partly duplicate the relevant parts here while hoping that someone knows enough history, literature, and philosophy to see the truth of what I say:

School:

Kleptocracy

Caging

Itself,

Its own

Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale appears in his Canterbury Tales.
It is preceded by the even more famous Wife of Bath's Prologue. Chaucer's first words for her are:

Experience

though non auctoritee

Were in this world is ryght enough for me

To speke of wo that is in marriage

God bless my good fortune. The medievalist had hung one right across my power alley. The fans will never see this one come down.

As my Shakespeare thesis explains, I'd conceived its basic points the first time I'd reread the sonnets after hearing MLA Secretary John Hurt Fisher analyze the Wife of Bath's Prologue in terms of heretical nominalism in guerrilla conflict with the Scholastic Realism which had become enthroned by the Church as Christian orthodoxy. Chaucer's Wife of Bath was a greased chute to my Meta-Oxymoron. I'd weave a spell with this answer and segue right to the next period: the Sixteenth Century (Shakespeare having primarily penned his sonnets in the 1590s).

I've been linking references to Realism and nominalism since the earliest days of this site. The linked-to files are just fragments, this file telling the story of the first series of reasons my thesis never got written beyond the original series of sketches until I started resketching it here.

Realism: Scholastic Realism

Realism with a lower case r is one of our trickiest words and I doubt that any two people mean quite the same thing by it. But Realism here refers to the philosophy of the Medieval Scholastics which became Christian orthodoxy. In simple: God is real; the world — its people and events — are shadow. Sounds like Plato, doesn't it? But the Scholastics had little to no access to Plato: they invented it for themselves.

Plato had it that the world was filled with imperfect "shadows" of ideal essences or i>Forms. Once Churchmen did have access to Plato they embraced him as theirs.

Nominalism:

Medieval Christendom, however, was not perfectly homogeneous. There were philosophers who mistrusted metaphysical vapors, preferring to emphasize concrete particulars. Peter Abelard maintained that reality is composed of its parts: there is this chair and that chair and the other chair; people were Alison, and John, and Geoffrey ... The philosophy that "abstract words do not stand for objectively existing entities"

(Random House Unabridged)

came to be called nominalism. Their dissent did not come cheap, not once they went up against the concept of Trinity. Abelard's castration may be the most famous in the history of the West (though reference to it is usually linked merely to ire at his secret marriage to Heloise).

The nominalists lost the battle in their own centuries. Realism was enthroned. But the war, a war that's still with us, had turned by the Renaissance.
William of Occam was defending nominalism by the mid-14th Century. His impatience with fanciful metaphysics yielded his famous
Razor:
"entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity," without which science could hardly have become modern.

Back to the chase: I quote her opening sentence in my excellent Middle English, my out-loud recitation of poetry already having long been second to none, as any number of students, teachers, and coffee house audiences will attest. Next, I repeat the quote, expatiating on the significance of the diction:

First word, "experience." That word tells her audience — which
within

the story, includes a Monk, a Friar, an Abbess, and a priest (and that
without

the story, includes us) — that she's on the side of the martyred Abelard. Occam's work had had a half century of influence before Chaucer composed The Canterbury Tales.

The second significant word is "auctoritee": authority. Chaucer's Wife of Bath embeds it with reserve in a negative phrase: "though non auctoritee." "World" has a significance I'll return to in a moment: more important, the word "ryght" appears smack in the center of line two: "right." Fourthordinally, the word "ryght" is

prime cardinally: Right. True. The Truth. Experience gives the truth; not the negatively embedded (false-)authority of this (falsely-governed-)"world."

The Wife of Bath introduces her (double-edged) tale of woeful experience in marriage (a Church sacrament, don't forget) with a three-line disquisition on
epistemology!
one more worthy than many a learned that has followed.

Experience:

whether or not there is "authority" in this world,

experience gives me all the truthful right I need

to speak of the woe that is in marriage.

She's claiming herself, much experienced in marriage, as an authority on the subject. (How her tale is multiply-edged
note
would be a thesis in itself as would be how the tale and the prologue interrelate.)

But my subject isn't the Wife of Bath. Neither is it Chaucer. My subject is two-fold: my doctoral orals and why the opening minutes of them finished convincing me that a university is the wrong place to seek or to seek to publish the truth (unless your truth is trivial or already four-fifths understood).

Please at this point also understand that it had been my point for years by that time (my thesis having been largely thought out in advance of my taking a couple of years off to teach at Colby College) that what John Hurt Fisher had observed about the opening words of the Wife of Bath's Prologue was also true of Shakespeare's sonnets: that Shakespeare's Fair Love and Dark Lady may far more richly be seen as emblems in a masque than as merely his "boy friend" and his "girl friend," the masque duplicating the main intellectual (and spiritual) struggle of this millennium: that between enthroned
note
Authority and the authority of evidence! The sonnets are oxymoronic, indeed,
cybernetic,
setting as they do "ideal" love in conflict with the love of actual experience.

Refutation by Interruption

I've reported the first question of my orals. I've recreated the introductory part of the answer I was prepared to give. I've recounted the following few seconds as I began to answer. I was no further than important word #2, "auctoritee," when the medievalist, who'd been receiving my answer blankly, interrupts: "I thought it was a poem about the "wo that is in marriage."

Science is the only human enterprise not routinely rigged

so that certain truths are excluded:

contrast church, state,

academe,

family, the press, law ...

This woman was on the same faculty with John Hurt Fisher. She should have been able to give me the bibliography for what I was saying. Did she really not know this material? Or was she just pretending?

That response I might have anticipated had I tried to say the same thing around the cracker barrel in Faulkner's The Hamlet, but I was in a room with five supposed doctors of English literature!

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

George Orwell

2002 12 18 insert: Robert Anton Wilson writes:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point.

You know it ain't the heat that gets to me; it's the stupidity.

Undertow

Indeed, this was the same woman who'd told one of my still favorite jokes:

High holidays at Temple Beth Shalom. The temple has expected such a huge turnout that guards have been hired to make sure that members of the temple have priority in seating. Just the adult male members have already filled it. No more admitted.

A boy arrives, stating that there's trouble at home: his errand is to fetch his father, a member.

The guard says he can't enter. Boy puts up a fuss. Fuss becomes a distraction.

"I'll only be a minute," the boy insists: "I know where he usually sits."

"All right," the guard relents, "only one minute. But I'm going to keep my eye on you:

xxxxx
and if I catch you praying ...!"

She'd told it as a deliberate analogy for the anti-their-own-purpose tendencies of institutions: universities and university libraries in particular. But here she was, in perfect harmony with Faulkner's rednecks: not just anti-educational; outright anti-intellectual!
Anti-Literature!
See the story, but miss the significance. Marshall forces to deny the significance.

Asleep at the wheel and proud of it

Toffler

Resistance to new information ... has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted / conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.

Robert Anton Wilson

Whew! There so much going on here: what to point to first? How about cutting straight to the conclusion and then flashing back to the flesh?

I had already multiply-read
Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society.
I had already published and somewhat distributed the early invitations to join FLEX.
It was my firm determination never again to teach through any institution but the latter. So what did I need this degree for? FLEX forbade the listing of degrees. I couldn't use it to be hired by my students: I was already committed, as founder and CEO of that institution, to offer myself on my merits alone. (I had hired myself, unfortunately without pay). (See the
Meaning of FLEX.)

I wanted to complete the degree:

1.	Because I had already put years toward it. I'd wanted to finish what I'd started, however foolishly.

2.	I wanted to write my thesis. I still regard it as core work, work which could have introduced the benighted profession of English to modern thinking, brought literature studies into the Twentieth Century.

It had existential appeal. Illich had a Ph.D.; yet he wrote Deschooling Society.

His disciple having one would be a good joke: like a buggy whip on the early automobiles, or like my Creator in
The Model
first using a barge to track the Sun across the heavens when he had put all the waters on the Earth.

4.	I think it meant something to my wife. Her family had after all fed us more than one meal and paid more than one rent check in the years when I was studying rather than teaching and the fellowship retarded the accumulation of bills only somewhat.

What's the opposite of diversity? ... University?

bkMarcus

Did I get up and walk out? No. Inertia is a force stronger than most humans most of the time. The medievalist, having insultingly interrupted my attempt to answer her first question was asking me another. That wasn't her last interruption. The others followed suit. (I've been the more keenly aware of interruptions by "authorities" ever since: cops, lawyers, judges ...) I tried to muddle through, hoping I could latch back onto the important track.

Even if I was on the right track, I could be in the wrong century.

Andrew Wiles

But the damage was done. It hadn't started there; it had started within the first five minutes of my first class at NYU. It's in retrospect that I see that that's where it ended. I had mentally walked out whether or not I was aware of it at the time.

I devoted myself to FLEX.
I had no further contact with NYU.
note

Perhaps academics have occasionally understood part of what pk says-writes-does: they just pretend that they don't:

Just as both Pilat and Caiaphas may have understood Jesus, understood that their jig was up
(Scorsese's Pilat (David Bowie) understands Jesus very well indeed, but is still a Roman kleptocrat)
Just as kleptocrats truly know, deep inside, that they live on stolen land, that all their labels are wrong: deliberately, synchronously wrong: choreographed to be wrong.

God won't have to cast anyone into hell or elevate anyone into heaven. Under the right circumstances — remove artificial interferences — everyone will know their correct, comfortable place. Creation and destruction — Eros and Thanatos — will distinguish themselves naturally.

(By the bye, I must now wonder: I'd passed FLEX literature around NYU. If people at NYU knew how to read, they'd know that cheap, non-coercive networking was being offered to them, the egg of a politically free internet, an educational free marketplace: in 1971! I can identify at least one grad professor I showed this literature to. I've already
characterized
how he harrumphed to it. It's possible that my orals committee had gotten wind of it. Could they have decided before my orals commenced that criticism of universities would not be tolerated? that no solutions were to be found? Were they united to guarantee that I wouldn't be able to get a word in edgewise even when it was finally my turn to speak?)

(We've all seen that done. I have a reference here to a "debate" in which the show opened and closed without the invited speaker ever having been allowed to complete one sentence.)

I decided that bringing the Information Age to the peoples of the world was even more important than my wished for transforms via
fiction,
even more important than my hope of getting the public to see how Shakespeare had delineated the muddles of our own minds. (Once delineated, shouldn't we, finally, be able to work our way out of the maze? Jesus showed us some key elements of how to get along as humans. His own disciples didn't get it. His "Christians" still don't: not as a group.) We celebrate Shakespeare while the best clues
note
as to what's before us are blocked.

That's the tip of the iceberg. Apropos of my orals, there are also stories I have to tell against myself. But my aim of short files dictates that the story continue in the next
Cage.
Post Scripts I move to a
Orals Scrapbook
file.

The relationship between my life and my orals is digested in a number of condensed versions here. Several appear at the
Archive Menu.
My Macroinformation directory contains another.

2001 09 03 I add a new weave under Teaching / Social Pathologies / Society as Kleptocracy /
Possession.

And, 2003 09 20, add a relevant quote from Swede Momsen to my piece on Gregory Bateson's metaphor of tram vs. bus.

pk Orals Scrapbook

This is the key module in this section. It recounts a key moment in my life. Had my cheap internet been claimed by the public, not stolen by the government, by CERN, and the universities, it would have been one of the key moments in the history of civilization, a turning point. As it is it anticipates a key moment in the long string on Homo sapiens' missed opportunities.

Dates: The bulk of my modules have been edited and reedited since first being mounted. This module is among those most tortured with reworking, though I never had time to recompose from scratch: not here, and in few cases elsewhere. Alas.

Notes

Multiply-Edged Tale
:

Hint: the Wife of Bath has been multiply married, seems to be (and is) talking about woe. But more importantly: she is still fishing!

Context

Enthroned
:
Authority Divorced from Evidence

The theme of authority which has lost contact with truth goes beyond our own poor millennium. You'll find the theme stitched throughout this site. My
treatment
in relation to
FLEX
offers the important example of Jesus teaching outside, not inside the Temple of Jerusalem.

The crux within Christianity came when the cardinals (and the academics) refused to look through Galileo's
telescope.note
They put the beliefs of their tradition above facts.
note
The Earth was the center of their universe. All things revolved around the Earth. Their vanity could not admit the idea of other bodies also having satellites. Therefore, the "moons" that Galileo had seen revolving around Jupiter had to be delusory.

Why look when your eyes will deceive you?

The logic is perfect. But logic and truth had been divorced long before: if not from the beginning).

Galileo is a high point in the Church's decline, Luther another. But the Church's authority had been in doubt for some time as Abelard and Chaucer's Wife of Bath show.

Context

Best Clues
:
Literature: living and dead

Marshall McLuhan paraphrased Shakespeare's Marc Antony to mock his fellow Shakespeare teachers:

Friends, Romans, Countrymen: I come to bury

Shakespeare, not to praise him

Art may be seen as of two types: art which
is;

and programmatic art. Mozart is a familiar example of the former; Beethoven of the latter. The latter is frequently also tendentious. If you learn from the former, it's bound to be at a higher level than a "lesson."

Before I relate this point to Shakespeare, let me quote something that Joseph Conrad, a conspicuous example of the former said to H. G. Wells. (Wells' Fabianism makes him the more conspicuous among the latter.)

The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity, but know they are not!

I personally, as much as I revere Wells and Shaw, as much as I have learned from them, as much as I imitate them, am more deeply on the side of Conrad. And Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wove things into his art without any apparent expectation, not even a hope, of our finding them.

(And we didn't: not even once a certain person, here present, volunteered to chart the maze and mark the exits.)

Context

No Contact with NYU
:

At FLEX I attacked "school" unilaterally: I deliberately didn't whine about my personal experience. Though I liberally illustrated my points from my own experiences where I thought it was appropriate. In other words, though I didn't go out of my way, my orals story did get told to the public more than once: on my soap box in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in my speaking engagements at Columbia, at the New School for Social Research, in my FLEX correspondence with educators ... (in my fiction). The story has been told in this file on-line now for more than a half a dozen years. Yet not once has NYU (in any form) or any other educational institution contacted me to call me a liar, to refute me with counter or discrepant claims, or to apologize ... and certainly not to repair damage. Thus, their silence could be claimed as a form of confession.

