Proposal for a Curriculum and Assesment for Michael Gove.

It's a Long Question:

I don't want to be a 'leader' or a 'politician', yet I desire -  my very soul and body demands, craves, endures to experience - that the exercise of State Policy, that the operations and outcomes of State Policy - if there is to be a such an Institution as the State, (which remains a pertinent line of investigation at all times on matters like these and many others, as to it's validity) it must manifestly nurture all the people, and the environment within which we all live, which we share as biological equals, though vastly diverse. The evidence is real! It always is... painfully so.

In truth, I don't want anyone to be a 'politician', or a 'leader'.

I'd much rather support administrators who willingly, transparently, happily take on the various roles required and available within State Institutions, that they would exercise their chosen roles professionally, with joy, and if in stressful situations, behave calmly with a view to resolution, all guided by fluid and continuous policy and decision making directly from within the grass roots of Society, informed by expert advice as required as much as by common human empathy and kindness.

I'd be more than happy to support such a Nurturant structure. A Nurturant Society is my bag!

I see no impediment to such a happy state, other than the status quo, learned helplessness, and other stuff ... no need to list it all.

No impediment as such. because it is our biological mandate, it is a seriously ancient mandate,  a deeply biologically material basis, it is the expression of a proven biological asset, that lies at the roots of genuine democracy, which is nothing less than that more or less empathic, and therefore disciplined, mature, playful and adaptive self organizational processes of any given human society, family or community, or self motivated children playing and learning together, across all age groups, that lives the Biology of  Nurture Webs.

What we are getting is clearly not working. The History books are littered with much the same, just lower numbers... Their take, the official historians, on pre-history serves to distance us from our native ways through which we humans thrived prior to History... which is like .0001% or less of the time we have been around as human mammals.

So what do I do?

AHA!

Proposed Curriculum for Education Minister, Michael Gove...



A 6 month course.

Modular or Webbed/Networked.

No Further Ministerial work that changes anything or alters any Laws is to be carried out until course completed. Think of it as a Public Audition.

So openings and press briefings, speaking events, constituency work will all continue.... plus ceremonial duties... This keeps the study in context with the experience of many students who have to work ti supplement thier Education, which Gove's generation got for FREE! How nice for them!

All materials to support the students learning are to be freely provided, a reasonable concession and Student Gove may collaborate with other students, colleagues and any other relevant party.

Course Overview.

STUDY AND INTEGRATE THE CURRENT UNDERSTANDING IN THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING BY COMPLETING THE FOLLOWING TASKS.

- Work through the writings on Education, Children and Society of John Holt, Alice Miller, Paolo Friere, Ivan Illych, Colin Ward, : all about natural learning, the problems of the 'schooling' system that disrupts natural learning. Also demonstrates ways to recover and change. : TEST: a 10 minute video briefing on the over view of these writers, and their data.

- John Taylor Gatto, on The History of State Education : TEST : Create a large mural/wall chart of the History of State Education aas outlined by Gatto, as a mind map or along the lines of the RSA Animate projects, or in some other graphic manner.

- The Biology and Anthropology of Empathy - cutting edge Science: Write a 10,000 word essay on the current state of awareness and understanding and both academic and grass roots, the potential outcomes of the current state of awareness at the grass roots and in Governance, and examine what needs to be done to facilitate a widespread in-depth dissemination of that information such that it informs both the Public and Institutional Policy Making, and that it is seen as a key element that prioritizes according to the real needs of children as people, rather than workers in an 'economy'.  Include all references.

- Homeschooling, democratic schooling, anecdotal evidence, historical 'greats'.... : TEST: Conduct a Radio Interview with three leading exponents in each case, total length 30 minutes, including credits.

- Each TEST is a project. It will not be marked. There's no need. the candidates work will simply be left, archived as a public record of the candidates experience and outcomes.

It will be peer reviewed by the Nation, the Public....

A good result might get the guy a really, really decent job!

And a change in the outcomes for the current and future generations of children, and with that our entire Society.

I wish!



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

Syria, the failure of the Institution of The State. Does it have to be this way?

The system of States, Nation States as we know them,  as legislative entities, as ratifiers of International Treaties and as maintainers of both The Law and The Peace are abject failures. They make Laws yet they refuse to obey them, or ensure they are obeyed. They do no preventative work. It's a charade.

What is happening in Syria is so clearly immoral, illegal, horrific on all sides.

And it's getting worse.

