Edutheria by Lilburne

Ludwig von Mises wrote:

"Society lives and acts only in individuals; it is nothing more than a certain attitude on their part. Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us."

The decisive battle Mises spoke of continues today, and it has come to a head. The unprecedented actions taken by the United States government in the last 8 years (especially the unprecedented degree of monetary expansion of the last 2 years) have brought human society to the brink. Now more than ever, society needs as many shoulders as possible.

When Mises wrote the above words, the "intellectual battle" he meant was a battle of economic ideas. Unfortunately today, the battlefield must be enlarged beyond that.

In Mises' day, it might have been enough to rescue society for a critical mass of individuals to only comprehend praxeology, thereby enabling them to explode the myths of the socialist and interventionist. But now the intellectual armament of a man who would be free must be larger.

• He must also know enough of algebra and calculus to know the limitations of their applicability and thereby explode the myths of the mainstream economist.
• He must know enough of true natural science and its underpinnings to explode the myths of the environmentalist.
• And he must know enough of true history to explode the myths of the public school teacher.

With Mises' injunction in mind, I intend to create a general curriculum with which any intelligent adult or adolescent can arm himself to that degree.

This curriculum for freedom, or education for eleutheria (Greek for freedom) will be called Edutheria.

This curriculum is not only motivated by Mises' entreaty, but it will be informed by his epistemology. Mises wrote extensively upon the appropriate ordering of conception before understanding in cognition, and thereby, of theory before history in scholarship. I believe this priority is just as appropriate for the humble student trying to find truth for himself as it is for the pioneering scientist trying to discover truth for the sake of all mankind. And so Edutheria will start with pure theory, namely logic, praxeology and mathematics, and work from there to the humanities and to natural science.

The four successive portions of this curriculum will be as follows:

1. Theory: First logic, then praxeology (including economics) and mathematics
2. Chronology: An economic and logistical exploration of historical facts
3. History of Thought: Applying theory to discover ideological insights and fallacies; culminating in a summary of contemporary natural science and a working ideology for...
4. A General Interpretation of History, Society, and Man

This curriculum will be useable both for completely independent study and for study under the guidance of a tutor. It will be appropriate for brilliant middle schoolers, bright high schoolers, and intelligent adults.

Ideas, facts, and narratives will be introduced with comics and skits, and then further elucidated with original monographs and worksheets as well as further reading assignments. Lessons can be applied via writing and report assignments to be provided.

I fully expect this to be my life's work.

Thus far, I have made the following progress:

• For the praxeology portion, I've created six issues of my series Human Action Comics.
• For the mathematics portion, I've created the following worksheets on various topics in Algebra.
1. Absolute Value
2. Zero and Negative Exponents
3. Scientific Notation
4. Substition Method of Solving Systems of Equations
5. Special Linear Systems
6. Mixture Problems
• For the "history of thought" portion, I've created the following three items for a lesson on the Theogony of Hesiod.
  1. A script for a skit paraphrasing the "proem" of the Theogony as well as the apocryphal poetry contest between Hesiod and Homer.
  2. A comic paraphrasing the proem and first part of the narrative of the Theogony
  3. A 17-page monograph explaining and analyzing the proem and first part of the narrative of the Theogony.

My work in the near future will be dedicated mostly to the praxeology portion, especially Human Action Comics.

On Private Education

Education is a good.  Like any good, demand for it stimulates supply.

Sumer

In ancient Sumer, where writing was first invented, being a scribe was a high-paying and prestigious job.  This was largely because

 

1. demand for scribes was high, since their services (especially record-keeping) were of such benefit to the sate, and
2. the engorged super-states of Sumer had tremendous purchasing power.  

 

So in Sumer, a demand arose among parents for scribe-training services for their children.  The first private schools in the world arose in Sumer (tuition-supported "tablet-houses") to meet this demand.

To be continued...

The Child, the Parent, and the State

A child is a potential man. Man is characterized by the fact that he acts and that he has morality. To act is to behave with purpose: using reason to willfully choose between alternative means toward ends. Morality is a set of feelings which constrain action. Newborn infants do not act; their behaviors are involuntary responses to internal urges and external stimuli. And since they do not act, they cannot have moral constraints on action. The maturation of the soul is the gradual actualization of the child’s potential to be a man: that is, the gradual development of purpose, will, reason, and morality. In the later stages of childhood, the child has imperfect purpose (his ends will tend to be capricious), imperfect will (he will tend to be diverted from his ends by his innate urges), imperfect reason (he will tend to choose less than optimal, or even ineffective means to his ends), and imperfect morality (his urges will tend to override his moral feelings). Manhood is more of a continuum than a discrete state. The more developed is one’s purpose, will, reason, and morality, the more one is a man. Learning is the part of maturation which is fostered by sensory input and the processing of sensory input. Parenting is the involvement of others in the process of general maturation. Education is the involvement of others in the process of learning.