2008 05 01

Finally, they contacted me: by having the FBI arrest me! After that the US court pressured me out of any expectation of a fair trial, my public defender, a lawyer of extraordinary intelligence, who seemed very well to follow all of my point, to see the justice, the wisdom, of them, nevertheless convinced me that he would not help me in any way to insert relevant issues into a trial. No, he was there to "help" me by making sure that the Nazis followed their prescribed rituals while scourging and crucifying me: ie, trying, convicting, and further incarcerating me. He did though see that they gave me a short, not a long sentence: and in exchange for that, he had my full cooperation. (He earned a $3,000 bonus for saving the US the expense of a trial: by getting me to lie about my "guilt." I did it to get back to these files the sooner.

Now the US forbids me to contact NYU for any reason. Thus, the fed protects its criminal institutions against complaints for fraud. Bear with me till I can rewrite all this: if I can live long enough.

Context

Galileo
:

Gilbert Mros has cautioned me that in his understanding of the story it was the professors who refused to look through Galileo's telescope and that the cardinals were willing. I could have my details wrong. Until I can research it (or until someone provides me with adequate documentation), I pull my horns in and fudge some of my many references to the historical scandal.

There's still no question that the Church persecuted and suppressed Galileo's science (or that it took the Church a hell of a long time to 'fess up and apologize).

Context

Facts
:

The epistemologically naïve may thinks that facts are as substantial as the stones Dr. Johnson kicked to refute the philosophers. I have begun (but only begun) to deal with some of the problems in the
Reason
section of my
Thinking Tools.

Context

School's Arbitrary Authority

2009-04-04T14:18:00.001-04:00

pk School Stories: Junior High

Arbitrary Authority: Water Pistols

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade water pistols suddenly became the rage among boys my age. One day I had never heard of a water pistol, the next day I was the only kid who hadn't yet gotten one. You'd be walking along, some kid, his face aflame with glee, would leap from hiding and hit you with a stream of water.

"Where'd ya get that?" I asked the kid who'd ambushed me. "Candy store," he yelled over his shoulder, "Thirty-nine cents." And off he rushed to find another ambush spot, reload, or what-have-you.

I knew he didn't mean "my" candy store. There was a strange candy store a block or two from the highschool, which in those days was also the junior high school, and as of that year was also the seventh grade school for those of us who could no longer fit into my old Morris Avenue grade school. ("My" candy store was the one closest to my house: down the block, across the street, then down another couple of blocks. Once I was allowed to cross the street, then also to cross Lakeview Avenue, I could walk or bike to that candy story: and to the little deli in the same row of stores. Indeed, my mother would send me: to get milk, some sliced ham ... or ice cream from the corner candy store.)

(Why are candy stores always on corners?) A different group of kids frequented that candy store. This candy store not far from the high school, serving people, and kids, from neighborhoods different from mine, allowed or not allowed to cross different streets, seemed dark to me, abandoned, poorly supplied. But that day it had a water pistol for sale sure enough: in bright yellow plastic. I had the change on me — rich kid, paper route, far more income than I spent, found a water faucet, and filled up. Back toward school I went, looking for a victim.

As I've written elsewhere combatants typically seem to know who to pick on. The guy who pulls a knife on somebody, generally, except when mugging, pulls it on somebody who then pulls his own knife right back. Gun toters, except when raping and pillaging, find that they've drawn on somebody who's now pointing a pistol straight back at them. The US tried to bully the other nation state that had nuclear weapons far more than it tried nuclear bullying of countries that didn't even have roads. It seemed natural to me that the kid who'd squirted me had found and assaulted a kid his own age and his own gender. I didn't see him wetting any little girls as he ran off. Old ladies, each under her own cloud of godawful perfume, were safe from me, even with my pistol now dripping water down my leg from inside my pants pocket.

As I approached the school playground, the football field right there on Lakeview Avenue, I saw no kids to assault. I didn't even see girls or stinking old ladies. Ah, there were some kids, just coming out the door. Before I'd gotten anywhere within striking distance — I'd seen the pistol's range without even having yet taken my first shot, that strong kid, Lennie, sprang from behind a bush and squirted the kids I'd seen.

Ah, but the janitor too had been lying in ambush. He sprang from his office and confiscated Lennie's water pistol!

A day later it had gotten worse. The janitor was forcing kids to carry their water pistols to his janitor shop and crush their water pistol in his vice. Kids cried and wailed, but did as he told them.

No bigger janitor, no janitor from the county, not just the town, no janitor from the state, and no fed janitor, sprang from Washington and made our janitor crush his vice in the junk yard's compactor. And I have yet to see angels take US nukes and make us shove them where the sun don't shine. But I did see that janitor take plastic toys from little boys, and coerce boys to destroy their own toys in his machine.

Where did he get that right?

How come I didn't see a single parent descend on the school, and holding a .45 on the janitor if necessary, make him eat his vice, and perhaps all the other tools in his shop as well?

Was having a water pistol illegal? If so, how come the janitor didn't go up the block and put the candy store in his vice?

Was the janitor acting on his own? Or was he enforcing school policy? If the later, who wrote school policy? And no matter who made school policy, shouldn't the policy have been made known to the boys before we bought our water pistols?

I didn't lurk around the school to see, but I would love to hear of some kid crushing his water pistol under duress from the janitor, then growing up, joining the marines, killing foreigners with his bare hands, then coming back to South Side High School, snatching that janitor from his cell, and hanging him by his suspender straps from the east goal post: better yet, hanging him by his earlobes.Side thought: Christians are taught to think of someone who teaches peace to humans as in charge of heaven: so people who obeyed the janitor and stopped buying water pistols, and who didn't go back and bugger the janitor with the south arm of the east goal post getting into heaven easily. But what if Mars is the god?

If Mars is the god, I don't like my chances if I show up dead without being able to tell how I'd gone back to Fort Dix and made Buck Sergeant Eton insert his M1 into his skull through his nostril.There's something seriously wrong with a society that has on the one hand candy stores selling water pistols to boys and also has a school janitor who makes the boys crush their plastic in the vice.

Could the janitor make the boy go home and crush his LP collection in the vice? Could he make the boy crush his father's hunting rifle in the vice?

Why didn't the society make the janitor apologize to the boy in public: and pay him back thirty-nine cents from his own pocket, with interest. Why didn't the society make the school janitor also then mow the father's lawn for the boy, and deliver the papers on his paper route too?

In this context I want to remind everyone of a detail in the Abelard / Eloise story. Abelard was a priest, Eloise was a young girl. Eloise's rich father put Abelard in charge of the girl's ahem education: Abelard being a famous intellectual, a big deal at the university of Paris. Eloise's father specifically ordered his daughter to obey Abelard in every detail, he gave Abelard full right to punish the girl as he saw fit.

Eloise's father understood that to mean: Do your lessons, learn your catechism, don't shirk. Abelard though, quite sensibly to my mind, used that authority to tell the cute little girl to lift her skirts, take her pants off, to do this, then that ...

This prose is typical of pk with his shoes off. Never mind the less than meticulous style; get the point.

Rewriting Twain

2009-04-03T12:26:00.036-04:00

The grade school teacher was reading Mark Twain to us: Tom Sawyer. She organized a play. Tom and Huck were off on the river bank, camping, loafing, fishing. I was appointed to play one of the boys. My instructions were to do the cooking, I complied. Oh, boy, Tom: bacon, beans, eggs: this is gonna be great.

No, no, our imprisonor interrupted. You're not supposed to be enjoying this: you're boys, on a river bank, you're cold, you're lonely, the food is terrible; you miss your mom ...

But I'm a good cook, I protested. This occurred after the incident around the fourth grade where I baked cookies for the class and not only did the teacher not thank me, not prepare time for the class to thank me, but she called me a liar: a boy could not have baked such great cookies. But I had. Teachers, doctors, cops, judges, prison guards: anti-Christian morons, all.

Have you read Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn? Was the teacher's interpretation supported by the text? Or was she making up her own propaganda: that boys are helpless, inept, need their mom? My interpretation too may not be supported by the text: I haven't read Tom Sawyer since then, and don't recall any such situations in Huck: though I've read Huck many times since grade school.

I'm just reading Bart Ehrman on how the assemblers of the Bible read this manuscript of this gospel and that manuscript of a similar story in another gospel, and a later follower's account in one of the Pauline epistles ... and wind up writing their own version in their own gospel, trying to blend different accounts as though one story were being told, in the same way, with the same finite set of facts. Uh: we've got a new gospel for each Christian! I do the same. I know I do it, I admit that I do it. I say that I'm writing the Bible. Everyone ignores me: pretends that they are reading God's MS; that I am simply off the page...

We make up our religion as we go along.

Modern Christianity is premised on an article of faith that God has said nothing new to anyone for two millennia. The Jews had done the same. Old messages count, the ones the priests have total hold of; there are no new messages, we crucify new messengers. School is the same: unless new propaganda is called for: then state trained morons become the new oracles. And God will never get a word in edgewise: not past the perpetually new Nazis: where a Miss Tilly is every bit as good a Nazi as any Herr Helmut or Herr Gerhardt ever had been.

pk School Stories (moved)

2009-04-01T14:20:00.003-04:00

I'm moving all pk blog posts to and resurrecting all pk domains modules at PKnatz.
As I move things there, I'll delete them here. Finally InfoAll blog will just redirect to pKnatz blog.

School Stories Menu

pk's personal experiences with school
from grade school through high school, college, graduate school,
teaching, deschooling, founding FLEX ...
Being the deschooler ...

pk Stories: HierCon

2009-04-01T01:16:00.001-04:00

My early home page made teaching points, fleshed with illustrative stories, many of them personal stories. Knatz.com's main organizational principle was to distinguish between personal materials and teaching materials though of course most modules mixed both elements. Some teaching sections spun off into their own domains. My DeProfessionalizing / Deschooling materials spun off to InfoAll.org. My information theory spun off to Macroinformation.org. Both of those domains then acquired blogs of the same first name: InfoAll, as here, and Macroinformation (all at blogspot.com). Many a module, from any folder, sported personal stories, but once I began telling personal stories where the initiating motive was to tell the story, however many didactic points I then also made, I put them in the personal section: Knatz.com / Personal / Stories (/ stories subdivisions: youth, college ...)

That's where my school stories went. Then I got arrested. Then the fed court censored my AgainstHierarchy.org. Jailed, my son and family took over my accounts, my internet host emailed bills but my daughter-in-law only paid bills sent by snail mail. The next thing my son knows, all my domains sank without a trace: and he didn't put the theoretically uncensored ones back up! Good Germans avoid the Jews when the brown shirts show up. My 3,000 files evaporated with my business: no more pk science, philosophy ... stories: not online (except where I'd sketched stuff to blogs).

Back home, my computers returned to me a half year later (though my parole officer warned me against trying to remount anything (off the record, of course, no witnesses: kleptocratic intimidations avoid a paper trail.) (Macbeth hired the murderers in secret: of course.), too broke to do anything but yield to the threats, my computers, printers no longer synergizing properly, their system destroyed by the FBI, my DSL gone, out of reach, I restricted my Knatz.com work to preparing future republication. And in doing so I decided that stories, personal or not, about Deprofessionalizing / Deschooling / and Illich conviviality-related subjects belonged in my NoHier and DePro sections of the Teaching division.

I second Illich's recommendation that society deprofessionalize itself in general as a part of weaning itself from compulsory schooling. We shouldn't tolerate coerced education, we shouldn't tolerate the state telling us which services we must subscribe to or which services we may not subscribe to. You want to go to a doctor, an AMA member, go ahead, who's stopping you? But if you want to go to a shaman, or a midwife ... or a snake oil salesman ... that should also be your right. Organizations who disapprove can warn you, but they shouldn't be able to stop you. If the deracinated hip surgeon is driving a taxi in Manhattan, why shouldn't you let him work on your hip? Why should you need official permission? Officials should mind their own business. That is: rightly, officials have no proper business!

I've now transferred my personal school stories from Knatz.com/ Personal/ Overview / Training / School Stories to Knatz.com / Teaching / NoHier/DePro / Conviviality / School Stories and thence to here: the InfoAll blog. Soon I'll start transferring church stories, army stories. Today though I want to tell a previously untold story. It's about my late girl friend, Catherine; but it concerns the unconscionable health care she got when terminal. The next post will tell it: for the first time.

2011 06 22 I'm moving all deschooling (and other) posts to pKnatz blog: school stories first.

Perverjiariazing Jesus' Internet

2009-03-30T06:47:00.000-04:00

Perverjiariazing: perverting while plagiarizing

When a Massachusetts publisher reprinted Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer without bothering to pay Twain any portion of the income, that was plagiarism: or pirating: theft. It wasn't however at the time illegal, not in Massachusetts. It was theft, not perversion; or, it was perversion only in that the author, while acknowledged, was not paid. If some Massachusetts lawyer had both printed and sold the novel and claimed to be the author, that would have been both perversion and plagiarism.

My post here from November 2005, which I named at the time "Meretricious Internet," told how Ivan Illich prescribed learning networks for an over-schooled world in 1970. Likewise in 1970 I offered to run the networks, to become the community's cybernetic librarian, tracking and publishing digital records of volunteered information about public resources for learning – who taught English (or bridge), who wanted to practice English (or to play bridge), and what English speakers (or bridge players) had to say about the teachers (and players). I further offered, via correspondence with the more than one hundred other learning networks burgeoning on all continents around the world in 1971, 1972, to coordinate this public information: establish the data base, maintaining the data base, share the data base with other data bases ... Say someone in Tokyo is planning to visit Manhattan: thinking ahead, they know that they will want a local English teacher upon their arrival, and will also want to meet with other Japanese speakers learning English for practice. Additionally they want to know if any of the teachers or practicers might have a reputation as a rapist. Their Tokyo learning network contacts my New York exchange: available data could be sent to the traveller while still in Tokyo.

Additionally my network recommended expanding learning resources to include all kinds of public information. The same system could be used to list healers, attorneys ... auto mechanics, firemen ...

Illich designed the learning networks in the religious spirit of the great priest and saint he was. I recognized his design as not only the science fiction I valued but the Christian simplicity that I valued more. Illich's networked public could slough off not only the ghastly intrusive coercive school system but also the ghastly intrusive all-but-coercive hegemony of the military-industrial complex. People could free themselves of government while they were freeing themselves of school. We moderns could begin to live for the first time like "Christians": no matter what superstition we did or didn't embrace!

