Pro-Sudbury Editorial. by Fremdfirma

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Pro-Sudbury Editorial.

POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Tuesday, January 5, 2010 10:00
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010 7:03 AM

I'm a little gratified to see the model taking off, and this is an especially good editorial from a source I don't usually much agree with, but then the author is a teacher, and is seeing the same things I did years go, from the same point blank range.

When a School Gets Sick
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/kohn1.1.1.html

"Being a libertarian, I have never been comfortable working in a government-run public school, but a PowerPoint presentation at a recent faculty meeting made me realize just how monstrous the system really is. The presentation was on something called RTI (Response to Intervention), and it began with a slide entitled "When a kid gets sick..." While RTI is hailed as a revolutionary new approach, it is really just an old practice dressed up in new jargon. With both RTI and its predecessor, nonperforming or uncooperative students are identified and treated as if they suffer from some kind of illness. In either case, the process typically ends with parents seated at a long conference table facing grim-faced teachers, administrators, counselors, social workers and perhaps even a psychiatrist all armed with file folders full of evaluations and test results. The remedy these "experts" prescribe usually involves placement in some Special Education program (i.e. low expectations dumping ground) and sometimes even the prescription of some dangerous mind-altering drug like Ritalin. Few parents ever object to or question these measures. Many parents even insist on them believing this special treatment is necessary to help their "ill" child. Supporters of RTI may protest that they are only trying to help and that Special Education or drugs are only last resorts. That may be true, but they fail to see the stigma attached to the child being labeled and processed like some kind of lab rat, and they fail to acknowledge the record of failure for all of their "interventions." Most important, they fail to even consider that the problem may be with the school and not with the child."

-F

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Tuesday, January 5, 2010 10:00 AM

DREAMTROVE

Lew is hit or miss.

I read the stuff you sent me on Sudbury, interesting, and a good model. I'm actually thinking of adapting it technologically, but I know a lot of teachers and educational theorists, etc., who know a ton about this stuff, and I want to run everything by them first.

Also, re: the specifics of the public school, I watched a documentary recently and I don't recall the name, but it hit me: The over arching problem:

The public school system is a socialist state. It's very much like the Soviet Union. The concept of evaluation of the functionality of the member units of the society is very much done on a social engineering top down systematic mechanical level, and not as a collection of human beings trying to achieve a common goal: education.

Cross-ref that with my recent reading into the early Soviet Union, and the real irony was that the Bolsheviks took over a society that was *already* communist, and essentially disassembled the communal social network already present and replaced it with their top down socially engineered statist model, which more than anything, resulted in horrific disaster after horrific disaster. For the most potent instance of this, I recommend everyone not familiar with the terms, check out Holodomor and kulak

From wikipedia
"The combination of the elimination of kulaks, collectivization, and other repressive policies contributed to mass starvation in many parts of the Soviet Union and the death of at least 14.5 million peasants in 1930-1937"

The source of the problem, Ukraine vs Russia aside, is such a repetitive theme in history: A small elite, consulting only amongst themselves, decide the best way to do things for everyone else. They then initiate a mass cooperation of everyone else, and force into cooperation any resistant element, without ever questioning their initial precepts or concept of superior judgment.

And yeah, I'm aware that corruption, stupidity, insanity and greed are always factors, as well as simple power grabbing.

I just thought it was ironic how much more communist or communal the society they were replacing was than the society they created.

Sorry, back to education: The public school struck me as a strongly soviet institution, just watching this documentary. There's no real feedback system, there's no concern for the individual, only the collective, and force and coercion drive cooperation if the principles of the original social engineer is not adhered to.

The intervention of drugs and the opportunistic pharma-gnomes is probably an inevitable result in such a system of the removal of outright force. What really needs removal is the system itself.

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