TED Community » Dan Conine

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An idea worth spreading

Net Future Usefulness is necessary for any species to survive.
Reduction of consumption is much easier than trying to increase production to make up for waste.

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Problems that you have tried to get solved by other people.

People don't know that I'm good at

Seeing the truth.

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• +1

  A comment on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  May 12 2013: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2007/04/a_feral_dog_how.html
  
  It is time to close America's universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. American universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.
  -- Fred Reed, American expatriate writer and "equal-opportunity irritant"

• A reply on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  May 12 2013: I see you read the whole thing I wrote..... sigh.
  The point is that we are already making the choice for everyone: they are forced into an education system that pushes more education as the lofty goal of the education system. It is not a system that evaluates the needs of our future based on real world needs. It tries to find a slot within the intellectual money-grubbing system for every person, and if they can't afford it, the system creates a way to coerce them into debt to pay for it, all because the basic premise of "success" is based on harvesting children from the place they are born and selling them as "professionals" to the highest bidders.
  Meanwhile, no school counselor encourages a kid with a high test score to become a plumber or farmer or machinist or ditch digger, but we need smart plumbers, farmers and ditch diggers just as much as we need smart physicists.
  This has created a huge disparity between the classes of people, and a delusion that there is such a thing as a middle class. The reality is that we have two classes of people: those who exploit and those who are exploited. The culture (media, for any other word) encourages everyone to strive toward the exploiting class, but in reality, that striving is the key to suckering them into working for someone else. The intellectual group in our society should be telling us about this, but instead it spends its time making excuses for the behavior of the exploiters, telling us all how we can either take advantage of the system (through their classrooms, of course) or how we can "rebel" as "activists" that are basically powerless without the money involved in the exploiting/extractive processes.
  I do not presume to choose FOR people, but to explain that We Don't Need Them: they need us. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Carpenter1102.htm

• A reply on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  May 12 2013: Point taken. I guess my point was that there are too many lawyers involved in the process and not enough teachers. There really needs to be a lot more brain research and behavior research use, but at the same time less of it. What I mean is that human beings are habitual creatures, not intentional ones. Most of the educational 'reforms' are based on people making choices intentionally and thoughtfully, and students are approached with the same specialized view as your teachers with individual subject matter. While I have a preference for using data, I know that I make choices by emotion and habit. Education needs to steal the power away from Madison Avenue: use the psychological techniques developed by religions and marketing professionals to form habits in children, rather than trying to "convince" them and their parents to try and live according to conscious choices. Research shows that humans can only make a couple of hard choices a day and then that function is pretty much depleted for the day. Trying to live intentionally all of the time makes us insane. Trying to teach children to do so with the modern system of education makes them robots at the mercy of our emotional nature. This isn't easy. It requires a complete cultural reform, not just education. It means ending the belief that we can just buy better educations or comfortable lives, and the destructive behaviors that come with trying to get the money to do so.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  May 12 2013: What if a thriving human mind isn't necessarily the goal we should seek? I will grant that SOME should be pursuing education with all the gusto they can, but as a rule, we also need people who are skilled at showing up for work and laboring without too much thought. Sometimes they are interchangeable, and a thinking person will take a day labor job to have time to think, but the system that conforms to a consumer economy, a corporatocracy, and mindless beliefs is no system at all and we would be better off without it.
  Humanism isn't necessarily a good thing when it leads to consuming our future waiting for The Next Big Thing to create even more humans. Any farmer knows you don't keep adding cows to the farm when you don't have enough acreage to feed them all.
  Meanwhile, our education system teaches us to serve humanity's extractive processes at the expense of everything else, rather than teaching people to serve everything else because humans are dependent on it.
  Childhood's End means letting go of selfish behaviors and ignorant prejudices. The foremost ignorant prejudice is that humans are more important than the world that birthed them: a prejudice based on the perpetual education of children with fears of Hell and fantasies of Heaven, and these teaching tools are even more prevalent and anti-creative than anything formal institutions will come up with.