If you didn't want your phone number published, then your phone number would be no business of my Free Learning Exchange. No one in Tokyo would be given your phones number via my digital library. (What the FBI or CIA did with your phone number would not be in my control.) (But: together, we could have starved all such federal agencies by ganging together to refuse to pay taxes!) (We would however have had to pay, voluntarily to pay, the networks – this world didn't come into being not for impossibility but because the group didn't will it so, didn't support it.)

What the group did do was wait decades, government and commerce leaching resources the while, and then offer a perversion of my internet: utterly plagiarized because no credit was given to Jesus or to Ivan Illich or to yours truly, Paul Knatz.

American Chieftains

2009-03-21T21:59:00.005-04:00

Sure there were slavers, Arabs maybe, who trekked into dark Africa, came upon some people, threw a net over them, hauled them off to sell as slaves. That's not hard to imagine, and for sure it happened. But I was sickened when I first heard that lots of slaves imported into the Americas from Africa were actually sold to the slavers by the chieftains. The chiefdom had excess population, some undesirables. Chieftains came to be regarded as "owning" their people. Hell, if you own something, you can sell it: right?

Oh those benighted Africans.

But what about American chieftains selling their people? Haven't heard of it? Think a minute: how else did the school system get the right to tell your kids what to do where and when?

One group kidnapped the kids to sell them to another group: industry. Present chieftains grabbed our children to train them in slavery to their future chieftains: Dupont, P. Lorillard ...

(this could be done better, that's just a scratched note, finger string)

Contempt for the Natural

2009-03-14T16:51:00.004-04:00

School's Teaching of Contempt for the Natural

No matter how stupid, illiterate, and ignorant the schools make us, the schooled nevertheless learn to hold those with less schooling in contempt: very much the way the Temple priests in the story of Jesus held Jesus in contempt. I'm just reading and enjoying John Grisham's new novel, The Appeal. We start with a verdict: a chemical company has knowingly polluted a rural area of Mississippi, made billions and billions, bought off both law and justice for decades ... Now their patch is a cancer cluster, so polluted that when the fire department used city water to hose a conflagration, the liquid actually quickened the fire: the "water" was combustible!

The jury awards one victim, bereft of health and family, $3 million plus $38 million in punitive damages, the jury knowing that the sum represents one month's profits for the company. Grisham switches to the reaction of the principal owner of the company on hearing the verdict. He vows that his "ignorant" victims will not receive one penny of "his" hard-earned profits!

Kleptocrats deny the humanity of their victims by attributing to them some denigrating attribute: "ignorance" comes handily to mind among the schooled. If only there were an objective correlative, a God, to Judge between the abuser and the abused. I want to see who's "ignorant" at Judgment.

I trust you recognize that the above is all very "Illich." I'll add details another time, if I live.

Anarchists Left & Right

2009-03-09T13:43:00.011-04:00

When I was founding the Free Learning Exchange my first statement to the public published in a west side paper resulted in my getting an invitation to join some people in a radio discussion. My hosts turned out to have been active in a Free U and were currently active in a People's Yellow Pages. I'd never heard of either and was glad to meet them. In fact I was delirious: I'd never met people with philosophies compatible to mine before, not in a group. They met in a church on West 4^th, just off Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. My activities went public there in 1970; they'd already been public through the 1960s.

Before long I heard them call themselves anarchists: and at one meeting I met a bunch of other anarchists visiting from Europe. These decades later, my son having researched my philosophical background with a thoroughness I never felt a need for, tells me that I had run into the left-wing anarchists. It makes sense: there was an awful lot of something damn near Marxism in the rantings of some of my new friends. Meantime my son tells me that there were also right wing anarchists around New York: Murray Rothbard and friends, for example. They too had their own alternate university. I didn't know of their existence. If they knew of mine, they ignored me. They were busy arguing against government. Only I was offering a tool that used by the public might pry government off their back; the Rothbardians just talked. And they're still talking. I'm still talking too. Only nobody pried government off of much. Government has just grown and grown: and serves us right, since we didn't, as a group, support my FLEX.

These days my son ignores my deschooling (when he's not misstating it, misunderstanding it, misrepresenting it) from the right, Rothbardian wing of anarchism. In those days my left anarchists turned on me, accusing me of being a federal spy.

Paranoia and political radicalism go hand in hand.

In the last days of the Nazis they were all accusing each other of treason, were busy assassinating each other. They killed Jews, fags, dissidents: then they killed each other.

(There's billions of people on earth, so clearly they didn't kill enough.) (That's a joke: a black joke, to match my black mood.) (I'm not aware of the right-wingers killing each other, but that's probably more due to my ignorance than to lack of examples.)

The gal who first phones me to invite me to join her and her friends in a radio interview I remain fond of, though I haven't seen her since 1976 or so. Her group shortly after we met began renaming themselves. She became Mercury. Alas, I don't remember what her "real" name had been.

One thing I did Not like about my new friends was that they seemed to be 100% homosexual. There were plenty of WASP "genes" in the group: English, German, Scots-Irish ... Dutch ... I don't remember anyone seeming Jewish. There were no blacks ... But they were all fags and dykes. Boy was I jealous of one of Mercury's little girl friends.

One thing I remember distinctly about Mercury, from our very first in person meeting – she came to my house – was her ghastly body stench. I'm confident she was on speed. The whole group, always except-for-, may have been speeding on A's.

Teaching Illusions of Democracy

2009-03-05T15:00:00.007-05:00

I first placed this in my piece on Illusion at Knatz.com/Society.

c. 1995

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade (1951 or so) the teacher announced that we were going to have class elections. First, we'd "want" to form political parties. "Who would like to nominate a name for the first party?" Um, err, one compliant girl fumbled. Er, the Republican Party! "Good. Now: who would like to second that nomination?" Uh, I second. "Excellent. Now: who would like to nominate an alternate party?"... I ... I nominate the Democratic Party. "Very good." Etc. She got a second. Four kids were off the hot seat. "All right then," she continued, "are there any other nominations?" This last was said perfunctorily, without really looking. Why should she look? We were Americans. We had now independently recreated our political culture.

My friend Joe and I were exchanging nauseous glances. I don't imagine either of us could have articulated our disgust at the time. But I can articulate mine now. We weren't rehearsing for democracy: we were being rehearsed, scripted. The director says to the actress, "Now say I love you. Sincerely. With all my heart." It's bad enough that marriage vows have been rehearsed and directed, scripted by people dead for centuries, people who can never have met you, know nothing of your relationship. But how shallow is the farce when the voice of the people is practically lip-synched?

So the teacher was asking if there were any other nominations. Joe & I are exchanging retching signs. One of us — I'm fairly sure it was Joe — blurts, "Communist!"

The teacher, as I say, wasn't looking, wasn't listening. But she heard that all right. (McCarthy Era, remember.) "You're going to the principal's office, right now, " she says. The other of us — I'm fairly sure it was me — reflexed a protest. So the two of us were marched out of the room. Leaving the others to "practice" their "democracy."

Let me assure you: I know I didn't know what "communist" meant. I'll bet Joe didn't. I'm not sure we knew what "pledge allegiance" meant either. Does a ten year old girl know what she's saying when she opines that something or other "sucks"?

I recommend that the reader see the context in which I placed this story in Illusion. There the context was society's pathologies as a whole; here the context is specific events in 's own schooling that prepared me to recognize the truths presented by critics of schooling from Samuel Butler & R. Buckminster Fuller ... to Ivan Illich and others.

Kleptocracy's Schools

2009-02-25T08:44:00.003-05:00

moved from K. to pkKlep blog to pKnatz blog

pk's Doctoral Orals

2009-02-17T10:38:00.009-05:00

The original of this post had been at Knatz.com, K. got destroyed, I recreated it here; but now will maintain all such materials at my PKnatz blog. I'll delete it here once pKnatz blog is mature.

I entered graduate school braced to endure a meaningless ordeal of an initiation for the sake of teaching at the college level. Encountering another school in which information flowed downward easily, but upward only with difficulty, was no surprise. I did however foolishly believe that with persistence I would eventually succeed in communicating my understanding of literature, art, and life. Failure only rededicated me to trying. That was in 1962, at age twenty-three.

But by 1971, a tad past thirty, married with a child, having already founded the world's first grassroots learning opportunity network, volunteering as it were to act as the world's cybernetic librarian for volunteered public information, already corresponding with other would-be cybernetic librarians on forming the world's first internet, having already figured out a half a dozen years earlier how to read Shakespeare's sonnets so that their relation to the history of Western orthodoxy was transparent, my orals committee merely interrupted me.

The first interrogator interrupted my answer to her first question. My answer contained a précis of my entire Shakespeare thesis, the way the Mandelbrot Set contains in any detail the whole of the Mandelbrot Set (the way a small cloud, out of scale, is the same as a huge cloud): and this authority simply cut me off, asked me a different question. The other four professors on the committee kept their silence as she did so. They too, all but one of them, would do their own share of interrupting when their turns came. (When it was over did a single of of them know that they still didn't know my answer?)

My thesis advisor had been reading installments on my thesis since 1965. But by 1971 he showed no more understanding of what I was saying about the Sonnets that he or any of the NYU professors showed of the significant of my passing around Free Learning Exchange, Inc. fliers.

My grammar school teachers taught that the modern school system respected individual learning, that it abhorred rote answers. But here I was, being allowed to speak while the teachers, certified original scholars by their own doctorates, waited impatiently for me to give the individual's pretense of spontaneity — accompanied by — The Expected Rote Answer.

My committee tortured me for their alloted two hours. I wasn't sure what I would do as of that date. What I did was concentrate on what I'd been concentrating on: creating an internet to replace the school and university system, the media, the government ...

That it doesn't exist is not my fault. That we still have the same old same old is your fault ["your" plural, "your" collective].

From 1970 onward I preached deschooling everywhere I was, setting up literature tables around town, regularly camping on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. I asked the public for funds. Specifically I asked for a van from which my volunteers and I could set up our table in neighborhood after neighborhood: the people most in need of deschooling not always frequenting the museum or Fifth Avenue. I did not specifically preach against my own schools. I did not spend public time complaining about the frauds visited on me personally, on me in particular. My critiques were on behalf of the world. That changed in 1995 when I added a personal home page to my offerings on the www that the public's institutions plagiarized from Illich's and my work. My indoctrination modules were among the first up. A file specifically devoted to my Ph.D. orals wasn't added till 1998: since which time it's been one of the most worked and reworked of all of my 2,500 text posts.

Now I have to translate it, with its dozens of links, down to a blog entry, where none of the links work: like representing the Mona Lisa with a chess piece, or a chess piece with a subway slug.

Check back: it will be the next post here.

Training vs. Brainwashing

2009-02-16T09:03:00.004-05:00

There's a difference between shoving somebody away from you and nuking a city. Both may be examples of violence but at some scale a quantitative change can become of qualitative change. Training is necessary for complex species. Birds learn to build better nests, sing better songs ... Willie practices the piano, the girl perfects her seeing the boy without looking at him. Culture institutionalizes some training. Fine. But at some degree it becomes brainwashing.

2003 01 11

Wherever "education" is coerced then it's brainwashing. If education is state controlled then our "brains" are state-washed. If education is church controlled, then our brains are church-washed. These days there's a temporary truce of sorts between church and state: like two Mafia families agreeing (for the moment) You take prostitution; We'll take drugs.

For the moment neither the Pope nor "Billy Graham" would dream of interrupting Congress. Neither Congress nor the President would dream of interrupting Easter mass. But such a day may come. Then we'll know who's really in charge for that era.

If a father twists his kid's ear until that kid practices the piano, that's coercion: but it's coercion within the family. Children before puberty are chattel no matter what the law says. Mama "owns" the baby. Mama doesn't need the baby's consent to change its diaper. Once the baby is an adolescent, it can run away if it doesn't like it. Neither state nor church nor sheer human numbers have yet eliminated the possibility of running. But running is hard: once upon a time banishment from your immediate cultural group was the worst possible punishment. These days you can find a Macdonalds where you run from and another where you run to. (Therefore maybe there isn't any place left to run to.) (The pimp who draws the runaway girl to his bosom on the street may shortly prove no better a papa than papa at home.) But in civilization both papa and baby (and mama) are chattel. The state can take your front yard by eminent domain, right up to your bathtub, whether or not you're still in it. The state can take your baby if it doesn't like how you're changing its diapers. The state does not have to demonstrate that it's any better at changing diapers: the state doesn't have to demonstrate anything but that it holds the gun: and that while it's holding the gun, you may not hold a gun back on it. And once upon a time, not long ago, the church was no different. (With the possible difference that once upon a time The Sheriff of Nottingham really wouldn't arrest Robin Hood while he was in the church.) (These days the state only looks to see if anyone's looking (who happens to have a TV camera turned on).) (I mixed state and church up there for a moment, but you'll follow anyway if you're trying.)

Papa owns mama (unless she meets a divorce lawyer). (Then mama owns papa.) (And the lawyer owns mama.)

My point is that coercion within the biological reproductive unit, the family (and I don't mean anything politically correct by family: I just mean the minimal reproductive group, minimally social) and political theory are irrelevant. We don't need to invent an ethics about the family; we need better ethics among people who aren't family. (Or, we should just kill all we encounter that we don't need for our immediate gratification and live as solitary creatures: like spiders. We're already camouflaged predators, costumed liars, natural genocides ... Tricky business for such as we to become social, to have institutions we're supposed to trust. Mama smacking baby is none of our business. Neighbor smacking neighbor is. Political gangs, like gangs of priests for some superstition, coercing individuals to be gang members, or to support and service the gang, is very much our business. Or "should" be. Anarchists say "No coercion." I say "No coercion." (But I ask you, I recommend it to you, I entreat you. I don't force you.

I add that my son includes the concept of "fraud" in his use of the word coercion. I fear that that broadens the concept dangerously. Eliminating it though might cause worse trouble.

I'll come back and say something relating brainwashing to the liar paradox. Statements that involve meta-statements about themselves such as "This sentence is a lie" are nonsense. Maybe they "work" grammatically, but not philosophically.

2011 11 05 duplicated at pKnatz, to be deleted here.

"Education," Yuck

2009-02-16T08:12:00.002-05:00

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.

Public Information

2009-02-16T07:46:00.002-05:00

What could be more preposterous (or more predictable) than for a modern kleptocracy to coerce the young into schools and then tell them that they are "free"?

I simplify Ivan Illich's (and my own) deschooling into Four D's of Public Information:

Disestablish School
Deregulate Information
Decentralize Everything
Delicence Skills

I'll go into details after I've rescued the most basic modules from the censored InfoAll.org.

