School Sucks, but Learning Doesn't Have To

in Home Edders2 years ago

The School Sucks Project began in 2009 when host Brett Veinotte started digging into the problems of modern education, and over the course of 732 episodes, he built a community around finding solutions to those problems. After 12 years of that podcast, he decided it was time to "graduate" and work on new projects, but he has been releasing a top-50 series covering the highlights of the show with 10 episodes each on 5 themes.

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As I draft this post, Episode 17 is the most recent entry in this ongoing series. This is largely a repeat of Brett's interview with Pat Farenga of John Holt GWS about the work of John Holt and John Taylor Gatto, how kids learn versus how schools want to teach, and the diverse opportunities for real learning available to anyone willing to break the mold.

I know summer is here, and school is perhaps the last thing on your mind. If you are a parent or a student, now is the time to consider what to do when autumn rolls around and enrollment time comes again. Just ask yourself: by what metric has education improved as more money has been spent and more central control over the youth of the nation has been seized by government schools?

I suggest listening to this episode for solutions, or going through these highlight episodes to get a broader overview of the real problems and how people are making changes already. New releases are coming out every couple days, so Episode 18 may be out by the time this publishes. If you need a summer podcast binge, you could even go through the entire archive.

What are you willing to do to make change happen in your own life? Just remember,

The schools will not improve. Higher education will not improve. The politics around these institutions will not improve. Only we can improve.


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It is interesting, that getting kids out of schools is finally starting to take hold...

Not because of the myriad reasons John Taylor Gatto gave, but because of Pretty Horny Poney Reading Hour.

Unfortunately, if i had children i had to teach, i am unsure what i would teach them.
I know that almost the entirety of science is wrong... but we haven't developed any solid, new stuff to teach.
I am unsure what i would teach about history... fortunately Tom Woods has a lot of episodes and classes

Anyway, we have only begun to disentangle that shit that was schooling, into something that could be considered learning.

I know that almost the entirety of science is wrong...

How do you know?

Are you arguing that there is a fundamental flaw in the scientific method, increasing compartmentalization leads to errors, the journals and their process of "peer review" has been cast into doubt, theoretical physics leads to too many chains of assumptions, or political and corporate influences have distorted the human factor?

Going back to my first post on STEEM

The Michelson-Morley experiment is wrong.
The M-M experiment "proved" that the aether doesn't exist.

But, in fact, it was barely an experiment, only looked at one possible aether configuration (not even the most popular), and THEY FOUND SOMETHING and called it nothing.

So, yes Dorthy, the aether does exist, and so, everything after M-M, including Einstein and Hawkins is completely, provably, wrong.

The Electric Universe model is FAR better at explaining the universe and what it does.

The current "Gravity is an effect of mass" model has been debunked so many times, that we should not even be discussing it these days. But still is the ONLY model taught to science students.
(Instead, we fix and patch the gravity-mass system. We now have "dark matter". Matter, that we cannot see or detect, but has to be there so that the gravity-mass system works)

BTW, flying saucers are REALLY easy, if you have accurate science. But are almost impossible to figure out if you have gone down the wrong path for over 100 years.

Ok. How do we test your claims?

Go on ThemTube...

You just have to find actual facts. Such as:

Gravity differs from point to point on the earth's surface.
Testable, measurable.
Why? When a mountain is nothing compared to the size of the earth (as ball, as stated)

A capacitor charged to a million volts loses weight.
Charged to ten million, it floats.

Iron loses magnetism long before it turns molten. (molten core of iron is the cause of magnetic field)

The speed of light changes. As measured.

The speed of light can be exceeded. Benchtop experiment, where a force is produced from end to end before light could get there.

During the time of Einstein, a guy did the M-M experiment but at differing altitudes and found he got different measurements. Einstein blew him off as it was temperature that was at fault.

Physicist today cannot duplicate the feats that Tesla did to impress Newspaper reporters.