• A reply on Talk: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

  May 12 2013: Unfortunately, the testing is applied to students rather than the teachers. In addition, there are other ways to document incompetence: like evaluations by staff and school boards. Unfortunately, the lawyers that the teachers' unions can afford are much better paid than the lawyers that the average school can afford.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim

  Apr 6 2013: Small campaign finance/redistribution is the other side of the corruption coin. The face of it, however, is that the rich get richer because the masses buy their stuff and work for them. One dollar, one vote.
  In order to really defeat the corruption of the culture, we have to address the culture of consumerism for what it is: it's the sacrificing of individual responsibility (even to grow and prepare our own food) in exchange for the 'safety' and 'security' of having someone else do it for us.
  This is also the root of your climate problems.
  The means to address it is to install a feedback mechanism that puts the real costs of every purchase at the deciding point: the cash registers. That means replacing the corrupt income tax with a sales tax. I like the FairTax (but raise the rate and the prebate until the air and water are clean and everyone can eat). Without a feedback mechanism, any machinery will end up open-loop or dependent on morality, which is automatically a failure.

• A comment on Talk: Allan Savory: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change

  Mar 11 2013: If we moved everyone out of the cities and made them grow their own food, the problem would also be solved: because we wouldn't have so many people anymore.

• A reply on Conversation: Colin Powell

  Jan 31 2013: Mark, I agree with your cynicism on this. Mostly because the problem isn't money or the intentional psychology assumption which throws blame at people for being "irresponsible". The real problem is that people are no longer considered valuable by themselves or their 'leaders' except as fodder for the money-based system. Each child is tested and categorized as to whether they are going to contribute to the well-trodden path of production toward someone else's profit, and if they don't see a good chance that they will share in those profits, they resign themselves to a life of mindless roboticism or rebellion and incarceration/wage slavery. We look at immigrants AND ours neighbors as people who are going to compete with us for a few morsels of handouts from the gods of capitalism, rather than looking at each other as potentially useful hands and brains that can carve a future out of raw earth and living wilderness. It is a systemic, cultural problem, not one of specific amounts of money (the statistics may give jobs to academia, but political decisions aren't made based on those statistics: they are made based on bribery from the flow of money). Will more discipline help people think of themselves as connected and valuable? Perhaps, but over the long term there needs to be structure based on real living needs and the skills and resources to meet those needs locally and cooperatively, rather than setting up false competition among children for the metered dispensation of necessities by corporations OR government.

• A reply on Conversation: Colin Powell

  Jan 31 2013: I was thinking about what you said, Shawki. "Young people instinctively look for the cohesion that allow them to become functional members of the society."
  In the context of the rural Midwest schools I'm more familiar with, that means that they work to become functional members of the group that is their has-been high school football star parents and their disappointed cheerleader/cosmetician wives. Academic-oriented teachers and the 'education' system groom the best and brightest to leave town for urban and suburban lifestyles, but nobody encourages the best and brightest to become the best and brightest parents, farmers, plumbers, and truck drivers.

• A reply on Conversation: Colin Powell

  Jan 28 2013: Doug Rushkoff's book "Life, Inc." shows us that our culture has turned everyone into a corporation: making decisions by adding or subtracting numbers on a spreadsheet.
  The "value" of anything in this culture is based on price (belief in the Invisible Hand), not usefulness. Prices are kept high on commodities by making them scarce; by accumulating resources and keeping them away from those who need them or could make use of them to build common (community) futures or put those resources back into nature, thus becoming part of their children's future.
  When it comes to children or adults, what gives them true confidence and value is their ability to directly contribute to their own needs, and to know they have the resources and skills to do so. Everything about current American culture is purposely designed to separate them from their own future, and to use debt to enslave them to money. I find it surprising that we have allowed this to happen to the general population even after we saw it happen to farmers over many decades (extracting the value from land by increasing debts and demands until the individual farmer is no longer a viable option).
  I apologize for my cynicism. The Invisible Hand is my White Whale (sigh).