The state tries to parent and educate the children of its citizens. It does so for its own ends. Therefore, it tries to make its own ends the ends of the child, and tries to inculcate a false morality conducive to its own ends. The state is inherently incompetent and indolent, so it does an ineffective job at fostering the faculties of will and reason in the child. The best educators of a child are his biological parents or those who have wholly taken on the responsibilities of parenthood. Such parents have an overwhelming Darwinian imperative to foster the success of the child for ITS OWN sake. The next best educators of a child are professional educators who, in addition to having certain fields of expertise, have an overwhelming market imperative to satisfy the parents as customers.

Practical Education

What is the point of all this formal learning we expect schoolchildren to do: the endless assignments and tests?

One stock answer to this question is that it teaches them how to get things done. That would obviously be learned better in the real world than in school.

The somewhat more plausible answer generally given is that schools are “teaching students how to learn and how to think.” Those skills are also better learned in the real world.

The only thing that formal schooling is good for is learning an academic topic itself. But why must every student learn Algebra through Calculus? Why must every student learn how to deconstruct Catcher in the Rye? If a student finds in learning basic math that he would be interested in pursuing it further, then it would make sense for that student to learn higher math in order to possibly use it in his career. The same goes for literary studies. But this would not be the case for everybody.

Intellectuals who consider educational goals are too enamored with their own interests. And those interests generally do not include producing something the market, when left to itself, highly values. (That’s why they’re always lobbying for policies which create artificial markets for their services.) So educationalists are none too interested in business savvy. But business skill and knowledge are the most productive sets of skills and knowledge in the world. The most important information are (as Friedrich Hayek showed) profit-loss facts on the ground that inform the billions of price decisions that make an economy maximally prosperous. So real-world outside-of-school education is not only much better for a young person’s character; it makes the young person smarter in ways that are actually beneficial to the student (and to others in society).

Rich, rewarding, prosperous lives need not (and should not) start in one’s mid-20s. Education and productivity should be intertwined and mutually reinforcing strands that run throughout a person’s entire life. They should not be compartmentalized the way they are now.

The Abdication of Parenthood

We as a society have abdicated parenthood. We have handed parenthood over to the state. The prime responsibility of raising children to become decent, humane, and successful adults has been given over to state schools.

Kids' lives are dominated by school. They spend about 6 hours a day at school, and then about 1 hour on homework. The parent's daily role has been relegated to hectoring their child into meeting the demands of the school: to "wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth so you can get to school on time"; and to "get all your homework done, and study for that test, so you can get good grades at school." The only daily meaningful interaction between parent and child is relegated to dinner: a tiny sliver of time in the day in which parents are enjoined to ask their kids, "How was your day at school."

This grip that the state has over the lives of kids not only strangles the parent-child relationship, it heavily proscribes nearly any other non-school-related fruitful relationship the child can have. The state, through laws and the overwhelming demands of the school, does not allow the child to work or to freely pursue extra-curricular passions.

And what is the effect on our children of the state's utter domination over their lives? In short, in makes our children improvident, shallow, incurious, and often immoral.

And it's no wonder. Instead of the vibrant, multi-layered, rich and loving relationships that a child would have if he were enmeshed in the world of his parents, relatives, friends-of-family, and business-parters-of-family, the child is stuck in the pernicious modern-day relationship of schoolteacher-and-student. This relationship is characterized by indolence, apathy, and impotence. The indolence and apathy comes from the fact that teachers tend to have the mentality of the bureaucratic sinecure-holder. They don't have the overwhelming Darwinian drive to improve the lot of their students that family members naturally have. And, in their padded and privileged role, neither do they have any entrepreneurial or competitive drive to maximally satisfy their customers. The impotence comes from the very format of the formal school. For the bulk of every day, each child gets 1/20th - 1/30th of the attention of one adult. No matter how "innovatively" you reform it, such a format is pure pedagogical poverty. And the rest of the day (recess, after-school hanging out, etc) is a "Lord of the Flies"-type scene of unguided, poorly-raised children reinforcing the worst aspects of each other's character.

Life in such a dysfunctional camp is an unnatural life of no meaningful consequences. The real-world realm of helping out parents, friends of parents, and other employers with work and home affairs gives a child a true sense of accomplishment ("look at how awesome this room looks now"; "alright, son, business is booming!") and a true sense of consequences ("Sorry, kid, if you don't do the work, I can't keep you on"). The artificial, unnatural realm of the school only has faux-accomplishments and faux-consequences. And kids (especially as they get older) see right through them. That is why they become apathetic about accomplishment and responsibilities, and completely shallow regarding the real world, caring only for friends and play.

