Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / DeGate / DeSchooling / School’s Purpose /
Schools Hobble Intelligence: Schools Promote Warped Minds
OK: the above module about Hobbling was just public high school. Wait till you get to college: then you can really learn it. But college is only marginally different. And graduate school is likely to be worse than public school. My high school forced some dumb lifer on me under the banner of “mathematics”: the degree mills compare to a public high school the way “Vietnam” compares to the Spanish American War. The Ph.D.s sitting on my doctoral orals were “patiently” waiting for me to parrot back the set answers they’d carefully fed me for years. I can’t be bothered with that. I laid state of the art scholarship on them (the relation of Chaucer’s opening line for The Wife of Bath’s Prologue to the Medieval (and perennial) controversy between (Scholastic) Realism and (heretical) nominalism): to be followed by important new scholarship (my analogy of that point to both the technical and esthetic structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets). Duh … that’s not the right answer …
What we need in all things kleptocratic (church, school, state …) is an equivalent to the Cambodian Celestial Verdict or the Teutonic Ordeal by Water. My committee should have been put in one uncomfortable tower with Spartan rations of food and water and me in another. See who cries uncle first. Or bind them and bind me and throw us all into an icy stream: the one whose corpse floats was the injuring party. The idea that a panel of sow’s-ear experts can grade a silk purse is ridiculous.
In Nature there’s no panel, no judgment, no verdict: other than who’s still here. If you can kill me and eat me, then you live and I’m food. If I can kill you and eat you, then you’re food and I live. But kleptocracy demands coordinated decisions. But what it substitutes (three card monte toujours) is orchestrated decisions. Not: who’s smart? or Who knows the subject? But Who harmonizes with our abysmal standard? Homeostasis toujours.
