And thank you Mr. Parker for quoting Stephen Jay Gould whose writings I did indeed have in mind when pantsing Mr. Duncan.

I sympathize with the commentator who wants reporters to have a "honeymoon" with the President-to-be. Unfortunately, as they say in Texas, "We been kissed but we ain't been loved."

That Dumbhead ruined our highschool in my junior year [I went to King High School, yeah on 44th] 90% of us showed up to school for lunch, not that we were hungry, it was about socializing, the teachers and everyone else made it perfectly clear that they would rather call in sick than teach us anything, or have any teacher fired who attempted to teach us [which happened more than once]. Then someone would kindly pull the fire alarm and we all went home. One day my best friend felt guilty about it, so we went back to the school to attend the last two classes of the day, the science teacher was shocked and frightened, he was sure everyone had gone home, we really felt bad about waking him up, he assured us it was alright and he let us play on the internet while he finished his nap[dont get me wrong, he was a very nice teacher from whom I learned..stuff that I dont remember].

I really get sick of those people who went to schools like Whitney Young, it and the few others like it are held up as an example, like they compare to anything [yeah right] while the rest of us sit in music rooms, passing around violins because we will never get the funding to have actual supplies. Meanwhile our school would literally get threatened if our scores get too high, when we do well we were punished.

The only reason why I can function is because my mom taught me at home, Plato's Republic and the fact that it is slavery with a smile never comes up at school, we were taught to the test PERIOD and thats why the majority of the children FAIL. I always tested 3-4 grades higher than the grade assigned, i'm not smart I was just PARTLY homeschooled.

Unions are not the problem, the goal is the problem, Obama's children are being given the education of the guardian class, thats why he has to get them in as soon as possible, they learn, like i did, with unscheduled time, play and curiosity driven motives, my mom didnt tell me to read chaucer she just put it in our playroom with our lego's and read us. Animal farm as a bedtime story, im not talking about big money, she was a single mother on welfare. At this point all three of her children have gone to college and the youngest is nearly done with his first year's flight training.

We are average, but we would be in BAD SHAPE if my parent had for ONE HOT SECOND expected the teachers who put their own kids in private school to teach hers anything. She considered putting us in the Lab School, but she could not afford it, so she just duplicated the method at home, our teachers were always impressed, curious and annoyed by the fact that the child who started school right before the Iowa testing began scored in the top 5%. She caught hell for it too.

My suggestion is if you have a child and live in chicago, TEACH THEM AT HOME, go to the library every day and let them check out any book they want, take them to the museum and let them explore within limits, have blank books around as toys and plenty of adventure stories to read, NEVER EVER trust the "deliberate dumbing down" system to teach you anything.

Look up John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt

Thank you Greg Palast for telling the truth, one rotten politician at a time!

Responsibility and authority must reside in the classroom with the teacher. As a student in the fifties and sixties, I saw that each teacher was god in the class room, who we feared, respected and wanted to perform well for. The principal only intervened when a student just did not get the big picture.

The only caveat here is that those teachers knew their subject matter, knew how to teach, knew how to speak and write English. They cared about their students.

I don't think that one student in this country actually believes that GW Bush cares about them.

I was paid the lordly sum of ten dollars per hour as an "independent contractor," as if I were a Newtonian, rational, absolutely isolated point instance, right? It's not just the economy. After all, whence come economics?

From our beliefs, our mythos. "The Great Cosmic Newtonian Mechanism" is the dominant metaphor today. SO we just tweak the machine, right: pull strings, pull the levers of power, push buttons, etc., to get what we want. The mind, so the "thinking" goes, is a machine, susceptible to programming--or malicious hacking--just like any other computer.

I was hugely popular with the kids. I talked to them like real people, I expressed empathy. I often went way off the script. I wanted my students to know how to learn, not just practice mechanical reflexes. I even learned how to describe how words work: as self-emptying vessels.

I was promoted. My new position, monitor, allowed me to see the pattern. Most of the tutors pushed the kids through the lessons like pushing Slinkies through obstacle courses. The whiteboard and other virtual classroom technology was being used as a modem--"good" kids assimilated to the hive mind quickly, "bad" kids rejected the artificial implants, requiring slow and expensive "face time."

When I went from 60+ hours per week to less than 20, and complained, suddenly, the very methods that got me promoted became problems.

Don't get me wrong, I love science. I spent the morning browsing the Scientific American site. I recognize the mechanisms of existence. Our tragic mistake is to allow secular and sectarian priests of war gods to remain permanently at the controls of the great cosmic mechanisms. For example, we spend more on the machines of destruction, as many of you know, than the rest of the world combined. That's pharaoh crazy, baby!

So I say, it's the mythology. The Newtonian mythos of the atomized mechanical cosmos grows social Darwinian psychos, like Greenspan and Rubin and Summers et al., who use the rest of us as fodder for their egos.

The fundamental problems with Newton's cosmos are 1) its assumption of absolute dualism and 2) its reduction of historically unique and hypercomplex systems to bits and pieces.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stephen Jay Gould:
The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. The commercial effects will be obvious, as so much biotechnology, including the rush to patent genes, has assumed the old view that "fixing" an aberrant gene would cure a specific human ailment. The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene "for" the trait in question.

But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. ("Analysis" literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? -- we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology -- and for two major reasons.

First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code -- and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=all&ei=5070&en=2c47b79e49d07726&ex=1229922000
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The solution, to education reform and ending torture, is the same: We need to reclaim our humanity and stop treating each other and our Mother like mere machines, susceptible to malicious hacking. See how long you can go, before referring to yourself or your Other as a machine. For example, are we citizens, or voting machines on two legs? People, or "consumers:" appetites on two legs? etc.