For kids like Matt, schooling can bring out the worst behaviors. Like a trapped tiger–angry and afraid–they rebel. Unable to conform properly to mass schooling’s mores, they get a label: troubled, slow learner, poor, at-risk. They will carry these scarlet letters with them throughout their 15,000 hours of mandatory mass schooling, emerging not with real skills and limitless opportunity, but further entrenched in their born disadvantage.
Tag: america
Public Education Vs. Public Schooling
The primary difference between public education and public schooling is that the former is openly accessible and self-directed, while the latter is compulsory and coercive. Both are community-based and taxpayer-funded; both can lead to an educated citizenry. But public education–like public libraries, public museums, public parks, community centers, and so on—can support the education efforts of individuals, families, and local organizations with potentially better outcomes than the static system of mass schooling.
Challenging Societal Defaults
The problem with mass schooling is that it is not serving children well. It kills creativity, punishes individuality, and pathologizes difference. As mass schooling expands and becomes more restrictive, there is mounting evidence that it is causing serious psychological harm to many children. In addition to these troubling outcomes, mass schooling simply isn’t working. Children aren’t learning.
How an Airborne Ranger Became a Voluntaryist
Government directives to do evil (whether by commission or omission) do not override our conscience and our understanding of right and wrong. I favor agoristic obviation of government institutions. I support voluntary alternatives to government services as much as I can and continue to encourage government institutions to reduce and eliminate their restrictions on our freedoms.
Does the US Have a Nazi Problem?
The level of the Nazi problem in the US is up to 2.5 (out of 10). 10 years ago it was around a 1.5 … so it is a very significant rise. The level of Nazi concern, vigilance and fear are at an 8.
They Keep Using That Phrase, “Net Neutrality”
As the FCC considers repealing the 2015 Net Neutrality rule, its supporters are desperate to associate bad things with its absence. So desperate that Demand Progress is advertising examples of Net Neutrality as violations of Net Neutrality.
Influences III
If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists — Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences who made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.
The Back Story 024 – The Secret Bank You Can’t Afford to Ignore (3m)
The Back Story 024 looks at the conspiratorial origins of the largest central bank in the world.
Xenophobia and Cultural Assimilation
No one has an obligation to “assimilate” into a different culture, regardless of what piece of dirt they happen to be standing on. People don’t acquire an obligation to wear what you wear, eat what you eat, speak the language you speak, and think what you think, just because they exist in close proximity to you.
Ripping Asunder and Incinerating Children
Collectivism is not only the greatest enemy of sound economic reasoning. It is even more so the greatest enemy of sound moral reasoning. Sad to say, I am trapped in a world in which such unsound — indeed, often monstrous — argumentation is more the rule than the exception. May God have mercy.