pKnatz blog

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

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

Just posted at pKnatz:

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

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

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

Post a Comment: or,

EMail to:

pk@Knatz.com

Research: in a Terrarium

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

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

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

My money is on death: and no learning.

Compulsion?

Compulsion?

Group Humility, Group Ceiling

No compulsory ritual, said Ivan Illich.

I've been seconding him as loudly as I can.

Bread and Wine

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

Even if I agree that a state had the right to exist which set skill standards for the public (to vote, a citizen must demonstrate literacy, numeracy ...), it does not follow that the state has the right to dictate where one learns what, when, or under whose tutelage.

(When we go to market, does the state dictate how much meat we must buy that day? which brand? at what price?)
(When I entered school already knowing how to read, why wasn't I allowed to go home?)
(When I demonstrated via the GRE that I could read better than 99% of the university faculty,
why didn't they give me the damn doctorate and release me?
(Such degrees are little more than fraternity initiation bullying anyway!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

School Teacher

Remember to distinguish between teacher and school teacher.

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

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

Perhaps worst, they get replaced by school teachers.

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

Record Keeping

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

Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authority: Smart or Understanding

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

---

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

Teacher Wars

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

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

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

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

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

What percentage? All? Some? Few?

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

One

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

Three Magi

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

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

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

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

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

FLEX, Life, & TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money Tables

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.