Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [209]
New Learning:
1) Founded on a kind of "cool" anti-establishment value system (pro-autonomy, choice, freedom)
2) Democratic (structure of the Internet, open access, advocacy)
3) Responsive to community (charter schools)
4) Creative, fluid in nature
5) Fast-moving, highly adaptive by necessity
6) Integrated
7) Horizontal in structure and proliferation
8) Small working groups
9) Project-oriented
10) Productive capacities emphasized
11) Design-mind, engineering approach to specific and general problems
12) Holistic, joining school and social system
Old Learning:
1) Pro-establishment, static [monopoly that eschews choice, openly attacks "non-expert" non-sanctioned learning]
2) Bureaucratic, industrial in structure (teacher unions vs. management "Who would we have to collectively bargain with?")
3) Reductive and rigid in nature (lecture, certification, accreditation; quality = accurate replication of professional norms and forms)
4) Unresponsive to community; they are recipients not participants
5) Slow-moving to the point of intransigence (highly resistant to change; same basic structure as late nineteenth century)
6) Compartmentalized
7) Vertical in authority structure and proliferation
8) Large classes
9) Working on abstracted problems
10) Receptive capacities emphasized
11) Unreflective, uncritical approach to internal problems, learning and teaching
12) Isolated understanding of "my" classroom, student learning disabilities, etc.
Education systems which attempt to "prepare" students for static jobs which no longer exist will clearly fail to create full-spectrum prosperity. The educational choices will be up to communities, but what works will be assessed by feedback from reality.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Assessment, (cost-benefit) analysis, deliberation and decision process (AADD)
Transparent non-privileged parallel structures
Small-scale counter-government
Parallel informal power structures
Chapter Twenty-Six: Structuring the New American State
The idea that the mighty Ming Empire was vulnerable to collapse did not exist in Imperial Beijing in 1634, yet ten years later the Dynasty fell in a sudden paroxysm of disorder, conflict and shifting loyalties.
As noted in Chapter Four, even as the financial and moral infrastructure of the Empire crumbled around them, complacent Roman commentators were still trumpeting a line of magical thinking that somehow Rome was too great to fail. A few years later, their magical thinking failed and the Western Empire collapsed in a heap.
We stand now at a similar point. The greatness and reach of the American Empire seems undiminished and incapable of collapse. Yet beneath the superficial solidity projected by the mass media and the State, the financial and moral infrastructure of the U.S. is crumbling rapidly.
The adolescent fantasy of the Savior State--that paying $100 in taxes would yield $1,000 in benefits--is being propped up by the mad, frantic borrowing of trillions of dollars each year: a "solution" doomed to insolvency.
In essence, the feedbacks which resisted State and Plutocracy over-reach have been overwhelmed or withered, enabling a vast extension of the State/Plutocracy partnership's share of the national income and wealth.
The mass media--a corporate cartel within the State/financial-rentier Elites--has masked this fundamental dynamic with an unprecedented campaign of mutually reinforcing propaganda and marketing.
Those trapped in the various ideological boxes cannot escape their self-made prisons. "Progressives" are abjectly terrified by the prospect that a central Savior State might implode, as they are unable to see that the Savior State's vast programs only serve to enrich the Elites while indenturing the productive and buying the complicity of the unproductive.
In another iron box, "conservatives" are incapable of understanding