In his highly important monograph Education: Free and Compulsory, Murray Rothbard tells the history of how (and why) the state progressively weaned us off parenthood: through compulsory schooling laws and an intra-school movement toward "educating the whole child". As should be entirely manifest to anyone with a shred of skepticism regarding pro-state-schooling propaganda and an open eye to local and world news, the state has made for a wretched parent. It is time we take our children back.

Because School Told Us

 

I recently taught a workshop about brains for a group of 24 5th graders. First I wrote on the board, “What does the brain do?” The students dutifully enumerated the standard list: controls your movements, thinks, feels emotion, controls your heartbeat, controls your body temperature; obviously they’d been studying this. Then I wrote on the board, “How do you know that?”

An awkward silence followed.

Finally a student hesitantly ventured, “Because school told us.”

“What if school is wrong?,” I asked. “Can school ever be wrong?”

I heard an indistinct rumble of “yeah” and “I guess.”

One student tried to resolve her cognitive dissonance by saying that we know because scientists have studied it.

I asked, “What if the scientists are wrong? Let me tell you a secret: scientists have been wrong about tons of stuff throughout the years. They were proved wrong by later scientists. How do you know that today’s scientists aren’t wrong about this? How can YOU know, from your own thinking and your own experience, that the brain does all these things: think, feel, move the body?”

“There was a smart guy a long time ago named Hippocrates who believed, like today’s scientists do, that thinking and emotion come from the brain. But there was another smart guy named Aristotle who said, ‘you know what, I believe thinking and emotion comes from the heart. What does the brain do: it sits there! It never budges an inch! How can all these amazing abilities come from something that doesn’t do anything? The heart is where all the action is: it’s constantly beating, boom-boom, boom-boom. That’s where you’re going to get exciting stuff like thoughts and feelings!’ So how do YOU know Aristotle is wrong, and that school and today’s scientists and Hippocrates are right?”

That’s when the students, one by one, stopped reciting, and started thinking. One student said that when he concentrates on his thinking, it feels like it’s happening in his head, and not in his chest. Another noted that when a person’s brain is damaged, their thinking and emotions are often changed. A third offered an argument-for-argument’s sake for Aristotle’s side saying that the heart is indeed involved in movement. A fourth countered with the example of paralysis from brain injury as proof that the brain is key to movement. For the rest of the intro, the students contributed evidence and arguments instead of memorized facts: except, that is, whenever their teacher interjected. Although she was basically pleased with the class, throughout the session I could tell she was perturbed by my approach. And every time she chimed in, she conducted little call-and-response exercises, pressing them to vocalize the various lobes and bulbs they had memorized, warning them, “this will important later in school!” She was my customer, so I could only sigh inside.

The role of teachers is to encourage students to reason for themselves and to question pedagogic authority. Memorizing facts may help children “perform” according the meaningless standards of formal schooling, but it will not make them true students of the world around and inside them.

 

The Crippling of Curiosity

 

Modern schooling has served to cripple the intellectual lives of every generation since its inception.

In schools, children are herded and harrangued into completing academic chores.  These chores are usually utterly mindless, pointless, forgettable, boring, harrowing, or some combination of the above.  Some students never get the hang of it.  Some put their heads down and plow through it, because they know how important it is to their future.  Some have been conditioned so well by their Pavlov-like teachers that they come to enjoy the work for the sake of the expected reward.  And a few of them manage to find interest in the world of thoughtfulness despite all the schools do.  The kids in the last group (and a few in the second-to-last) end up as thoughtful adults.  A smaller subset of them become true philosophers, in the broadest sense of the term, with an insatiable curiosity and a lust for the truth.  But the majority of people end up as one in the burgeoning mass of the shallow and the frivolous.  Even those who manage to succeed in school, college, and even graduate school generally end up never reading a book from cover-to-cover again: let alone explore a school of thought, question long-held beliefes, or debate another person intelligently about politics, religion, or ethics.

That is why on the television show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”, the answer to the show’s fundamental, eponymous question is so often, “No.”  Many people peak intellectually in the fifth grade, or soon thereafter.  They cram their brain with as many facts and algorithms as they need to in order to succeed while in school, but then intellectually check out for the rest of their lives.

 

History of Violence

Why is it that when we study history, so much of it is recounting a succession of rulers and wars: that is, political history? As a liberal, I believe the state is predominantly an agent of violence. And wars are obviously violent. So looked at that way, the common conception of history seems to be a history of violence. What is more important to the mass of humanity is not so much which cast of thugs has managed to put them under a yoke in any given period: but what they themselves have managed to achieve in spite of them. So a truer history of humanity, I think would focus more on cultural, economic and technological history.

Geography too has politics as its default subject. When we think of a “map of the world”, we automatically think of a multi-colored display of nation-states and their capitals. What is seen as most important is not the land itself or the nature of the people who populate it, but rather how it is chopped up by our overlords, and which city each cabal of overlords chooses to set up shop.