What school is all about

I have just finished a piece of John Taylor
Gatto's book. So far it is brilliant, heavy, and truer than the overwhelming material
I have read on schooling (exceptions go to Seymour Papert and Ivan
Illich). One thing that struck me deep was a poem by a high
school senior in Alton, Illinois, two weeks before he committed
suicide. I though of sharing it here, for me to remember what
school is all about.

He drew... the things inside that needed saying.
Beautiful pictures he kept under his pillow.
When he started school he brought them...
To have along like a friend.
It was funny about school, he sat at a square brown
desk Like all the other square brown desks... and his
room Was a square brown room like all the other
rooms, tight And close and stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, his arms stiff
His feet flat on the floor, stiff, the teacher watching
And watching. She told him to wear a tie like
All the other boys, he said he didn't like them.
She said it didn't matter what he liked. After that the
class drew.
He drew all yellow. It was the way he felt about
Morning. The Teacher came and smiled, "What's this?
Why don't you draw something like Ken's
drawing?"
After that his mother bought him a tie, and he
always Drew airplanes and rocketships like
everyone else.
He was square inside and brown and his hands were
stiff. The things inside that needed saying didn't
need it
Anymore, they had stopped pushing... crushed, stiff
Like everything else.

Return to blogging, updates and a first glance look at clojure.

Hello dear internet, it's been a year, I have missed you.

This year has been a very interesting one. I have got a job as a
researcher and technical leader, have been professionally programming
in lisp for artificial intelligence projects, built a concurrent
crawler using racket, started using clojure to integrate with java
projects, and more important, have met some very interesting people.

First, let me tell you about lisp in a professional setting. Simply
put, it rocks. Common lisp+slime is a stupendous development
environment. The ecosystem is very alive, albeit not very organized. I
have to remind myself to publish a small article about how to get to
speed with emacs + slime. It really does pays off.

Racket is without a doubt the best language I have explored so
far. The documentation is top notch, the community is full of
intelligent and helpful people, and there is a slime-like plugin
called geiser that is very nice. On a personal note, It was the first
time I have developed a system using an actor like threading system
(racket has mailbox threading). I must say that it has changed the way
I thing about concurrency.

The last technical note is about clojure. It is very nice, specially
if you have to cooperate with the JVM, something that is very probable
if you are interfacing with big corp. It is a modern language,
embracing concurrency and parallelism, is immutable by default, and at
the same time is a lisp. I encourage anyone who wants to learn
something deep and at the same time "practical", considering the JV.

We can never forget that life is about people, and I have met some
incredible people. Crazy, happy, high, depressed, strange, and
interesting people. Because of them, I have got a bit into security
again, learned more about myself and my emotions, entrepreneurship,
martial arts, Austrian economics, anarchism, and much much more. For
all of you, my deep sincere thanks.

Thanks again everyone, I sorry that I have been away for so long. I'll
try harder this time. Merry Christmas!

Thoughts on Deschooling Society

This is a small review about Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling Society. One of the best books I've ever heard about the negative effects of the current educational system.

The author explains exactly what the book is about:

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three
unquestioned premises. Children belong in school. Children learn in
school. Children can be taught only in school.

I think these unexamined premises deserve serious
questioning.

Most of the text is dedicated to question, very skillfully in my
opinion those premises. The author anarchist/libertarian tendencies
show in the book, in the sense that most emphasis is directed to the
free choice of the individual in detriment of institutions. But I
think one would be wrong to say that Illich has an agenda other than
point out the evils of a systematic enforcement of teaching:

To understand what it means to deschool society, and not just to
reform the educational establishment, we must now focus on the
hidden curriculum of schooling. We are not concerned here, directly,
with the hidden curriculum of the ghetto streets which brands the
poor or with the hidden curriculum of the drawing room which
benefits the rich. We are rather concerned to call attention to the
fact that the ceremonial or ritual of schooling itself constitutes
such a hidden curriculum.

We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first
understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can
be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the
consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public
schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is
taught in them.

Illich goes very keenly to the core of the damages that the
paternalistic system of education do to a person.

The man addicted to being taught seeks his security in compulsive
teaching. The woman who experiences her knowledge as the result of a
process wants to reproduce it in others.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance
to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively
manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style
of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but
to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one
person's judgment should determine what and when another person must
learn.

From every single source about pedagogy I have ever heard, this book
is
the one to learn about why the current
situation is fundamentally broken, why it is harmful to society and to
the individual.

But school enslaves more profoundly and more systematically, since
only school is credited with the principal function of forming
critical judgment, and, paradoxically, tries to do so by making
learning about oneself, about others, and about nature depend on a
prepackaged process.

It is a very profound responsibility of the individual, to take charge
of his own education, and you could say the same about freedom. It is
hard work to be a free person, and you cannot be a free person if
others control what, how and when you should learn something.

Only liberating oneself from school will dispel such illusions. The
discovery that most learning requires no teaching can be neither
manipulated nor planned. Each of us is personally responsible for
his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it. No
one can be excused if he fails to liberate himself from
schooling. People could not free themselves from the Crown until at
least some of them had freed themselves from the established
Church. They cannot free themselves from progressive consumption
until they free themselves from obligatory school.

This is a life changing book, and I guess Illich's works will only
increase in importance the deeper we go into the knowledge age.