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Reply to comment by eltrkbrd in by !deleted8445

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eltrkbrd wrote (edited )

Thanks for sharing those links.

Besides John Taylor Gatto and John Holt, Neil Postman's work is another favorite:

I haven't seen Holt's "Instead of Education" yet, although I added "A Life Worth Living" to my library 8 years ago.

"John Holt is probably best known for his early books, "How Children Fail" & "How Children Learn," and his advocacy of homeschooling -- although his concept was nothing like the rigid indoctrination of the fundamentalist mindset. From his decades of working with children, from accepting them as whole, autonomous human beings, he fully believed in the capability of the individual to learn. He had less & less faith in the official school system, which he saw as simply one more tool & reflection of a culture more interested in turning out interchangeable, obedient widgets for the machine, rather than freely thinking individuals.

In this superb, insightful selection of his letters, from his days as a young man, to his tragically early death from cancer, we follow the development of his thought. He wrestles with ideas, always born of personal experience, which he trusted far more than abstract theory. His empathy, his compassion, his heartbreak all shine through from every page -- he CARED with all he had to give, and he gave all that he had, that much is clear.

It's difficult to sum up an entire life of thought in just a few words, but I'll try: Holt believed that human beings are born with an innate desire & need to learn, and that they'll exert all their effort for something that truly matters to them. He also believed that schools did far more harm than good, by being glorified certification factories ('You've got to have X degrees to get a good job!"); training grounds for obedience to bullying authorities who were unworthy of respect ("You'll find out what the real world is like soon enough!"); and places of needless humiliation & emotional damage for children ("What are you, stupid? You'll never amount to anything! Loser!").

In short, that schools are essentially boot camps for modern American society, breaking people down & rebuilding them for use as consumers & cogs.

Holt believed that (to use his phrase), education is something a person gets for him/herself, rather than something that's force-fed to a person. At least, that's what it should be. And of course his worldview went beyond just the school system, or the idea of learning -- his was a humanistic critique of our materialistic, power-hungry, status-oriented culture as a whole." Source: Amzn book review

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Gerherd wrote

The theory of complex systems according to Jay Forrester “Complex systems are characterized by specific responses, this is the reason for the frequent failures and failures of attempts made to improve the behavior of the system. As used herein, the term “complex system” implies a multi-link structure of a large order with non-linear feedback. All social systems belong to this class. The corporate governance structure has all the characteristics of complex systems. Similarly, urbanized territory, national government, economic processes and international trade are complex systems. Complex systems are distinguished by many, at first glance, unexpected and obscure properties. Like all systems, a complex system is an interconnected feedback loop structure. “Feedback chain” is a technical term that refers to the situation in the system for any moment of decision making. The decision determines the sequence of actions that change the state of the surrounding system and cause a new flow of information on which the new solution is based. Such a chain-like structure is characteristic of all kinds of decisions, social or individual, conscious or unconscious. The processes inherent in the human body and nature, governed by laws that are studied by psychology and physics, medicine and technology, are all within the boundaries of this structure. But a complex system has a number of specific features. A complex system is a large order system. The "order" of a system is determined by the number of level equations (that is, integrals or states) in the system description. A company can be characterized by several level variables - staff, bank balance, finished goods, goods in the manufacturing process, equipment, various psychological aspects, reputation components and elements of traditions. The systems referred to here as complex include systems of a higher order than the fourth and fifth. In the same way, a social system, even for very limited purposes, can be represented as a system from the tenth to the hundredth order. The city system in our book is a twelfth order system. A complex system is multilink. It contains more than three or four feedback circuits. The interaction between these feedback chains, the shift of the dominant role from one chain to another - this is what largely determines the nature of a complex system. A complex system has chains of both positive and negative feedback. The negative feedback chain is most often mentioned in the literature on systems theory, and in the technical literature this concept is used exclusively. But there is a positive feedback that predicts all growth processes, whether biological or economic. Negative feedback circuits are target search circuits that regulate the system in the direction of a certain goal. Positive feedback chains are deviation from the target chains that exponentially deviate the system from some point of unstable equilibrium. But the nature of the positive feedback that determines the positive round of growth behavior depends not only on the structure, but also on the many changing factors surrounding the chain. These factors are often added up and controlled by other chains in the system. As these factors change, the regenerative characteristics of the positive growth loop can be suppressed, which will lead the process to a neutral point that separates the positive and negative nature of the feedback behavior. If the chain is pushed into the negative feedback region, it begins to generate exponential decay of the process towards the starting point from which it was rejected. [...] The complex system is non-linear. Modern mathematics deals almost exclusively with linear processes. But life and society are almost entirely characterized by non-linear processes. Nonlinear interaction in the system allows one feedback loop to dominate for some time, but it can also cause this dominant to shift to another part of the system, where the behavior of the system is so different that these two situations seem to be unrelated to each other. Multi-link restructuring according to non-linear functional dependencies makes a complex system extremely sensitive to most system parameters. Such non-linear behavior at the same time makes the system resistant to the efforts made to change the behavior of the system. But this non-linearity, being correctly understood, makes it easy to simulate system models with realistic dynamic characteristics. Our knowledge of the components of complex systems mainly relates to the field of nonlinear relationships. We will begin to understand the dynamics of the behavior of a social system when we turn directly to non-linearities in the system. Nonlinearity is what is needed to represent the behavior of complex systems. The concept of nonlinearity is easy to operate if you abandon the requirement of an analytical solution to the system

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eltrkbrd wrote (edited )

Hmm, what is this Wall of Text? A preliminary glance indicates a wicked problem.

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Gerherd wrote

Jay Forrester, a people management system

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eltrkbrd wrote (edited )

Interesting, I found Jay Forrester's work that you mentioned is related to Donella Meadows "The Limits to Growth". I respect her work, especially regarding "Leverage Points":

Jay Wright Forrester's bio reeks of STEM to me; especially paving the way for autocracy and mechatronics, and although I try to keep an open mind, I'll have to come back to that massive wall of text you posted earlier...

On a more positive and somewhat related note, I'm reminded of Howard T. Odum's Energese.

My guess is if Jay were alive today, he would cream his pants over Industrial Ecology, Blockchain technology, Natural Capitalism & TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), etc...

Mostly what I see here is the same old authoritarian bullshit with neoliberal technocrats and their religion of Scientism spreading the myths of civilization, whilst hurdling towards the inevitable conclusion of collective psychopathy...

Paul Feyerabend's concept of epistemological anarchism? Now we're talking...

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