However as 'it' - the actions of gun-men and of statesmen and biased 'reporting' - is politically motivated..

That makes a difference. It's justified.

Struggle for liberation. Defence of The State.

And the statesman and pundits will proclaim that one side is proven to be far more immoral than the other (which is the subtext that sells the war) and that's all that anyone needs to know or think about the matter.

No negotiation is what that means.

The rest is just business.

The idiot Statesmen, the absurd 'civil servants' send in the Israeli's on airstrikes, arm the rebels, and 'win' the war only in terms of ousting the legal and constitutional Administration, - the Objective - and again, the gun men will take over civil control, with 'democracy' no-where in sight, other than this kind of violence harms all of Syrian's people. It is nothing less than collective punishment by both sides, by all gun-men.

Change of gunmen. Privatise the gun-men. Job done. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Egypt. Same old, same old. There IS a pattern here.

This pattern suggest strongly that the current paradigm and actions of Governance are failures, because all of this is avoidable, preventable .... once might be accidental...
 

That fact that some aspects of Governance does do *some* good, in *some* places does not mitigate the impact, with regard to these patterns, which are continuing, upon lovely ordinary citizens, families, villages, etc etc who are  living where the gun-men are engaged in live fire street war with a State Army.

Imagine that kind of violence outside on your street? I shudder to imagine, to think on that. And I cannot turn from it and ignore it. It is more truth about Syria for me than anything written about it, or on the public record, or in Academia....

I feel that the Political State is a failure, and I am only saying this because it needs to be said. It is the way it is, and it is sad.

And please understand that it's not about the State, it's about that FAILURE. The impact.

It's even more about the lives of all those who die violently, who are injured and otherwise traumatised in these patterns, these cycles. The objective is that no such experience could be considered under any circumstance within the State system.

That's the only sane and honest objective. That then would determine how peace is approached.

The State infrastructure could of course be used for ensuring peace through negotiations, which is not impossible, if they are genuinely transparent, and include full participation of the people as a collective, local and national. A dream, perhaps?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Adverse Childhood Experiences present in both immediate behaviur, and long term illness later in life. Punishment does not work.;

Rather a long title, I know.

It's just that this has been rattling 'round my heart recently when I saw a brief article suggesting it's time to make emotional abuse a criminal offence, and the article avoided the subject of how to help parents break cycles of behaviour that are effectively institutionalised in our Society. Including coercive schooling.

And at the same time, I have to look at my own health, and observe the changing health of those older than I, as well as my peers, as it is emerging now I am in my 50s. For sure some of my behaviour - I smoke - is causing me some damage. There are also a number of visible behavioural issues, such as unreasonable anger I might find difficult to control at times, intense political rants at in appropriate moments,  shyness, telling dreadful jokes. 

There's a damaged knee from a fall long, long ago that was never diagnosed, my changing eyesight. 

These and other symptoms are all visible. My friends probably see them clearer than I do.

Q. Are there processes within my body that have been disrupted as a consequence of my earliest experiences such as caesarian birth, incubator baby etc etc.... events that I cannot recall?

This is a question that has been of interest to me for some time, and I have taken steps to explore and to a small degree deal with some of this. There's always more I could do.

As much as I might have expressed my pain, grief, anger and resolution at the time, I certainly have suppressed some of each in turn, buried it, stored it in my body somewhere.

We experience our lives, and if the earliest years are adverse, or there is trauma at any time, that experience is written into our bodies, our minds, our hearts and souls. So too the good stuff. Our response to those experiences can be external or internal. Resolution or just coping. Or enjoying.

It terms of 'just coping' here are two modes of presenting outcomes of a situation where the natural mandated experience are disrupted, over time.

Externalisation : the expression of distress outwards, presenting as anti-social behaviour, aggressiveness, non-compliant children, etc.... visually observable

Internalisation : the holding of that distress within the body, the distress goes inwards, as in one's boo-chemsitry is thrown out of balance as a result of adverse traumatising events, and coping means resolution does not happen, so the feelings of pain, fear, grief remain, stressing the body's systems, eventually presenting as as physical symptoms or a disease state that emerged over time ....usually invisible until the symptoms become noticeable, or cause pain, discomfort or organ failure.

Externalisation : punishment for 'bad behaviour, blame and sanctions.

Internalisation : medication, surgical intervention, suppression of symptoms, make the pain go away, complications and death due to some inherent weakness of patient not any inadequacy of treatment.

