Our conversation circle touched on some of my Pirate Party planks today, not that I raised them as such, only that boarding school naturally arises once we have our planning hats on. We talking about the ongoing experiment with the dorm, in Mitchell School District #55 in Oregon. Different mixes of gender and subculture have been tried.
Sometimes I try out what will eventually become segments in more formal presentations, about Nietzsche for example, and how his sick and twisted sister helped shape his legacy into a form suitable for Third Reich exploitation. We learned that whole story from Walter Kaufmann. You may have heard me on YouTube covering that segment already.
After the conversation circle, I drove to WinCo, streaming Candaces Ep 352, which is about how the private sector has replaced the public one in the military.
In this post nation-state world, it’s private mercenaries all the way down, although some inherited the decals of their ancestral states and still flaunt them. Some people dress up like Romans or re-enact the Civil War.
We see a lot of creative anachronists using live ammo, and starring in tawdry melodramas written by Urizen’s slaves. You can probably tell I’m not a big fan of today’s military-minded scenario programming, for use “in theater” as they say.
We saw our Republic fading with that Ollie North crowd and it only got worse: “never mind about the constitution and civilian control, we have our own agendas”. But then we had the 1960s assassinations before that. The fragile Union had been on a bumpy road ever since it had become an empire, having been birthed to fight one. Some would say the Philippine-American war was the beginning of the end.
Fictional television played a big role in helping folks jailbreak out of their narrow so-called “thinking caps” which no longer fit. Shows like Breaking Bad for example. Financial fluency also increased thanks to the crypto chapter (another soap). Fictional TV continues to be informative.
Anyway, those of/ us keen to regenerate a public sector are still allowed to brainstorm about what that might look like.
It’s not like everyone will be on the same page, nor do they need to be. A common mistake in social engineering is to suppose too large a scope. At the other extreme, an experiment might be too minuscule to really matter. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears has an obvious interpretation; there’s too hot, and too cold, with a sweet spot in the middle.
The days of “too big” publishing, which takes a “one size fits all” approach to schooling, are ostensibly over. It’s no longer about what they’ll need in Texas and California and let the others accept their choice as a consensus. We no longer need consensus on that level. The technology allows us to localize, even as we import from the various curricula, on tap around the world.
The personal workspace, or “nerd cave”, has taken over as the place where education primarily happens, punctuated by field trips, more likely by smaller van than big school bus. Their scheduling might eventually be seen as a county level responsibility. In the meantime: it’s private sector.
These workspaces might be in office buildings, repurposed. You might be learning algebra on some 28th floor of a mixed-use high rise, and getting paid in some form (catalog options?) for your self improvement work. Society benefits from improved selves, which is why it pays to pay the self-improving.