Learning vs. Education

2009-02-16T07:40:00.003-05:00

People who would become free must distinguish learning from education and divorce them.

Learning is a process, common to life; education is a thing, coerced and administered by kleptocracies: for purposes of social control.

Church & State: Kleptocracy's Binary Monopoly

2009-02-15T12:52:00.007-05:00

2001 10 14

Both church and state dictate morality on stolen landChurch and State are presented to us (by Church and State) as rivals. The dominant ideal since the American Revolution has been to keep them balanced: the church mustn't run the state; the state must not interfere with the church. Pick one of those positions to argue and you'll have your Ph.D. at twenty-one and be dean of the graduate school before thirty. You may be running for the White House barely past forty-five.

I point out that Church and State are rivals the way Cain and Abel were rivals. One's always killing the other but the other never actually dies completely. They're brothers: almost as close as twins. They seem opposite only if you let them draw the distinctions for you.Church and State compete for an imaginary monopoly on playing God.Church and State are like different wings of one party: the kleptocracy party. To listen to the Democrats and the Republicans you'd think they were opposite: rather than almost twins. They're just right and left wings of the one party of America: the Property Party (the stolen property party!) (Rule the NonPlusUltra: Hang On To It!)

Church and State are both magical entities, both offering salvation. The Church offers spiritual salvation, the State offers secular salvation. Whether you're supposed to get pie in the sky when you die or you're supposed to get pie next week (as soon as we've routed the opposition), you're still promised pie in the future. The only pie you're likely actually to get from either source is in the face.

Before Churches promise salvation shouldn't they prove they can actually deliver? shouldn't they show someone actually in heaven through their ministrations? (shouldn't Satan have proved to Eve that he controlled any of the things that he promised?) shouldn't the State have to prove that secular salvation is real, that they have it, that they control it? Otherwise are all entities for sale something like the Brooklyn Bridge? Maybe you have a piece of paper, but is the bridge actually yours?

So long as Church and State can maintain the illusion that kleptocracy is the only game and that they're the only two legal players, they can go on till we run out of reality to delude ourselves in. (If we're all drinking acid rain and breathing acid air till we can drink and breath no more, then no one will have won.) False dichotomies and false choices are the common fare of kleptocracies. Remember the "choice" we were reduced to in Vietnam? Not: Prove you belong or get out but When will our prisoners of war be released?

Something else they have in common, the promise is never delivered, and it's never the promiser's fault. It wasn't Stalin's fault that communism was never delivered: only worse and worse forms of tyranny. It wasn't Washington-Jefferson-Nixon's fault that democracy, education, a genuine prosperity ... never arrived: it was the Catholics, the Irish, the Jews, the Communists, the Niggers, the Terrorists ... the workers, the owners, the Martians ... that betrayed us.

Funny thing is: if we just lived in small bands, and found a mate ... or didn't, and found food ... or didn't, and killed each other ... or didn't ... nothing would be anyone's fault: because no one would have promised anything: at least not with the weight of an institution.

If I say I'll take you to the movies, and I don't: I get drunk instead; big deal. It's just me. Avoid me. Tell everybody. But if priest N, in a series of generations of priests, takes your money as he took your grandfathers ... and you don't wind up in heaven ...? Isn't that infinitely worse?

Wouldn't it be better for no one to go to heaven after no one's been sold heaven, than for everyone to have been sold heaven, with not one demonstration that anyone's there?

The parent file, on pk's childhood indoctrinations, was one of the first written for Knatz.com. A number of important themes were introduced there first: conflicts between freedom and coercion, between church and state, between individual and group, between faith and evidence, civilization and its discontents ... Though only a half-dozen years ago, I carried a couple of handicaps in my first writings here that I no longer have: 1) I hadn't yet encountered Jared Diamond's all-encompassing coinage "kleptocracy"; 2) I was most practiced then at "creative" writing, not at exposition.

The digital drawings I did to accompany those early files characterize a ricocheting do-si-do (unfortunately non-cybernetic, not learning anything) between church and state for power over our minds. Another early file, my history of Magic, observes that church and state are siblings: offshoots of each other.

2011 11 05 Duplicated at pKnatz blog, to be deleted here once all is moved and checked.

Secular Indoctrination: pk's

2009-02-13T10:10:00.016-05:00

1995
original indoctrination module subdivided 2001 04 29

I obeyed my parents sending me to Sunday School willingly enough. Hell, it was once a week, for an hour. But there's something monstrous about being wrenched from your comfortable norm, your mother's bosom, at age four or so, and forced, leaving her on the sidewalk, to enter the most imposing building you've ever seen. You don't have to know that you'll go to jail if you refuse. You don't have to know what a jail is. You don't have to know that actually, it's your parents who would go to jail. You don't have to be aware of the jail, and the police, and their guns, and the army ... or the bombs ... to know ... Son, meet the State.

(Your parents in jail, the state would take you full-time via foster parents.)

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy
frightens people, while the word state does not.
Joseph Sobran

And what were we told inside that institution? We were told that we were free. At school age you don't know to say, "Excuse me? When did the meaning change? How come the dictionaries have it wrong?" Freedom means doing what the state tells you or go to jail? The police, the guns, the bombs are to make you and keep you free. Be grateful you get to go home at night.

I remember ages five and six, standing on the front lawn at the end of summer, looking at the sidewalk and the road, thinking of the school reopening shortly, and wishing it would all go away: wishing I could be a caveman where I wouldn't have to be so free; wishing it despite knowing that I wouldn't have lasted five days as a caveman: puny, sickly me, with my bad sinuses.

Sally has complained to Chuck that she can't talk to the principal:
"At least the school building listens," she says.
The building's speech balloon reads:
Unfortunately, kid, I've heard it all before.

pk reconstruction of a Charles Shultz cartoon

At home I didn't have to be "free" and do what the teacher said; I had to do what my parents said. They bore me, they fed me. I was helpless without them. It made sense.

(Are we helpless without the State? On the contrary: we are all but helpless with the state.)

But of course I went into the school. And returned. Again and again. Till I was thirty-something.

A reason religion is taught early is so that nearly no one will be
able to think analytically about their "beliefs" as an adult:
same reason we pledge the legions of the flag with bandaids on our knee

I took the school's measure by what I already knew and found it short. Nevertheless, some of its claims got absorbed and took the literalist and sectarian character of my Christianity. I took the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as given. I absorbed the basic assumptions: religious tolerance, separation of church and state, liberty, democracy ... As with my will to be a good Christian, a while passed before I noticed how few others followed suit. Hypocrisy is not confined among the religious.

"I mean that literally" really means
Please take my metaphor seriously.

Religion is easy. They give it to you early. They offer it, with conviction, as the truth. My Sunday School teacher introduced me before puberty to epistemology (not that he used that word): a subject that thence became central to my life and to the material of this site.

In contrast, there's nothing Messianic about public school. They don't have to convert you. They don't have to convince you. They own your ass.

Are there really more than a handful of adults who believe as an adult what they were taught as a child? How could you tell? Is there any way to know rationally that the Pope (or Billy Graham. or the Dalai Lama.) is "sincere?" Can you really be sure they're not merely careerists with good acting ability?

There isn't any sure way with an individual. But there is with populations. Take demographic samples at the relevant rituals. If the "alpha males" are scrupulous in attending, the myth is believed by the culture. If attendance is relegated to women and children, it isn't.

The highest Druid priests would have once danced the May pole. Children couldn't have gotten near it. No one today would dream of wasting a little boy's time with such folderol. If we bother at all, the lessons are imposed on little girls. Oh, aren't they cute?

The Druids would have found such attitudes suicidal. The May Dance was serious magic [qv]. Why, without correct dancing around the pole by magicians of the highest qualifications, there would be no rain, there would be no summer, the sun would stay thralled in its winter weakness, there would be no crops, there would be no game ...

If Congress dressed as elves, the most senior senator leaving his hospital bed to attend, if sacrifices to Santa Claus were filched from the military budget, then our belief, as a culture, in Santa Claus would be genuine.

Belief is of course an issue distinct from truth.
It's simple. Walk into a church. Look around. Disregard those you can tell are paid to be there. Need I say more?

(Of course, the president of the country or of the bank may be present. Though there may be no direct compensation, no salary, it does pay them to be there.)

Now consider the attributes of those who are directly compensated. Are any of them alphas? How many could be advantageously employed elsewhere who yet remain?

Now try it with a school. Who's there voluntarily?

Really? None? Who's paid to be there?

Still no alphas? Not even a Margaret Thatcher?

Try MIT. Ah, now we've found something the culture does take at least half seriously. You won't find a Napoleon, but you might find an Einstein: on either side of the lectern. Technology is the one area of education where the true nature of things is expected to be represented in the material. Otherwise, our bombs might not explode.

1999 06 02

An older version of this file proposed class action suits against church and school for their false teachings and against the state for its flagrant lack of correspondence between word and deed, theory and fact, map and territory. When I can get to it, I'll add a teaching module recommending that any honest pursuit of justice should require that all suits be examined for their potential as class action suits. What we have instead I characterize in a note on class action.

My schooling stories over the decades got spread all over a few domains: Knatz.com, InfoAll.org. Had I not been arrested and censored, they'd now be gathering in a new domain on de-professionalizing as well as de-schooling. But as it is, unable to publish normally, or even as formerly, I'll move them all here, to my InfoAll blog.
Realize please, translation to a blog is translation downward: my domain hypertext was dynamic, with a zillion cross-references.

Notes
The State:
The state of course currently seems to be victorious in its famous but on-going conflict with the Church.

It hasn't always been so.

Thus far I've published only tiny installments on this important subject: Family vs. State, History of Magic ...

The state's promise of secular salvation is no truer nor more rationally based than the church's promise of spiritual salvation. I wouldn't bet two cents on our chance of seeing many more centuries unless we fire both of them.

Foster Parents:
My section on the Family has not yet gotten very far off the ground, but of course I think about this dilemma constantly. Sir David Attenborough now informs the literary and PBS viewing public that ostrich pairs bully other pairs to steal their chicks, sometimes winding up with a tribe of hundreds. He speculates that the pair's own chicks may be better protected in the crowd, like fish schooling. I'd like to see bird specialist Jared Diamond's speculations on the phenomenon. I wish I could confer with both those great scholars on the multiplicity of things the state might be up to in its behavior. For the moment, I hope more than one person agrees with me that kleptocracies should draw the line at theft from the family. I don't care if the parents are murdering their children: arrest them outside the home; not in it.

2001 04 29

It looks like I've changed my mind still further. Now I don't believe that crimes within the family should be any but the family's business wherever they're committed. Shooting a stranger while aiming at your wife in the mall is a different matter.Once upon a time an accused could escape capture by reaching a church door. The sheriff's men had to stay outside. I wish kleptocracies would yield that the hearth should be sacrosanct. Hell, the American kleptocrats of Highlands County, Florida don't even respect the church: Rev. David Chapman was recently dragged from within his church and arrested. Not even the Sheriff of Nottingham would have done that. (It's irrelevant that Chapman's church is probably as full of it as the others.)

Sectarian:
Voltaire said, These English: all those religions and only one sauce.

Christian Epistemology:
I give major treatment to the subject of epistemology throughout this site: it even has its own directory. Here I briefly expand the above reference:

What basis do we have for being Christians? Because of the Witness of others before us, passing on the story. Because Thomas doubted but was then able to put his finger in the hole through which Jesus had been nailed to the cross.

It's not very good epistemology, but it is epistemology.

"Alpha Males":
My reference is made not as much to biological gender as to social gender. In human culture some alpha males may be biologically female. Others, such as an underage king, may be chronologically immature: the ministers nevertheless kowtow to them. (Of course it's their royal personhood that's being honored; it's some regent whose judgment will be kowtowed to.)

Among hyenas all the alpha males are female. They have an enlarged clitoris which they use like a phallus: not for procreation, but for dominance. (See Synecdoche.) Don't look under Judge Judy's robe. Just notice that she's wearing the black costume of the kleptocratic sorcerer: she's "male." The jails are behind her, not above her.

Class action: Class vs. Individual Action:

Half a century ago the French made a comedy called The Seven Deadly Sins. A decade later they did it again. Seven short scenes by seven European directors, plus a framing scene. The Greed section of the original was a priceless bit of bawdy humor: a farmer's wife and the traveler story. Go out of your way to find it. The sequel also had a Greed which stays with me: this latter for the significance of its joke.
W.W.I. The French trenches. The poor bastards have orders for the following morning: they are going to have to make another assault on some impregnable German position. 100% have died on the last N attempts.
So. It's their last night of life. There they are in the filthy trench. Demoralized, diseased, doomed. They dream out loud about the spectacular whore in the town only a kilometer or so behind them. Alas, she charges 200 francs for the night. None of the hundred soldiers has much more than a fiftieth that amount.
Ah, but each of them has a few francs! They put up two a man and draw lots. Pierre wins. Lucky Pierre. He'll be killed in the morning but only after a good, human night of love.
The officers grant him a pass. He goes to town. The whore is as wonderful as promised. She likes him. They're talking on the pillow. She asks his story. He tells it.
"Oh, you poor sweetie," she says. She goes to her purse. A whore with a heart of gold. She gives him back his two francs!Isn't that the way it always is? Pierre gets laid for free; ninety-nine dead men walking get nothing but their doom. A one percent discount!

The tobacco companies kill millions. One family collects $800,000. And that family is American, with US courts. Meantime, the tobacco companies kill tens of millions overseas. How can the Japanese or the Chinese sue a corporation in Virginia?

1999 02 13

I was just recalling Lumet's movie, The Verdict, to my friend Catherine. The Catholic hospital has falsified records after inappropriately serving a meal to a patient about to receive anesthesia: whoops, brain death. Milo O'Shea, Irish Catholic if there ever was one, and James Mason's Lucifer Lawyer, tell Paul Newman's drunk Irish Catholic lawyer-character to settle: "Take the money and run like a thief." But Newman's drunkenness is related to his once having had a shred of integrity.

He takes it to trial. He produces the nurse that silver-templed Dr. Welby had ordered to falsify the records. (What? or suffer eternal hell fire? I reproduce a fraction of Lumet's iteration of Catholicism to admit the presence of the film's (appropriately) heavy irony.) The jury awards crushing punitive damages. We all cheer.

Great. But they all go right back to what they were doing. All except the ruined nurse. The doctor isn't ruined: his hair was mussed. The hospital isn't ruined. The insurance company pays. The bills for the next brain-dead go up. The Church remains the Church. Boston is still incorporated, still taking taxes, and telling Bostonians what to do. What in hell are we cheering about?