Light... supposedly a particle, enters a piece of glass and slows down, and then, upon leaving the glass, speeds back up. (a 9mm bullet enters the body, blowing out the lungs, and then continues at the same velocity :-p )

I find before starting such discussions it helps to ask why your expect a given outcome first before declaring that outcome disproves a given theory.

Why would you expect gravity to be constant across the planet if it is an oblate spheroid with non-uniform density and varying composition instead of a homogeneous sphere?

Weight and mass are not synonymous, and electromagnetism is orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity. Under what conditions is the test for a levitating capacitor performed?

You are correct, heat does affect magnetism. However, the Earth's core is a large mass under extreme pressure, and it does rotate every 24 hours while interacting with the electromagnetic field of the sun. I don't know whether that affects these calculations of demagnetizing or not. I would hesitate to call this disproof.

If a guy did an experiment in the past, we can replicate it today, right? What if Einstein's criticisms were correct? How can we account for it and ensure that criticism is invalid while replicating the test?

Tesla is reported to have performed amazing feats, and while I doubt he was a charlatan, many other potential considerations must be weighed. Wireless transmission of power has been performed, but between interference with radio communications and the problem of the inverse square law over distance there may be good reason not to replicate them.

Light is strange. I don't claim to understand the intricacies of how light interacts with objects. I know there are reports of slowing light. I know there are reports that the alleged FTL information transfer have been challenged as in fact a miscalculation. I don't have the knowledge base to confirm or disprove anything there. However, I am willing to co conditionally accept the status quo of physics for now.

The real test is whether a given model more accurately predicts the outcome of experiments consistently over time. As an extreme example, flat earth theory fails to predict or explain anything, while the heliocentric spheroid earth model does predict and explain eclipses, retrograde planetary motion, the day/night cycle, the horizon, etc. and the flat earth criticisms I have seen can all be tested and rendered moot by checking the assumptions and testing in the real world.

Now, I am not saying your position is that level of error, but I am trying to find a standard for investigation of your claims.

Why would you expect gravity to be constant across the planet if it is an oblate spheroid with non-uniform density and varying composition instead of a homogeneous sphere?

Congratulations, you just disproved the modern science text books....

I said the above because i expected you to know the current model of earth, and know how mass, in the shape of a sphere would display gravity. (basically, the anomalies are cancelled out by the size of the planet. Uniformity is assumed because the planet doesn't have a huge wobble, which it would if one side was heavier than the other. The mathematics works out such that all the mass is considered to be at the center point of the earth)

Furthermore, the gravity is not just a little bit off from being uniform, it is WAY off.
So much so, that there is a scientist who believes that there are micro-blackholes inside the earths crust.

I doubt you have seen any disproofs of flat-earth.
You have probably seen videos which just discard their claims.
But, here is the root problem:

  • You can see things over the edge of the horizon.

The US published charts on how far away you could see a light house.
A guy worked out from their height and position, that this was beyond the edge of the horizon.
So, you have to see through the water to see them at that distance.

To drive this point even further, you can see these light houses from even FURTHER on still, clear nights. (so it isn't even a question of it being beyond the horizon)

And now, people are taking infrared photographs of cities WAY over the horizon.

Of course, this could be because light travels along the surface of the earth. (not in a straight line)

Allow me to shed some light on point 7 (pun fully intended). Light is both a wave and a particle at the same time, much like electricity. Different substances offer different levels of resistence for electromagnetic signals. In the case of light, this resistence is called the refractive index, and for ordinary glass, it is 1.5, meaning that light travels at c/1.5 (2/3 its normal speed) through it. By contrast, the refractive index of water is 1.336, diamond is 2.417, and air is 1.0003.

As I mentioned in my initial response, every time that the media reports that FTL travel has been achieved, they've misrepesented what actually happened, reporting an increase in the group velocity, which doesn't actually transmit any information. Now, if the phase velocity were ever increased, that would be big news. To the best of my knowledge, no such claim has ever been made.

