Clone the 3 Best Schools ..
The Burning Child
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The Burning Child .. Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Industrial Complex. That’s how the title began. That’s the idea. I was vexed by the second ‘industrial’ but couldn’t grok something else with the proper cadence. I asked some wordsmith friends. Nada. Time floated by. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Indictments. Waiting for the Rapture to Lighten the Piety Load on the Beloved Planet.
Then Dear The Blue, my second best pal after Spiteful Puffy – The Blue and me ain’t Biblical or nothing, we just hang out a lot – Dear The Blue dropped a present into the air just in front of me like a hummingbird hovering, iridescent. “Instructional.” Ah. Aha.
The Burning Child .. Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Instructional Complex. Sweet. It works.
Child, child burning bright in the forests of delight. Every child has the civil right to a superb education. We shift the $820,000 per minute over to a Manhattan Project of funding to provide an explosion of education in our nation.
So, let’s for a few moments leave all the objections to the side and assume as a thought experiment that the ATBs, the Aliens with Tractor Beams are saying, “You Hairless Bipeds have five earth years to provide equally superb education to every single child from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border or we will incinerate your whole lousy belligerent species.” So, we have to do it. How then?
I imagine a team of Smart Good Hearts flying over the country in Education Force One looking down at all the schools in the country. We find the 3 Best Schools. We clone them. We buy out the remaining military obligations like veterans health care and so 4th. We re-write the contracts with the DDX destroyers and A22 fighters and Robust Nuclear Earth Pentrator and Star Wars people so that they re-tool to research and build cheap, mobile, indestructible laptops and the infrastructure for free nationwide wireless ultraband and the best new schools gehryesque architecture can cathedralesquely create. They do this shift as if their hair was on fire – which it will be if the ATBs get pissed.
This is our Moon Shot. This is our Manhattan Project. If immediate profit weren’t any object, how cheap and fabulous could these tough thin fastest nifty laptop WolfBooks become? We put the $14,000 per minute we’re spending on the fantasy Missile Nonsense System aka Star Wars into WolfBook research. We have the forbidden socialism for the Military Budget now. We just re-allocate those resources to the Education Instructional Complex. We export education systems rather than weapons systems. If we can have the darned nanopod, thin and sexy (tho not so tough apparently), we can have a cheap fabulous laptop WolfBook for every citizen, child and Granny.
This is an emergency for our very survival as a viable species. The planet is going to buck us off until we grok it. We do destruction; it does destruction – tho lots better. We do construction and fruitfulness; it will do construction and fruitfulness.
All this is a national effort like WW2. This is WW3 – except that we fight for the future instead of smashing the present. Bloodshed will be considered Losing.
Always look back from Y3000. Imagine where we are as our better angels in Y3000. How do we get there? That’s what pogblog wants to challenge and cajole you to think about. Not why we can’t. Because we do. So how do we get to the constructive, fruitful world? The more you bring to the table if even just in your mind and heart & not yet the street, the sooner this more delightful, smart inventive stuff can manifest. You dream about it every night. It just isn't manifested yet. We're the midwife people for the education dream. You can be a raving nutcase militant pacifist epistemologist like me, or you can be milder, cogitating in your living room. The NaySayers do not contribute. They just slow it down. We have to live with them until they shapeshift. Don't let 'em fuss you. Press on, regardless. ///<^>/////
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I don't know that any group of people would ever agree on what the 3 best schools were, but I do definitely agree in principle.
It is time to build our culture's version of the Cathedrals or the Great Wall of China. I don't want to be the culture remembered for the atom bomb or even the interstate highway system, I want to live in a culture whose signature achievement was full literacy , something that goes beyond reading and writing and moves into an awareness and capacity to appreciate our spiritual and personal possibilities as well.
Consider the Great Wall of China already borrowed. I'll definitely credit you, CL, in the acknowledgements for Burning Child, the book, but in the meantime, thanks. I already used the line when I was out walking with myTeach Peace sign tonight. “The shift from the Military Industrial Complex to the Educational Instructional Complex — superb schools for every child — is like the building of the Great Cathedrals, the Great Wall of China, the Manhattan Project for our time.”
We don't want to fuss about the exact 3 Best Schools — any 3 really fine schools will do.
One of the luxuries of private schools which I would institute immediately in the Quantum Schools is each child having her/his own text books. Good underlining & hi-lighting was a key to my getting thru highschool and college with the flying colors.
“Full literacy” is another nice term for which you get credited in the book. I'm starting a file today with the notions & phrases that come off the pogblog so I can be sure to give them credit in the book. You have Reagan's Law; Great Wall of China; full literacy so far.
from CL: full literacy , something that goes beyond reading and writing and moves into an awareness and capacity to appreciate our spiritual and personal possibilities as well.
Quantum Schools would also have kids start designing Just Societies and seeing how they work a la Sim City. (I've never played it but my friend has told me about it.)
The first step is to have the Idea. (Sounds so Plato.) Then comes the Aristotle part of making all the practical steps.
I've been bringing up the Military Budget since you mentioned it. Even quite defiantly liberal people shrink back as if they had been so inculcated in fear that they'd had a quick shock. This involuntary reaction is something we have to account for.
The other thing is the knee-jerk dialectic. Often people just go against things automatically. I think your 'thought experiment' tactic is a good one. That way they can try the clothes on without committing to buy them.
Thanks, ofdroll, for the heads-up about how, like, cowed we all are about challenging the Military Budget.
And for the reminder about the knee-jerk dialectic. I'll try to remember to write about improv-think which is very different. It isn't Haruumph, but. It's Yes, and. Which I need to elucidate. Feel free to hound me to cover these.
I always learn from your & chancelucky's invigorating comments.
Improv likely does help people think laterally and in “borg” like fashion where thoughts get communicated and acted on without being spoken first. In addtion, it requires intense listening skills, because the actors have to create, build, etc. within the structure of what's been said and done just prior. None of this gets taught much in conventional schools.
But those weasel people are strange and scary.