One's issues are a constant travelling companion, until they are dealt with!

I abhor war, not because I love peace, which is true; I do.

I abhor war because it causes hurt, harm and pain. All of these I understand in a visceral manner, a sensation, and in experience. I would not want to inflict such sensations and experiences on any other, any more than I’d wish to experience them myself.

My response to war is REAL - based on the lived experience - rather than a merely intellectual or moral objection.

It's rather sobering to think that there are so many 'good people' in the Governing Structures of Power who, for whatever reason, set this aside and implement Policy. It is also very, very sad. Tragic.

Because, war is always avoidable. After all Human Behaviour is learned, it is not set in stone.

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No war has ever happened on it's own. All occur in a context. The straight media twaddle and mythological school history - the extent of most peoples understanding of history, as an intentional and successful outcome of state education - ignores both the truth and the context and reject any observation of the pattern. Once the context is accepted, understood, then the justifications become obvious lies.

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The amount spent on State Education is huge, and it's a very large part of the standard state economy. The state has a huge interest in maintaining that economy, as a form of leverage, because if one's job (and mortgage or debt burden) is dependent on that income from that state education job, one is unlikely to challenge instruction sets handed down from Government. That's what keeps much of the system in place. More than my job's worth.

State Education is designed intentionally to undermine our innate independent critical thinking and questioning, - quite often, when an infant says why? they have already worked it out, and are merely checking in to see of the adult has also worked it out or genuinely seeking accurate information: this is natural behaviour - and this it does for the vast majority of people.

In other words, war would not be feasible (neither would Bank Bail outs, etc) without State Education as it is : a well informed, well educate, critical thinking population would NEVER vote for the kinds of people currently in Power, would NEVER accept the actions those in Power are taking, day in, day out, and would easily curtail their behaviour: General Strike. Tools Down. Game Over. Start again.

The people who have been so conditioned are not to be blamed for their being misinformed, lied to, or for being bored shitless by school, or worse demonised (ADHD, special needs, disruptive), and for giving up on sharing their exploration, insights and thinking.

They are to be helped. To be 'educated' again to think again for themselves, to lose their fear, to trust their insights, the loss of which was inculcated in so many little 'gradings' - fail, bad, poor, good, excellent, outstanding -throughout 12 years or so of schooling. Repetition, drip, drip, drip, drip ... a technique, a method: to break the spirit and reform the child into a suitable behaviourally modified citizen and voter. Calling these folk names will not help the work we are engaged in.

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Anything that 'disturbs' the balance of Power - the differential between those who hold power and those over whom power is held - is either co-opted (Cosmopolitan 'Feminism') (Bank Bail-outs) (United Nations) or demonised (Radical Feminism) (Austerity Programs demonise the poor) (Peace 'Protestors').

Just as the Vatican co-opts 'healing' of Survivors, by providing 'services based in Christianity' and demonises those Survivors who pursue Justice and Reparation and change.

This is because the holders of Power cannot afford honesty - it undermines their position, which they hold as being more important than other peoples lives. They are the Institutionalised individualists, the ME ME ME people, 'vote for ME' : the policies are merely a cover.

This is due to both their personal psychological dysfunction, and the Institutionalised and Bureaucratic nature of Power, which seeks to preserve itself above all else.

Enlightened Self-interest is also a make believe philosophy, an excuse, a mitigation of the realities of Power, a meme that disguises itself, not least to the person that holds such a perspective.

A genuinely enlightened human being retains their individuality AND their place in community as equal drives, each informing the other in a continuous feed back loop which allows for growth, exploration and learning.

Note I did not say 'the community' for the sense of community has to be inclusive of all human beings - and all biological communities - for it to be genuine, for it to reflect the biological realities.

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The healing of a dysfunctional family dynamic is dependent upon the people in the family recognising their dysfunction and choosing to do something about it.

The healing of a dysfunctional state is dependent upon the agents of the state recognising their dysfunction and choosing to do something about it.

As voters, the electorate are agents of the state.

As Tax-payers, we are all agents of the state.

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One's issues are a constant travelling companion, until they are dealt with!

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The State is a mirror of the psychology of the people who control and design it. Only when the State is designed and controlled by a well informed, rational and empathic people will the State become a structure that Nurtures life. This is our task. To render the State as Nature intended, in effect to make the State redundant. The same applies to all Hierarchical Social Structures that mediate Power.

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Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Gove, Immaturity and some truth.

Some definitions and logic. 

Autonomy, self directed = An emergent sense of self,  a learning process, maturation through honesty and direct experience, necessary for any functioning egalitarian culture.

Hierarchy, directed by = a given sense of self, directing the directed, avoidance of honest insight, alienation from natural self, training, inhibited maturation, remains juvenile, seeks leadership, essential for a hierarchy culture.

