03 February 2010

Speaking of -- and against -- public education...

as I was doing, below, and for which I was criticized by my old arch-nemesis, "Q":

Just as the role of the state has transformed science and deformed it, the role of the state has been to deform education and learning. Compulsion and public tax support are the common destructive elements. The right-wing or tax-supported approach — the current matter of government aid to Lockheed, which developed from government contracts, is instructive — with its twin of compulsion must be confronted.
School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the US Constitution: "The state shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education." ~ Leonard P. Liggio, reviewing Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, here.


Clearly, Liggion and Illich are dominated by their prejudices and religions indoctrinations.

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James Frank Solís
Former soldier (USA). Graduate-level educated. Married 26 years. Texas ex-patriate. Ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.
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