Prometheus 6

Yeah, but some incarnations of that "self-made whole" can place a gaping chasm between an individual and reality. Make that chasm wide enough, and one's ability to intuit, affect, and cope with the wider world is handicapped. Even though we all experience the world through subjective lenses, those lenses require sufficient clarity for survival and success.

For the urban league of portland, I participate in a mentoring program. For all mentors, a best-practices class is necessary, which is shared by many volunteer organizations in Portland. The day of my session, I found myself in a session with all 4-H mentors, some of them literally arrived straight from the barn. Anyway, in this group was one self-avowed home-schooler. I spent hours in the same room with this woman, participating in several activities, including 2 "team building" exercises.

My impressions? In a nutshell, this woman was self-important, xenophobic, and highly paranoid. It was amusing to witness her wail on me for "ruining" one of the team building exercises, for not following her "leadership". All of those folks struck me as unsophisticated, but that woman seem doctrinaire as well as ignorant.

If she is representative of the homeschooling movement, then government schooled kids have nothing to fear. In a world where global competition will be the norm, and the artificial barriers of white privilege will mean less, kids taught under her tutelage will fit in well in the Walmartized service economy.

Yeah, but some incarnations of that "self-made whole" can place a gaping chasm between an individual and reality.

Frankly, I think most of them do. All I've seen in the public debate for the last ten years is dueling illusions. 

Aren't children who attend public schools where they will possibly interact with peers from all different socio-economic backgrounds better prepared to enter into society as adults with a better sense of where they fit in the world?  It is my belief that parents who arrange for their children to attend private school or home school deprie them of the opportunity to gain an education in reality even as they seek to cultivate the "self-made whole."  This is one of the problems, in my opinion, with school vouchers.  Those who support it are selling or buying into the illusion of self-empowerement when in reality they are distancing themselves from the social and political realities that account for failing and under-funded schools.     

It is my belief that parents who arrange for their children to attend private school or home school deprie them of the opportunity to gain an education in reality even as they seek to cultivate the "self-made whole."

With one in public and one in private, and both in academic and cultural enrichment, I'll assume responsibility for cultivating interpersonal reality awareness in my children, thank you very much.

Public schools are fubar'd - and without the degree of parental involvement and control allowed by the charter under which my sons public school operates, it would be an unacceptable option. People forget, that even absent the supernumerous defects in contemporary public schooling, the model itself is intrinsically pernicious by design.

distancing themselves from the social and political realities that account for failing and under-funded schools.

Trying not to take a page from Cosby, there IS an extent to which what you describe as "social and political realities" is in fact consensual. IOW - people play an active role in the condition of the communities in which they reside. The capacity to reality engineer is limited only by imagination, effort, courage, and initiative.

Take for example the consensus realities forged by the NOI during its heyday, or the work still in progress with the UNOI - which has a large and somewhat rebounded from scandal community actively operating in Kansas City Kansas. Take the Amish, or the ultra-Orthodox lubavitchers, intentional communities are possible to any group of people sufficiently motivated to take agency in their own lives.

Consensus realities. Bah.

Cnulan...  I will have to read the book you link to get a better sense of the inequities inherent in our public school system.  I do think that the design of public schools is meant to control rather than to cultivate and enlighten.  I personally did not benefit from the approach to learning engendered by the philosophy of public schools.  I do think, however, I benefited from attending school with a number of people from different economic backgrounds, since I learned not to take the privileges accorded to me by my parents for granted.  The class-mixing that I experienced, however, was not a conscious design of the powers that be that ran the school district in which I was educated.  Students fom poorer backgrounds were still placed in remedial classes like shop while more priviliged kids were placed in honors courses which provided a fast track towards college.  From what I have heard, the community I grew up in is becoming more stratisfied along the lines of class and more and more parents from well-off neighborhoods do not want their children attending school with poorer children.          