Easier Said Than Done: Beasts in Cages

The Sunday School chapter of this section went up months ago and has changed little since my original draft. The rest has been increasingly bollixed as I try to juggle all the themes. Dissatisfied, I take it down in hope that a little revision will better coordinate my juggling. Unimproved, I'm then aghast that the material is merely absent.

Why don't children do what they're told? Why, given a choice, do they choose the wrong friends? the wrong wife? the wrong career? Because they're alive.

Why don't rivers flow the way the Army Corps of Engineers would like them to? Why does an aerial photograph of a city, even of a building, taken in 1998 not look like the models of the planners and architects of 1968? Because the river is something analogous to life; the city even more so; the building occupied and surrounded by life.

Why does my writing here refuse to fit the nice design that made sense to me a year ago? I repeat what George Bernard Shaw wrote of his characters: I have no more control over them than I have over my wife.

Yesterday I added a note to my Shakespeare thesis on new strides in ordering the authenticity of old manuscripts: Chaucer wrote something, a scribe copied it, another scribe copied the copy. Errors propagate, breeding new species of error.

Don't panic. It's life. Life is messy. You've got to change diapers. After all: human beings, self-described as sapiens, resplendent in reason (also self-described), looked at another way, are nothing but a stack of "mistakes" bacteria made billions of years ago. You could also say that the bacteria were a stack of mistakes non-life made billions of years before that.

It seemed so simple, such an elegant solution to the problem of how do I relate my work, especially my writing, to my life: to how I came by my themes. Talk about Church, then school, weave in how I came to see what was wrong with both—perceiving both to be symptomatic of the pathologies of our culture as a whole—relate what I learned that transfigured me into a post-Christian, post-democrat, one who believes that those of us who would survive on an intact planet must get rid of both church and state, and cap it off by discussing why I still drive myself, despite my poverty of external resources, to save from itself a public that I hold in contempt while it despises, when not ignoring, me.

But when I go to beard some of the core grit in its den, it growls and I back off. I rope it and it slips the noose. I think I've finally got it caged. But the cage doesn't fit, so I store it in the cellar. Meantime, escapees burble up elsewhere: on the site, but not in the cage I'd prepared. My "Teaching" essays
have taken over much of this part of the biography; my "conversion" to modern reason, or at least part of it, got sucked over into R. Buckminster Fuller notes to my writing as well as into a dozen other newer files.

2011 11 09 I've duplicated this module at pKnatz blog, K.'s target reincarnation. I'll delete here when complete there.

Religious Training

2009-02-12T16:28:00.009-05:00

's Religious Training

1995 September

My godfather, Episcopal Bishop of Brooklyn and author of NYU's Alma Mater, performed my baptism. The first ambition I remember was common enough: it was all but assigned to me in Sunday School. (The sign in front of the church read "Presbyterian," but I recall nothing Knoxian about its pastor. My Sunday School teacher on the other hand was straight Calvinist.) The ambition I conceived in his care was to be worthy of Jesus' love. Christianity was the truth, the truth was to die for, and I wanted to be not just an acceptor, but a promoter: an active Witness.

Sometime after I was confirmed, a Catholic friend declared virtuous intentions that I recognized to be similar. As years passed I felt more and more alone in mine. Don't people mean what they say? I was sure I did, and to this day can still feel the thrill I felt when, having learned book store browsing as still another way not to do homework, I first saw the title of Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ.

I saw no conflict in my regular playing of doctor in a neighborhood dense with young girls. I never planned not to be normal. No, I dreamed of some impact on mankind. When the time was right, God would show me what it would be, how to do it, and give me the strength necessary. In the meantime, I was distinguished for my activity in the church and even, as a teen, preached from the pulpit of the Brick Presbyterian Church on New York's Park Avenue.

When I was ten or eleven my Sunday School teacher made me the focus of the Sunday morning class as he gave me a dollar. I was to put it in a piggy bank. He announced that he was going to contribute to it each year till I was eighteen so I could buy my own Bible. He predicted that by that age my faith would be sorely tested. I'd probably go to college. I'd imagine problems.

I didn't recognize any cause for his concern. Neither did I doubt him. In the faith assigned to the young, adults are mature and wise; youth, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is green salad (a pretense best maintained by keeping the young sequestered while the adults are at each other's throats). Now I am sure that he was afraid I'd learn reason and its close ally, disciplined skepticism. (See also pk on Reason. [Search pk blogs for Thinking Tools.]) Those are tricky words, and much of this site is about them. But for the moment just let me observe that we all consider ourselves reasonable. My teacher certainly didn't believe that what he'd talked on was either unreasonable or untrue. (I do find it interesting to reflect that he didn't worry about me for my public school years.)

Christianity had our problems originating with the Tree of Knowledge. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster had reproduced through the generations since the Industrial Revolution. Science was trying to peek at God's blueprints. I found the invitation obscene and rejected it: unconsciously if not deliberately. Most of the way through college I still didn't recognize grounds for my Sunday School teacher's concern.

Now it's true that I stopped going to church once the minister ruined my seventeenth Easter (age eighteen) by mispronouncing Sartre's name and attributing to him a philosophy of despair. I worshipped in private. I listened to The Saint Matthew Passion on Sundays. I read sermons by John Donne. In my mind, I was still a Christian, still trusted Biblical authority. My absence protested only the intellectual dishonesty of the pastor.

2001 08 09

I am sure my home page is not the only example of something in the human world seldom manifesting as planned. A relevant story should have gone in here way back in the early writing. Only recently did I add it and then in the wrong place: my Academic Bestiary's background notes [coming here soon] to my doctoral orals [ditto]. But it belongs here. So I'll tell it again and later rewrite the other files.

Some time after offering me my dollar toward the purchase of a Bible, clearly still concerned about my soul, my Sunday School teacher asked me what I planned to do with my Christianity as an adult. I told him right out. I planned to travel the world, studying other religions. My childish hypothesis was that God, being good, and loving his special creation, man, would have communicated his message universally. Maybe the Jews were the Chosen. Maybe we Christians took the baton when the Jews dropped it. But I was convinced that God would have given everyone a chance. Underneath the mythology of the Koran, the Buddhist sutras, there must be one essential message.

I write my hypothesis with my adult vocabulary and understanding and now recognize in it something akin to Noam Chomsky's hypothesis of innate grammar. But even as a child I had some sense of things being garbled in translation. I didn't trust man, neither Jew nor Christian, to have heard quite right. I didn't doubt that I, with God's inspiration of course, would be able to winnow out some of the human transcription errors, to enhance the divine part of the message for the benefit of universal human wisdom. It never occurred to me that the human errors could be deliberate or the documents politically choreographed. I'm sure I sensed some of the jingoism, but I'm sure I didn't attribute it to human or kleptocratic evil. (And I certainly never entertained the possibility, endemic throughout the jingoist creeds, that God loved the Jews but hated every-one and every-thing else.)

I am embarrassed to realize now how long it took me to recognize what followed as an early, if not my first, experience of Paul Knatz failing to communicate something important. My Sunday School teacher advised me not to try such an enterprise until I was absolutely certain that my Christian faith was unshakable. He told me that under such certain circumstances I might study another religion, but I must remember to pull back before actually believing it. Study it, but wear a rubber as it were. My memory is that he was speaking gravely, but I backwards interpret it that he was very nervous about what I'd said, concerned about me, about my difference from the others, as always.

I now realize (belatedly interpret) that for my teacher faith and understanding were incompatible. I now recognize his faith to have been not faith at all but rather the loyal acceptance of propaganda. He wanted the team to be a team more than he wanted the team to be right.

My ideal Sunday School teacher would have said something like, Wow, that's deep. But you're beyond my competence. You're beyond the competence of our minister. Why don't we hook you up with Joseph Campbell. Or at least put you straight into a comparative anthropology course. Of course you might be beyond them too: for all their learning and all your ignorance. Kid, I see the light of god on you already. Since I can't reconstruct exactly what year that would have occurred in, I can't say reliably whether anyone let alone my Sunday School teacher would have heard of Joseph Campbell by that time. Campbell may well have not yet published any of his anthro-theo-syntheses. (Neither am I sanguine that Campbell would have received me with either arms or mind open. I don't think he was looking for a partner, especially not a "ten" year old. Whatever may have been the case with John and Jesus, the gurus I've met since then want to see only one halo: their own.) (Neither do I any longer exempt myself from that generalization.)
I have other files to fix before I run out of steam. But don't let me fail to come back and notice also that this may have been the first time (first of many) that I was (unconsciously-)deliberately misunderstood. Encore homeostasis. [With Knatz.com down, search pk blogs.]I didn't worry as more and more time passed while no one mistook me for a saint. God had to know that I was ready and waiting. Jesus, I reminded myself, didn't launch his ministry till he was thirty. Schweitzer gave the first half of his life to himself. (Of course, for him, indulgence meant things like mastering the Bach organ, becoming a doctor ...)

I was a few months short of my baccalaureate when God paid me the first of His direct visits. The communication was radiant, intense, overwhelming. But there was nothing in it that could be interpreted as specific instructions. It does translate as Compassion. I applied it to my screw-ups in general and believed that the rest of my life was my last chance.

We must respect the other fellow's religion,
but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect
his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
HL Mencken

Next post: Secular Indoctrination

Notes
First a note about the notes: My modules breed other modules, none more so than the earliest modules. Any number of the points which follow below may themselves come to be "promoted" to their own module. If I had the resources (including time) to redesign the whole site, there would be a thousand modules and few notes. All links would be to a map of the site as a whole.
Mean What They Say? -- Honesty, Childhood Intentions ...
The child that I was believed that he was honest. That child believed that others — his friend, his pastor, his teacher, his President ... — were honest. If I reached adulthood and didn't keep my childhood intentions, I would want to know why.
Who remembers their childhood intentions, their childhood perceptions, with any seriousness? Mark Twain, for one. Damon Knight, bkMarcus ... me.
It was my Catholic friend's misfortune to be the first of my circle that I noticed to have changed? Was it dishonesty? Forgetfulness? Or could it have been that terrible state, justly feared by all twelve year olds: adulthood? Regardless, my Sunday School hammered away at Catholic errors. Here Catholics erred. Ergo: Catholics are not honest. (A visit to a Catholic confraternity showed me that they were doing the same thing in the other direction.)
Logical? It doesn't matter: it's how I see my opinion as having been formed.
So then: how do I explain my becoming, age thirty-one, a disciple of the (defrocked) Roman Catholic priest (Monsignor) Ivan Illich? Easy. He's one of the few honest Christians of the millennium!

Contribute: Class Distinctions by Education ... Perpetual Student ... Fake Education ...
My Sunday School teacher never made a second payment on that promise, but even the first proved to have been unnecessary: for my confirmation the pastor gave me my own King James version, complete with soft leather, concordance, subject index, red lettering for Jesus' words, and a ribbon place marker sewn into the binding. It's still the Bible I refer to regularly.
I don't know whether my teacher singled me out suspecting that I was the only one bound for college or because he thought I was the only one whose mind might actually be open once there. All these decades later I read between the lines and hypothetically discover that teacher to have been revealing that he hadn't gone to college. His two sons were present in the circle. It's additionally curious if you realize that of the two hundred graduating seniors of my public high school, the teacher's elder son being another of them, all two hundred went to college. I don't say that two hundred stayed there long. I don't say that all went to good colleges: only that the marine sergeant who came recruiting couldn't believe the zero response he got. Flustered, he asked for a show of hands from those planning to attend college. Overwhelmed, he reversed his request. The zero hands raised were much easier to count. Finally a teacher helped sic the sergeant onto a dunce unlikely to graduate high school whether accepted by a college or not.
Of course there was a huge difference in society's habits between the mid to late 1940s when my teacher expressed his fears for me and 1956 when we finally got released from the prison of high school. Who went to college and who didn't meant nothing to me at the time either way. It never occurred to me that perhaps not all of our neighboring parents had gone to college. My mother hadn't finished Hunter, but she'd started it. My father had graduated Columbia and gone on to law school. I just thought such behavior was normal. Nothing special. Very ordinary.
I myself was "in school," either matriculated or employed as a teacher, till I was past thirty. (Of course I've been a teacher all along, but it's been a long time since I was "employed" as one.)
At Columbia, we typically held all other schools but Harvard and Yale in contempt. Many Harvards and Yales would have included Columbia in their contempt.

By my late twenties the soon-to-be founder of FLEX had refined his attitudes on the subject. What I revered was knowledge and learning; what I held in contempt was fake education: "schooling," in Illich's phrase. Edcentric Magazine commissioned me to write an article on education and my efforts at reform. I included a history of schools in the West, most of which they cut in their published version. I recreate it here among the essays. (See History of Universities.)

Dishonesty: Inappropriate Celebration
There was the church, all filled with lilies. We'd just had our annual treat of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. What in hell was he talking about Sartre for? Accurately or inaccurately?
Forty years later I still haven't read all that much Sartre. I certainly now recognize Existentialism to be an enemy of conventional Christianity. But non-the-less the pastor was misrepresenting it. (Even without expertise on the subject I wouldn't hesitate to suggest that Existentialism is an alternative to despair.) (I'll further add that "despair" here is culture specific: surely there must be cultures wiser than to bother despairing at the simple facts of mortality and limited abilities.)

The church, with its wild legend of immortality
Howards End

I rejected that church so long as it had that pastor. I did attend service occasionally at other churches (see Homeostasis), but my habit was broken.
Increasingly, I've come to regret the silence of my protest. I should have waited till the sermon was over, but then stood and addressed the minister before the congregation. In retrospect, I've come to indict that congregation as well, regardless of my own silence. It's one thing for a kid to keep his mouth shut; something else for the elders to have sat still for such misrepresentation.
My reticence on that Easter I see as a form of sloth.

