Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

bought a baseball today with the following warning: "for recreational use only."

A post about how the Universe answers my questions.

So, while I was browsing through various links friends had posted on Facebook, I came across an article (from 2000 written by Jerry Mintz) talking about homeschooling & unschooling cooperatives, learning centers and so on. He mentions a private school that is really a community in Texas where the students & teachers live together. I posted a link to this article to the Facebook crowd with a plea for information about the community in Texas that Jerry mentioned. Currently, no one has said that they know anything about this community.

I posted that on Monday night.

I went grocery shopping on Monday afternoon. While at the co-op, I glanced over and saw the magazine Communities. It was the Spring edition and the focus was on Family & Raising Children in Intentional Communities. I have to admit that I scoffed at the price, but was compelled by the Universe to purchase it.

I finally finished reading it last night and there towards the back, where the ‘Letters’ section was continued, was a short letter from Jerry Mintz (who BTW is the director of AERO, in case you were wondering). Jerry basically asks why it seems that children’s education is usually so low on the list of priorities for intentional communities, something that I’ve wondered myself. I’ve also wondered why many of the communities that do address education for children seem to insist that it either happens outside of the community OR that it happens at the school that the community has established. AND by school, I mean, it usually amounts to a school…not as terrible as most of us have endured, but rarely are they democratic or egalitarian (which is terribly funny when so many communities with this issue ARE democratic or egalitarian! Compulsory education is neither democratic nor egalitarian!) and though they might be freer and looser than a traditional public/private school, they aren’t Free (Free as in Liberty, not Free as in beer) and Unschooling seems to be a foreign concept.

Jerry goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why groups of homeschoolers haven’t gotten together and started intentional communities. Good questions, right? He says he only knows of one of these communities and then (Eureka!) he also mentions Greenbriar School in Texas! This would be the school in the article above that I wanted to know about! Well, they’re website is not very informative, but I suppose that’s why they list contact information!

No, I don’t want to move to Texas and no, I don’t want to enroll my son in a school run by an intentional community, but I DO want to make more of an effort to build a community of fellow Unschooling families up around us. I DO want to find more people who are willing and wanting to start an intentional community with families who are Unschooling or those families needing the extra support of a physical community to make the transition to Unschooling. I DO like the idea of living in a community where everyone is in the same book, if not on the same page, with each other’s philosophy of children and living in Freedom and Harmony with them.

I know White Hawk Ecovillage has a couple Unschooling families, but the aim of the community is not to gather up Unschooling families.

There is the blog that asks the question about an Unschooling community.

On Radical Unschoolers Network, there’s the group that stemmed from the blog and there’s always ‘talk’ by people who want a community on the forums there.

Maybe there are communities out there that for some reason don’t have a huge-ass banner announcing themselves. Well, please, start little. Start here and leave a link to your community that already exists and embraces Life Learning children.

If you are wanting to relocate to a community or have ideas for when/how/where for community, please leave your idea here or a link to your idea here.

And if you happen to be in or around Pittsburgh, PA and have been living under a rock…crawl out, leave a comment and let’s get together!

Peace & Love
Michele

If you are coming to this via Facebook, feel free to leave your comment in both places.

sometimes with regard to the catholic priests/altarboys it's said that, you know, the frequency of pederasty among the priesthood is probably similar to that of the general population. um. horseshit. it seems to be everywhere, all the time. one would have to think that really there was an informal practice what we call child sexual abuse in the church: that this was a conventional practice, perhaps even to be encouraged as an aid to...celibacy, especially as a screaming misogynist might understand it: the real degradation is to touch a woman. i bet there are documents of this, going back centuries, only you can't subpoena the vatican, you know?

then again, as i've said many times, you can see that someone who views their own sexuality as horrendously sinful - especially self-loathing gay men in societies of extreme homophobia - would want to make a vow of celibacy. and then of course like most of us when we swear off sex such people are not able to keep that vow. now sex with boys might actually be proposed as a necessary outlet, a way to keep people in the priesthood.

i would say that if you haven't learned this lesson before now, you should let this teach you to stop being a catholic. or anyway be one only in the very attenuated sense in which you repudiate the authority of the human hierarchy of the church entirely. now that you can't exactly be a catholic and do that should teach you something...

Discussions ranged from whether President Ronald Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).

Of particular contention was the requirement that lessons on McCarthyism note that "the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government."

The Venona papers document communication between the Soviet Union and its spies. Historians dispute the extent to which transcripts show Soviet involvement in American government.