In terms of racial diversity, I was poorly prepared to interact with people of color both by design and by circumstance.  As someone who is white and who grew up in an almost entirely white environment (I grew up in Wyoming which is approximately 95% white), my education in the realities of living in a society that operated according to my priviliges as a white male to the exclusion of others did not begin until I entered college and encountered the tasks of making a living.  For this reason, I can identify with your commitment to assuming responsibility for the interpersonal development of your children due to the fact that public education in this country is both unequal and antithetical to the goals of building an equitable and multi-racial society in which young people are encouraged to build their own potential and steered away from the perils of the barbarian culture which you so insightfully comment on. 

To get back to the original subject of this thread of whether schools and communities that operate outside the mainstream can provide adequate education and living skills for young people, I do agree with your statement that "the capacity to reality engineer is limited only by imagination, effort, courage and intitiative."  I do see, however, the point made in the previous entry which indicates that certain parents who try to create an ulterior reality for their children fail to prepare them to negotiate the realities of a world in which working at Walmart forms the basis of what every good American should aspire to.  My experience as a student in the public schools furthermore allowed me to comprehend that these sorts of service jobs were all that were open to kids from under-privileged backgrounds, even if I could see evidence that poorer kids were every bit as smart as kids who had the opportunity to go to college.  This, I believe, provided an education in-and-of itself.  What the debate between public schooling and other forms of schooling presents for the African American and other non-white communities is something I need to investigate further given that my background alone does not put me in a position to fully comprehend or identify with the educational realities of minority parents and children.  Nor am I completely cognizant of the examples that you provide cocerning the community-building efforts in Kansas City and other places.  I will need to look into and study them.         

One last point I would like to comment on invovles the Amish community and the shootings which recently made headlines.  By choosing to live a life which refrains from participating and identifying with the modern world, the Amish can not escape the fact that they live in the same world as those who embrace and interact with modern changes.  They are, therefore, just as susceptible to these changes as the rest of us and must lean to account for them.  Even they cannot escape the influence of the barbaric aspects of modern culture which puts the safety and well-being of everyone at risk.  I don't have any information to decipher whether the conditions which provoked the shootings referred to exist in most Amish communities, but it is worth asking the question whether acts of violence such as this have the potential to occur in other Amish communities.  In weighing the benefits of rearing young people in an environment which rejects and runs counter to the values of the dominant culture, we must acknowledge and deal with certain realities that bind us altogether.                                                                                              

Cnulan... I will have to read the book you link to get a better sense of the inequities inherent in our public school system. I do think that the design of public schools is meant to control rather than to cultivate and enlighten.

not only, but children are not the primary constituent interest served in metropolitan public school districts. children serve as an excuse for two parasitic economic classes, 1. the vendors and contractors who sell goods and services into the district, and 2. those folks who have obtained education degrees and become certified as teachers - the lowest conceivable stratum of people allowed into community college - even less competent than PE majors. 3. almost forgot, administrators - the fully carapaced devolutionary end-result and career goal of many of those teaching grubs...,

do you have any idea how pathetic and useless a degree in "education" really is?

Give me a mathematician/engineer to teach math, a chemist to teach science, a working writer to teach english etc..., and I'll give you a group of happy, satisfied children who are learning something of substance, as much from who the teacher is, as from the subject matter which he has mastered and internalized.

one of the principle attributes at the learning center is that all 80 volunteer instructors are working professionals who actually use the skills they are instructing and make it real for the children with whom we work.

while socio-economic and ethnic diversity is laudable, it isn't even on my radar as a priority attribute or even an environmental attribute at school. that the teachers be competent, genuinely care about my children, be accountable to me, and I accountable to them - is really all that matters to me in that context. metropolitan public schools lost that modulus of interpersonal connectivity a very long time ago.

By choosing to live a life which refrains from participating and identifying with the modern world, the Amish can not escape the fact that they live in the same world as those who embrace and interact with modern changes. They are, therefore, just as susceptible to these changes as the rest of us and must lean to account for them.

yeah, I'm thinking 36 Chambers of Anabaptist Shaolin would be about par for the course to get these nice peace loving folks up to barbarian speed..., seriously, but on an ironic note, the modern barbarian culture with its critical dependency on cheap energy is VASTLY more fragile and at risk than the largely self-sufficient Amish.