Pastor
Hell, it was a long time ago, the principals are dead, I may as well name names. The Pastor was the Reverend Harry Mathias. I never confronted Rev. Mathias. I just avoided him. When our paths crossed anyway I just glowered, he turned aside, seeming no more anxious to chat than I. The last time I saw him was a decade or two later and we were both trapped. My mother had a problem. She wanted to confide in her pastor. Why a person of normal to superior intelligence should want to consult with an illiterate I can't imagine. Convention had him as literate and compassionate and wise so the hell with actual experience. She knew I held him in contempt, so she warned me he was coming. I promised to behave.
He arrived. Saw me. Blanched, but quickly recovered, filling the room with blustery bonhomie. He blustered for an hour. He blustered about himself (though some poor old shut-in woman he'd just visited also got mentioned), smacking my mother on the knee every other minute or reaching out and shaking her elbow. His subject was all about how he knew he wasn't a very good preacher. (He shot me his only glance since entering as he said it.) But, boy oh boy, he kept telling his fidgeting audience, was he ever a really good pastor. "Well, Norma, well, Paul, I have the rest of my rounds to run. That's what I am: a pastor." And he left.
My mother sat. Helpless. Grieving. He'd never asked her why she'd called for him. Never inquired about the problem she'd specified existed. Never let her get a word in edgewise.

Misrepresentation
In retrospect I have to take back my accusation of mispronunciation. His saying "Sart" jarred my French-practiced ears; now prof. pk says Americanized names are fine. Misrepresenting substance is another matter, including misrepresentation of character: a routine practice with perceived enemies. "Slanty-eyes, kike, dumb Pollock, pig, nigger, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, ...": we all recognize the practice. (See my Description vs. Thing.)
But then all's supposed to be fair in love and war, and I now see all churches as sects and nearly any sect as at war with all that is not itself. Do we like our own behavior when we see it in the form of a Muslim jihad? When we're the perceived enemy? How could they do that? How could they be so wrong?
I may have read far less of Sartre than my friends, but there's one point of his I've quoted for decades: "A Jew is anyone that anyone else calls a Jew." Do we imagine that Hitler's SS gave theology tests before throwing people into cattle cars? Do we imagine that the Nazi's bothered to learn the Jews' own method of identifying a Jew? (Judaism is matri-lineal.) Each culture should translate Sartre's perception to its own case: "A black is anyone that anyone else calls black." There is no rational basis to the popular concept of race.
(It's decades since I thought to title my autobiography "The Voluntary Nigger." The Lakota people apply their epithet Wasi'chu to the white man. The literal meaning is "takes the fat." (The implication is that we take it and keep on taking it.) I've long wanted no part of that kind of whiteness.

2001 08 11

My son just sent me a piece on the inimitable RA Wilson which I will quote at (the above-linked) Race.
Turnabout is supposed to be fair play and the "minorities" play the same trick in reverse. I remember a Jewish group protesting a performance of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in New York in the '60s. Didn't they realize that that play is the best break the Jews had ever gotten in Europe up through the Seventeenth Century? Shylock is a villain, but he's a sympathetic villain, a villain with an excuse. His tormentors are far worse: Shakespeare's Venetian Christians are villains who have no excuse. Portia's legalisms are bullshit by any law other than that "it's right to cheat a Jew."
Perhaps they did realize that. Perhaps their motives were complex: the truth of the Merchant of Venice isn't important compared to making our point about anti-Semitism; the truth of the Merchant of Venice is important and we're giving it free publicity. (Call me any name in the rags: just spell my name right.)
The note just below on sloth tells one story from the Vietnam years. Another I'd continued here, but this is getting too heavy for a note. So I promote the balance to the module Misrepresentation. (Lot's of modules started this way.)

Sloth
The Middle English word for Sloth was acedia and it was redolent of connotations of spiritual sloth. I believe I was guilty of that sin on that Easter in church and on many occasions since.
Jacob Bronowski interpreted Hamlet's abulia — his failure of volition (his failure to act on his revenge in this case) — as a characteristic of youth. For all his brilliant babble to himself, the prince made little sense to the court. Ah, but we know that he was still in school! He may have been near thirty, but in the culture's sense, he was still young, still without responsibility.
I was on the campus of the Columbia Law School in 1969 when a briefcase carrying law professor asked a young cop why Broadway was lined with empty Tactical Forces buses. "Are the tactical >police here?" demanded the silver-templed professor. The cop still had the flushed face of a baby. "Naw," he sneered, "it's da marines, come to kill youse kids." The cop had a baton and a gun. He was an adult. The professor had a briefcase and was standing on a campus. He was a kid.

Killing people is a bad habit.
Sanjuro

My own babble, brilliant or otherwise, was also to myself. Some spilled over to my girl friend or to my mother. They made little of it.
My efforts with FLEX my sometime enslavement to my writing, and my wrestling this site into order are compensations, apologies for that acedia.

College
The introduction to this set of files makes reference to college and the ideals of a liberal arts education. Of course the concepts are more complex than were appropriate for me to explore there. My Social Solutions directory is the place for that. But one aspect of the idea of "college" which is a simple ambiguity, I believe I will begin to develop elsewhere.

Joseph Campbell:

2005 08 07

I just learned! Joe Campbell couldn't get published as he got older! (I'm reminded that his first book, his life's work, decades in the preparation, years in the writing after other years without a publishing connection, was contracted for a total of a couple of hundred bucks.
Some of those previously unpublished works are now being released by the Campbell Foundation, hawked on PBS fund raisers.
All that reminds me: what a shame it is that PBS never taped Alan Watts. As good as Campbell's subject is, his treatment quality, he's a poor speaker. Watts could lay it on, but he was far more commanding.
Bottom line: if Campbell had been even better, then maybe he'd never have been published at all! And if he'd been better yet, he might have been kangerooed: scourged, crucified: one temple's famous solution to publication problems.

2006 07 05

There are books that have influenced me greatly even when I may not have read more than a paragraph or two. Just a title can be inspiring. Lovejoy's Essays in the History of ideas has been yellowing on my shelves for decades. Occasionally I dip, but never till the past few days perservere. Now I see that my childhood idea of something universal beneath the apparent differences of culture and language is very old.
From Tertullian:Thy thinking is vain if thou supposest this to be given only in our language and in the Greek, so that thou doest deny the universality of nature.
... Among all peoples, man is one though his names are various. Every people has its own speech; but the matter of all speech is common to all.

2011 11 06 I've duplicated this module at pKnatz blog but won't delete the corresponding posts here till all is transferred.

Schooling: pk

2009-02-12T10:48:00.010-05:00

Schooling: 's Own Indoctrination

1995 September

(Metaphorically, Meditations of a Slave Against Slavery)

This narrative, reconstructed from the federally sabotaged Knatz.com, will mount in sections: secular training, religious training ... academic fraud ... My purpose with the narrative is biographically thematic more than biographically personal. The point isn't to say "pk had breakfast," "pk found a girl friend," pk went to the movies" ... It's to provide the background for my work. This file in particular introduces the first person in the world to offer networking to the public (as far as I know, the only person ever to endeavor to provide networking for the entire public: the entire world-wide public, that is: no national boundaries. In other words, these files are the biographical adjunct to my Social Solutions or FIX Directory.

Paul Knatz
Biographical Background
Every living thing is unique. Interchangeability is more in the eye of the beholder than in the examinable evidence. Every human is some combination of genetic disposition, cultural inheritance, and individual modification. The latter part varies from person to person: the majority exhibiting little, some more, and some very few manifesting enough modification to frighten the culturally conservative majority.

Ivan Illich identifies school as the reproductive organ of society. For many of us the first school we encounter is Sunday School. A famous bishop said "give me a child till he's six and he'll be Catholic for the rest of his life."

On its heels comes secular school, public for the majority, with some opting for private or religious alternatives. The state tolerates the latter so long as the churches know that their place in modern societies is second place.

More and more people go on to college. The state can relax as more and more institutions of advanced learning come more and more under state control, bearing less and less resemblance to their
institutional forebears. (See my History of Universities.) (See also the following meditation on Brain Washing.)

Some colleges maintain, at least in part, their Humanist tradition of liberal education. What's that? you ask. "Studying the best that's been thought and said": with the sometimes explicitly added "for the purpose of determining what constitutes (or would constitute) the good life."

A tradition cannot be inherited; it has to be earned.
Goethe

I went to Sunday School. I went to public school. I attended a liberal arts college of the old school: only to discover that the culture at large hasn't caught on to that last part of the liberal purpose. The schools do represent the culture and the culture is not liberal: has interest in its life, not in "the good life." The culture at large cannot conceive of any life but its own as being good: and it homeostatically blocks all possible inputs to the contrary (and can defend itself against charges such as mine by pointing out all the "laws" it has that supposedly protect "freedom."

If you read on, you'll see not only what I am, but the routes by which I came to be what I am.

Next post: Religious Indoctrination

Notes
Catholic for Life: Dyed in the Culture's Wool, Atheism ...
A successful indoctrination means they've got you for life: almost. Not all indoctrinations are entirely successful. But all leave marks.
I've known atheists of many colors and descriptions. Nearly all had started with Sunday School or its equivalent and still bore that stamp. Catholic atheists are as distinct from Protestant atheists and Jewish atheists as the latter two are to each other. But even those distinctions are still coarse: your-trained-from-the-cradle atheist won't recognize or identify with the concerns of your Spanish Catholic atheist.
I have never, for one second, been an atheist. Perhaps I've been tempted by agnosticism. Of course I've been called both of those names (and many others as well). Even my own son once referred to me as an atheist. How could he possibly have thought that? Because I'm forever attacking, just as I previously defended, Jehovah?
I once heard a Protestant Minister say: "Well," referring to some theological specific of a competing sect, "if that's what they mean by God, then I'm an atheist."
Perhaps my case is more complicated even than that. I've now gotten a couple of steps further than this old note. See and judge for yourself.

Search pk's blogs also for
Order vs. Magic
gods, God, god

2000 03 01

A new wrinkle occurs to me, a couple of new wrinkles. People who take the concept of god seriously are routinely called blasphemers by the majority of conventional believers. Action is taken on the name-calling by the real atheists: the magicians in priests' robes, judges gowns ... who have to protect the success of their racket from serious criticism. If the Catholic Church really believed in either God or Jesus, could it have done the things it has? But that I point I make at least implicitly throughout my home page: this one is new:
There is something in me that people see accurately (they just mislabel it, getting everything backwards as usual). I am not a believer among believers. But it isn't god I don't believe in. What I don't believe in is their faith, their integrity, their honesty, their honor ... What I don't believe in is our country, our church, our justice ... Oh, we have a country, I don't dispute that. And we have churches. You can see them, walk inside. But is our country what we say it is? Is our religion what we say it is? Is God what we say "He" is? I say not.
I say bring in a non-biased testing system (it would have to be totally alien, at least an AI) and instruct it to compare our descriptions against our realities. Any matches? Not many.

2011 11 10 This piece has been duplicated at pKnatz blog as pk Training: Religious & Secular. When the whole section on my training has been moved to pKnatz, the new Knatz.com, I'll delete these earlier resurrections.

Fundamental Errors

2009-02-12T10:21:00.002-05:00

I am about to reconstruct Knatz.com's biographical materials on pk's schooling, training, indoctrination here. I begin though with an insert from the original on epistemological flaws that should perhaps stand alone:

from 1995 September

Our political liabilities relate to our epistemological flaws.
They in turn stem from fundamental religious and cosmological errors.
I've devoted my writing and teaching to correcting them.
That I have had more obstruction than help from our basic institutions
— state, church, media, universities ... —
doesn't bode well for our chances of survival.

Worst, I find the public no better.

Free Learning Exchange

2009-02-09T15:57:00.017-05:00

1970, 1996, 2009

Deschooling: Universal Information Network: FLEX: The Free Learning Exchange,
July 1970 (incorporated in NYC 1971)

Freedom of Information
The Paul Knatz chronology at censored Knatz.com report[ed] the purpose of my life as being intended to transform society. My incipient pieces on civilization (AKA: kleptocracy) suggest a duality, even a contradiction, between civilization as we've known it (i.e., kleptocracy) and civilization as we must come to know it. My writing has tried (and thus far failed) to transform our spiritual and intellectual being. Founding FLEX

in New York City [1970], was the central, defining act of the political aspect of my life.

The not-for-profit institution was incorporated in New York State [1971].

The ConceptFLEX was designed to use cybernetics to further the democratization of information storage and exchange: initially, for the purposes of education; eventually for all possible purposes related to the informational empowering of free individuals.

Thinking the world together

The Educational Institution

FLEX invited all repositories of tools associated with learning to advertise their holdings together with specifics of availability. Libraries, lecture halls, instrument rentals ...
FLEX invited all persons competent to teach a skill to register that competence together with fees expected and experience teaching it. A list of awards and prizes was allowed; certificates and degrees, disallowed. Quality control was a function of #4 below.
FLEX invited all individuals interested in a topic to register that interest. Registrants were matched to interest-peers so that activity, from a bull-session to a seminar, could self-form.
A.Registrants of Parts I & II were invited to comment on the qualifications of other registrants in the same field, the results published.

B.Consumers of the skills and opportunities of Parts I & II were invited to comment on their experience with the resources, the results published.

Facilitate: don't regulate.

Let's note the diction of the name and elucidate connotations as well as denotations:

Free:As in freedom of choice, as in political freedom, as in free marketplace;
not "free" as in "free ride" or "free lunch."Learning:What we all do as living creatures, what we all must help each other with as social creatures,
a process, not a thing;
not "education" which has been degenerated into a commercial and institutional "product" like a BigMac,
not "school" which restricts how and when we learn as well as what it costs, controlling and ever raising the price, irrespective of quality.Exchange:What we all do as social creatures, what we must all do better:
the more so as we have let our institutions degenerate into
cancerous parodies of their purported purposes;
but not limited to our sorry-ass, neo-feudal tool, the monetary economy.Additional ImplicationsFrom the beginning, it was the published intention of FLEX to expand into FIX:

Index all cooperating material resources: not just bookstores, libraries, and lecture halls;
but clothing stores, vegetable stands, automotive dealers, fish mongers, fishing piers, shipping piers ... everything not excluded to the public.
Not just for the town, city, or county; but world-wide!
Index all voluntary human resources: not just teachers;
but healers, legal advisors, machinists, mechanics, electricians, plumbers ...
Again: world-wide.
Match all interest peers: not just for learning;
for walking in the park, for discussing the election, to see a movie together, for jumping in the sack ... anything.
A. Peer review
B. Consumer review.

Do away with school,
FLEX is enough.

Free is still free:

Exchange is still exchange;

But the word learning expands to

Information:

Who's who, what's what, where are they, and
what do they demand in return?
Not Gregory Bateson's nor Claude Shannon's deep definitions of information
(see Macroinformation)
merely information as we are all familiar with it:
addresses, phone numbers, services and products offered, feedback on those services and products ...