A commentator wrote that I was an ‘idealist’, suggesting that I was “living for an unattainable and slightly fluffy silly dream, missing out on real life!”

It’s been a regular comment on my attitudes for most of my life, and today I have finally come to the conclusion that they are all very much mistaken. Possibly even hallucinating.

Micheal Gove is definitely hallucination inducing. Mind boggling.

I find it difficult to listen to his patter, his script. Nonetheless I did. He is an assured performer, he is. You can watch him on The Andrew Marr Show, on the BBC. From 40 minutes and 50 seconds onwards.

But every now and again......

Apparently his first attempt at reform in Education was to give more powers to teachers to exercise power in the classroom to punish and thus control the children better, which he found couldn't be made workable, so then  he turned his attention to the national curriculum and 'accountability'.

"Corporal Punishment wasn't accepted, So we went for (psychological controls by)  reverting to rote learning, disguising it as 'proper history' etc...." is how I read it. He was campaigning for more physical force powers for teachers prior to the election, and afterwards.

In other words Michael Gove is continuing a long held conservative objective, through their control of 'state education', of ensuring that the people are educated to know and adhere to their places in Society. A well controlled class room is the essential training for later life. Order will be imposed.  Imposing order is for your own good. (when in fact it is all about the 'welfare' of those imposing order..)

It's also true that what is currently being 'banked', deposited into our children's brains and psyches, throughout all of Compulsory State Education is not that much use beyond moving onto the next academic step, contains a lot of falsehoods and misleading content and that many of the practices accepted as normal within Compulsory State Education are anti-democratic in nature... children are made powerless, disenfranchised within Compulsory State Educational Systems as we know them.So much for Educational Reform. It's pointless.

After 150 years of Compulsory State Education, we still have employment issues, we still have war and we still have those flag waving maniacs, those many millions who learned to identify with the Nation/State, and accept it all, and participate. All of those people are 'products', outcomes of the conditioning  aka Education system.

Which is what immature men who have their hands on immense social power really like, I guess. To see their plans work. Their 'ideal' is my horror story. I am not alone in this.

The fact that adverse Power has the ascendency at this point in time does nothing to alter the case, and never will.

Our human baseline or healthy default or biological mandate is empathy, co-operation and nurturing..

Truth is the social material experienced reality.

The concept that the human child contains an innate disruptive nature that must be quashed (or evil/social breakdown will break lose) is an ideal. It's essential, central to a cultural ideology which justifies coercive 'education'. Which projects itself onto the natural world.  A culture which wages war as it's normal behaviour will project it's filter onto the natural world. It is the way they see it, filtered by the habituation to bullying.

The Science (and what so many mothers have, in spite of being told otherwise, felt as natural common-sense) is clear; children and their mothers are biologically mandated towards empathy and co-operation, towards nurturing. This is the biological base-line of health. And they need appropriate nurturing experience and environment for this base line to fully mature as the child grows.

Ideal or Biology?

I'm more of a base-liner, when it comes to children and their welfare... if you will, the bottom line here is happy, self directed, autnomous, co-operative, creative, unique and diverse children who happily co-operate and nurture the world they find themselves in. 

It's not something to attain, not a future evolutionary progression. It's biology calling!

" respect any parent out there trying the best for their kids! I don't think there are any easy overall rights and wrongs in" That's important to remember... this is NOT about torturing parents, it is about questioning 'standard practice' with curiosity and exploration.

There are however genuine biologically mandated experiences that promote self determination, self empathy and an ability to resist/ respond affirmatively to coercion and manipulation which our Society as whole disrupts.

A well informed and supported parent is the outcome I seek. A Society that does this, that recognises the centrality of children’s welfare as a guiding principal, that encourages and supports natural empathic parent and genuinely democratic education especially when it is grass roots organised, that seeks to nurture life for all life.

That is the Society which I would most I want to give to my children's children.

And we all have work to do.

Until we have culture of honesty, until we acknowledge the adverse internalization processes we have gone through, as we survived the harms inherent in how our Society treats children as the 'norm' it is, many, many wounded people walk in silence and pain because we as collectives, and as individuals, will most often refuse to face the truth, maybe because it terrifies us and because we want to feel strong.... It IS personal.

Sometimes being wounded, frightened means we mask our true needs and feelings, and act in ways we don’t much enjoy or like.

A useful, and empathic key to understanding what a victim/survivor is experiencing, at any stage of their life, is in understanding how the loss of autonomy inherent in abuse, an innate autonomy which IS biologically mandated, affects the person.

Each persons experience is unique, and there are some patterns, some constants….  They are not the whole of the matter.

Care must be taken not to stereotype, but to hold awareness of that context of uniqueness, of the human, the person and understand that the reactions, responses and outcomes will vary in degree.