Also contentious were changes that asserted Christian faith of the founding fathers. Historians say that the founding fathers had a variety of approaches to religion and faith; some, like Thomas Jefferson, were quite secular.

now henry, i wouldn't think that the assertion that hip hop should not be taught as part of a lesson on american culture or that jeff davis's inaugural address should be included or that reagan should get more space are false, exactly. it would be perfectly possible to emphasize the christian faith of adams, for example, while de-emphasizing jeff's deism etc. this is not a series of false assertions; but rather, at worst, distortions of emphasis, like george washington carver's box. it ain't that easy!

the tx reactionary curriculum controversy will seem less dire if you ditch the basic delusions that: children are perfectly plastic and curricula make them what they are; that history at any level consists of a reciting of uncontroversial facts; that people remember what they learn in school; that history textbooks hold anyone's attention; that children agree with whatever they're told. such things are the nightmarish platitudes of those - starting with plato - who hold that we can transform the word by re-engineering a generation. the efficacy, and even the possibility, of education strike me as profoundly questionable. so i'm chill!

you also might think about this as the opposite number of a thousand pc interventions: the kind that got george washington carver or somebody's wifey their own shaded box. now, if you think that it's legit for leftists to re-write history books to reflect their contemporary ideas about social justice, you need to expect a backlash and also that everyone will play the same game. i think a lot of people would view a fundamental purpose of education as mobilizing the coming generation against global warming. you can call that science if you like, but it's also activism of the kind that's everywhere in school textbooks. i don't know: teach whatever the hell you like.

i wouldn't mind my kids getting taught by a creationist or a global-warming denialist or a mccarthyite. i better not mind, since really they're already getting indoctrinated - insofar as such a thing is possible - with a million things i disagree with. they are taught under the universal presumption, for example, that government has legitimacy and is based on some sort of social contract etc. not only are these views with which i disagree, they are views which i have literally demonstrated to be false, and which, to boot, reflect a groveling capitulation, a global failure of personality. even children have to think. now teaching them to think is just more of the same: teaching them to agree. so i say: tell old pharoah, let my babies go.

i am not a skeptic. quite the reverse, i guess, unless the reverse is dogmatism. rather i am pluralist as regards knowledge. i do not think there is a single technique, method, procedure, style or even a small group of them, that exclusively or invariably leads to knowledge. i say that whatever way you reach the truth (which i believe is out there; indeed that it is precisely as common as dirt) is a good way. for example, some subject-matters at some moments suggest or require science; others require sudden flashes of intuition or improvisational riffing to uncover. i actually think that teaching ought not to be scientifically studied (and that in some sense it cannot be). it is a human relationship and has to be processed or accounted for in a way that is in keeping with its actual subject-matter.

to take another example: i propose that aesthetic qualities (beauty, for example) can be the subject of perfectly true-or-false utterances: perhaps judgments of beauty are no more subjective than judgments abbout weight. but that doesn't mean they are quantifiable or that you need the same epistemic procedures to uncover and describe them. that there is one way to reach the truth (the alleged method of "science" for example) is itself an a priori metaphysical structure into which you're trying to jam the world. wait and see what works or what sheds light or what makes sense or what compels assent.

hey i just want to briefly thank henry for participating, and for consistently representing a different point of view here, over a period of years. usually we all gravitate to people who confirm what we believe: part of the problem of contemporary american political discourse. henry does better!

actually, there are cases where i would defer to expertise, especially if i didn't care very much how it turns out. but one might point out that expert opinion now on education is more or less the opposite of what it was thirty years ago, and will reverse again, no doubt. and one thing to keep in mind about experts: they are less critical and more unanimous than an average population: their status of experts is in part defined by their agreement with one another. they are more subject to irrational fads than the average illiterate peasant, for example.

the nyt argues with regard to texas that curricula shouldn't be politicized and should be left to teachers and experts (really? teachers? somehow i don't feel they are sincere about that); the expert thing is more or less their view of every issue of course. but of course this is disingenuous, and if teachers and experts were recommending, e.g., a more positive portrayal of conservatism or having second thoughts about darwinism, they'd be calling for democracy. (by definition, of course, no expert could endorse a more positive portrayal of conservatism.) let's say that you're setting and enforcing standards in a school system through the use of taxpayer money. then according to our system of government, the taxpayers ought to be setting the curriculum. in other words, you need to get rid either of the public school system or the democracy to do what the nyt thinks (at this moment) ought to be done.

if the state government of texas, or more relevantly at the moment the federal government, is going to set standards for curriculum then they are going to be, and should be, subject to political adjudication.