Object : to avoid discussing the source of the distress, which if carried out honestly, scientifically and logically would demand that certain Institutional Influences/Powers would have to abdicate, step aside, take the gold watch, retire or just go. Or accept the information and change accordingly, as a mature and psychologically healthy adult no doubt would do.

 1. In truth, ALL adults are parents, for parenting was never meant by biology to be a couple based process, let alone a working couple based process.

2. So we are where we are.....

3. I am looking at two sets of symptoms of distress or trauma, one's that emerge at the time and are visible, and as such, provide a useful starting point for a resolution of the distress or trauma.

3.a Others, less visible, emerge many years later, often as disease states, some of them life threatening, all life debilitating to some degree.

4. A little empathy towards children would go a long, long way to reducing the NHS annual budget on a wide range of conditions.

4.a The use of punishment to control the child, which Institutional Society accepts as necessary. and standard parenting jealously guards as a 'right'. Indeed as corporal punishment was outlawed in public schooling, it was replaced with psychological behavioural modification punishment through highly structured, target based educational processes which stress both teacher and child.

4.b The widespread practice of medication to suppress disease or ill-health symptoms are both qualified with 'it's for your own good'. They are linked.

4.c Psychology, dysfunctional or functional always seeks congruence throughout.

5. The science : The Adverse Childhood Experience Life Survey http://www.cdc.gov/ace/year.htm in brief... there is much, much more solid science on all this, and it all points towards a biological mandate towards empathy, and self empathy as an expression of optimal human health.

6. A good doctor is always trying to ensure he is not needed. Prevention ought be the primary concern of any public health system, the primary drive of any decent physician.

7. I have heard that there is some political movement towards criminalising emotional abuse expressed towards children by parents, and other primary carers. It sounds like punishment..... which we know does not work.

In this, prevention is surely the most important aspect to be concerned with, by a long margin.

Most parents follow the parenting 'style' that Institutional Society suggests, the ideal of the 'normal parent', and most parents will also, as a basic biological process repeat with their own children aspects of their earliest learnings and experiences, much of it unconsciously, because in the biology, the child grows into the psychological state of the parents, and of their world, which in our case is very largely defined by Institutional Power, through Governance, Wars, Economics, Ideology and Religion, and the defenceless child must adapt to that psychology as best he or she can, and some adaptations, or survival strategies the emerge in that situation become 'dysfunctional' psychological and behavioural patterns, many of which are damaging in the long term if they are maintained.

The child cannot be held responsible, and the adult must be held accountable; though within each adult is a child. wounded, fearful, surviving. So the psychology that determined that child's environmental habitat is also linked to the Institutional structure's psychology, and it's behaviours as much as it is linked to the individual parents.

Both share responsibility. Punishment is often a means to an end: one party can avoid it's responsibility in the matter.

That an adult CAN see the harm they could be or are causing, ought to be enough for that adult to choose to stop harming action. That choice is always there, no matter what the person might say.....  no matter who they are, whether they stride across the corridors of power or walk the streets.

So there's this element of choice or will, and of past psychological conditioning, stressful situations predicated by the way Power expresses itself throughout Society, resulting in presenting behaviour that is harmful, and both past and present must be understood and worked with, including incarceration as containment (not as punishment) where the danger to any other person or child is real, and with the clearest intent and mandate to resolve each case, and to prevent future occurrences, through honest education, and practical support, aiming to reduce the incidences across society over time.

Clearly, current punishment paradigms, current consumerist ideology, current understanding of what Governance means in practice, is all working against this potential pathway.

That does not diminish the value of this approach. It enhances it.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

What is Natural?

Every creature. eats, shits, and dies. and in all three processes materials are passed on to nurture more life for all life. That is nature.

Mome creatures when abused or stressed abuse or stress others. That's natural.

Most creatures, when treated well, will not do this. That's natural.

Some people think Dominant Industrial Culture is superior to nature. That's un-natural.

Some people think the costs born by those who are bombed, whose lands are degraded, whose cultures are made extinct are 'worth it'. That's un-natural.

Some people know that the Dominant Industrial Culture is toxic. That's natural.

Some people ignore that fact, due to conditioned self alienation, insecurity and adverse psychology. That's natural.

The Dominant Industrial Culture cannot metabolise it's effluents. That is un-natural.

The effluents of all other living process can be metabolised by natural processes. That's natural.

We have the choice to metabolise the adverse affects of our experience and conditioning and to make compost of those that nurtures life from the outputs. Or not.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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