FLEX / FIX

FIX / FLEX

Harvard, Columbia, and Yale Colleges came first: their universities grew up around them. Columbia University may in part administer my own Columbia College, but the College is the parent and remains the soul. FIX may have come to administer FLEX, but FLEX would forever, had you supported your own best interests, been the heart.

Do away with government

FIX is enough

My home page is intended to be made up of bite size pieces. This is not just because our culture has so shortened the attention span of all but the most dedicated scholars; I want those scholars too to get the gist in a glance. The supporting modules deal with different aspects of the whole.

In the 20^th Century the United States ran it's democracy by 18^th-century technology
while the industrial-military complex ran itself by 20^th-century technology.
As cybernetics developed who in Washington said,
"Gee, we could use this to upgrade democracy: get rid of the political middlemen"?
Such thoughts come seldom and only from outside the fraternities of middlemen.
(People like Illich and me get booted out of such fraternities.)
Both learning and democracy belong in the public sector.
And the public sector must be taken away from
and kept away from
Government.
That's the only way it could be kept away from the corporations.
We had the chance in 1970. That chance is now gone: forever.

Notes
Civilization as we Must come to know it:
We must transform civilization, that is, if mankind is to leave a record in the universe of having been anything but a malignant tumor on an otherwise mostly benign biosphere.
My piece on civilization linked from the above file is still far from complete, but the implications are more and more spelled out throughout this site. Human chauvinism, the idea that everything is for us, that we depend on nothing but ourselves and our magical destiny, must go. We need to temper Christianity and all political -isms with a little Taoism.

FLEX logo:
The FLEX logo was designed by Bob Price. Bob's wife Gretchen was also an occasional FLEX volunteer. Bob once said he wanted to write my biography. Bob, I wish you had. But I'm doing the best I can on it myself: right at Knatz.com.

Cybernetic Networking

2006 03 07

I'm just catching up via DVD on James Burke's Connections2 series from the BBC. I loved the original series in 1979 but had missed the second installment. Burke traces connections among the punch-hole card programming of the French weavers and the punch-hole card program innovations of the US census takers: and thus, the founding of IBM. Information could be related to mechanics, then could be abstracted by electronics. Government, through the vision of the occasional brilliant contractor or employee, saw cybernetic applications first for the census, then for the military. The census guy founded IBM. Burke then relates how in 1953 Blair Smith of IBM met C. R. Smith, president of American Airlines. The booking of airline reservations was limited by how many people could sit around the file system and use it. IBM saw how the military SAGE project applied to bookings and developed SABRE. The rest is history: business got computerized.
What Burke doesn't relate, what no one but relates, is how in 1970 Ivan Illich saw how SAGE, SABRE ... could be applied to education, potentially freeing the public of the school system. In the early Renaissance schools were an efficient way to share resources: the guy with a rare document could read it aloud while a number of interested parties could sit before him, copying. The number was limited to human architecture of the time and to human acoustics. (Could all those people in the back really hear Gandhi's unamplified voice?) Mechanical printing obliterates those acoustic and architectural limits. Electronic computers obliterate the mechanical limits of the press. In 1970 pk heard Illich, saw deschooling as the satellite-aided SABRE-type internet he'd been dreaming of for a decade, saw such an internet as what the public needed to do its own bookings, publish its own information: make the public independent of school AND business AND government: a true democracy, a true free market. Illich talked about cybernetic community bulletin boards; pk wanted satellite connections for every community bulletin board.
But: the buck stopped with the military and with American Airlines. Instead of funding our own internet we swallow the one shoved down our throats: driven by commercial hysteria.

The Buck Stops Here
Don't forget that "buck" is a term from poker. The deal is supposed to pass from player to player. The buck is a physical token used to indicate who will deal the cards next. Passing the deal is convivial and frustrates attempts to monopolize cheating.
In Las Vegas only the house deals the blackjack. In DC only the government deals period. Conviviality can't even get started: and the cheaters' monopolies get carved in stone.

Moving:
I founded FLEX in 1970. FLEX was incorporated in 1971, Ivan Illich became a trustee in 1971.
FLEX got reported on line in 1999, summarized at this blog in 2009.

All pk materials are being moved to the PKnatz blog. This module is one of the most important of all pk files, a keystone: I copy it there but temporarily leave it here too.

Deschooling Update

2009-02-09T10:43:00.005-05:00

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.

History of Schools

2009-02-08T15:03:00.024-05:00

History of Schools & Universities

My Free Learning article was commissioned by EdCentric Magazine and published by them in 1971. It contained my history of schools, not all of which Edcentric printed. In 1997 I republished the piece online using the whole manuscript. The early 2000s saw it moved to InfoAll.org, but 2007 saw the fed censor one of my five domains but in fact knock down all five (as well as destroy my life and my business).
I can't take time this 2000 10 02 to blend the following into the prose, but since I'm not confident that I made these points clearly enough below, I temporarily suture them here:
The university was once the only place were scholarship could exist independent of the Church. Now there is no place (but poverty) where scholarship can exist independent of the far from scholarly or truthful government.

Today's universities can discover truths that the government will sponsor the search for. So could medieval priests discover truths that the church was looking for.

Both church and state have been replaced today by a single megalithic kleptocracy. Different states today resemble each other far more than they differ. If a modern equivalent to the late Medieval-early Renaissance university is ever to develop I fear it will have to wait till satellites can exist in space with independent economies (and at distances which would render kleptocratic hegemony pound-foolish per penny).

FLEX and FIX could have fixed everything, but the public declined the invitation to provide the infrastructure that could have given real meaning to our bullshit words about freedom, independence, education, and learning.Here follows the original module:

Medieval monasteries were populated by Monks among whom vows of celibacy and poverty were common. Their task was to act as librarians and publishers for the sacred texts of Christendom. They housed the old books and scrolls and labored to copy the most important. Any new church got its new Bible from these scribes. Only the religious arm of society had a literature. The secular arm, in contrast, had records. It's literature would soon come into being. For the old literature, kings and magistrates kept priests around to access it where appropriate. (Records of course are far older than literature: as least as far as written literature is concerned.)

The Bible was the Latin Bible, the Septuagint was a relic even the priests had forgotten. The Church had become cozy with its unchallengeable authority. Obviously it didn't want any Martin Luthers stimulating any questions via original readings. Why obvious? Because the medieval Church made the study of Greek a capital crime!

Humanist was the name applied to those who defied the danger and studied Greek anyway.

More and more ancient texts were being unearthed. Aristotle, Ovid ... For centuries the monks' pornography had been pretty much limited to the Song of Songs and to what they themselves doodled in the margins of their illuminations. With Ovid, they had stories of guys sneaking under the floorboards of the latrine to squint up at the girls washing themselves. Some of the monks preferred the wisdom of Aristotle to that of Solomon. Once found, those texts couldn't be lost again.

The monasteries split. Those which kept and copied the Bible also kept the name. Those which kept and copied the Aristotle were called universities. If you had a copy of Aristotle, and word got around, you were invited to bring your copy to a university and to lecture there. That meant: you sat in a room with your copy, and you read it. Aloud. Slowly, so those interested could gather around you with their scribal materials and copy, word by word.

Thus, a principle function of both monastery and university was publisher: the one was a sacred publisher; the other was a secular publisher. Much of our distinction between sacred and secular comes from that distinction, imagined to be real at the time, between Bible and Other; Christian and Pagan ...

Before the Renaissance there were very few secular monasteries or universities. With the new plenitude of old manuscripts in the Renaissance, the universities burgeoned. Many of the modern characteristics of universities were established at that time.

There's a precedent to the "lecturing" part so familiar that it's seldom recognized. In synagogue, the rabbi reads aloud from the Torah to the assembled men. Women can listen through a screen. In Church, the minister stands at the lectern and reads the week's lesson from the Bible. Once upon a time, he was literate; you were not. More importantly, he, the Church, had the book; you did not. In other words, the priest was the guy with the scroll; the congregation was the guys without the scroll. Possession was the entire law.

In the young universities, those who gathered around the books were capable of copying as well as listening. Each then produced a copy and would go to lecture with it at another of the burgeoning universities.

Again: the universities functioned as curator and publisher. There was no pretense of superior understanding. Lecturing, as you may see in the Latin root, was reading, not explaining.

In Chaucer's day, by the end of the Fourteenth Century, a book you didn't copy yourself cost as much as a good middle class house. By the next century, the invention of printing, brought the cost way down. Now the humanists were already poor whether or not they had taken vows, the poorer since they had forsaken advancement in the Church. The monasteries had gardens which produced food if not money; the universities had left that part behind. (The monasteries were part parasitic on the Church (the Church parasitic on the public); the universities were entirely parasitic. Anything that doesn't find its own food, me, for example, is a parasite.) And so printing brought the secular scholars face to face with starvation. The publishers were making and selling the books. Anyone with a house could now house a library. The universities were bereft of their function. So they started explaining and charged tuition for the privilege of listening. It was no longer the case that the lecturer had the book that you wanted and you had to put up with him to get it; now you already had the book. The lecturer's survival depended on your swallowing his new claim to
wisdom.
For the early Renaissance,
the universities were the ideal technique for
taking a scare resource and making it abundant.
In the early universities, the lecturer was your shortest path to "Aristotle." In modern schools, the teacher stands between you and Aristotle. (If the teacher has even heard of Aristotle.)
Contemporary schools are the ideal technique for
taking an abundant resource and making it scarce,
a cheap resource and making it expensive.Now you have the book. You know how to read. But both you and employers are discouraged from believing you to be capable of understanding the book until it, or a certain number of other books, have been explained to you by an accredited member of the wisdom guild.

The universtiy ... so untouched by the tarnish of reality
Stephen Hunter

Buckminster Fuller said "Do more with less." Buckminster Fuller showed us how to do more with less. Ivan Illich's (combined with my subsequent) designs for networking could have done more for people in 1970 than governments, churches, and schools combined: and for no more (in the way of hardware and software) than netflix.com now uses to distributed DVDs. (Of course we didn't have contemporary software or hardware, but we understood what was needed and were ready to write what was necessary: (if my associates could have written Fortran for IBM, they certainly could have written a peer matching application for all of us together with a community Rolodex-with-a-feedback-feature).

FLEX, as I pointed out at CIDOC to an Illich suspicious of Fuller, could do more with less.

(I followed Illich "because" he embodied Fuller (because he embodied God). (Not infallibly however; Illich seemed to mistrust Fuller as representing materialism! Mechanism!)

(I saw Fuller as god the maker, the creator, the architect. I sensed that Illich saw Fuller as a forger of idols.)

Anyway, FLEX offered to do more with less. The public showed a firm preference for Church-State-School-...: with doing ever-less-and-less for ever-more-and-more.

(Don't forget that it was for Fuller that I had written The Model! Release, which I wrote for Illich, hasn't yet impressed even Illich fans (has anyone read it?), whereas the Model has heard sucked breath and been grapevined for four decades.)

In an oral culture, the less experienced, the less skilled gather around the more experienced, the more skilled, to learn. No, not during the hunt, not while gathering the tubers or tilling the soil; in the evening, around the fire, or at Sabbath or some other seasonally rhythmic meeting. The boys learn from the men, the girls from the women, the men learn from the chief, the child-bearing women from the menopausal veteran, and so forth.

As detailed above, school structure has this history. Now I emphasize that the phenomenon has sub-speciated since. The Renaissance was birthed by the interested gathering around new and rare resources. Before long, other forces and interests came into play. When Shakespeare wrote of a Hamlet, understood to be a figure from the past, having been sent abroad (from Denmark to Wittenberg) to school, his contemporaries recognized the practice.

(English aristocrats had no need to go abroad: it's the wogs who have to do that. There were plenty of schools for aristocratic brats right there in England. The minor aristocrats might have to leave their county; the major aristocrats could practically walk. Scottish George Gordon, once he came in line for the Barony of Byron, was sent to Harrow: a sizable hike from Scotland.)

These schools were called "public," meaning they were for the future rulers of the public (and also for future literate advisors to the rulers: Chaucer, and Polonius, and Horatio could go too. What happened to them there would be exposed to a horror-stricken middle class by the Nineteenth Century. They were frozen, starved, beaten ... Lord Byron complained and joked endlessly about his "kibes."

More than a little something of these "public" schools was inherited by the public schools of the United States. Not much of Virgil may have gotten through, but the birch rod came unobstructed.

OK. Monks got kibes as part of their Christian asceticism. Humanities scholars inherited it. Poverty. Celibacy. So what's going on? English aristocrats were hardly celibate or impoverished. Ah: while they were young, they were. English law did not bring income even to the heir by primogeniture till he came into his majority. At home in the castle there were maids all over the place. Not much privacy, but lots of nooks and crannies. The whole rest of the world was filled with peasant girls. Once at his helm, the castle did become private: Everybody out! Except you with the canapé tray and you with the soup tureen and you with the raven flax and décolletage. Et cetera.

Like dear St. Francis of Assisi I am wedded to poverty, but in my case the marriage is not a success.
Oscar Wilde, after jail, in broken health

I nest this mini-history within the others for a reason. I have a hypothesis about such schools. In simple, it is:
The English punished their aristocrats in advance for the crimes they would commit one they achieved their majority. For the period of their adolescence, the silver spoon was taken out of their mouth and the birch rod was laid across their back. Remember the male youth of Romeo and Juliet?
Sixteen years old, armed, and murdering each other in the street? The Duke banishes Romeo. How many of the other murders were even mentioned? How about blood shed by the inevitable "pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders"? Absolutely: never punished? never even mentioned!I feel sorry for all of us in overpopulated, over(mis)organized society (kleptocracy): but I feel especially sorry for the majority on the receiving end of the birch rod who never get handed the sword or the castle. Punish the aristocrats, fine; but why punish the whole population with instruments of torture designed for the lords? Public school.

The immediately above was inserted this 2000 02 24. I sat down with three ideas and have written only one. When the others reoccur to me, I'll return. I can't ask them to come now: I've got to get back to the most important of all things: Macroinformation. [With Macroinformation.org censored, see my blog of the same name.]

By the Twentieth Century, with the development of paperbacks and the existence of some acreage still to be deforested, a book became, for the first time in the history of the species, cheap entertainment. But some monastic habits find vestigial survival in the schools, most notably the habits of poverty and chastity. Lord Byron's matriculation at Cambridge might as well have been a circus parade—some students today drive their 'Vettes to campus. But most are borrowing money to stay poor. Their expectation of course is that this prolonged dependency will be handsomely compensated in future.

