Charlotte Iserbyt: Societies Secrets

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks for the complete response Ed. I can't type fast so the post amazes me. I'm sure you have a few tricks to accomplish that though. At any rate I am not going to go into an explication of Marxism but will say that its reality caused Marx to see into its inner workings resulting in his class analysis of state capitalism as a system that needed to go away with the help of the proletariat. When classes cease to exist as Magda says we have no further need for the state as we experience it. My point is that big govt. is ultimately a problem the right and left have more agreement about than they think. I agree education, as you describe with your bibliography, will create humans that would make a stateless society possible, i.e. a "socialist man".
I would disagree with you though by saying MORE money does need to be spent on education. Not to pay teachers more necessarily but to hire more of them to cut class sizes drastically. As long as we have a class based state that generates tremendous poverty we can only compensate by having more teachers "hand making" student outcomes instead of "mass producing" them assembly line style.

You're welcome. The tricks up my sleeve are having had the bibliography digitized for some time, and having a voice recognition software package that allows me to dictate text from books rather than painstakingly type it, and the occasional use of actually drafting and polishing my posts on the side.

The intent of my "Summon The Magic" project is certainly not to create a socialist man (or woman); it is to create a self-driven individual who is capable of summoning from within themselves the knowledge, application, insight, intuition and motivation that is inherent within them as bipeds with a brain that is often poorly used or mis-used and for which few if any school systems are prepared to to teach them to harness to their own ends. Starting as eaerly as the first grade, kids can be led to discover for themselves what it is they they know, want to know, or need to know. Then they simply need coaches, tools, and resources through which they can acquire that knowledge or skill, take it back into the world of play to see how it works and performs, and re-emerge to acquire new skills and knowledge when they find a barrier, or obstruction, or performance plateau.

The two people who have benefitted most from the "Summon The Magic" material, starting at about the tenth grade with the regular "feeding" of three pages every other day of excerpts, were my two kids (now adult parents), the first of whom has retired two national sales awards [if he wins another one, he will be the first person in the history of a global leader in sports retailing to have won three of them] after having been scouted as a major league pitcher, and his kid sister whose athletic career ranked her at the top of her game as a collegian, an amateur and a professional and who has two master's degrees as of next month and who is an elementary math teacher in an inner city. [Their friends and teammates, too, but I won't bore you and everyone else with the details.]

And I disagree about the money/teaching equation... The book cited ["One Kid at a Time"] works with a system in which teachers are replaced to a great extent with learning coaches. The late George Leonard also has a book in which he postulated the role and value of a sophisticated approach using learning systems -- i.e., computers, DVD's, audio systems, simulation systems, and games. Games as a prime source of learning are well-described in lots of places... just Google "game theory of learning", or see the following,among others:

Architect for Learning: Utilizing The Internet as an Effective Educational Environment, Philip J. Palin and Kari Sandhaas, Saint Thomas Didymus Corporation, Ruckersville, VA (Telelogic Learning Company, http://www.teleologic.net).

"Video Games and the future of learning", David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt P. Squire, Richard Halverson, James P. Gee, Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison, December 2004 (http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/gappspaper1.pdf).