It represents a profound loss of Self-Agency, which if one has 'adapted to' is all the more difficult to resolve. That adaptation is a coping mechanism, a survival strategy. In as much as it precludes the utter despair, utter resignation and powerlessness that leads to violence, self harm or the ending of all possible resolution or recovery, by whatever means - it is a valuable part of our experience.

And at the same time, of course the empathic approach would be to help, to nurture, to support and to heal, rather than to coerce that person into some prescribed remedial action, for that merely repeats or reinforces that loss of self agency, that sense of powerlessness…. why is that not at the heart of 'Social Services practice?

Which is probably not that great, for one’s immune system.

A hint of judgementalism or careless stereotyping in addressing these kinds of issues creeps in quite often in the general and media discourse. You know, sound bites. Not enough information news! NEIN! No!

I am conscious of what one single experience, one story, one life might feel like. I see war and I see a much worse situation and experience, multiplied, over and over and over, again and again. This is horrific and cannot be avoided. This is what motivates me, my outrage and horror and despair that the System into which I was born does this, it is no accident.

War has never stopped. Indeed, ‘Peace is more than the Absence of War’. Much more.  The abuse of children, a wide ranging spectrum of mistreatment and coercion, must also end. For there the roots of violence are.

It’s only an ideal that holds that abuse of children in place.

The truth will set us all free.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

The Corruption of The Curriculum.

I read this rather clear and yet short piece, on the 'corruption of the curriculum' and it's a damning indictment of Educational policy and tinkering with teaching practice, learning 'styles' and course content.

It states the following :

 "The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students."

The article then outlines in concise language some of the 'corruptions' and their adverse effects.

The describe 'educational apartheid' (subjects excluded for some students based on income and class), 'history without dates' (without a coherent narrative), a policy of behavioural change that reduces

It's well worth a read, and I would like to put it in context, "join-the-dots" so to speak. To go further. To clarify.

After all, it was issued by Civitas, who are pretty much a right wing think tank, and why would I be impressed by what ever spewed forth from such an establishment. So I gotta put that right. I am not at all impressed, because the article itself is tinkering, and while it makes a critique that has some substance, it fails (as intended) to set things in context.

Has anyone mentioned to you that it is known, and proven, that State Education was initially instigated by intensive and long-term lobbying from business? 

"Perhaps the greatest of school's illusions is that the institution was launched by a group of kindly men and women who wanted to help the children of ordinary families—to level the playing field, so to speak."

It was of course,  presented as philanthropy,  the trojan horse of modern social engineering effected by the use of wealth, by stealth. And yes some people really did believe they were genuine seeking to help others and to help 'mankind'.

In fact there was close to a century of lobbying at  local, national and international levels of Industrial Society, and a huge, vast amount of money was spent over that time in this project to introduce Compulsion Schooling for all children.

"The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

	Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...
	Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...

The primary driver was of this project was the power and control of business, mostly the coal business, which with coal being the first fossil fuel, has a certain resonance with corporate power play within Governance by the petroleum industry. that we know today ... the coal and steel business was or became the central power in 'Civilisation' and one of the most aggressive in terms of 'expansion' (globalisation) and in terms of infiltrating Governance. The project to compel all children into education started in the 1750s.

And what has happened is that for a while it worked, as all training does, then some people started to see through the system, and found ways to use it as the basis for real learning outside the system, and began to resist the indoctrination and worse, actively self organise.

Power cannot allow that. For two reasons.

!. To many power players is dangerous if they are all equals.  There has to be manageable limits.

2. "If some 'poor' people learn to do what we are doing, we are out of business. So let us 'educate' them such that they cannot really learn, but can remember what they have been told, and they'll confuse memorising for learning. And we will set the psychological limit within the education SYSTEM, the systemic process does the work, not merely the curriculum."

The curriculum can be tinkered with, both by Power and by those Power allows, within limits and under their watchful eyes.

The article I quoted is complaining about the tinkering, and not the system. It prefers the 'traditional tinkering'. That's as far as it goes.

Not impressive.

The SYSTEM must  remain, even as it's façade is ever changing as either genuine empathic understanding emerges (they can't fool all the people all of the time) which Power will always seek to co-opt, by systematising whatever emerges organically, thus neutering any potential threat to Power it might represent.

Any right winger knows this. Well,the ones who dictate policy. Who ever they are..

This is partly why John Taylor Gatto says we must disestablish the SYSTEM, retaining the infrastructure and applying and modifying those infrastructure so that they can be used as places of self motivated learning, where the full person is allowed to grow, as such to truly meet the needs of the children, and indeed of all of us, as natural learners.

"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

Self motivated, self organised. Self Governing. Common Sense. Biologically mandated.

The article is a brief overview of a book, by Frank Furedi...

'The Corruption of the Curriculum' by Frank Furedi, Shirley Lawes, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, David Perks and Alex Standish is published by Civitas, 77 Great Peter Street, London SW1P 2EZ

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe