Government-Regulated Education: The Chains That Bind to Set Us Free?
Calling Rob Reich, calling Rob Reich . . .
Self-driving cars?? Right there at Stanford University, whence emanate your advanced theories of controlling kids to set them free?
Homeschooling should not be banned, but regulated much more vigilantly.
Not to mention the intellectual cradle of your Stanford-educated colleague Kimberly Yuracko, who quotes your theories so um, liberally -- or illiberally, both, neither? -- as spitshine for her own Stanford-servile theory that home education is a public function from which government is required to protect all children. (Did you two go pub-crawling while she was a student, to swap collegial notes on these elaborate fantasy worlds you both had under construction, like CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien?)
It says right there in the news, “The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.â€
Only if society is asleep at the switch, and that's where you come in, quick! There's still time to cook up some kind of ethical servility theory to stop it. Maybe use your homeschool regulation screed as a template, here, we'll help --
Society can't ethically empower individual kids with such transformative innovations, especially not if they actually WORK! Parents letting kids go soft with automatic transmissions and power steering was quite indulgent enough, but this is worse than how calculators almost made a mockery of government math testing as social control. Self-driving cars could "theoretically" decouple government's control of kids' lives through control of their driver licensing. Stanford professors of all people cannot be so enthusiastic and cavalier about the serious theoretical risks of outright liberty
Rob Reich, your reputation is on the line. You know what you must do. Expose your scientific colleagues as ethical slavemongers against children, for conceiving of robot computers controlling helpless (one could even say servile?) passengers -- no matter how well it works, "self-driving" is by definition unAmerican!
(damn kids need to take the city bus like we did, and support government services or all is lost . . .)
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times June 15, 2007. . . the scientists at Stanford said a new generation of technologies is on the horizon that will increasingly assist human drivers in operating their vehicles. “Why are we doing this? We all know automobiles are unsafe and inefficient,†said Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford faculty member who was one of the designers of the Volkswagen Touareg autonomous vehicle, named Stanley, that won the contest in 2005.
“The idea of a self-driving car is a really big idea that will have a big impact on society.â€
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Don't Make the Mistake
Submitted by JJ Ross on 16 June 2007 - 1:23pm.
of confusing the Rob Reich I am challenging to a duel
;-)
with the Rob Reich who served in Bill Clinton's administration. Someone unfamiliar with Reich's published theories about homeschooling just did, which reminded me this is a common mistake.
FWIW I think the former secretary of labor's last name is pronounced Rike, and the homeschool critic's as Reesh.
Driving My Last Exchange with Reich
(at a now-defunct blog of homeschool defense lawyer Scott Somerville)was the analogy of driver regulation -- coincidence or conscious framing, you decide!
Whereupon I responded to the conservative lawyer and the liberal philosopher with this:
You're Both Wrong Then!
Provocative for sure - you're both wrong then, about what we need to be debating. I am concerned about actual children, and thankfully despotism (in 21st century America) doesn't even make the Top 100 on my list of immediate, real-life, daily concerns for them or their survival or their souls.
I know that you both are fathers who thus are responsible for addressing all those direct, real-child concerns too, so having had this same esoteric and intensively divorced-from-reality debate with you both before, I suggest this time you respond the way we mothers do instead.
Let's stop debating who has more right to teach them NOT to think for themselves -- my answer is no one, case closed -- and be more concerned about finding ways to help them learn to think critically without any despotism whatsoever! Then they can protect themselves from despotism, without being "ethically servile" to their parents OR the State. (Not to mention a biased press, propaganda from any source or their own peers and fellows, at any age.)
I just read a scholarly review of a new book in this regard (see below) making the point that most classroom teaching and learning is "non-thinking practice" rather than critical thinking -- comprised as it is of commonplace "defining, telling and believing."
From the review:
"Boostrom believes that students can benefit from inquiring into the
distinctions between learning to 'receive truths' and to 'seek meanings
in our lives.'
In this frame, 'Thinking does not settle anything; it unsettles' (p.137), which is a part of the reason that non-thinking is so difficult to
disrupt. . ."
I think this intentional unsettling of commonplace classroom defining,telling,and believing is precisely what's desired and required by us all, to avoid despotism from ANY source.
JJ Ross, Ed.D.
*Thinking: The Foundation of Critical and Creative Learning in the Classroom* by Robert E. Boostrom
Teachers College Press, New York
ISBN: 0807745693, 175 pages, Year: 2005
Reviewed by Anne Slonaker -- August 30, 2005
for www.tcrecord.org