Wait a minute - I thought that the prevailing theory (i.e. Relativity) was that gravity is a property of space-time, rather than matter, so where are you getting this idea that "gravity is an effect of mass" is the current model? It's not, it's the outdated Newtonian model, which is still plenty useful for the vast majority of applications.

Furthermore, to address some points in your later reply to @jacobtothe, light is not "supposedly" a particle, rather it was first proposed to be an electromagnetic wave back in 1865, and while that hypothesis has been challenged, it has never actually been debunked. Light has a dual nature, it behaves as both a particle and a wave, as any object at the quantum scale does. In other words, matter also has a dual nature, but matter behaves less and less like a wave as the corresponding particles get larger (look up "De Broglie wavelength" to see what I mean). The duality of matter is most easily observed with very small particles such as leptons (the class of particles that includes electrons). Also, c is definitely a constant. Experiments in which c is supposedly exceeded are always ones in which the group velocity of the wave has been accelerated, sometimes as high as 300c, but the phase velocity never changes. If c can be exceeded (by anything other than the expansion of the universe), kindly show us a single experiment in which the phase velocity exceeded 3x10^8 m/s.

Yep, the same flack thrown up each time.

Newton: Mass -> Gravity
Einstein Mass -> space distortion -> Gravity

Yeah... so Gravity is a product of mass in each schema.

Light, as a photon is really silly.
Try to compute the number of photons a star has to put out so that one of them strikes earth.
Assuming photons are evenly distributed in both planes, 360°.

If light is a photon, than we shouldn't see stars.
But wait. In space, you can't see stars.
High up on a mountain, stars are quite faint.

Anyway, all of this is out there, put together in packages much better than i can write a reply.
So go investigate it.

All i can say, so you do not say the obvious rebuttal:
I have more college classes in the hard sciences than anyone i know.

And yes, all of it is garbage that i had to unlearn.

Mate, you're not exactly helping your case. If you want to convince me (or JT) of anything, you could at least provide links to your past posts (so I don't spend over an hour scrolling) in which you summarise the problems with Relativity, or explain the advantages to the Electric Universe model. Don't send your intervocateurs on a wild goose chase, be prepared to give an answer. Write up a FAQ-style document and copy-paste responses if you must.

Furthermore, you don't help your case by stating well-established science is "silly." Wave-particle duality is directly observable, so if you think that it's incompatible with the existence of luminiferous aether, please explain why. Please explain, for example, the photoelectric effect.

As for the "obvious rebuttal": don't try flexing your credentials on me. That's a logical fallacy called an argument from authority, and in any event, I'm more of an authority than you; I started out as a chemistry major before switching to engineering, and I personally know four PhD-holders in the hard sciences (one of whom is my father, which is relevant because I was homeschooled). You could try saying that I'm just "more thoroughly brainwashed" than you were, but are you sure you want to go down that route?

I know all this.

Sooooo, there is this Theory in science.
And so, the scientific method says, find a disproof.

Found a disproof.
The theory should be gone... right?
Not in today's Materialistic Science.

No, scientists instead have to come up with "dark matter" and that leads to their needing to be "dark energy" and that leads to strings and that leads to...

And this isn't just one disproof.
Modern Materialistic Science looks like swiss cheese. But we still tout it as "Science".


Here is one for you. Many scientists and astronomers poo-poo astrology.
I cannot count the number of scientists i know who have gone out to debunk / disprove astrology and are now Astrology Chart Readers. Astrology is a 5000 year old science.

How are you doing with the Flat Earth people?
They have disproven the ball earth.
Still, most of the world calls them quacks.
(I do not know what shape the earth is. I have some theories...)

I am glad that all of my kids are grown and I no longer have to deal with the school system.

I home schooled my kids most of the time, and am glad I did. I am also glad I don't have to teach them now.