Though student marriages have increased over the decades, the expectation of student chastity wasn't blown apart until the 1960s.

All societies educate their young. Illich wrote that schools are the reproductive organ of society. "The rationally tested truth of things" is one of the most minor aspects of the meaning of "education" and may be near to wholly absent in what is meant by the term in most schools. Our concern is to pass on both our beliefs and our techniques. The beliefs include superstition, credulity, time honored lies, and so forth. The techniques are our arts and crafts, our technology. There's seldom either committee or budget to review the quality of the technology. It's normally more "art" than science.

2002 05 30 I've long been proud of my illustration above of school's purpose in making abundant information scarce but I now feel shamed that I've still not expressed another characteristic of schools with equal simplicity: schools are authority based, not fact based. The inquisitor's version of things is immediately, unchallengeably recorded as official; not the heretics. The graduate's thesis is on file in the library; not the thesis the faculty ganged up on. It's pure kleptocracy: "history" is recorded by the thieves and murderers (who always record it that they're "peaceful and law abiding" (or whatever fiction is politically fashionable in that era).

2000 02 13 I return here to emphasize in this module something implicit around the site that I don't think I've stated baldly enough yet. Calling the Middle Ages the Dark Ages may over-simplify complexes of things but there's still something to it. Christian Europe was very far from being the world's intellectual or social leader however much it claimed to be the spiritual leader of the sub-celestial world. Neither was China at that time. At least for the latter case, Jared Diamond explains why: they were too successful as a monopoly. Progress comes from difference, competition, contention. I say (and imagine that Diamond has or would also) that the same applies to Medieval Europe. Christian Europe had turned into an intellectual vegetable. Power and intellect don't go together. (One reason I've never striven for power.) It was the "two literatures," however factitious the distinction, that spurred the Renaissance.

Now consider this: I say that the American world has returned (as power always will) to a mono-culture. I say that the universities are the mono-culture medium, just as the Church was. The universities do not stand apart from the government and haven't for at least fifty years now. (Good God, no: they get funds from the government. Of course there's a pretense of standing apart, but how real is it? I'll come back and develop this section further. Before I leave though let me establish this topic: how rationally structured are universities? They're still medieval. Galileo couldn't show his satellites of Jupiter to any public, not even to his supposed peers; only to a bunch of cardinals. They united against him and his evidence and that was that: at least temporarily. (Neither the professors nor the cardinals were likely to have imagined that centuries of people would ever inspect their doings.) I started to pave a segue to my points about Scholasticism and nominalism in Shakespeare's sonnets and the university cardinals slammed the door hard. Like an idiot, I thought I could go around them: direct to the public. (Who else was I going to appeal to? another cardinal?) I learned the hard way that there is no public. Only a bunch of morons waiting to be told what's what by the mono-culture of university/government/press.

(Joke:What's the opposite of diversity?
University.

bkMarcus)

Nature

Normalcy

Perception

Indeterminacy

Politics

Pathology

Delusion

1998 10 19 It's around a year now that I've been promising to get back here to add more on economics and education. At the moment, I don't even remember what I primarily had in mind. It's a different tack that returns me to this page today. I've traced the history of the university. I've highlighted the crafty way in which the original institution has reversed the spirit of its function. Now I ask:
What was the Identity of the university?
and
What is its present Identity?

Yale University was founded by the volunteer faculty assembling themselves and pooling their private collections of books onto one common table. Clearly Yale, at least at that moment, was in the humanist tradition described above: the university was its library.

The university is resources: human and symbolic, records and expertise with those records.

In the 1950s both the Democratic and Republican parties were soliciting Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president. He was finessed into the presidency of Columbia University for practice. My Russian literature professor told the following delicious story: Ike held his first meeting with the faculty. He said he intended to be a hands-on president. He'd be accessible: have an open-door policy. Any employee of the university would be welcome to come through that door at any time, he said.

A professor emeritus stood. He told Ike that that sounded very nice but reminded him that he was addressing the faculty. "There's only one employee of the university present in the hall: and that's you! We are the university!

That's not too far removed from my Yale story: the faculty is clearly an important part of the resources. By the latter part of the 1960s the students at Columbia made headlines by vociferously claiming themselves to be an integral part of the university. My fellow students of the 1950s wouldn't have dreamed of such a claim.

But: by the 1950s, Columbia University had accepted a cyclotron: not as a gift from alumni, not purchased from income from endowments by the trustees, but from the United States government. Were there any strings attached? When has the government ever given anything without strings attached? Ike won. When the students acted up, the administration, not the faculty, called in tactical police.

The day Columbia accepted a cyclotron from the fed
was (still another) beginning of the end of the free university:
and only sadder days have followed in our silly period of ahem history.

Columbia is a private institution, older than the United States. It's original name was King's College, the land grant coming from authority in England. Its present land holdings include much of the most cherished parts of New York City: downtown, midtown, Morningside Heights, and uptown. A school song goes:

Oh, who owns New York?
Oh, who owns New York?
Oh, who owns New York?
The people say.
Why, we own New York.
Yes, we own New York.
Who?

C - O - L - U - M - B - I - A !
Did the rebellious students have a right to trash faculty offices and papers? Certainly not. Did the students have a title with their name on it to show the police before bringing claim against them for trespassing? No. Did the administration? I don't think the courts would want to face this one.

The university is an idea. That's the word John Henry, Cardinal Newman chose to title his book on the subject. The idea was clear in the early Renaissance. The idea was clear at the founding of Yale. Today it's a muddle.

One thing's for sure: whoever can call the police and have them come has a claim to practical ownership, whatever the centuries of tradition and papers say.

How many more "favors" from the government have slipped into habitual acceptance? (Habitual acceptance leads to dependency.) More than we could count. Untraceable.

How independent do the independent universities remain? I have my answers. If we heard all the answers, we'd have a real muddle.

T. S. Eliot said it:This is the way the world ends.
Not with a Bang but a whimper.

Related Pieces
being added to pk blogs to recreate censored domains
FLEX
Mislabeling
Thesis
Crichton, State of Fear, on universities

Notes
Capital Crime
2000 01 24 Only just discovered a serious error in the version of this piece I've had mounted now for years: I'd written that the Church was ignorant that there was a Greek version of the Bible. I should have said that it was more like they'd forgotten. The Church honored Saint Jerome for doing the translating. But I can't overstate how unhappy the Church was with the prospect of any new Saint Jeromes.

Professor: Ike's library
My professor also recounted the tale of the first party he attended at Ike's President's Mansion on Morningside Drive. He was bored. He drifted into the library. Ike's books were floor to ceiling. It was the kind of library you see in the movies, where you need a ladder rolling from a track to get at anything. My professor noticed all the vellum bindings, the gold letters, the titles proclaiming the Complete Works of This One and That One. "Ah, Pushkin" (or some such favorite), he muttered.
But when he went to slip the volume from the shelf to his hand, it was no dice. The Complete Works of Pushkin turned out to be one long panel of tooled leather adhered to a wooden dummy. He poked further. There were no books in the President's library! It was all dummies! All for show!
What did it actually show though to someone who looked?
Ten years ago my poverty after writing my third novel landed me once again in Florida where I wouldn't need much in the way of shelter or clothing: just food and electricity for the Toshiba T-1100. (I had to write!) I soon learned that the people at the local library didn't know much about books either. I fled up the road where I'd heard there was a college.
Every ten or fifteen years I try to reread all of Shakespeare. I never succeed, but it's OK if I get through six or eight before other things distract me. At least I have the sense to choose first the plays I know least well. Why read Lear for the eighth time if I've only read Timon once? (Attendance at stage renditions run in similar proportions. Yes, I have seen Timon actually performed. Once. New York. Shakespeare in the Park. '60s-ish. Could have been the '70s.)
Anyway, 1989: I'm due. Hmm. Measure for Measure.
There's a weak spot to shore up. I find I don't need permission to enter the stacks at the college library: stacks are all there are. I find the English literature section quickly enough, all half a row of it. Not like the Columbia Library where you can get your week's exercise browsing the English literature rows just once. But at least there's a complete Shakespeare. And there's Measure for Measure.
Not the variorum edition I'd like. It's an edition I don't recognize. No vellum. No gold letters. But neither is it a wooden fake. Eighteen-something or other for the publishing date: over one hundred years old. Never heard of the editor. Or the publisher. "Donated to the South Florida Community College" some dozen years earlier is rubber stamped inside the cover. It's only then that I notice: the pages don't flip. The pages haven't been cut! The text is in there, in its womb, as it were.
I kind of like the continental habit of cutting the pages as you read. Every Frenchman has a letter opener as an essential tool for reading. No one has ever read any pages of this book beyond the fly leaf! In a hundred years! And it's the college library's only copy! This library's Shakespeare is a virgin!
I investigate further: the majority of the series, book after book, first quire to last, had its hymen intact! Furthermore, it was the only complete Shakespeare there.
This is a college?
Now what has that word come to mean?

1998 10 23 Come to think of it, it got worse. Some time later I was back at that library to review a proposition by Wittgenstein. I found nothing. The reference librarian was being less than helpful when she suddenly perked up. "Oh, here's comes the head of the science department." I transferred my inquiries to him. "Who?" he asked. "Ludwig Wittgenstein." "Who's he?" "Only the most important philosopher of the Twentieth Century." He glowered at me. "That's a matter of opinion." Acid spit between his teeth. How could Wittgenstein be important if this "Chairman" had never heard of him?
"It certainly is not a matter of opinion." My son seethed with indignation on hearing the story. "Completely apart from tracing the influence, all you have to do is quantify the references by other philosophers. It's a statistical certainty."
But of course this head of a collegescience department was merely bluffing, masking his ignorance with the familiar know-nothing cliché. But the bluff was stupid. Hadn't he picked up that the person standing before him wasn't himself totally ignorant on the subject? There is something worse than ignorance: arrogant ignorance.

Employee
Who owns the school?
A neighbor turned out to be the widow of the retired head of the music department at some university in Greensboro, NC. In I forget what context I told her my professor's Eisenhower story, fully expecting a resonant listener. I was wrong.
"That's absurd," she said. "The faculty thinking they were the university. The very idea!"
I've never had any truck with any state college or university. I've matriculated and taught only in private, independent colleges and universities. FLEX was the ultimate independent institution. It was deliberate as well as fortunate.
I never had any idea how fortunate until conversing with my neighbor. She knew nothing of the relevant histories. Despite all the revolutions of this millennium, by its end, we've turned back into serfs. Owned by the king.

Important
If you don't know Wittgenstein, Daniel Dennett provided a good short overview for Time's The Century's Greatest Minds [March 29, 1999, p 88-90].
The ignorant community college "Chairman" reminds me of the retarded brother of a guy my sister went out with in high school. That family was sitting at the diner table. The father, a high school teacher, math or history or something, mentioned Leonardo. "Who's that?" the dumb younger brother asked? "Why Leonardo was a genius," replied the father.
The son/brother "retard" was quick with his refutation: "He can't be: if he were a genius, he'd be famous!"
How can you beat that logic?
When the Beetles were at the height of their fame, when Paul was quoted as having said they were more famous than Jesus, the Beetles were still not the world's most famous musicians: Om Kalthoum was.
You never heard of her? You don't know anyone who ever heard of her? Irrelevant and immaterial. Try asking in Egypt. Try asking in Saudi Arabia. Try asking in a place where even politics ground to a halt when she sang on the radio. Take a world-wide survey.
I'd like to know how typical this "science" professor's ignorance was: Dennett comments that "Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's work has not been appreciated by many scientists." [p 90]

2011 11 05 I've duplicated this post at pKnatz, but leave the source file (and the graphics) here: till all can be moved.

Illich: Deschooling Society Contents

2009-01-14T06:32:00.003-05:00

Ivan Illich
Deschooling Society
Contents

Deschooling Society: Introduction

Ch1: Why We Must Disestablish School

Ch2: Phenomenology of School

Ch3: Ritualization of Progress

Ch4: Institutional Spectrum

Ch5: Irrational Consistencies

Ch6: Learning Webs

Ch7: Rebirth of Epimethean Man

Note:

Preserve.net has listed Illich texts online for some time. The text for Deschooling Society had been mounted by Penn State until recently. Personal sites from Ira Woodhead to my Knatz.com have published Illich and other passages for years. My FLEX of 1971 was supposed to digitize all texts and all digitizable artifacts for one universal (universally accessible) library (and would have had the public donated "one percent of one percent" of its coerced budgets).

After Ivan Illich's death, Penn State took the text down. Now what are we supposed to do? Knatz.com linked to the Penn State text as did other sites around the world. Single Source is good for a corporation, but hardly good for society. Don't unite: divide: then there may be some survivors.

Fortunately for the public, I saved Penn State's text to disk. The world should save Knatz.com to disk (after digesting it).(If you don't voluntarily pay me for it now, you'll still pay: in the bone yard.)

The HTML files have been edited as well as coded to approximate the formatting of the first edition. The text files have been reduced to ASCII files: formatting lost.

With regard to the Deschooling text, I've filled in several missing sections by typing from the first edition. (I also have an "edition" earlier than the first, Ivan Illich having shared his CIDOC printed "MS" with me in 1970 or 1971. I no longer have the NYR versions of chapters 1, 2, & 6.)

2011 01 11 I've been trying to stimulate the public to absorb Illich's points, particularly his deschooling points, since 1970. He welcomed me as a disciple, I have a right to quote him: at any length. That is, I had his permission, that permission was never withdrawn. We had God's permission to speak. But do I have society's permission? Do society's laws protect such permissions? No. When U PA put Deschooling's text online, I copied it. I improved it a bit. I uploaded it at Knatz.com, then at InfoAll.org, since at this InfoAll blog. Upon Illich's death I asked permission of Illich's estate, in the person of Valentine Borremans: just to dot my i's. She has never answered me!

In 1970 the radical Catholics embraced me. But I haven't felt any such embraces since 1973 or so. What happened? I think it should be explained to me, rather than by me.

Apropos: when John Quintero went to join Illich friends in Bremen in a commemoration, he'd planned to remind the group of my work founding and developing FLEX. He traveled from California to Florida to check his facts before continuing on to Germany. But once there, he said nothing on the subject. He explained to me that that atmosphere seemed to him to be one of personal commemoration: remember drinking wine with Ivan; not remembering what he said, or tried to do, or tried to stimulate. I am disgustipated, as Popeye said in Altman's movie.